The first photos from today's total solar eclipse are here, and they're spectacular.

Captured Wednesday (Aug. 12) by NASA scientists during a special eclipse livestream from Spain, the images show the moon completely blocking the visible surface of the sun, plunging the daytime sky into twilight for roughly 90 seconds and allowing our star's elusive corona (its wispy outer atmosphere) to shine through.

In this incredible image taken with a solar-filtered telescope, the moon appears as a black circle, cloaking the sun. The white spikes of light encircling the moon are the corona, a mysterious part of the sun that is rarely visible to the naked eye. (Why is it so mysterious? For one thing, the corona is millions of degrees hotter than the sun's surface, and scientists aren't sure why.)

On the left side of the image, a bright-pink blob shoots off of the solar surface. This is not a solar flare, but a prominence — a towering structure of plasma held in place above the sun by powerful magnetic fields. Prominences often measure many times taller than Earth is wide, making them clearly visible from 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) away.

Another image, taken just before totality, shows "Baily's Beads" shining in the small gap between the sun and the moon. This effect occurs when the last vestiges of sunlight shine through the uneven mountains on the moon, creating a bright and bumpy spectacle.

Today's eclipse followed a narrow path of totality — the path of the moon's dark inner shadow cast on Earth — from near the North Pole to Greenland, western Iceland and northern Spain. Viewers outside the path of totality were treated to a partial eclipse of up to 90% coverage in Europe and a much humbler 10% to 25% coverage in the northeastern U.S. and Canada.

The sky show continues tonight as the Perseid meteor shower peaks. Because it's a new moon (the only time when a solar eclipse is possible), an especially dark sky awaits, with the prospect of up to 75 "shooting stars" visible per hour, according to NASA.

More eclipses are also on the way, with the first coming in just two weeks.

As is always the case, today's solar eclipse will be paired with a lunar eclipse. Two weeks from now, on Aug. 27-28, a deep partial lunar eclipse will be visible across most of North and South America starting around midnight EDT. Almost completely engulfed in Earth's shadow, the moon will take on a faint reddish hue.

Then, next year, the longest total solar eclipse of the century will be visible from southern Spain and northern Africa. Mark your calendars for Aug. 2, 2027. This is one solar spectacle you won't want to miss.

Octopuses are known to smack fish when they get too close. But while it might seem unsporting for an animal with eight arms to start a boxing match with an animal that has none, new research shows that octopuses don't just lash out indiscriminately; instead, they slap certain fish species that "jab" and "swipe" at the octopuses in a squabble over territory.

These marine fight clubs show that octopuses' aggressive behavior is part of a more complicated set of responses than previously thought, the scientists said in the new study.

The researchers observed 101 interactions between juvenile Brazilian reef octopuses (Octopus insularis) and 10 species of reef fish in shallow waters along the northeastern coast of Brazil and on oceanic islands. The encounters revealed that the young octopuses didn't respond to every fish in the same way. Territorial fish that appeared to defend their territory from the octopuses triggered rapid, defensive reactions, including the "slap" arm movement.

But nonterritorial fish that followed the octopuses as they hunted tended to produce longer, less-confrontational encounters in which the octopuses simply continued foraging.

The findings, published July 31 in the journal Behavioural Processes, add to decades of observations of interactions between octopuses and fish by showing how juvenile O. insularis adjust their actions depending on the behavior of the fish they encounter.

"Clearly there's not one way at which they're interacting," said study co-author Jennifer Mather, a recently retired octopus behavior researcher at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta. "The territorial fish are really going to do one thing, and the nonterritorial fish are doing other things," she told Live Science.

Different fish, different response

The researchers recorded 38 juvenile octopuses interacting with fish, splitting the encounters into those involving territorial species, like damselfish (family Pomacentridae) and nonterritorial species, like blue tang (Acanthurus coeruleus).

The difference was striking. Interactions with territorial fish lasted an average of about 14 seconds and tended to involve rapid changes in behavior. The fish performed "jabs" and "swipes" as they tried to attack the octopuses, while the octopuses responded with "flinches" and arm "slaps."

Interactions with nonterritorial fish lasted much longer, averaging about 46 seconds. These fish were more likely to follow or circle the octopus while the octopus continued hunting.

The researchers used a statistical technique called lag-sequence analysis to determine whether particular behaviors tended to follow one another in predictable sequences. The analysis confirmed distinct behavioral patterns for the two types of encounters. In other words, a territorial fish trying to drive an octopus away would trigger a very different behavior than a fish that merely trailed the octopus.

"Fish territoriality significantly affected the behavior of both fishes and octopuses," the researchers wrote in the study. "These interactions are adaptive and highly context-dependent."

A slap is just one part of the story

The arm-slap behavior itself isn't new to science. Researchers have described octopuses striking or swiping at fish in previous observations. But the new study provides a more systematic look at when the behavior occurs and what happens around it.

To capture the footage, the research team snorkeled in shallow water and filmed juvenile octopuses without disturbing their normal behavior.

The clear water at their study sites sometimes offered visibility of around 66 feet (20 meters), giving the researchers a broad view of the underwater environment.

The team's analysis of the footage revealed that individual octopuses appeared to have different personalities. Some were noticeably shy, while others were more reactive during interactions. The researchers don't yet know whether those traits differ by sex or age or whether the behavioral traits remain consistent over time.

The octopuses were also curious about their observers.

"During our field sessions, the octopuses frequently showed interest in our cameras, reaching out to touch them," said study co-authors Michaella Pereira Andrade, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences in the United Kingdom, and Charles Morphy Santos, an associate professor of evolutionary biology at the Federal University of ABC in Brazil. "In fact, one octopus even managed to steal our diving weight and carry it straight into its den," they told Live Science in an email.

The footage also showed that the octopuses reacted to different fish in other ways.

"One key finding that stood out in this study was that, when observing the octopuses and fish, it was clear that the octopuses would sometimes split their skin patterns into two distinct colorations," Andrade and Morphy Santos said.

The researchers called this pattern "half-blotch." The distinctive pattern appeared during interactions with territorial fish, when the fish approached or attacked the octopuses. The octopuses displayed circular white spots on the sides of their bodies facing the fish. Observing the interaction, the researchers noticed that the fish appeared to back away after the octopuses displayed the body pattern.

"We hypothesized it might serve as a form of warning communication," Andrade and Morphy Santos said.

The researchers don't yet know exactly what the fish see when they look at the octopuses' changing skin, or whether the pattern is deliberately produced as a signal.

The findings can help people understand octopuses' behaviors when they encounter the animals in the wild, the team added.

"One of the interesting things about when we do this is, people can read [this study], go snorkel, and have a guide to what they're seeing, which I think is really important," Mather said.

How much do you know about octopuses? Find out with our octopus quiz!

Despite historical portrayals, the dodo was a relatively intelligent bird that might have spent much of its life in the dark, new research suggests.

Dodos were traditionally portrayed as dumb, bumbling birds. But now, scientists have scanned dodo skulls and found nothing to suggest these birds were stupid. What they did find, however, was that the part of the dodo's brain that's responsible for visual processing was small ‪—‬ comparable to that of some nocturnal birds.

"Our interpretation is that this species was really, really not relying much on sight," study first author Sara Citron, a doctoral candidate in behavior and evolution at the University of Lethbridge in Canada, told Live Science. "And the only situation where you're not relying on sight is when there is no light available."

Dodos were wiped out within a century of humans settling on their island home of Mauritius in 1598. However, it wasn't just hunting that drove them to extinction. The sailors introduced dogs, cats, pigs and rats, which would have likely killed the birds and eaten their eggs. These invasive species wreaked havoc on the dodo's ecosystem and continue to plague Mauritian wildlife to this day.

In the new study, published Aug. 5 in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, researchers found that dodo brains scaled with their body size as would be expected for their group, which is made up of pigeons and doves. In other words, their brains weren't especially small for their size, with no evidence of inferior intelligence compared to their relatives.

This isn't the first time researchers have poured cold water on the stereotypical depiction of dodos. A 2024 study found that dodos were likely fast and powerful, rather than slow and bumbling. The new research also builds on a 2016 study that concluded dodos were likely as smart as modern pigeons, which can solve problems and understand abstract concepts like space and time.

The dumb-dodo myth likely stems from accounts that these birds had no fear of humans and tended to run toward trouble. Sailors figured out that if a dodo was in distress, other dodos would run toward their calls, which meant the sailors could catch even more of the birds.

"Apparently, they would just grab one, let it scream and wait, and all the other dodos would run towards this one to see what was the cause of the distress," Citron said.

This might seem like an incredibly stupid survival strategy, but it's not a failure of dodo evolution. Dodos, like many isolated island animals, evolved in an ecosystem that didn't have any mammalian predators, so they were not equipped to deal with humans or the other animals they brought.

Inside the dodo's brain

To better understand dodo biology, the researchers embarked on an international collaborative effort to study as many CT (computed tomography) scans of dodo heads as they could to deduce the size and shape of their brains, starting with one at the University of Lethbridge.

"As soon as we started looking into it, we realized that the optic lobe, which is the part of the brain that processes visual information in birds, was extremely reduced," Citron said. "And that's typically a very good indication of something completely different in the behavior of a species."

The team compared the dodo scans to those collected on 36 living species of pigeons and doves, as well as the extinct Rodrigues solitaire (Pezophaps solitaria), a close relative of the dodo that lived on Rodrigues Island — east of the Mauritius mainland — and suffered the same fate. Unlike dodos, the solitaire's brain was what researchers would expect from a giant pigeon.

The researchers concluded that the difference in visual processing abilities seen in dodos, along with an enhanced sense of smell, might be evidence for the bird being crepuscular — active during twilight — or nocturnal. There weren't any historical accounts of the dodo being active in the dark, Citron said, but that wasn't surprising. Other than the accounts of sailors using dodo cries as bait, researchers don't have any reliable records of the bird's behavior.

"The most absurd thing is that the dodo is this famous bird," Citron said. "Everyone knows what a dodo is, what it looks like. However, we don't know absolutely anything of its behavior or its ecological niche. If you look at the historical accounts, we have more information about how it tasted."

For now, interpretations of the dodo's behavior remain speculative. However, Citron said she wishes the dodo would stop being portrayed as a "stupid thing that is doomed to go extinct because of how inept it is." She argued that animals on the brink of extinction today, especially when they're not like humans, are also dismissed for the same reason.

"[Endangered animals] are intelligent, they are adapted to their environment for millions of years, and the fact that we are destroying it now doesn't mean that they are stupid or they don't deserve to keep living," she added.

For space fans and skywatchers, Wednesday, Aug. 12 is destined to be a date for the history books. Viewers in North America — including Alaska, eastern Canada and parts of the northeastern U.S. — will be able to see a partial solar eclipse during the daytime.

Across the pond, a total solar eclipse will be visible from eastern Greenland, western Iceland and northern Spain. (If you're planning to see this rare event in person, it's important to wear certified solar eclipse glasses during the partial phases of the eclipse ‪—‬ which means throughout the entire eclipse for everyone in North America. We have some solar eclipse gear suggestions that can help you watch this skywatching event from anywhere.)

Once the sun goes down, the night sky will offer its own treat: the Perseid meteor shower, which peaks overnight on Aug. 12-13. Thanks to a new moon, stargazers will have an even better chance of catching these lights streaking across the night sky, with the best hours to watch occurring from midnight to 2 a.m. local time. According to The Planetary Society, observers in dark-sky areas can hope to catch between 50 and 75 meteors per hour. The dark skies also make it a great night to try observing the Milky Way or the six planets that will appear together before dawn.

In a Live Science poll, we asked our readers whether they would be observing today's solar eclipse or tonight's Perseid meteor shower.

More than 240 readers responded to the poll, which was published Aug. 10. At the time of writing, the results showed that 51% of respondents will be watching both events, with 21% interested only in the Perseid meteor shower. About 20% of readers noted that they're not in a great place to watch the solar eclipse, with one commenter noting, "I'm in Georgia, not a viewing area, but I'll be looking online!" (Space agencies NASA and ESA will both be offering live streams of the eclipse from Spain, starting around 1 p.m. EDT).

What was perhaps the most surprising is that 2% of readers admitted they will not be watching either event but will instead stay inside and “scroll on Instagram.”

But some of those who are planning on witnessing these rare phenomena are making it an experience to remember. One commenter mentioned, "My brother is heading to Spain for the eclipse, meeting with a group of surfers, they'll surf into the eclipse."

Will you be enjoying today's skywatching events? Let us know in the comments below.

Though the spectacular sight of a total solar eclipse feels like a rare experience, on a planetary scale, the average time between two such events is just 18 months, with some occurring much closer together. Now, thanks to centuries of studying the orbit of the sun and moon, we are able to correctly predict when and where the next eclipse will be far into the future. But for thousands of years of human culture, the lunar crossing of the sun remained as mysterious in cause as it did in location.

In his book "Solar Eclipses" (Reaktion books, 2026), writer and historian of astronomy William Sheehan goes back to ancient times to discover what impact this awe-inspiring celestial dance between the sun and the moon had on ancient civilizations, and how over time we began to understand the science choreographing it.

This excerpt from the book goes as far back as ancient Greece, where we learn of the "immoral, foul-mouthed and violent" soldier and poet Archilochus, who gave us the first written account of a total solar eclipse.

Today, with the ability to predict the paths of eclipses to extremely high accuracy, to make quite successful long-range (ten days or more) weather forecasts, ease of travel and for many, plus a significant amount of discretionary income that never existed in previous times, seeing eclipses has become a passion for thousands of global eclipse-chasers. People seek out a connection with the larger universe that includes a huge rush of adrenaline and life-transforming emotions that have been described as "spiritual" in nature. Of course, eclipses have occurred since time immemorial, but until recent times people have experienced them on a somewhat haphazard basis. This is emphatically the case with total solar eclipses, which, despite being the most stunning, are rare from any given place and could hardly be expected (before eclipse prediction and travel became more convenient) to be seen in a human lifetime.

The reason for this is that the central (umbral) shadow of the Moon that creates the totality zone is so narrow —– only 200 kilometres (124 miles.) on average —– so that it mostly falls on uninhabited portions of Earth's surface. From any one location, totality might not occur at all during a person's lifetime. The 30 June 1954 total eclipse, for instance, was the last visible from Minneapolis until that of 14 September 2099; the 22 July 2028 eclipse visible from Sydney will be the last visible from there until 3 June 2858 (!) and so on.

The actual width of the direct path of the shadow (known as the antumbra at annular and umbra at total eclipses) can vary from 0 kilometres to more than 1,000 kilometres (620 miles). It reaches the latter figure if it strikes Earth obliquely as it did, for example, during the annular eclipse of 12 September 489 B.C.E. (which occurred, incidentally, a year to the day after the usually accepted date of the Battle of Marathon, in which the Greeks defeated the Persians); the antumbral width was then 1,132 kilometres (703 miles).

Even to be aware of the partial phases of a solar eclipse is difficult unless the eclipse is very deep — marked changes in the intensity of sunlight occur only minutes before totality. And in general, people working in fields or hunting and fishing have little incentive to stare at the Sun. Thus, for untold ages, partial solar eclipses must largely have been simply missed. Lunar eclipses, on the other hand, are much more frequent from any one location, since a total lunar eclipse is visible anywhere within the night hemisphere of Earth. Lunar eclipses are also highly impressive, involving as they do the Moon's light being encroached upon and swallowed in shadow as well as the colour of the Moon turning to blood red.

That having been said, even without being able to make specific predictions, people from earliest times certainly took a keen interest in the vast pageant taking place overhead — Sun, Moon and stars, as well as clouds and other meteorological phenomena. The universe seems replete with powers more than human, powers mysterious and largely beyond our ken. The sense of this underlies the origin of religion, which in the first instance may have consisted in the apprehension of "something, indicated by terms such as the holy, the numinous, or the sacred … transcendent and irreducible." Our first response to the strange universe around us is deep, primal, pre-verbal.

Until the second century B.C.E. (and then first in Babylonia after millennia of recording celestial phenomena and their associated omens), it was impossible to predict with any accuracy when a total solar eclipse would occur. The best one could do was to suggest that on such and such a date it was somewhat probable that an eclipse might occur, though whether partial or total — or no eclipse at all — could not be determined. Thus any supposed prediction of an eclipse would have been a matter of sheer luck. No one yet had a clear idea of what caused an eclipse. Moreover, at a time when the Sun and Moon were regarded as gods, who could possibly know the minds of deities, or set limits to their arbitrary sway?

Even in modern times, an eclipse, for which the circumstances have been predicted fully and in detail, elicits an overpowering emotional response. What kind of response would a completely unexpected event have elicited?

We are lucky to have one very vivid first-hand account from an eyewitness of such an event. He was the Greek soldier and poet Archilochus, who lived on the island of Paros during the seventh century B.C.E., a century or so after Homer and Hesiod. Much of what we know about him (or think we know) is based on what he recorded in his poems. Thus without his poems, "we would never have found out that his mother Enipo was a slave … nor that he was an adulterer, that he was licentious and violent, and, most disgraceful of all, that he threw away his shield [during a battle]."

For all that, Archilochus' poems don't show him in a very flattering light. He appears to have been immoral, foul-mouthed and violent. It was said that after his engagement to one Neobule was broken off by her father, he wrote a series of songs so scurrilous (only fragments remain) that Neobule herself, the father and her younger sister all hanged themselves for shame. Throwing away his shield was even worse, by the standards of the time, than his lewd remarks towards women — it was the ultimate faux pas for a member of the warrior class of seventh century B.C.E.. He justified doing so on the grounds, already a cliché at the time, that it allowed him to fight another day. And so he did, being killed in a battle between Paros and Naxos by a Naxian warrior named Calondas, at the age of 35.

All very interesting, but the only reason that Archilochus is mentioned here is because he is something of a hero to eclipse watchers, because of a chance event that occurred on 6 April 648 B.C.E.. On that date (as determined from modern eclipse calculations) a total eclipse occurred; the Moon, like a shield thrown away in battle, covered the Sun. The path of totality began in the Atlantic off the western coast of Africa, ran just south of the boot of Italy, crossed Greece and the Black Sea, then veered north across Siberia. We can’t be exactly sure of Archilochus' location; it might well have been in Paros itself, which was exactly on the centre line (where the duration was some five minutes). Nevertheless, we do know exactly what he thought and how he felt:

Nothing is surprising anymore, nothing is deniable on oath;

No longer will anything seem impossible or marvellous, since

Zeus, father of the Olympians, has turned midday into night,

veiling the radiance of the sun, and turning mankind slack

with fear.

Hereafter all things become credible, they are to be expected,

There is no longer any reason for amazement, even if you see

The wild beasts changing places with dolphins,

making the oceans their pasture, and taking joy

in the sonorous murmur of the sounding sea,

while the dolphins, for their part, think better of the wooded

mountain.

(Translated by Michael Armstrong)

Archilochus achieved immortality with this poem: he became the first person we know of by name to have seen a total eclipse of the Sun, and to have recorded his stunned reaction.

Excerpted from "Solar Eclipses" (Reaktion books, 2026) by William Sheehan.

Researchers have developed a tent that harvests energy from its own motion ‪—‬ a process that could one day power small devices in shelters, disaster zones and off-grid camps.

The key lies in a material property known as "magnetoelasticity," which turns bending and stretching motion into electrical energy. Magnetoelasticity, first described in 1865 by physicist Emilio Villari, is the change in a material's magnetic flux density when mechanical stress is applied in the presence of an external magnetic field.

The design, described in a study published July 31 in the journal Matter, uses smart textile layers that respond to everyday movement in and around the tent, harvesting both environmental and biomechanical motions. Wind, a person shifting inside, or the fabric flexing during setup can all contribute to the energy output, making the shelter itself part of the power system.

The tent fabric acts as an energy harvester. When the material bends, stretches or flexes, its magnetic state changes, and that shift is converted into electrical energy through induction. The tent's floor incorporates magnetoelastic ribbons, while its roof is constructed as a layered architecture that integrates conductive fibers and magnetoelastic film.

In the study, the researchers reported that tapping a small sample of the magnetoelastic textile unit with a hand charged a 0.22-μF [microfarad] capacitor to 5.8 volts within 1.5 seconds. This is equivalent to the kind of charge you might see in a tiny timing or filter cap on a low‑power sensor node. While that's too little to power something like a smartphone, it demonstrates that even a small piece of the material can harvest energy.

Scientists have already shown that magnetoelastic devices can generate electricity from body movement, sound and other mechanical inputs, but the new study scaled this concept to larger fabric systems.

Primarily, the scientists envision it being used in places where electricity is limited, unreliable or unavailable, where even modest power generation can make a difference by powering LED lights, charging a phone or running a small heater.

The researchers also framed the design as a response to the impracticalities of existing portable shelters; they often need power, but generators require fuel, batteries add weight and maintenance, and solar panels depend on sunlight.

Unlike a solar setup, the tent does not need bright sun to function. Wind, handling and ordinary movement can contribute to the energy output, which means the system could keep collecting electricity even in shaded conditions or after dark, as long as the fabric continues to flex.

The scientists said this technology is not meant to run high-drain appliances. Instead, it targets low-power electronics, like microwaves or power tools. In that sense, in its current guise, the tent is a supplemental power source, not a replacement for grid electricity or a high-capacity battery pack.

Plenty of questions about the tent's durability remain unanswered. In future research, the scientists will need to prove how much electricity the tent can produce in real-world conditions, how durable the textile remains after repeated folding and weather exposure, and whether the design can be manufactured affordably at scale. But they said this prototype suggests a modest shelter could one day do more than keep a person dry.

The patient: An 82-year-old woman in Bologna, Italy

The symptoms: The woman was admitted to the hospital with abdominal pain that had worsened over the previous four days. The symptom was accompanied by constipation and episodes of nausea and vomiting.

What happened next: During a physical examination, doctors found that the patient's abdomen was distended and tender. Laboratory results from a blood test indicated that her white blood cell count was elevated, which is often a sign of an immune response to an infection.

When doctors performed an abdominal X-ray, they discovered that parts of the woman's intestines had expanded due to gas or fluid, while other portions of her intestines had collapsed. An abdominal CT scan revealed that the woman had a solid object blocking her intestinal loops on the right side ‪—‬ a situation known as a small bowel obstruction (SBO).

The diagnosis: SBOs have several possible causes, including tumors. Additionally, a section of the bowel can twist, forming a "volvulus," or a mass of tissue can push through a tear in the intestinal wall, causing a hernia.

However, in a report of the case, the doctors wrote that SBOs can sometimes be foreign bodies, such as swallowed objects; gallstones that migrate to the intestines; packed masses of parasites, like roundworms or nematodes; or bezoars, which are solid clumps of undigested matter that collect in the gastrointestinal system.

Bowel obstructions can be life-threatening if the blockage completely shuts off the intestinal tube and the condition goes untreated. In this case, the doctors recommended emergency surgery to clear the patient's blockage and prevent strangulation, meaning tissue death that affects parts of the intestines when the blood supply is cut off.

The treatment: Surgeons performed a procedure called a laparotomy, making a small abdominal incision to access the patient's intestines. They then pinpointed the location of the mass and surgically removed it. The object measured just over 2 inches (5.5 centimeters) long and was a phytobezoar, meaning a bezoar composed of plant material.

In addition to undigested plant matter, the surgeons found something they did not expect. As they extracted the bezoar, what they initially identified as "a small live insect" jumped from the vegetable mass and crawled up the sterile surgical drapes, they wrote in the report. The authors did not report the creature's size, but it was smaller than the bezoar.

The medical team captured the live intruder, sent it to a lab for analysis and learned that it was not an insect but rather a different type of land arthropod in the order Isopoda. These animals are crustaceans, relatives of crabs and shrimp. Terrestrial isopods have flattened bodies with rigid, segmented exoskeletons and seven pairs of legs.

Land isopods are found around the world and have hundreds of common names. They are most often called pill bugs, sow bugs, roly-poly bugs or wood lice. In the U.K., their regional nicknames are especially diverse and include chucky pig, monkey pea, cheese log, daddy granfer and granny grunter.

Isopods feed on decaying vegetation, and the doctors hypothesized that the patient had accidentally swallowed the isopod along with a mouthful of unwashed vegetables or fruit.

She recovered from the surgery and, shortly after, moved to a retirement home, where she was still living 18 months later during a follow-up visit, according to the report.

What makes the case unique: Only about 25% of all SBO cases are caused by foreign bodies such as bezoars; in people over age 50, the most common SBO is a volvulus.

The isopod group contains more than 11,000 species, of which about half live in the ocean. Some of those marine isopods parasitize fish, such as the tongue biter that consumes and then replaces its host fish's tongue. However, no terrestrial isopod is known to parasitize humans, the physicians wrote in the report.

If a person accidentally swallows a nonvenomous insect, spider or other small arthropod, the digestive system typically treats it like any other type of protein and dissolves it with acids and enzymes. In this case, though, the capsule of compressed plant matter in the woman's digestive tract may have protected the isopod, temporarily keeping it alive inside her body.

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!

A wild widow spider behavior involving a backflip into death during sex has a simple genetic explanation, new research finds.

Male redback spiders (Latrodectus hasselti) — Australia's version of black widows — flip into females' fangs while mating in order to make sex last longer. They also constrict their abdomens — a maneuver that seems to help them survive the experience of being eaten alive long enough to finish transferring their sperm. Then, they break off their sperm-transferring organs, known as pedipalps, into the females like a cork on a bottle, which prevents other males from inseminating them.

Intriguingly, a close New Zealand cousin of the redback, the katipō (Latrodectus katipo), doesn't do any of this. ‪There are no backflips and no cannibalism — just a respectful courtship dance and a polite parting of ways afterward. That difference offered researchers an opportunity to understand the genetics of the more gymnastic mating behavior.

"What makes this system so intriguing is the fact that we are dealing with two species here, which are very closely related," Kardelen Özgün Uludağ, a doctoral student of behavioral biology at the University of Hamburg in Germany, told Live Science in an email. These two species may have separated less than 100,000 years ago, but they still show entirely different behavior and observable traits. "This is very uncommon in animals," she said.

To figure out the genetic basis of this behavioral schism, Uludağ and her colleagues first exposed katipō females to redback males so that they would mate. The two are closely related enough to yield hybrid offspring. The researchers then crossbred hybrid females with either male redbacks or male katipō spiders. This led to mixed-genetic males. (The researchers couldn't mate katipō males with redback females in the first place because redback females will eat katipōs instead of mating with them.)

The researchers took these hybrid males and paired them with katipō females so they could watch their mating behavior without any of them getting eaten. Then, they tracked how often the hybrid males backflipped and/or constricted their abdomens at the (presumably baffled) noncannibalistic females.

To their surprise, the researchers found that the behaviors did not have close genetic links. Hybrid males combined backflips and life-extending abdominal constrictions only about half the time, otherwise doing just one or the other. The researchers also saw patterns of inheritance that suggested that the somersaulting was linked to the spiders' sex chromosome — the X chromosome. Male and female spiders both have two X chromosomes, but females' X chromosomes carry two full sets of chromosomes, while males' carry only one. What's more, the somersaulting behavior had a surprisingly simple dominant-recessive pattern of being passed to offspring.

The abdominal constriction, on the other hand, was a more complex genetic trait, the researchers reported Wednesday (Aug. 12) in the journal Biology Letters. That behavior may be controlled by multiple genes or strongly influenced by female behavior, the researchers concluded.

Although widow spiders are famed for eating their mates, only a couple of black widow species really do. The Australian redback is one, and the U.S.-based Southern black widow (Latrodectus mactans) is another.

The researchers would like to get to the bottom of what drives this behavior. "It would be nice to investigate more species of the genus Latrodectus to allow comparative studies," Uludağ said.

What do you know about spiders? Test your smarts with our spider quiz!

The largest 2D map of the universe just dropped, and it’s a stunner. Compiled from more than a decade of observations, the new map charts 4 billion stars, galaxies, black holes, asteroids and other objects of interest throughout the cosmos.

The map reveals about three-quarters of the night sky in high resolution, spanning both visible and near-infrared light wavelengths and charting the areas of the universe not blocked by dust or gas. The map is so big, in fact, that it’s impossible to reproduce as a single image here; instead, astronomers invite you to explore their vision of the universe using the free Legacy Survey Sky Browser webpage.

It took 13 years and three ground-based sky surveys, using telescopes from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the University of Arizona to gather the information for the map. The results are available for other scientific investigators to use and will likely help other telescopes to search the cosmos.

"Astronomers and citizen scientists can combine the map with their own observations to better understand our universe," NSF officials from NOIRLab said in a statement Aug. 10.

"Researchers can search for rare phenomena like gravitational lenses, observe fleeting events like supernovae, and investigate two of physics' biggest mysteries: dark matter, the invisible substance that accounts for most of the mass in our universe, and dark energy, the force driving our universe's accelerating expansion," the statement added.

Past versions of the map have generated at least 1,800 science papers, according to the statement. The latest map is expected to inform newer observing projects, such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Additionally, these maps laid the groundwork for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey, which is creating a 3D map of the cosmos by measuring the light of celestial objects to figure out their distances.

DESI's first five-year survey wrapped up in April, and the early results suggest dark energy may be getting weaker with time. As physicists grapple with the implications, including how the universe may end, more data from DESI is coming shortly, with improved results from the first five years expected next year. DESI's work will continue into 2028, so even more is to come.

The three telescopes behind the map are The Dark Energy Camera, mounted on the NSF’s Victor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope in Chile, the NSF Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, and the UA Bok 2.3-meter Telescope, also at Kitt Peak. The observations were supplemented by years of data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite mission.

The eclipse has begun! Today (Aug. 12), the new moon swoops in front of the sun, casting its dark shadow across a stretch of Earth from Iceland and Greenland to northern Spain. Viewers in the path of the shadow, known as the path of totality, will see a stunning total solar eclipse.

Meanwhile, millions of skywatchers in North America and Europe will be treated to a partial eclipse, with the moon covering more than 90% of the sun's visible surface in some areas.

NASA is live-streaming the entire event from Iceland and Spain. Their stream begins at 1:15 p.m. EDT, and you can watch it right here:

Want an alternate view? ESA is also streaming the eclipse from the Astrophysical Observatory of Javalambre in Teruel, Spain. CNN will also stream totality from Spain, starting at 1 p.m. EDT Wednesday.

Want to know more about the Aug. 12 eclipse? Live Science has all the details below.

Where is the Aug. 12 total solar eclipse visible?

The path of totality for the Aug. 12 eclipse runs in a perplexing arc from far northern Siberia near the North Pole down to Greenland, western Iceland and, finally, southern Spain. Prime locations to catch the total phase of the eclipse include Scoresby Sund, Greenland; Reykjavik, Iceland; and León, Spain.

Here's when totality will occur in various locations, and for how long:

• Scoresby Sund, Greenland: 4:35 p.m. WGST (up to 2 minutes, 17 seconds)
• Reykjavik, Iceland: 5:48 p.m. GMT (60 seconds)
• León, Spain: 8:28 p.m. CEST (1 minute, 45 seconds)
• Soria, Spain: 8:29 p.m. CEST (1 minute, 43 seconds)
• S'Arenal, Mallorca, Spain: 8:31 p.m. CEST (1 minute, 36 seconds)

Totality is the only time when it's safe to view the eclipse without a pair of certified solar eclipse glasses, which you can still buy online. Protective eyewear must be worn at all times during the partial phases of the eclipse — meaning everyone outside the path of totality must wear their glasses at all times while viewing.

You can also use a pair of binoculars or a telescope with a solar filter to enjoy the partial phases safely.

Where is the Aug. 12 partial eclipse visible?

Skywatchers in North America won't have the best view of this eclipse, but some cities in the Northeast will have a chance to bust out their eclipse glasses and see the moon blocking part of the sun in the afternoon.

Here are the best places to catch the partial eclipse from North America:

• Iqaluit, Nunavut: 1:24 p.m. EDT (61% eclipse)
• St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador: 3:00 p.m. NDT (53%)
• Fairbanks, Alaska: 8:27 a.m. AKDT (37%)
• Anchorage, Alaska: 8:21 a.m. AKDT (28%)
• Quebec City: 1:46 p.m. EDT (24%)
• Bangor, Maine: 1:53 p.m. EDT (23%)
• Montreal: 1:45 p.m. EDT (18%)
• Boston: 1:55 p.m. EDT (16%)
• New York: 1:54 p.m. EDT (9%)

Viewers in Europe will experience a much more complete eclipse, with the sky dimming somewhat and the air feeling a bit cooler than normal. However, eclipse glasses must still be worn at all times, even in places seeing a 99% eclipse. These are the best spots to see the partial eclipse in Europe:

• Madrid: 8:32 p.m. CEST (99.9%)
• Lisbon, Portugal: 7:36 p.m. WEST (94%)
• Dublin, Ireland: 7:10 p.m. BST (94%)
• Cardiff, Wales: 7:13 p.m. BST (93%)
• Belfast, Northern Ireland: 7:08 p.m. BST (93%)
• Paris: 8:17 p.m. CEST (92%)
• London: 7:13 p.m. BST (91%)
• Edinburgh, Scotland: 7:05 p.m. BST (91% eclipse)

Where to stream the Aug. 12 eclipse online

Many news networks and space agencies will be livestreaming the eclipse, including CNN, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). For viewers in North America, this will be the best way to experience the eclipse without having to leave home.

NASA will stream the eclipse with views of totality from Iceland and Spain starting at 1:15 pm EDT. You can watch it on the agency's website, YouTube page or by clicking the video at the top of this page.

When is the next eclipse?

If you don't have a prime spot for the Aug. 12 eclipse, you'll get another opportunity soon; more skywatching spectacles are just around the corner. As is always the case, this solar eclipse will be paired with a lunar eclipse. Two weeks later, on Aug. 27-28, a deep partial lunar eclipse will be visible across most of North and South America, starting around midnight EDT.

Then, next year, the longest total solar eclipse of the century will be visible from southern Spain and northern Africa. Mark your calendars for Aug. 2, 2027.

Editor's note: This article was updated on Aug. 12 at 1:15 p.m. EDT

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

Tens of thousands of years ago, Neanderthals mated with modern humans and passed along a gene variant that enables us to pack on more muscle, a new study finds.

Researchers found that this specific Neanderthal gene, a variant of the growth hormone receptor gene, causes cells to respond strongly to growth hormone. The Neanderthal version of the gene creates a growth hormone receptor with two amino acid changes and one deletion, compared with the typical receptor in most modern humans. The researchers think it entered the modern human gene pool through interbreeding, probably about 47,000 years ago.

"The most noticeable characteristic would likely be greater muscle mass, around 270 grams [9.5 ounces] per copy of the variant," study co-author Hugo Zeberg, a geneticist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, told Live Science in an email. "A person who inherited two copies, one from each parent, could therefore have more than half a kilogram [1.2 pounds] of additional muscle mass."

The study, published Aug. 5 in the journal Cell, found that almost all Neanderthals had this gene variant, but only about 10% of modern humans do. Certain modern human groups were more likely to have it, with the variant showing up in about 1% of modern people with European ancestry, and up to 25% of those with Southern Asian or Southeast Asian ancestry. It does not seem to appear in people of African ancestry, possibly because the interbreeding happened in Eurasia.

Growing cells

Human growth hormone is produced naturally by most people in the brain's pituitary gland, and it stimulates growth in children and adolescents. Some people have too much or too little human growth hormone, but most of these cases can be medically treated for it. The pituitary gland is also essential in adults for producing hormones that have several roles, including regulating metabolism, stimulating ovulation in ovaries, and stimulating testosterone production in testicles.

In the study, the researchers studied 10 samples of Neanderthal DNA and two samples of Denisovan DNA from archaeological sites in Europe, the Balkans, Siberia and Asia. (The Denisovans were closely related to the Neanderthals.)

They compared their results to modern biobanks that store more than 1.1 million human genomes and related physical data, to understand the effects of the gene variant.

The researchers next tweaked cells in the laboratory to express the regular and Neanderthal variants of the gene, and found that the Neanderthal cells multiplied about 40% more often than regular cells when flushed with growth hormone. Despite this, the Neanderthal gene variant doesn't always make people look bulkier, the researchers found. Instead, the differences are more subtle: for example, people who have this gene variant would have higher levels of a key signaling protein in response to growth hormone, the researchers wrote.

The team also found that people with the gene variant might have slightly shorter tooth roots and small differences in their jaw shape — features that are seen in Neanderthals, who went extinct around 40,000 years ago.

Growing Neanderthals

Neanderthals were, in general, stockier than modern humans. But Zeberg thinks their enhanced response to growth hormone does not fully explain why Neanderthals were generally more robust and "thick-set" than modern humans.

"It cannot explain the Neanderthal body type on its own," he said. "Neanderthal robustness was almost certainly shaped by many genes, as well as by development, lifestyle, and environmental factors. Our results provide one possible piece of a much larger puzzle."

The placenta produces a particular form of growth hormone for a fetus, which differs from the form of growth hormone produced by the pituitary gland. However, it seems the Neanderthal variant doesn't respond to growth hormone from the placenta. As a result, Neanderthal babies were the same size at birth as modern human babies but grew faster after that, Zeberg said.

In the study's sample of modern humans, the team noticed that children aged 11 or younger with the gene variant didn't show the effect; rather, only older individuals did. This suggests that the gene variant's differences might not emerge until puberty, strengthening the idea that it responds only to growth hormone produced by the pituitary gland and not by the placenta, the researchers said.

"Growth hormone is also particularly important during puberty, when its levels rise substantially," Zeberg said. "The effect of the variant is therefore likely to be especially important during puberty and later development, rather than before birth."

Kornelius Kupczik, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Chile in Santiago who was not involved in the study, told Live Science that it was notable to see such a high prevalence of the Neanderthal gene variant in people of South Asian and Southeast Asian ancestry, when it was relatively rare among Europeans.

This suggests that early human migrations may have been more complicated than had been assumed — a "curious" challenge that required further investigation. "I guess that's something we still have to find out," he said.

How much do you know about our closest relatives? Find out with our Neanderthal quiz!

Scientists have developed a new type of artificial intelligence (AI) chip that mimics the human brain's aptitude for instinctive motor responses.

Modeled after the cerebellum, the part of the brain that helps coordinate balance and fine muscle control, the chip is designed to ignore routine information and respond only to unexpected events.

In simulated tests using electrocardiogram (ECG) data, the device flagged irregular heartbeats (arrhythmias) within one-fifth of a heartbeat and with 98% accuracy, according to the researchers — and did so twice as fast as conventional AI systems. The team published their findings July 10 in the journal Nature Communications.

The device could pave the way for highly responsive, low-power AI systems capable of spotting and reacting to unusual events without relying on the massive computing resources of data centers — from always-on health monitors to self-driving cars and autonomous robots.

A new approach to neuromorphic computing

Computer architecture inspired by the human brain is known as neuromorphic computing. Many researchers consider it key to developing more advanced and efficient AI systems, because it more closely mimics how neurons fire in the human brain.

Rather than processing all incoming information with equal intensity, the brain's biological circuits prioritize important signals and filter out routine background noise, helping it conserve energy.

Most neuromorphic approaches focus on the cerebrum, the largest part of the human brain and the central "thought center." In the new study, the scientists instead focused on the cerebellum, a smaller brain region responsible for coordination and instinctive motor skills — things we do without much conscious thought.

Neural circuits in the cerebellum contain competing excitatory and inhibitory signals that normally balance each other out. When something unexpected happens, the balance shifts and alerts the brain that it needs to react.

This makes the cerebellum a prime, untapped candidate for neuromorphic AI systems, said study co-author Mark Hersam, a professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University.

"The cerebellum is excellent at ignoring the expected and reserving its resources for reacting to the unexpected," Hersam said in a statement. "That approach ultimately translates into lower energy consumption."

Merging memory and compute

While current AI is exceptionally good at recognizing patterns, it spends enormous amounts of computing power continuously analyzing streams of data.

One of the constraints is the hardware itself. Processing information involves shuttling data back and forth between separate memory and processing components, resulting in a delay known as the von Neumann bottleneck.

This new device integrates memory and processing into a single component called a memtransistor (a portmanteau of "memory" and "transistor"), enabling it to move data much more quickly and efficiently.

The memtransistor is made from an atomically thin semiconductor called molybdenum disulfide, which forms a channel between two electrodes. One electrode makes direct contact with the semiconductor, while the other sits partly above it, separated by a thin insulating layer.

This asymmetry changes how electricity flows through the device, allowing it to switch between "excitatory" and "inhibitory" modes when the direction of the voltage is reversed, the researchers explained in the study.

The "output layer" of spiking neural networks

The device is designed to form the core of the output layer of a larger spiking neural network (SSN), Hersam explained in an email to Live Science.

SNNs are a type of neural network that processes information as a series of electrical spikes, mimicking how signals pass between neurons. For the study, the researchers measured how individual memtransistors responded to repeated electrical pulses, then used the results to simulate a network comprising multiple devices that could distinguish normal ECG patterns from arrhythmias.

They then fed the same ECG data into the cerebellum-inspired memtransistor network and a standard transformer model — the AI architecture that underpins large language models (LLMs) — and compared how quickly and efficiently each detected an arrhythmia. The cerebellum-inspired system was more than twice as fast and required around 10,000 times fewer computer calculations, according to the team.

Hersam said the results should translate into faster, more energy-efficient hardware, though he added that real-world performance would depend on the speed and size of the devices.

"We have not scaled memtransistors to the level of commercial Si [silicon] chips, but in principle, 2D materials and memtransistors can be scaled to comparable sizes and operating speeds," he told Live Science.

More efficient AI at the edge

Hersam said the new device was particularly suited to scenarios where quick inference was needed using minimal power. "One example could be edge computing, or in cases where access to the cloud is not available or is not desired due to the sensitivity of the data," he added.

A huge potential benefit of the technology is that it could slash AI's reliance on data centers. According to the International Energy Agency, global data center electricity demand could reach around 945 terawatt-hours by 2030 — slightly more than the entire electricity consumption of Japan — largely driven by AI. One terawatt-hour is equal to 1 trillion watt-hours — enough electricity to power a 60-watt lightbulb continuously for 1.9 million years.

A hypothetical future memtransistor-based network could enable robots, autonomous vehicles and cybersecurity systems to run continuously at low power by processing data locally and reacting only when they detect an unexpected, potentially hazardous event, the researchers said.

"The current AI deployed in cybersecurity and autonomous vehicles uses the massive computing power of data centers or an in-house facility of GPUs and CPUs," Hersam told Live Science. "In contrast, our approach promises low energy/power consumption by simplifying the net number of operations needed… [This] is not an incremental performance improvement, but a fundamentally different way of detecting anomalies."

The next stage of research will focus on mimicking the cerebellum's ability to adapt to predictability ‪—‬ specifically, how the human brain stops treating events as unique or unexpected when they're encountered multiple times.

See how much you know about the most complex organ in the human body with our brain quiz!

When penicillin was first introduced to the public, it earned the nickname "the wonder drug" because it cured infections that had once been deadly. It ushered in the golden era of antibiotics, during which the bacteria-killing drugs entered widespread use, driving down rates of severe disease and death from infections.

Unfortunately, the sweeping adoption of these medicines also set the stage for their obsolescence. Once hailed as miracles, antibiotics are now losing their power as bacteria evolve strategies to evade them.

Today, the world is contending with a "silent pandemic" of antibiotic resistance, driven largely by the misuse and overuse of these critical medicines. Curbing resistance, then, means changing how doctors prescribe ‪—‬ and patients use ‪—‬ antibiotics.

I traveled to Japan because a government initiative aimed at correcting antibiotic misuse has helped slash unnecessary prescribing and I wondered if a similar approach could work in the U.S. The program offers "tips" of 800 yen (about $5) to the clinics of pediatricians and ear, nose and throat doctors (ENTs) who withhold antibiotics in cases when they're likely not needed.

My findings suggest that many of the factors that drive antibiotic misuse in outpatient clinics overlap in the U.S. and Japan. But the cultural, governmental and insurance landscape may differ too greatly between the two countries for America to copy-and-paste Japan's approach. Instead, here's what I think could work to close the gaps in antibiotic overprescription in the U.S., based on my conversations with doctors.

Similar pressures, different systems

In both Japan and the U.S., sick visits are mere minutes long, so doctors must determine quickly whether an antibiotic is needed. Few rapid tests exist for bacterial infections, introducing a degree of diagnostic uncertainty. Children's caregivers sometimes request antibiotics when they're not needed, and depending on the doctor, that social tension can be enough to prompt an unnecessary prescription, research has found.

I learned that children's caregivers value doctors who can answer questions and clearly explain their reasoning. They don't necessarily arrive at an appointment expecting a specific "solution," such as an antibiotic prescription — even if they sometimes request one. When faced with parents who request a prescription, doctors can often defuse the tension by explaining why antibiotics aren't necessary, my reporting found.

On paper, Japan's antibiotic incentive gets at both halves of this pediatrician-parent dynamic. It offers pediatricians and ENTs extra payment to avoid antibiotics for certain types of infections. To claim that cash for their clinics, the doctors must explain their reasoning for withholding antibiotics to the child's caregivers, to help educate them about appropriate antibiotic use.

Although the pressures that lead to overprescription are similar in the U.S., the countries have several big differences.

For one, Japan has a national insurance system in which children's healthcare is essentially free. People in Japan report a relatively high degree of trust in their national government overall, and they specifically report being very happy with their healthcare system, with satisfaction rates far exceeding those of similarly wealthy countries.

By contrast, the U.S. has a patchwork of private, subsidized and public insurance. About 27 million people — roughly 8% of the population — are uninsured, and those with insurance frequently face issues with using their coverage and major barriers to care, such as prior authorization and claim denials. Navigating these barriers can derail and delay medical care, spurring frustration. Meanwhile, the number of people able to cover medical care is falling as costs spike, and people worry that insurers hold too much sway over health policy.

These layers of complexity are baked into the U.S. healthcare system, whereas in Japan, the federal government can introduce an insurance policy and affect change across the whole system at once. That's how the 800-yen incentive for pediatric clinics was implemented.

Hesitations from U.S. doctors

Japanese doctors readily accepted the notion of "tips" for withholding unneeded antibiotics, in part because those types of small-scale incentives already exist in Japanese healthcare.

Clinics earn incentives by claiming an add-on fee when they seek insurance reimbursement for a given appointment. That reimbursement rate is dictated by Japan's federal government, which sets healthcare pricing, so it's simple to introduce such incentives at scale. Similar add-on fees have been used to encourage doctors to prescribe cheaper "biosimilars" over costlier drugs with the same effects and to adopt better treatment approaches for conditions like hip fractures and painful periods.

In contrast, reimbursement rates in the U.S. are set by a dizzying array of agencies and private companies, all with their own goals.

I asked U.S.-based doctors whether a similar incentive could work here. Their responses were mixed.

"I think a program like the Japanese one could work in the U.S.," Dr. Conor Blanco, a pediatric ENT based in New Jersey, told me in an email. He noted that many physicians' pay is determined partially by patient satisfaction scores, so there are existing financial incentives that steer their behavior. If you set up a similar incentive around proper antibiotic use, "maybe it makes a difference, it's tough to say," he said.

Dr. Dmitry Volfson ‪—‬ chief medical officer of CityMD, a large urgent care provider in New York and New Jersey ‪—‬ agreed that it might work. "But [it] may be difficult to implement" given America's multitude of insurance payers, Volfson told me in an email.

Other doctors were less open to the idea.

"On first pass, it feels very unethical to me," said Dr. Morgan Leafe, a pediatrician who worked in both inpatient and outpatient settings for 11 years. Children's caregivers might be upset to hear that clinics get paid more when they don't prescribe an antibiotic, given that some are already under the impression that U.S. doctors are overly motivated by money, she told me in a direct message.

Doctors already widely criticize insurers for denying what physicians deem necessary care. Dr. Jennifer Shu, a pediatrician with Children's Medical Group in the Atlanta metro area, worries that insurers might set up the incentive in a way that restricts doctors' prescribing patterns too aggressively or doesn't align with current scientific evidence.

"I do not believe that financial incentives should dictate clinical practice," said Dr. Erik Blutinger, an emergency medicine physician for the Mount Sinai Health System in New York who also works in its urgent care centers. "It should boil down to the patient's health and ultimate well-being over finances."

Dr. Ilan Shapiro, a community pediatrician at AltaMed Health Services in Southern California, said he could see an incentive driving down unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions, but he added that it could also overcorrect, encouraging doctors to hold back antibiotics that are actually needed.

"I'm not a believer in the carrot or the stick," Shapiro told me.

How incentives work in the U.S.

Notably, many U.S. doctors are already financially incentivized to improve antibiotic prescribing — but those incentives apply at a high level, rather than case by case.

For example, many American health insurance plans use a tool called the Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS) to assess patients' quality of care at the medical centers they visit. The tool is used by many commercial insurers, as well as by private groups that manage Medicare and Medicaid plans.

Some insurers incentivize providers to achieve higher HEDIS scores by offering higher reimbursement in exchange, "but this is not universal," Volfson explained. There are HEDIS metrics that track how often antibiotics are used for ailments that are frequently viral, like upper respiratory infections, sore throat and bronchitis, he added.

These incentives fall under "value-based care," which aims to reward behaviors that tend to improve patient outcomes and lower healthcare costs. That's opposed to the more dominant "fee-for-service" model, which compensates practices for individual services provided.

Medicare has its own value-based care approach that includes metrics to track antibiotic use, including for upper respiratory infections. These metrics get factored into one composite score that can boost reimbursement (if the score is high) or lower it (if the score is low) for eligible clinicians and practices covered by the program.

Medicaid, which covers nearly half of U.S. children and is run at the state level, does not have an equivalent to this Medicare approach, but it has other ways of tying reimbursement rates to metrics like antibiotic use.

Medical practices' participation in value-based care is growing, but fee-for-service remains dominant. Some doctors are skeptical of the alternate approach, Leafe noted, because they feel it puts them on the hook for outcomes that are not completely within a healthcare team's control. But Shapiro, whose healthcare system uses value-based care, sees it as a way to encourage doctors to consider the long-term trajectory of a patient's health rather than only the acute ailment at hand.

"You have to have some sort of guardrail"

U.S. doctors were often put off by the idea of clinical decisions being steered by a potential bump in payment. "Patient-related outcomes are more important than financial incentives when it comes to shaping my clinical decision-making," Blutinger said.

Shapiro embraces value-based care but expressed doubts about the Japanese approach to incentives. My interviews suggested that incentives awarded for individual actions — such as offering $5 to not prescribe antibiotics for a given child's cold — might not be accepted as easily in the U.S. as they are in Japan.

As Shu expressed, that may partially come down to a lack of trust in insurance companies. There may also be a lack of trust in other doctors and practices; multiple doctors I spoke with expressed worries about underprescription.

"What if people become disincentivized to give antibiotics at all, even when they need them?" asked Dr. Shruti Gohil, an infectious-disease specialist with UCI Health who has designed antibiotic stewardship interventions for hospitals. "You have to have some sort of guardrail on that."

Gohil noted that, in Japan's case, the government incentive aims to promote a "culture of safety, whereas with an insurance company, it's just about finance." In other words, she worries that U.S. insurance companies mainly care about their bottom line, not public health. An insurer incentivizing doctors to provide less care struck her as "unsettling."

In contrast, the pediatricians I spoke with in Japan expressed concerns about other doctors overusing antibiotics, not underusing the drugs, and they argued that some doctors still don't take antibiotic resistance seriously. Their salaries are also lower than those of other medical specialties, and the doctors explicitly stated that they appreciate that the antibiotic add-on boosts their practices' profits.

Alternative approaches?

U.S. doctors may not accept a clone of Japan's incentive program, and given America's complex mix of insurance providers and systems, a similar incentive could be difficult to implement uniformly and at scale. But based on my research, I think that incentives that fit more comfortably within our existing infrastructure could still move the needle.

Doctors are already incentivized to record certain metrics, such as body mass index (BMI) and ongoing weight-management plans, in their notes, Shu said. For example, Medicare and HEDIS bake this documentation into quality measures that affect reimbursement, as well as other calculations that help dictate insurance payments.

Borrowing from Japan's approach, I propose that clinicians and health systems could be paid more when they document that they've explained key facts about appropriate antibiotic use to patients' caregivers. These facts might include that childhood illnesses are often viral and that symptoms like fever or green mucus don't necessarily mean bacteria are to blame. They could note that unnecessary antibiotics can cause side effects like diarrhea and make the medicines less effective over time. These talking points could be added to the electronic medical record, where clinicians could easily access them.

This parent-education requirement could incorporate follow-up plans for further learning. That might include providing parents with physical materials, like pamphlets, or links to vetted websites like the American Academy of Pediatrics' HealthyChildren.org.

Gohil's practice regularly uses those types of patient-directed materials. "Nothing beats the conversation," she said, "but they [the materials] give you talking points and then allow the patient to reference something."

Various trials suggest that educating parents about appropriate treatment for respiratory infections and uses of antibiotics can help shift their expectations around the drugs, in turn reducing how often they seek antibiotics. There's also data to suggest that doctors' providing parents both verbal and written information can help the knowledge stick. Some trials have found that the number of antibiotic prescriptions fell after such educational interventions.

Particularly effective trials combine parent education with efforts aimed at healthcare providers: in-office materials and presentations about antibiotics, guidelines within the electronic medical record that point doctors toward best practices, data on antibiotic resistance rates in the community, or "audit and feedback," where clinicians get report cards comparing their prescription rates with those of others in their practice.

This approach would not specifically incentivize nonprescribing over prescribing, but it would prompt clinicians to educate patients and caregivers about appropriate antibiotic use while providing them a simple script to follow. U.S. adults report placing more trust in health information from their own healthcare providers than from government entities, suggesting that these messages are more likely to stick when doctors deliver them.

Targeting caregivers

Incentives might also help by rewarding children's caregivers for educating themselves about antibiotics. That approach might be less ethically dubious than directly incentivizing doctors' prescribing habits, and the infrastructure for such incentives already exists, my reporting suggests.

Major U.S. health insurers — including private and public insurance — now offer their members cash, gift cards or reward points when they engage in certain "health promoting" behaviors. Even life insurers are getting in on the idea. Participants earn rewards by completing an annual well visit, getting a routine cancer screening, logging a certain number of steps per day, or completing courses on healthy eating or nicotine cessation.

The hope is that, by rewarding such healthy habits, insurers can reduce their members' medical costs. Evidence suggests that these programs can motivate people to change their behavior and improve related health measures, especially in the short term. Their long-term and systemic impacts are understudied, although some research — about quitting smoking, for example — demonstrate long-term behavioral changes.

This same infrastructure could be used to enhance patients' understanding of antibiotics, and thus relieve some of the pressure on doctors to explain why the drugs may not be necessary. Children's caregivers could earn rewards for engaging with short, interactive courses or informational pages about the basics of antibiotics — what the drugs treat, what they don't, what "watchful waiting" is, and why antibiotic resistance is a problem. Short quizzes and surveys could check parents' understanding and prompt further rewards from the insurer.

These resources could explain that many common childhood infections are viral and resolve on their own or, similar to an app about childhood illness created in Japan, lay out the recommended care for acute viral infections and describe the signs that a bug might actually be bacterial. The creator of the app, Dr. Masahiko Sakamoto of Saku Central Hospital, has found that the platform changes how parents understand childhood illness and interact with the health system.

Such information is already available to parents via trusted sources like the American Academy of Pediatrics; the difference in this scenario is that caregivers would be paid to use it. Gohil thinks that incentivizing this type of patient education would be a "boon," especially when combined with strategies aimed at improving providers' antibiotic use, such as audit and feedback.

"Presumably, with that kind of continuing education of patients, they would perhaps seek antibiotics less and less and understand when they're necessary," she said. "I think that [idea] is so compelling."

This approach could benefit insurers by averting unnecessary doctors' visits and prescription costs, and on a larger scale, potentially help lower the risk of resistant infections.

Beyond pediatrics

Japan's incentive program focuses on pediatricians and ENTs, because the government recognized a pattern of overprescription in those groups. In the U.S., pediatrics clinics aren't the main source of overprescription — but urgent care centers may be a significant one.

Compared with other outpatient medical settings, like doctor's offices, urgent care centers are more likely to write unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions, several studies suggest. One study of millions of urgent care visits found that prescriptions were written for 15% of bronchitis cases, for which antibiotics are nearly never needed.

Unlike primary care pediatricians, who see children's caregivers many times and have the opportunity to build trust, urgent care providers may see them only once. In a 2026 study of pediatric urgent care providers across the country, many reported feeling pressured to satisfy parental requests for antibiotics, and over 50% admitted to altering their care plans in response to such requests.

That said, 66% of those participants said parents are open to education about antibiotics, even when the provider's care plan didn't align with the caregiver's initial expectations. That suggests that prioritizing — and perhaps incentivizing — parent education in urgent care settings could help prevent unnecessary prescriptions.

"It does become challenging when you have a queue of patients waiting to be seen," Blutinger noted. Nonetheless, his practice aims to prioritize such education. He's found that parents are receptive to explanations about antibiotics, especially if he carefully listens to and addresses their concerns. "I've never found it helpful to make it a one-way, information-sharing conversation. It has to be two-way," he said.

The 2026 study included physicians, physician assistants (PAs) and nurse practitioners (NPs), with the latter two groups making up about half of the participants. (In Japan, only doctors can prescribe antibiotics, and there are no equivalent roles to NPs and PAs.)

Urgent care centers are often staffed largely by PAs and NPs, with one doctor on-site along with various medical assistants. That might be relevant to their antibiotic prescribing.

That's because some studies suggest that PAs and NPs are more likely to prescribe antibiotics than physicians are. In one study of acute respiratory tract infections, the providers were 30% more likely than doctors to write an antibiotic prescription for the same ailments, and that difference was more pronounced for visits with pediatric patients. In another study of outpatient providers, PAs and NPs had the highest likelihood of inappropriate prescriptions and pediatricians had the lowest.

The reasons for this difference aren't fully understood, although the study authors pointed out that efforts to improve antibiotic use have been aimed mostly at doctors. NP and PA education and training also tends to vary more widely than doctors' training, suggesting potential knowledge gaps.

These trends point to an opportunity to tailor interventions to NPs, PAs and urgent care providers. These might be easiest to implement in urgent care facilities affiliated with larger hospital systems, representing about 35% of U.S. urgent cares. These systems set the metrics that factor into bonuses that doctors, NPs and PAs frequently earn on top of their base salaries.

One metric that's already used widely is clinical documentation, which could be required to note when rationale for denying antibiotics was provided to patients. A large Utah urgent care network recently took a similar approach and gave their clinicians a goal to decrease antibiotic use for respiratory illnesses. They made a certain threshold of antibiotic use in a year a quality metric that clinicians could earn extra compensation for hitting.

That financial incentive didn't stand alone, though. It coincided with new educational materials for clinicians and patients about antibiotics, new guidance on antibiotics in the medical record, and the introduction of peer-to-peer comparisons of prescribing rates. Together, these strategies drove a substantial decrease in overall antibiotic use for respiratory ailments. Clinicians initially prescribed antibiotics for 48% of respiratory conditions; that fell to 33% within one year and to 26% the next.

It takes time for new antibiotic-use guidelines to filter down to individual providers, particularly when there's an existing culture of overprescription. Japan's experiment demonstrated that targeted incentives can reduce antibiotic misuse — at least in Japan. The exact same approach may not be acceptable or feasible in the U.S. But we can still take inspiration from the idea and explore it as one tool among many to fight this silent pandemic.

"Antimicrobial resistance is one of the world's most urgent public health threats," Dr. Sarah Kabbani, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Office of Antibiotic Stewardship, told me in an email. "Because outpatient prescribing is so common, even small improvements can have a large impact on patient safety and population health."

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

Sperm whales make the loudest communication sound of any animal on Earth, researchers find — but they aren't sure why.

In a new study, researchers investigated the mysterious, low-frequency clangs made by male sperm whales and found that they were louder than any known sperm whale communication signal, with the potential to be heard by other whales around 43 miles (70 kilometers) away.

They are very loud and metallic sounds that almost sound "like a jail door slamming," which is "why they are also called clangs," study first author Simone Videsen and co-author Peter Teglberg Madsen, biologists at the Center for Active Sensing with Sound at Aarhus University in Denmark, told Live Science in an email. "You feel small as a human when you hear them, as they are clearly made by something bigger than you," they said.

Sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) are the largest toothed predators, growing up to around 59 feet (18 meters) long. They dive deep into the ocean to hunt giant squid (Architeuthis dux) and other prey that dwell as low as 1.9 miles (3 km) below the ocean surface.

The distinctive clangs, first reported in the 1980s, are the loudest communication signal that sperm whales make, although they can produce even louder echolocation clicks to locate prey during hunts. The clangs are unusual because they are made only by males and represent an extreme form of communication that scientists still can't fully explain.

In the latest study, the researchers used hydrophones (underwater microphones) off the Seychelles to measure the sound level of the clangs. They also studied the rhythm of the signals in recordings collected in other locations, including off Sri Lanka, Norway and Scotland.

The recordings revealed that the whales kept up a slow, low-frequency rhythm, unlike the short, rhythmic clicks that both males and females make for typical social communication or the clicks used in echolocation. In fact, the rhythm was so slow that males left a gap of 5 to 10 seconds between each clang. That might not sound that impressive ‪—‬ but as far as we know, whales can't count to 10, so they are using another means to keep up this rhythm. According to the study, the whales might be relying on the echoes of the clangs bouncing off the seafloor.

Sperm whales can produce these record-breaking acoustics thanks to their ginormous noses — the largest of any animal — that dominate their massive heads, which make up about one-third of their body length. To make the clangs, male whales use their "phonic lips" ‪—‬ structures in their noses that snap together.

"They make [these noises] by forcing pressurized air through so-called phonic lips in their giant sound producing nose," Videsen and Madsen said.

The researchers proposed a few possible explanations for why the whales might be making the long-range clangs. For example, the males might be using the sounds to attract mates or scare off other males.

However, the communication may exist for another, unknown reason. In future studies, the researchers hope to learn more about this mysterious form of communication by playing recordings of the clangs underwater and seeing how nearby sperm whales respond.

This dramatic astronaut photo shows a highly active stratovolcano in Tanzania that was recently adorned with a striking white "crown" of ash. The explosive volcano produces a rare type of lava that is unusually cool, uniquely colored and the fastest-flowing on Earth.

The volcano is officially named Ol Doinyo Lengai and stands up to 9,718 feet (2,692 meters) above the grassy plains of the Arusha region of northern Tanzania. The local Maasai people call the towering peak the "Mountain of God," because they believe it is the residence of the supreme creator god Ngai (also known as Engai or Enkai), according to the book "Sacred Mountains of the World" (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Ol Doinyo Lengai is one of Africa's most active volcanoes; it has been erupting on and off for the past 15,000 years. It alternates between effusive eruptions, where lava seeps out of its vents, and sporadic explosive outbursts, which can drastically alter its appearance. Its most recent eruption, which is effusive, has been going on since April 2017, according to the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program.

The sacred mountain produces a rare type of lava that consists of natrocarbonatite rock, which is rich in sodium, potassium and calcium carbonate but low in silica. As a result, it is much cooler than most other lava, dipping to temperatures below 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit (600 degrees Celsius). It also has an unusually low viscosity, which makes it "some of the fastest-flowing lava in the world," according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

When it solidifies, this unusually runny lava turns surprisingly pale, due to chemical reactions with rainwater and moisture in the air. In this image, you can see several lightly colored rivers of rock snaking down the volcano's flank. The youngest of these lava flows was created during an eruption in 1998.

For most of the past century, Ol Doinyo Lengai's summit consisted of a bowl-like depression that gradually filled with lava. But between 2007 and 2008, a series of major explosive eruptions birthed a 330-foot-tall (100 m) ash cone that now looms over the summit's center.

This explosive event has transformed the volcano's appearance when viewed from space, additional photos from the Earth Observatory show. In the featured image, a dark spot of fresh lava can be seen in the center of the cone, making it look like a crown.

Ol Doinyo Lengai is located in the East African Rift System, a roughly 2,000-mile long (3,500 kilometers) area surrounding a divergent fault line where the African Plate is splitting into the Somali and Nubian plates.

This region has been tectonically active for more than 25 million years and has created some of the continent's most interesting topographic features, including Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya, which are located on each side of Ol Doinyo Lengai, according to the Earth Observatory.

The godly mountain is around 10 miles (16 km) south of Lake Natron, a red salt lake that's famed for its large flamingo populations. The geographical features are often photographed alongside one another.

See more Earth from space

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently approved the first mRNA vaccine for seasonal influenza, bringing a bumpy approval process to a close.

The shot's approval appears to contradict the federal government's generally unfavorable view of mRNA vaccines. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) terminated half a billion dollars in funding for mRNA vaccine development, impacting 22 projects. A key vaccine advisory committee was remade to include people who have been vocally opposed to mRNA vaccines. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has falsely called the mRNA-based COVID-19 shots the "deadliest vaccines ever made" and incorrectly claimed that mRNA vaccines don't work well against upper-respiratory viral infections.

Does the approval of a new mRNA vaccine signal a shift in this sentiment? Not necessarily, experts told Live Science.

"I don't read this as a shift in the administration's stance on mRNA," Jeff Coller, a distinguished professor of RNA biology and therapeutics at Johns Hopkins University, said in an email. Coller is also a co-founder of the Alliance for mRNA Medicines, an international association aimed at advancing mRNA technology, and he advises several RNA companies.

The approval does suggest, however, that the FDA's approval process isn't completely compromised by anti-mRNA sentiment, Coller said.

"What the approval does signal, and I think this is the more useful story: the statutory machinery still works when it is allowed to run," Coller said. "For companies and investors deciding whether to keep building in this space in the United States, that matters more than any statement from HHS."

A "tortured" approval process

The new flu vaccine, called mFlusiva, was made by Moderna. The company filed for the shot's approval in February, but initially, the FDA denied Moderna's request to have its materials reviewed.

Reporting by STAT News later found that career FDA scientists had planned to do the review but they had been overruled by Dr. Vinay Prasad, then director of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER). (Live Science has contacted the FDA for comment.)

"It's been a little tortured," Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, said of the approval process. In April 2024, before starting its final trial of the vaccine, Moderna ran its plans past the FDA, and the FDA confirmed in writing that the trial's design was acceptable. But when Moderna filed for approval using data from the trial, "Vinai Prasad, who had just been put in place at CBER … said no," Offit told Live Science.

"That didn't last long, nor did he last long, after that," Offit added. The denial was reversed within the month, and Prasad left the FDA in April.

"That refusal was reversed fifteen days later," Coller said. "Nothing about the evidence changed in those fifteen days." What changed were the choices made by FDA leadership, he said.

Once allowed to do so, the FDA's vaccine advisory committee, called the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), met to discuss the shot's safety and effectiveness. The group voted unanimously to recommend approving the vaccine for adults ages 50 and up. The FDA then followed this advice, making the approval official.

"They're experts in the field," Offit said of the VRBPAC members. He personally sat on the committee from 2017-2025. "It's a pleasure to go to those meetings because, you know, it's the way it's supposed to work," he said.

Unlike the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), VRBPAC has not seen a major overhaul in its membership since Kennedy's appointment, though it does have a number of open vacancies. However, its remaining members have ample expertise in infectious diseases, immunology, global health and genetics.

Next step for the new mRNA flu vaccine

Now that mFlusiva is FDA approved, the data must be reviewed by the CDC, which issues recommendations about how the vaccine should be given and to whom. Normally, a vaccine advisory committee would review the data first and then give the CDC guidance, but it's unclear how that might look in this case, Offit said.

That's because ACIP is in the midst of a lawsuit, which recently prompted a federal judge to put a freeze on several of the committee's recent changes. Those changes include the appointment of new committee members by Kennedy and a major revision of the childhood immunization schedule. While the litigation plays out, the committee could still issue new vaccine guidance if it appoints enough new members to compensate for the ones who are currently in limbo — but that hasn't happened yet.

The CDC could issue its own recommendations for mFlusiva without ACIP's help, Offit noted. It's within the agency's power to do so. But will that happen?

"I don't know," Offit said. "Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has ultimate say, and he's a science denialist and an anti-vaccine activist. So I don't know." Offit predicts that Kennedy "will do nothing to encourage vaccination, period, independent of what the vaccine technology is."

The shot is now licensed, thanks to the FDA approval, and that means it could be used without bespoke CDC recommendations, Offit said. But a lack of CDC recommendations may undermine insurance coverage for and access to the vaccines.

It would be useful to have an mRNA vaccine option available this upcoming flu season, Offit said, in part because trials suggest that the shot is more protective than existing options, especially for adults 50 to 64. There's also strong evidence that that's true for adults over 64, but for that age group, more data will be collected in the coming season to see how well mFlusiva stacks up against existing high-dose flu shots for older adults. Offit expects those upcoming results will likely be positive and back up the existing evidence, which involved measuring antibody levels in older adults given either vaccine.

Other strengths of mRNA-based flu vaccines are that they can be produced in about half the time that existing flu shots are made and they can be better tailored to match the targeted flu strains, Offit noted.

In the 2025-2026 flu season, there were at least 390,000 hospitalizations and 24,000 deaths from flu in the U.S. Flu shots are the best way to prevent severe illness and death from influenza.

Looking to the future of mRNA vaccines in the U.S., mFlusiva's approval suggests that vaccine regulatory bodies still have the means and will to review mRNA vaccine trials and approve new products, as Coller said. However, this stand-alone approval doesn't necessarily mark a sea change in the federal government's sentiment toward the technology, he noted.

"An approval is a legal determination on one application. It tells you the data met the standard, which everyone involved in reviewing it already knew," he said. "A genuine shift would look like the 22 canceled mRNA contracts being restored, or a retraction of the claim that these vaccines fail against respiratory viruses. As far as I know, neither has happened."

Live Science contacted the HHS for comment on the mFlusiva approval.

"Secretary Kennedy has been clear that he believes mRNA products warrant heightened scientific scrutiny. That's why this vaccine is entering the market with some of the strongest post-market study commitments FDA has required, particularly for individuals 65 years of age and older," HHS Press Secretary Emily Hilliard responded in an email.

"CDC has not yet issued its recommendations, and this vaccine is not mandated. Americans deserve transparent information, informed consent, and the ability to work with their physician to decide whether — and which — seasonal flu vaccine is right for them," she continued. "HHS will continue to follow the evidence and make safety and effectiveness data publicly available as additional information emerges."

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

Archaeologists excavating near the ancient town of Aspendos in Turkey have discovered the grave of a person who may have been a pro athlete over two millennia ago.

"Coins with depictions of wrestlers and other artifacts found in the tomb indicate that the person buried here may have been involved in sports, perhaps even a wrestler," Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, Turkey's minister of culture and tourism, said in a translated statement Monday (Aug. 10).

The archaeologists found the skeleton and artifacts in a box-style sarcophagus made of stone slabs while digging in one of the cemeteries outside Aspendos. The tomb likely dates to between 475 and 300 B.C., during the city's Classical period, according to the statement.

Aspendos was a Greco-Roman city in southwest Turkey, roughly 10 miles (16 kilometers) inland from the Mediterranean Sea. The city was founded by Greek colonists in the fifth century B.C. and quickly rose to prominence as a trading center for salt, olive oil, wood and horses. Aspendos had a large Greek gymnasium as well as a large stadium that was erected in the second century A.D. and could hold up to 8,000 spectators who watched footraces, javelin contests and wrestling.

The ancient sport of wrestling is linked to Aspendos primarily through the city's coinage. Aspendos minted its own silver coins with the image of two naked wrestlers on one side.

These coins, called staters, were minted for well over a century, which suggests wrestling held civic significance for Aspendos, Oğuz Tekin, an archaeologist at Koç University in Turkey, suggested in a 2000 study.

Although wrestler-type Aspendos coins were discovered in the newly excavated grave, it is unclear whether the deceased was a wrestler.

"There will need to be much more analysis before a positive identification of the body as a wrestler can be determined," Sarah E. Bond, a historian at the University of Iowa who was not involved in the discovery, told Live Science. For example, signs of a broken and healed nose could indicate the person was an athlete.

"Coins alone cannot indicate this was a Classical era Greek wrestler," Bond said, because "these coins were numerous and used as payment by the entire populace, not by wrestlers alone."

The grave is part of the ongoing excavation of a newly discovered cemetery at Aspendos, according to Ersoy. "With every new find in Aspendos, we will continue to complete the missing pages of our history, protect our cultural heritage through scientific studies, and carry it into the future," he said in the statement.

See if you know what these mysterious artifacts are with our archaeological fragments quiz!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

Baader AstroSolar Filter Film OD 5.0 is one of those "secret" astronomy products that looks almost too simple to be special. In its most familiar form, it’s a thin, silvery A3 or A4 sheet of metalized film that can be cut and mounted in cardboard, plastic or commercial filter cells. Surely it’s better to have a pre-made filter for your camera? Go to any solar eclipse, and you’ll get your answer: experienced eclipse photographers, solar observers and anyone wanting to safely point a camera or binoculars at the sun very often rely on Baader AstroSolar Filter Film OD 5.0.

Its popularity does not come from its ruggedness nor its out-of-the-box convenience. Whether bought as a loose sheet for making filters or as ready-made Baader solar filters for binoculars, camera lenses and telescopes, it enables super-sharp captures of sunspots on the sun, allowing much faster shutter speeds than some rival solar filter materials.

Although a brighter Baader AstroSolar Filter Film OD 3.8 Photo Film is also available (which is not designed for visual use), this review focuses on the Baader AstroSolar Filter Film OD 5.0, both as a practical DIY filter material and as the core of ready-made solar filters.

Baader AstroSolar Filter Film OD 5.0: Design

• Thin and delicate
• Perfect for crafting homemade solar filters
• Available as A4 and A5 sheets and ready-made filters

The defining feature of Baader AstroSolar Filter Film is how little there is to it. The film is extremely thin — around 0.01 mm — and feels much more fragile than tougher solar polymer materials. That can be disconcerting the first time you handle it. It wrinkles easily, but should never be pulled tight. However, initial fears are misplaced because a good homemade solar filter does not require the film to be flat. In fact, it should be mounted slightly slack, because wrinkles and ripples in the filter material actually improve the image.

The real design advantage is that AstroSolar Film is hugely versatile and can be cut to suit almost anything. A single sheet can be used to make a front filter for a telephoto lens or two, as well as for a couple pairs of binoculars. Any filter must always go over the front of the optics, never behind them. For binoculars, make a filter for one objective lens for safe one-eyed viewing and securely cap the other.

The film is sold as a loose sheet of material for DIY use in four sizes: ECO (140x155 mm/5.5x6 in), A4 (20x29 mm/8x12 in), 100x50mm/40x20 in, and Giant (117x117 mm/46x46 in). Also sold are the ASTF: AstroSolar Telescope Filter OD 5.0 (80-280mm), ASSF: AstroSolar Spotting Scope Filter OD 5.0 (50-150mm) and ASBF: AstroSolar Binocular Filter OD 5.0 (50-100mm). All come in multiple sizes.

They are, of course, neater and more durable than homemade cardboard versions, but the optical principle is exactly the same. Besides, the loose sheet version is more attractive if you have several lenses or binoculars to cover, or if you want to make a filter that precisely fits a specific lens hood.

Baader AstroSolar Filter Film OD 5.0: Performance

• Sharp solar detail
• Neutral white color
• Suits cameras and binoculars

Although its versatility makes it unusual, making DIY solar filters won’t be for everyone. However, the main reason to choose Baader AstroSolar Filter Film is for its image quality. When used correctly, it produces a sharp, high-contrast, white-light view of the sun. Sunspots appear cleanly defined, the solar limb looks crisp and the image has a neutral white tone, rather than the deep orange produced by some polymer filters.

That white rendering will not be to everyone’s taste. Casual eclipse watchers often expect the sun to look orange through solar filters because that is how it often appears through eclipse glasses and some glass or polymer solar filters. Baader’s version is a lot more clinical. For photographers, however, that is an advantage. A neutral white solar disk is easy to warm up later in editing, while a heavily colored orange image gives a little less flexibility. It all depends on your point of view.

The sharpness advantage comes from the fact that it allows shorter exposures, something that becomes more obvious as the focal length increases. In a short-lens or wide-field composition, the sun is small, so differences between filter materials are less obvious.

On a 400mm, 500mm or 600mm lens, where sunspots and the edge of the solar disk matter more, Baader AstroSolar Film OD 5.0 shows why it has such a strong reputation among eclipse photographers. In our tests at 400m set to f/8 and ISO 100, we found that exposures of 1/800s and 1/1,000s achieved the best results.

It also works well with binoculars. In fact, we’ve been traveling to watch solar eclipses using the same DIY solar filter fashioned from Baader AstroSolar Film OD 5.0 for a decade. Over the years, it’s been reinforced with plastic tape to extend its lifespan. It turns a pair of 10x50 binoculars into a safe solar-viewing instrument for the partial phases of an eclipse (just remember to cap the non-filtered lens).

The use of Baader AstroSolar Film is, of course, solely for capturing the partial phases of a solar eclipse, allowing safe imaging of the shrinking solar crescent. If you’re in the path of totality and about to watch a total solar eclipse, you’ll need to gently remove the filter when it gets dark.

That makes a homemade slip-on filter particularly attractive: it can be designed to slide off quickly, avoiding the fiddly delay of unscrewing a hot, threaded plastic or metal filter during the brief moments of totality. It’s wise to have an empty shirt pocket ready to take that filter for the few minutes of totality, which will keep it safe until the post-totality partial phases a few minutes later.

Baader AstroSolar Filter Film OD 5.0: Functionality

• Easy to use for DIY projects
• Works across many optical devices
• Safety checks required

If you buy a solar filter that uses Baader AstroSolar Filter Film OD 5.0, you have an excellent product that requires care when traveling and storing. If you purchase it as a sheet of material, it requires some time and patience as well as cardboard, tape, glue and scissors to custom-build your own Baader AstroSolar Solar Filter for almost any optical device. That’s a huge advantage over many screw-in photographic filters, which only fit specific thread sizes.

As you’d expect, making a new solar filter for any new gear from an existing sheet of Baader AstroSolar Filter Film is much cheaper than investing in an all-new screw-in photographic filter.

The DIY construction is simple: two cardboard rings sandwich the film, then a short cardboard sleeve fits snugly over the lens hood, binocular objective or telescope tube. The result should be secure enough that it cannot fall off accidentally, but easy enough to remove deliberately. It’s a good idea to have some masking tape handy in your camera bag for added security, particularly if it’s windy and/or the sun is low on the horizon.

Whether your solar filter is pre-made or homemade, it’s important to inspect it before use, especially when using Baader AstroSolar Filter Film. Any holes, tears, or scratches are reasons to stop using the filter.

Should you buy Baader AstroSolar Filter Film?

Baader AstroSolar Filter Film OD 5.0 is neither the most robust nor the quickest solution for casual eclipse viewing. Its delicate construction demands careful handling, storage and inspection before every use. For some users, a ready-made polymer or glass filter will be less stressful.

However, for photographers and binocular users, it’s hard to beat. It is light, sharp, adaptable and available in various forms for different solar imaging needs. Its greatest strength is that it allows you to create exactly the filter you need, whether that’s for a 400mm camera lens, one side of a pair of binoculars, a compact travel telescope or any other equipment.

Treat it gently and mount it securely, and Baader AstroSolar Filter Film remains one of the most useful solar filter materials available.

For space fans and skywatchers alike, Wednesday Aug. 12 is destined to be a date for the history books. For those in North America — including Alaska, eastern Canada and parts of the northeastern U.S. — viewers will be able to see a partial solar eclipse during the daytime. Across the pond, the total eclipse will be visible from eastern Greenland, western Iceland and northern Spain. (For those planning to see this rare event in person, it's important to wear the right solar eclipse glasses, especially if you're watching the partial phase of the eclipse; we have some gear suggestions that can help you watch this skywatching event from anywhere).

Once the sun goes down, the night skies offer their own treat: the Perseid meteor shower, which peaks overnight on Aug. 12-13. Thanks to a new moon, stargazers will have an even better chance of catching these streaking lights across the night sky, with the best hours to watch occurring from midnight to 2 a.m. local time. According to the Planetary Society, observers in dark sky areas can hope to catch between 50 and 75 meteors per hour. The dark skies also make it a great night to try and spot the Milky Way, or the six planets that will appear together before dawn.

With so much going on in the skies on Aug. 12, will you be watching? Take our poll and let us know what you think in the comments below.

This tall, conical hat made from a single sheet of hammered gold was likely worn by an ancient priest during a sun cult ceremony. The Berlin gold hat is the best preserved example of only four Bronze Age accessories of this type that have been found in Central and Western Europe.

The gold hat is in the collection of the Museum of Prehistory and Early History in Berlin. The museum acquired the artifact in 1996 after it circulated on the antiquities market. As a result, it is unclear where the hat was found, but the other three known Bronze Age gold hats were discovered in southern Germany and western France.

The hat is roughly 29 inches (74 centimeters) tall and weighs just over 1 pound (480 grams). It is accented with a flat bronze band with a bronze wire bordering its brim. A wool or felt lining was likely worn underneath the gold hat to stabilize it, but no traces of a lining remain.

Bands of decoration on the Berlin gold hat make the artifact stand out. The repeated motifs of concentric circles, disks, ovals and other symbols encode numerical values that correspond to a calendar, archaeologist Wilfried Menghin argued in a 2008 study. Each band represents a numerical value, and combinations of bands can help calculate lunar months and solar years, as well as convert between lunar and solar dates. The calendar can also be used to predict lunar eclipses.

"The person who wore this hat was the carrier of secret and very special knowledge," Matthias Wemhoff, director of the Museum of Prehistory and Early History, said in a translated 2018 video. Wemhoff described the hat's wearer as a priest who may have come out on a mountaintop at sunrise. The glistening gold hat would have caught the sun's first morning rays, dazzling the other participants in the ceremony.

Although there are no historical records of a Bronze Age sun cult in Europe, other astonishing artifacts, such as the Trundholm Sun Chariot and the Nebra Sky Disk, showcase the importance of celestial bodies to these prehistoric societies.

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

Can you put together last week's Astonishing Artifact?

This article was originally published by Yale Environment 360.

Near-extinct oryx are returning. Farms are prospering as irrigation water reaches fields for the first time in decades. Farmers are even nurturing new trees on their land. Once a byword for drought and famine, the African Sahel region on the southern flank of the Sahara Desert now has more water than it has for decades. Wells are filling as water tables have risen by 13 feet or more in places. Lake Chad, which was one of Africa's largest expanses of water before shriveling during the droughts, is recovering.

Over years of drought in the late 20th century, the sun hard baked the soils of the Sahel. Now, erratic but extreme rains are returning to this semi-arid region, causing lethal floods but also replenishing rivers, filling desert depressions, restoring water to dried riverbeds known as wadis, and sluicing rainwater off impermeable soils directly into aquifers. The process began in the 1990s but has accelerated in the past five years.

"Across the Sahel, from Ethiopia to Senegal, we have evidence of increased terrestrial water storage," says Richard Taylor, a hydrogeologist at University College London who has led ground teams investigating the relationships between climate, land use, and groundwater recharge in the region.

But increased rainfall since the drought years of the 1970s and 1980s explains only some of the rewetting of the Sahel. It cannot fully account for the transformation, say researchers. Also driving the rewetting, they posit, are changes to the land surface, ranging from the internationally funded Great Green Wall project to the revival of traditional water harvesting methods and the chaos caused by jihadist militants, which has led to the abandonment of irrigation projects that once emptied rivers of their flows.

Much remains unclear in these remote lands on the edge of the Sahara Desert, but the trend seems set to be long-term, with climate scientists saying more — and more extreme — rainfall is on the way in the 21st century. As underground water reserves revive, some are forecasting an agricultural renaissance.

The Sahel is a band of semi-arid land around 500 miles wide that stretches across North Africa, from Senegal in the west to Ethiopia in the east, with a fast-growing population above 150 million. It is a transition zone between the Sahara Desert in the north and savanna grasslands and coastal forests to the south. Water is everything in the Sahel. Its rains are critical to human survival, but they have been sporadic and unpredictable since the close of a humid era around 5,000 years ago.

How much rain the Sahel gets depends on the West African monsoon, a wet wind that sweeps north from the Gulf of Guinea between June and September, and on how far the monsoon penetrates into the interior. Whether it reaches the 15th parallel north of the equator or stalls at the 10th parallel make the difference between a good year and a failed harvest, say hydrologists.

During the droughts of the late 20th century, as the monsoon repeatedly fell short, up to a million people died of hunger and disease. But now, with a strengthening monsoon, there is talk among scientists of the Sahel being on the verge of a new humid era.

That is good news for wildlife. With wadi systems reviving in Chad's Ouadi Rimé-Ouadi Achim nature reserve, conservationists are documenting resurgent numbers of aardvarks, porcupines, badgers, and foxes, and the successful reintroduction of the scimitar-horned oryx, which was once declared extinct in the wild but now numbers more than 600 individuals. Elsewhere, West African giraffes are browsing on verdant vegetation in areas from which they had disappeared.

As the rains return, farmers have boosted crop yields by nurturing the natural regrowth of some 200 million trees on formerly treeless fields in southern Niger, according to former World Resources Institute geographer Chris Reij. And, supported by new aid programs such as the World Bank's regional recovery program PROLAC, they are re-establishing small-scale irrigation systems by tapping groundwater around resurgent oases in Chad, Niger, and Cameroon.

"In the past … there was not enough water to irrigate crops, and our harvests were meager. Now our lives have changed," Achta, a farmer in Chad, said last year. She now has water to plant on four times as much land and has doubled her onion crop. The Bank says her story "reflects a broader transformation across the Lake Chad basin."

Most places in the Sahel are seeing more rainfall. And that rain has become concentrated in extreme downpours from clusters of violent thunderstorms, known to meteorologists as Mesoscale Convective Systems, that occasionally bubble up during the monsoon season. Sahelian storm clusters are now rated as some of the most powerful on the planet, and they deliver most of the region's rainfall. There has been a threefold increase in the frequency of extreme storms since the 1980s, according to a recent analysis.

Why the revival of the rains? An assessment published in 2021 by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found "high confidence" among climate scientists that it is a result of strong warming in the North Atlantic, caused by a combination of global heating and a reduction, in Europe and North America, of sulphate aerosols from coal burning, which once created a thin haze that cooled the ocean. That cooling prevented the northward migration of the West African monsoon into the Sahel, resulting in drought. But the clean-up has warmed the ocean and pulled the monsoon back into the Sahel, strengthening its ability to produce deluges.

The effects of these mega-storms are especially challenging in a region more used to disasters caused by the absence of rain. Niger, one of the world’s 10 poorest countries, saw tens of thousands die from famine during the late 20th century droughts. Now, it sees more deaths from floods than droughts. Fierce storms during the 2024 monsoon season inundated the capital, Niamey, and in rural areas washed away more than 150,000 mud-brick homes.

Sudden downpours are initially destructive, but they are a boon to underground water reserves. Falling onto compacted ground, the water does not initially infiltrate the soil but rushes into rivers and dry wadis, which speed the water's flow into aquifers.

Hydrologists say that this indirect infiltration is most intense after heavy storms. "In some locations, rainfall intensity is more important than the annual rainfall amount in determining the magnitude of groundwater recharge," says Taylor. This intensity, he says, is a major cause of the rapid rising of water tables — especially since, in the Sahel, most water drains not to the ocean but inland to depressions and lakes.

Not only are new ponds forming across the formerly arid lands; ancient networks of wadis are being restored. And Taylor's network of researchers has found wells across the region refilling. Mean water tables in much of Niger have risen by some 13 feet, indicating a 15 percent increase in aquifer reserves.

This local data is now being corroborated by analysis from satellites that measure changes in land mass by tracking subtle changes in gravitational force from the land below. NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment mission has found a sharp increase in gravitational force across the Sahel in the past two decades that hydrologists attribute to growing terrestrial water storage.

But rainfall and its intensity are only part of the story. Events on land also play a part.

Environmentalists have long held that the encroachment of agriculture into the Sahel during the 20th century caused "desertification" by removing natural vegetation, destroying soils, and allowing the advance of desert sands. But hydrologically, the effect may be the opposite because some crops can actually help the land retain water.

All vegetation absorbs moisture from the soil before transpiring it into the air. But shallow-rooted African grain crops such as millet and sorghum transpire less moisture than the deeper-rooted grasses they replace, leaving more moisture in the soil.

An amplifying factor is the drought-driven crusting of soils, which has increased runoff by around 50 percent in the central Sahel in recent decades. Analysis by Christophe Peugeot, a hydrologist at the HydroSciences laboratory at the University of Montpellier in France, found that the droughts "have permanently transformed the region's soils… fueling today's floods."

Much of this runoff ends up in Lake Chad, on the border between Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, and Niger, which drains an area almost six times the size of California. The lake's dramatic demise became a totemic image of the late 20th century hydrological decline of the Sahel. But less well known is that the lake is now recovering, as water inflows increase. Hydrogeologists at the University of N'Djamena in Chad report that in 2024 it swelled to a peak of more than 9,000 square miles, almost as big as in the 1960s and 10 times its size in the mid-1980s.

This growth is partly masked by large areas of saturated vegetation in the lake that do not show up in satellite images, say hydrologists. But as the lake grows, the aquifer beneath is also refilling.

Some researchers argue that deliberate efforts to capture rain in soils can also help explain the rising groundwaters across the region. One such effort is the Great Green Wall. Originally planned as a barrier of planted trees to prevent the advance of the Sahara, it has morphed into more grassroots efforts to control soil erosion by capturing rainfall and improving soil moisture, all of which can improve infiltration underground.

Many such projects revive traditional water-harvesting techniques, including the placement of stones along hill contours, digging small holes known as "zai pits" amid crops, and forming crescent-shaped mounds around trees.

Alpha Lo of the Climate Water Project, who highlighted the restored Sahelian groundwaters in a recent online analysis, argues that such techniques are "the primary reason." But most researchers believe that, while locally effective in nurturing trees or crops, they are not happening at sufficient scale to explain the region-wide resurgence.

A final suggestion is that humans are extracting less water from rivers, leaving more to eventually infiltrate into aquifers. One driver of this trend is the decline of big irrigation projects that were constructed during the drought years to boost food production. For instance, Cameroon once largely emptied the River Logone, historically the biggest single source of water flowing into Lake Chad, to grow rice. But the SEMRY irrigation project reportedly diverts much less water now, due to poor management, aging infrastructure, and the outmigration of farmers.

In areas around Lake Chad, farmers have also abandoned their irrigated fields because of Boko Haram, a militant jihadist group that continues to terrorize communities. Timmo Gaasbeek, food security policy officer at the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, says the chaos in northern Nigeria "means that the water in the rivers is not caught upstream, and continues to flow into Lake Chad, where it contributes to higher water levels and more groundwater recharge."

Most climate models predict a further increase in annual rainfall in the coming decades, due to global heating and the banishing of cooling aerosols from the North Atlantic. Taylor predicts that "the Sahel will experience particularly marked increases in extreme rain" that will "serve to increase groundwater recharge."

Peugeot says that "the increased availability of water in valley bottoms could promote the development of irrigation, offering new prospects in several Sahelian regions." Buoyed by such predictions, Nigeria is looking to restore the 165,000-acre South Chad Irrigation Project on the former shores of Lake Chad, which has long been abandoned for want of water.

But the road ahead will not be straightforward. Sahel rains will continue to be erratic on all timescales. Most immediately, climatologists are predicting that this year's strong El Niño event could deliver drought in the eastern Sahel, but bumper rains and more floods further west.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

Ever since NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began science operations in 2022, something has been bothering astronomers. Scattered across JWST's deepest images of the early cosmos are tiny, crimson-colored smudges that glow brightly in infrared light but appear surprisingly compact, making them difficult to classify. These mysterious objects appear in huge numbers around 600 million years after the Big Bang before seemingly vanishing less than a billion years later.

These odd-looking "little red dots" (LRDs) left astronomers wondering whether they were witnessing an entirely new type of galaxy or something even stranger. But now, fresh observations from JWST, combined with data from the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, suggest that LRDs may not have disappeared at all. Instead, they may have simply changed their appearance as the universe grew older.

Researchers trained JWST on a relatively close galaxy near the Big Dipper known as WISEA J123635.56+621424.2, nicknamed the Saguaro because its sweeping spiral arms resemble the iconic cactus of the Sonoran Desert, which bears red fruit.

The Saguaro galaxy existed around 3.3 billion years after the Big Bang, long after LRDs were thought to have faded from view. However, at its heart sits a compact, reddish core that ticks nearly every box for an LRD, including unusually weak X-ray emissions. The researchers chose the Saguaro because, unlike the incredibly distant LRDs, it's close enough for the space telescope to spot the galaxy's spiral arms and brilliant central core.

The aim wasn't to study the Saguaro as it is now but to try to calculate what it would look like if it were much farther away. Using computer models, the researchers shifted the galaxy to the enormous distances seen in the early universe. As they did, its elegant spiral arms gradually melted into the darkness until only a tiny glowing red point remained. It looked almost identical to the LRDs littering JWST's farthest deep-field images.

The findings suggest that many LRDs may in fact be ordinary galaxies, but at such vast distances that only their bright, active centers remain visible, while the surrounding galaxies fade beyond even JWST's incredible vision.

Instead of representing a completely new class of cosmic object, then, LRDs may actually be a short-lived phase in the growth of supermassive black holes during the universe's youth.

The hunt is now on for more nearby galaxies like the Saguaro to see whether they follow the same pattern. This will enable scientists to build a catalog of LRDs to understand better how galaxies and their central black holes evolved together across cosmic history.

Although it might be difficult to believe in our hyper-connected lives, there are thousands of people across the planet who remain almost completely disconnected from the rest of the world.

It's estimated that there are at least 196 "uncontacted" Indigenous groups worldwide, living mainly in 10 countries in South America, Asia and the Pacific, including Brazil, Indonesia and India. They live in diverse environments, from islands, to deserts, and the forest-dense borderlands of the Amazon basin. These groups have had varying levels of contact with the outside world; while some have only sporadic encounters with neighboring Indigenous peoples, others more regularly encounter outsiders, sometimes against their will due to the presence of oil, logging, agriculture and mining industries that increasingly encroach on their lands.

But who among them are the most isolated people on Earth?

While this question is difficult to answer, there are some candidates for the "least contacted" groups, experts told Live Science.

There aren't strict definitions of what makes a group "uncontacted." The United Nations even notes that the description of such groups can vary from "free, uncontacted, hidden or invisible peoples, peoples in voluntary isolation, etc." Hal Russell, Asia and Pacific research and advocacy officer with the nongovernmental organization, Survival International, said, "We define 'uncontacted peoples' as Indigenous peoples who generally avoid contact with outsiders and have no permanent relationship with them, even while being aware of the outside world."

"Certainly there is a spectrum between permanent contact, initial contact, sporadic contact and none at all," he told Live Science.

Generally what unites these groups is that they have actively avoided or tried to limit contact with other cultures, even with other uncontacted peoples, to maintain their unique way of life.

"They do not want to be disturbed"

One such candidate is a small group of Indigenous islanders known as the Sentinelese, who live on North Sentinel Island within India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal. This group is so little known that anthropologists aren't even sure what they call themselves; their name is based on the roughly 23-square-mile (60 square kilometers) island where they live.

According to Survival International, it's believed that the Sentinelese have lived in the Andaman Islands for up to 55,000 years and are direct descendants of the first humans to migrate out of Africa. Today, the Sentinelese follow a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and fish along the coastline, using sleek, hand-carved canoes. Survival International estimates that the group includes between 50 and 150 people, although lack of access to the group makes them near impossible to count, and the government has not attempted to include them in the Indian census. Their official numbers remain unknown.

Aside from the island's remoteness, contact is even more difficult because the islanders reject it. The community has been known to shoot at approaching boats and hovering helicopters.

"When they shoot bows and arrows, they are communicating," Simron Singh, a professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario whose expertise is in island environments and the peoples of the Andaman and Nicobar islands, told Live Science. "It says they do not want to be disturbed."

Only a handful of outsiders have ever set foot on North Sentinel Island, and Indian law now prohibits travel within a 3-mile-radius (5 km) of the island for the protection of both parties. Islanders are vulnerable to diseases brought by outsiders, and visitors are at risk of attack; the Sentinelese have shot and killed at least three people, including a missionary named John Allen Chau, who traveled to the island illegally in 2018.

"They erase their footprints"

Survival International estimates that 95% of "uncontacted" and "isolated" peoples live in the Amazon Basin (though the term "voluntarily isolated peoples" is more commonly used to refer to such groups there, according to Beatriz Huertas, an anthropologist, independent researcher and special adviser on isolated peoples policy with Rainforest Foundation Norway).

Huertas conducts research on these groups and to her one stands out in particular: the Kakataibo, a forest peoples in the Aguaytia basin, part of the Amazon in central Peru. The Kakataibo are very rarely encountered, even by other Indigenous peoples. In fact they "are so determined not to be found that they erase their footprints with Earth," Huertas said, "so there is not much information about them."

"We know that this isolation is a protective strategy they have adopted" precisely because they have had contact with the outside and it has not been a positive experience, Huertas explained.

Survival International highlights other highly-isolated groups in the region, including a nomadic Indigenous group called the Kawahiva. This group has evaded contact so successfully that they are known only through chance encounters and one piece of video evidence, and were only recognized as a distinct group in 1999. It's not uncommon for there to be "little recognition or documentation of an uncontacted group, in fact there are likely many uncontacted groups with no documentation at all," Russell said.

He noted that even in Brazil which has some of the most rigorous documentation policies, one Indigenous group was only documented in 2021, having eluded authorities up until that point. Very little is known about them, including their name.

Another prominent group that is extremely isolated is the Mashco Piro of the remote forests of Peru, who are thought to constitute the largest group of uncontacted peoples in the world, numbering about 750. Some in this group are the descended relatives of people who were enslaved and forced to work on Amazonian rubber farms in the 1800s, but escaped deeper into forests where they have since remained, shunning contact.

Misconceptions about isolated peoples

This history of contact for even the most remote people on Earth shows that the term "uncontacted people" is misleading, Huertas said. In fact, the phrase has fed into unhelpful misconceptions that these groups are "stuck in the Stone Age, as if they were living in a bubble," she said. "In the social sciences, we know that no people remain completely isolated from what is happening in their surroundings and, therefore, no people have remained stuck at any particular stage in history."

Another frequent misunderstanding is that these groups would want to connect if they knew more about the benefits of the outside world, Singh said. He has worked with the Nicobarese peoples of the Nicobar Islands, who haven't completely rejected contact like their Sentinelese neighbors, and has discovered that in their case this is not true. In fact, the Nicobarese are aware of wars and conflict beyond the island, and this has framed their perception that the outside world is "dangerous and uncivilized," Singh said.

In many cases historical experiences can explain why these groups would want to avoid the world beyond. By the mid-1900s, the Great Andamanese of nearby islands had experienced a population decline of up to 99% after bouts of conflict with British settlers and the influx of disease. The Sentinelese themselves had a historical encounter with British colonizers in the 1800s during which time some were kidnapped, infected with disease, and died, which may have shaped their current wariness of the outside world.

Some researchers have argued that these groups should be contacted to better protect them from current and future harms. But groups like Survival International counter that a long history of forced contact shows that this ultimately leads to more harm than good for these peoples, their safety and their survival.

Indigenous peoples have a human right to self-determination as affirmed by the United Nations, and researchers like Huertas and Singh said these groups clearly express that right by seeking contact when they want to associate with others, and retreating when they want to be left alone.

"It's not that they don't have the option [to seek contact] ... It's not rocket science to get on a boat and sail somewhere," Singh said. "It's a choice not to connect."

Inside the world’s newest data centers, energy-guzzling computations proceed round the clock as AI chatbots and other generative AI tools tackle tasks from the frivolous to the weighty: assembling imagery for social media, proffering relationship advice, analyzing medical images to diagnose cancer, creating code for developers or detecting financial scams for banks.

Just as the popularity of AI tools has skyrocketed in recent years, so have the associated environmental costs. Data centers now consume 414 terawatt-hours per year, or about 1.5 percent of global electricity use, according to the International Energy Agency — an amount that grew by 12 percent annually for five years before jumping to 17 percent in 2025. By 2030, the agency projects that demand for electricity by data centers will more than double. Much of the increasing demand for electricity is being met by fossil fuels, while experts also worry about the use of local water resources to cool data centers in drought-struck regions.

Use of AI to generate text or imagery probably accounts for a mere sliver of any given person’s environmental footprint. And experts stress that the onus is on tech companies to reduce AI’s resource consumption, from creating smarter, energy-saving algorithms to building more efficient hardware.

Yet there are simple actions people can take to ensure that their AI usage has as little environmental impact as possible — from carefully considering where AI is needed to tailoring prompts to minimize the amount of computation required.

“Individual choices are not meaningless, and some are more powerful than people realize,” says computer scientist Ivana Drobnjak of University College London.

Energy-hungry bots

It is notoriously tricky to estimate the energy expended on processing an individual chatbot query. Google, for example, estimates that its chatbot Gemini consumes around 0.24 watt-hours to respond to a median-length text query — equivalent to the electricity needed to watch TV for less than nine seconds. It also uses about 0.26 milliliters of water and emits the equivalent of 0.03 grams of carbon dioxide (driving a gas-powered car for a mile would emit about 400 grams). Small individually, these expenditures build up for those individuals and companies that use AI tools a lot.

The reason AI models consume so much energy lies partly in the processors that power them, such as the graphic processing units (GPUs) that consume significantly more energy than the central processing units (CPUs) that fuel simpler tasks like web searches and email. It also has to do with the models that underlie most popular generative AI tools, including the large language models (LLMs) that power AI chatbots and assistants.

These are based on a particular design called transformer architecture. This allows LLMs to train on vast swaths of language patterns in text and, from this, compute hundreds of billions or trillions of parameters. These parameters can then be used to generate new strings of text, by predicting which words are likely to follow one other.

A transformer-based LLM is computationally intensive because for each new word it generates in response to a user’s query, it runs the query and the words that have been written so far through the model, performing billions of calculations each time.

Tech companies note that LLMs have become more energy-efficient over time; according to Google’s 2025 calculations, the 0.24 watt-hours that Gemini consumes on a median-length text prompt represents a 33-fold decrease compared with the model’s energy consumption the previous year.

In any case, even small amounts of energy add up quickly given the scale of AI use. Based on 2025 numbers from tech company OpenAI, Drobnjak estimated in May that, at that point, around 3.2 billion queries are being sent every day to its chatbot ChatGPT. Users are asking AI tools to process and produce vast quantities of text, images and video. Some are having lengthy conversations with chatbots. And, increasingly, people are creating their own “AI agents” that themselves send queries to AI chatbots.

So what can users do to minimize the resources spent on their AI use? Experts have some tips.

Don’t give up on search

As a first, simple measure to save energy, users should carefully consider whether they truly need AI for a given task. “Asking ChatGPT ‘What should I wear today?’ or ‘How is the weather?’ is like taking a Concorde to travel to your supermarket,” says Günter Klambauer, an AI expert at Johannes Kepler University in Austria.

The same goes for web search engines that use AI to automatically generate a response to a query alongside the actual search results, such as Google’s AI overviews or Bing’s Copilot search. “If you’re just looking for a particular article, turning that off could be powerful from a saving-energy perspective,” says Udit Gupta, an expert in electrical and computer engineering at Cornell Tech in New York City. Selecting “Web results only” in one’s browser or including “-ai” in the wording of your web search can do the trick.

Smaller models use less energy

People and businesses that use AI tools a lot for specific tasks like translating or summarizing could consider shifting to smaller language models that are specialized to these tasks. Because these are trained more narrowly and perform fewer computations, they expend less energy than the massive, all-purpose LLMs on the same tasks.

In one 2025 study published by UNESCO, Drobnjak tested the benefits of using small models — such as one called opus-mt-en-es for English-Spanish translations, and other models for summarization and query-answering — in lieu of the model Llama 3.1 developed by Meta. Though these smaller models are often less user-friendly than more popular AI models, they’re freely available from the AI platform Hugging Face. The small models consumed between 15 and 50 times less energy while producing higher-quality outputs on the tasks for which they were designed, the study found.

The shift away from larger models resulted in a 90 percent decrease in energy use overall, making this the most powerful single energy-saving strategy Drobnjak tested in her study. As Gupta puts it, “You don’t need to use a trillion-parameter model for editing an email.”

Less chatty chatbots

Because LLMs perform so many computations for every consecutive word they produce, it helps to choose models that produce less text in general. AI systems expert Mosharaf Chowdhury of the University of Michigan, who has been measuring the electricity usage of LLMs that have been made publicly available, has learned that models that are “chattier” by nature tend to consume more energy.

For instance, one version of the model Qwen developed by Chinese company Alibaba Cloud consumes significantly more energy when it’s in “problem solving with reasoning mode,” where it produced roughly 10 times as many words in response to a prompt compared to its “text conversation” mode. So some experts recommend using reasoning mode only for complex questions and otherwise sticking with a chatbot’s standard mode.

Simply asking AI chatbots to “be brief” or giving them a word limit can also save energy. In the UNESCO paper, Drobnjak and her colleagues found they could reduce the energy consumption of the Llama model by 50 percent when they instructed it to halve its output. By contrast, keeping the prompt itself short had less significant savings — just 5 percent for a prompt that was half the length of the original query.

“The size of the output is what determines and drives the energy expenditure the most,” Drobnjak says. She has collaborated with the city of San Francisco to develop energy-saving tips for AI users, which include being as specific as possible and adding instructions like “five bullets max.”

Go low-res and batch video

Similar recommendations apply for generating images and video, which can consume orders of magnitude more energy than generating text, as they involve iterating millions of pixels many times over, each time processing the entire image anew, says Drobnjak. Such tools are highly popular: Nearly 40 percent of teens ages 13 to 17 surveyed in a recent study by the Pew Research Center use AI to create or edit images or videos.

Drobnjak recommends generating images or videos only when necessary and only at the resolution necessary. “One option is to just start in low resolution,” she says, “and if the algorithm is in the right direction, you then start increasing resolution.” She also notes that editing existing images is always less computationally intensive than generating new ones from scratch.

And when generating multiple images, it helps to do so in a single session or batch, which is more efficient than doing so in multiple separate requests.

These actions may seem like a drop in a bucket, and in many respects they are, experts say. But small things add up. While waiting for tech companies, scientists and policymakers to find ways of reducing AI’s overall environmental impact, “the individual who knows to reach for the right tool can make a real difference,” Drobnjak says. “AI is [consuming] so much energy that we have to look at it from every angle.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated on July 21, 2026, to clarify that the energy use of individuals who use AI tools a lot is cumulative, not necessarily huge, as was originally stated.

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

About 2,500 years ago, people in what is now India and Sri Lanka were manufacturing an exceptionally high-quality type of steel. Wootz steel was extraordinarily strong and sharp, and they exported it globally — in the Middle East, it was used to forge the legendary Damascus blades. But around A.D. 1100, it vanished, and the knowledge of how these ancient people forged such high-carbon steel was lost.

In this excerpt from the book "The Age of Alchemy: How Early Innovators Shaped Modern Chemistry" (Profile Books, 2026), author Kit Chapman, a science journalist and honorary researcher at Falmouth University in the U.K., reveals the extraordinary story of Wootz steel and the experiments that finally showed how it was created using furnaces powered by monsoons.

Kit Chapman interview: 'His urine goes on tour around Europe, showing the kings and queens this glowing pee'

During the Industrial Revolution, it became clear that something far stronger [than iron] — steel — was needed. Victorian engineers had started to build larger projects than anyone had ever seen, and were using cast iron for their structures, such as the first metal bridge, at Ironbridge in Shropshire. But cast iron was too weak. In 1847, a cast-iron railway bridge over the River Dee collapsed less than a year after it was opened.

If the world was going to modernise, it had to come up with a better material. Steel was the obvious answer, but how did you get rid of just the right amount of carbon in pig iron? The answer was found by an inventor called Henry Bessemer, who was hired by the British government to try to make cheap steel for use in guns. Bessemer's great innovation was to suggest that, once you've got your molten-hot pig iron, you blow air — a lot of air, between 85,000 and 550,000 litres per minute — up from beneath it.

This results in the iron undergoing oxidation, both increasing the temperature of your molten steel and reacting with the impurities. The impurities form a scum at the top of the furnace called slag. This is a mix of metal oxides and other unwanted byproducts such as silicon dioxide, which then needs to be removed, decarbonising the pig iron into the exact ratio you need for steel. With the steel already molten, it can then be poured out into whatever shape you need.

Bessemer became one of the leading figures of the "Second Industrial Revolution" at the tail end of the nineteenth century. He was knighted by Queen Victoria; his steelworks in Sheffield led to it becoming synonymous with steel; and in the US, eight towns were named after him. Without Bessemer, the world would never have known steel's true potential, and our skylines wouldn't be dominated by modern structures that rely on them, such as skyscrapers, railroad tracks and suspension bridges.

Except there's a big problem. "The story you've been told about metallurgy is from a western viewpoint," explains Gill Juleff, an archaeologist from the University of Exeter, and the reason I've come out to Sri Lanka. "It comes from colonialism, and the dominance of Europe. In Asia, there were technologies that were making very good-quality steel. The makers of iron understood it. All of the evidence suggests that India was very familiar with it. They were producing hardened chisels that carved granite even in the Iron Age. You can only do that with steel."

As early as 500 BCE, steel began to originate from the Indian subcontinent that was far greater in quality than any other. The blades were forged with intricate, elaborate patterns and banding, like the marbling of the finest cut of steak. These were harder than any other blades, cut sharper and cost more.

Arabian, Greek, Roman and Chinese writers all described this wonder-material, which became so legendary that a Persian euphemism for cutting someone with a sword was an "Indian answer." It was known as Wootz steel. Just like pepper or other commodities from southern India that moved west along the Silk Road, the steel's rarity made it a luxury item.

"It's not a material that your everyday blacksmith would necessarily want," Juleff says. "High-carbon steel is an awful lot harder to work. It's not for arrowheads or kitchen knives. It became used by specialist swordsmiths." Then, around 1100 CE, the mysterious, intricately patterned blades simply vanished. Subsequent versions emerged (the most famous is Damascus steel), but Wootz steel had disappeared completely. It left a gaping hole in the history of chemistry.

No one could figure out how the Sri Lankans produced steel of such fine quality, and with such intricate patterning, well over a thousand years before it should have been possible. That is, until Juleff discovered the answer. She realised that archaeologists had been looking at the question based on how Europeans worked with iron.

"We discovered that the furnaces were all placed at the top of hills," Juleff explains. "Hundreds of them, of a type we'd never seen before; we only knew they were furnaces because there was slag everywhere. For some reason, the early Sri Lankans had their villages at the bottom of a hill, and then dragged all their iron to the top to smelt it." Initially, the strange furnaces were a puzzle. Typically, a furnace is tall and erect, like a chimney; this creates a natural draught that feeds oxygen to the fire, drawing air in and pushing out the exhaust gases. The Sri Lankan furnaces were totally different. They were flat, half a metre high and 2 metres long, with hundreds of holes bored into the front and back. They looked like oversized harmonicas.

"The answer wasn't immediately obvious why," Juleff says. "And then we realised they were all facing into the wind." What if the Sri Lankans weren't using bellows at all? This is why Juleff asked me to come to Colombo in the off-season. Every year, Sri Lanka is buffeted by two wet seasons: the south-west monsoons from May to September, and the north-west monsoons from December to February. It's a kind of weather you have to experience yourself to truly appreciate.

"A monsoon wind blows up to 90km an hour [56 mph]," says Juleff. "When you're at the top of a hill, you get an aerodynamic effect, where all the wind's rushing up and cresting. You're battered by it. Everyone told me you couldn't run a furnace just using the wind, because it's not strong or reliable enough. So, I decided to experiment. I built one." Juleff's furnace was identical to the Sri Lankan ruins she had found. She fed it using charcoal and iron sourced locally from surface deposits — exactly as would have been available to the villagers who built them.

Then, she waited for the monsoon. "So, we ran this furnace," Juleff says. "And, to begin with, I thought it wasn't working. We had this line of fire behind the front wall, and nothing at the back. I thought everything needed to be burning." It looked like the experts had been right: the monsoon winds weren't regular or consistent enough to blow into the furnace's holes to create the temperatures required.

But then Juleff's mood changed. "It was like a Transformers toy, everything rearranged in my mind. I had a eureka moment! It wasn't wrong at all; it was how it was designed to work. The wind was blowing up the hill — it wasn't blowing into the tubes at all, it was blowing over the top of the furnace. It's like an aeroplane wing: by blowing over the furnace, you're creating this incredible pocket of low pressure." The Sri Lankan furnace wasn't a harmonica, with air puffed through it; instead, it was played like a flute.

This is the Bernoulli effect, the same principle that sticks a race car to the road, or keeps water moving through your plumbing. The change in pressure and the smooth, ordered air flow was creating a furnace beyond anything western science had considered possible. The team continued putting in ore and charcoal throughout the day, then allowed things to cool. The next day, they returned to see what they had produced. At the top was a knotted lump of pure iron — a bloom, as expected. "But then below that, stuck to the bottom of our slag, was another layer of metal," Juleff says. "High-carbon steel. The wind did it. We couldn't stop the wind doing it. We had created a furnace that could make the best steel anywhere in the world."

Juleff had solved the mystery of Wootz steel. Not only did we now know how it was made, we understood why the technology hadn't spread around the world: the technology was anchored in the unique geography of Sri Lanka, and the people who visited weren't scholars, but traders who didn't appreciate the small miracle they were witnessing.

"The metal-makers weren't moving," Juleff says. "They were here, sat in the interior of Sri Lanka, season after season, running these incredible furnaces." Why did Wootz steel vanish? In the twelfth century CE, Sri Lanka was invaded by the Pandya dynasty of southern India. It triggered a societal collapse, as Sri Lankans were forced to pay tribute to their conquerors. The most likely explanation is that, during the chaos of the invasion and its messy aftermath, the traders and middlemen who brought the Wootz steel to the coast, and the ships that transported it around the world, had stopped coming.

It wouldn't have occurred, or mattered, to a Sri Lankan metallurgist that their goods were ending up in the hands of kings and emperors in some distant land they'd never heard of; they'd have only seen that they couldn't sell to local traders any more. The villagers stopped making goods that didn't sell, and moved on to other, more profitable, careers.

Excerpted from "The Age of Alchemy: How Early Innovators Shaped Modern Chemistry," Profile Books, 2026.

Millions of people across Europe and North America will witness a solar eclipse on Wednesday, Aug. 12, but the event will vary greatly depending on the location. A narrow corridor stretching from Greenland to northeastern Spain will experience a total solar eclipse, much of Europe will enjoy a deep partial eclipse, and parts of North America will see a smaller partial eclipse.

Want to know what you can expect to see from where you are? Here's an overview of the event from various locations, along with the exact viewing times for the Aug. 12 solar eclipse.

Remember, it's important to wear certified solar eclipse glasses during all partial phases of the eclipse. Totality ‪—‬ when the sun's face is completely blocked by the moon ‪—‬ is the only time it's safe to remove your eclipse glasses. (It’s not too late to order last-minute eclipse glasses if you don’t have a pair on hand.)

If you're in the path of totality

If you're fortunate enough to be inside the 180-mile-wide (290 kilometers) path of totality — the path of the dark shadow of the moon — in eastern Greenland, western Iceland or northeastern Spain, you'll experience the moon completely covering the sun for up to 2 minutes, 18 seconds. The sky will darken to twilight, bright stars and planets may appear in the daytime sky, and the sun's spectacular corona (its wispy outer atmosphere) will become visible. Here’s a handy guide to all the gear you’ll need to get the most out of totality.

The closer you are to the centerline of the path, the longer totality will last. But the most important consideration is to stay within the boundaries of the path, because it has a hard edge. Madrid, for example, is barely outside the path and will see a 99.99% partial eclipse — and no totality whatsoever. The partial phases last an hour on each side of totality.

Here's when totality will occur in various locations for the Aug. 12 total solar eclipse:

• Scoresby Sund, Greenland: 4:35 p.m. WGST (up to 2 minutes, 17 seconds)
• Reykjavik, Iceland: 5:48 p.m. GMT (60 seconds)
• León, Spain: 8:28 p.m. CEST (1 minute, 45 seconds)
• Soria, Spain: 8:29 p.m. CEST (1 minute, 43 seconds)
• S'Arenal, Mallorca, Spain: 8:31 p.m. CEST (1 minute, 36 seconds)

If you're in North America

Viewers in North America will see a modest partial eclipse, with the biggest eclipse seen from northern and eastern Canada, Alaska and the northeastern U.S. The farther northeast you are, the deeper the eclipse will appear. Eclipse glasses are essential at every stage of the two-hour event, because there will be no totality. Here are the times of maximum eclipse in various locations:

• Iqaluit, Nunavut: 1:24 p.m. EDT (61% eclipse)
• St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador: 3:00 p.m. NDT (53%)
• Fairbanks, Alaska: 8:27 a.m. AKDT (37%)
• Anchorage, Alaska: 8:21 a.m. AKDT (28%)
• Bangor, Maine: 1:53 p.m. EDT (23%)
• Quebec City: 1:46 p.m. EDT (24%)
• Montreal: 1:45 p.m. EDT (18%)
• Boston: 1:55 p.m. EDT (16%)
• New York: 1:54 p.m. EDT (9%)

If you want to watch totality from outside the path, there are many live stream options available, including planned streams from NASA and the European Space Agency.

If you're elsewhere in Europe and North Africa

Most of Europe and far northwestern Africa will see a spectacular deep partial eclipse, with more than 90% of the sun covered in many western cities. Although the eclipse will never become total, it will still be an impressive sight, though solar eclipse glasses will be required throughout the event. Here are the times of maximum eclipse in some major cities:

• Madrid: 8:32 p.m. CEST (99.9%)
• Barcelona: 8:29 p.m. CEST (99.8%)
• Algiers, Algeria: 7:33 p.m. CET (96%)
• Nice, France: 8:24 p.m. CEST (95%)
• Lisbon, Portugal: 7:36 p.m. WEST (94%)
• Dublin, Ireland: 7:10 p.m. BST (94%)
• Cardiff, Wales: 7:13 p.m. BST (93%)
• Belfast, Northern Ireland: 7:08 p.m. BST (93%)
• Paris: 8:17 p.m. CEST (92%)
• Tangier, Morocco: 7:40 p.m. WEST (92%)
• London: 7:13 p.m. BST (91%)
• Edinburgh, Scotland: 7:05 p.m. BST (91% eclipse)

To check exactly what you'll see and when, enter your location on an interactive map of the eclipse, which will give you a schedule for when the eclipse begins, peaks and ends where you are.

Yams and sweet potatoes are often confused, and the names are sometimes used interchangeably in the U.S. However, they're two different crops. So what sets them apart?

The differences lie mainly in these vegetables' classifications, plant growth, and nutritional profiles, experts told Live Science.

Despite both growing underground and appearing somewhat similar, "Botanically, sweet potatoes and yams are not closely related, as they belong to different plant families," said Phillip Wadl, a research geneticist at the U.S. Vegetable Laboratory in Charleston, South Carolina. Sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas) are in the morning glory family (Convolvulaceae). Yams (Dioscorea), by contrast, belong to the Dioscoreaceae family, and there are 11 yam species cultivated for food and income, Wadl told Live Science in an email.

Yams and sweet potatoes also belong to different plant groups, or "cotyledon types," said Jeffrey Cole Denis Gregorie, a sweet potato specialist at the Sweet Potato Research Station in Chase, Louisiana. Yams are monocots, plants whose embryo has only one cotyledon, or seed leaf, like grasses and lilies. Sweet potatoes are dicots, plants with two embryonic seed leaves, which include many fruits and vegetables, such as grapes, squash, strawberries and tomatoes.

In addition, yams and sweet potatoes store food in different parts of the plant. "Sweet potatoes form storage roots which are enlarged parts of the root system," Wadl explained, "whereas yams form tubers, which are enlarged underground stems for nutrient storage."

A single sweet potato plant typically produces about four to 10 sweet potatoes, while a yam plant yields about one to five yams. Sweet potatoes generally take about three to five months to mature, compared with about six months to a full year for yams, according to Craig Yencho, a professor of horticultural science and a sweet potato and potato researcher with North Carolina State University.

How do you tell sweet potatoes and yams apart?

Visually, sweet potatoes and yams are easy to tell apart when you know what to look for. Sweet potatoes tend to be shorter and blockier, with tapered ends. Yams are usually long and cylindrical, sometimes with "toes," or branching shapes.

Sweet potatoes come in various flesh colors, including orange ‪—‬ the most common color in the U.S. ‪—‬ as well as yellow, purple and white. Their skin is typically thin and smooth, whereas "yams often have a rough, bark-like skin and their flesh can be white, purple or reddish," Wadl said. One well-known purple yam, known as ube (Dioscorea alata), is a popular ingredient in treats such as ice cream, cookies and pound cake.

Sweet potatoes and yams also have noticeable differences in their culinary and nutritional profiles, Wadl said. "Sweet potatoes are generally sweeter and have a moist, creamy texture when cooked, although dry types are available," he explained. "Yams, on the other hand, tend to be starchier, drier, and have a more earthy, sometimes less sweet, flavor compared to sweet potatoes. Their texture can be more like a regular potato."

Nutritionally, the two crops are quite different, too. Sweet potatoes, particularly the orange-fleshed varieties, are an excellent source of beta-carotene (a precursor to vitamin A), vitamin C, dietary fiber, potassium and some B vitamins. "While nutritious, [yams] typically contain less beta-carotene than orange sweet potatoes," Wadl noted. Instead, yams are a good source of potassium, vitamin C, manganese and dietary fiber.

Sweet potatoes are generally considered safe to eat both raw and cooked, Wadl said. By contrast, many wild varieties of true yams, especially those not cultivated for commercial consumption, contain compounds like dioscorine that could make them toxic to humans if eaten raw. "These must be thoroughly cooked to remove the toxins and make them safe for consumption," Wadl said.

Thanksgiving confusion around yams and sweet potatoes

If yams and sweet potatoes are so different, why do so many Americans call sweet potatoes "yams"?

Part of the answer lies in history. The yam was a key provision on voyages of enslaved people from West Africa to the Americas, "used to feed captives a familiar food," said Judith Carney, a professor of geography at UCLA. "In mainland plantation societies of North America where the African yam could not be grown, the sweet potato served as a substitute dietary staple." Because the two crops shared some characteristics, "the word 'yam' came to refer vernacularly to both tubers in mainland America, as we see in the U.S. today," Carney told Live Science in an email.

The U.S. sweet potato industry also leaned into the confusion, adopting the term "yam" for marketing reasons, Gregorie told Live Science in an email. "In the United States, many orange-fleshed, moist varieties of sweet potatoes are often mislabeled as "yams" to distinguish them from the drier, white-fleshed sweet potato varieties," Wadl explained.

As a result, the "yams" at most U.S. supermarkets are probably sweet potatoes. "Garnet yams" and "jewel yams" aren't actually yams, despite those labels; instead, they're softer, sweeter varieties of sweet potatoes, according to the University of California, Davis.

Although genuine yams are sold in many international markets in the U.S, "if you're buying a "yam" in a typical U.S. supermarket, you're almost certainly purchasing a sweet potato," Wadl said.

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

Bolstering a type of bacteria that lives in the uterus may help counter age-related changes that can make it harder to get pregnant, a new study suggests.

While fertility decline is often linked to changes in egg number or quality, the uterus also becomes less receptive to an implanting embryo with age. The new research suggests that changes in the bacteria living there may be part of the reason.

In experiments, treating aged mice and lab-grown human uterine cells with a specific species of Lactobacillus, a group of bacteria often found in the uterus, reduced signs of aging in the uterine lining and improved embryo implantation. This improvement was also seen with a specific byproduct of Lactobacillus.

The findings, published Thursday (Aug. 6) in the journal Cell Host & Microbe, suggest that the uterine microbiome could be a promising target for treating age-related infertility. However, experts who were not involved in the study cautioned that the research is still preliminary.

"This is an interesting and promising approach, but we still don't know whether these findings will translate into meaningful improvements in human fertility," said Dr. Alex Robles, a fertility specialist at Columbia University Fertility Center who was not involved in the study.

"The microbiome can be influenced by many factors, including genetics, diet, geography, environmental exposures and other lifestyle practices," he told Live Science in an email, "which is why it's important to validate these findings across diverse populations before developing broadly applicable treatments."

To explore whether and how the uterine microbiome changes with age, the study researchers analyzed samples of the endometrium — tissue from the lining of the uterus — from 149 women ages 20 to 45 who were undergoing fertility treatment in China. The older women had lower levels of beneficial Lactobacillus bacteria, particularly L. gasseri and L. crispatus. These bacteria are generally associated with a healthy reproductive tract.

"One finding that surprised us was that overall microbial diversity did not change markedly across the different age groups," study co-author Dr. Rong Li, deputy director of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Peking University Third Hospital in Beijing, said in a statement. "Instead, the major differences involved particular bacterial species."

Later, 93 of the women underwent in vitro fertilization (IVF), and of those, 56 became pregnant. Those who became pregnant had higher levels of Lactobacillus in their uterine lining than those who did not get pregnant. That said, the pregnancy rates were similar across women of different ages who underwent IVF.

To better understand the effect of these bacteria on the uterus, the team isolated five Lactobacillus species and tested how they interacted with uterine cells. L. gasseri stood out because it attached strongly to uterine cells, and this attachment was associated with reduced inflammation and lower damage from oxidative stress. The bacterium also produced large amounts of exopolysaccharides (EPS), a type of sugar molecule.

The researchers then purified these sugars into a postbiotic they call LG-EPS. Unlike probiotics, postbiotics are products of bacterial cells and thus do not contain live bacteria.

Then, the researchers ran tests in older female mice (roughly equivalent to a middle-aged woman) to see whether introducing L. gasseri or LG-EPS to the vaginal canal could affect the aging uterus. After four weeks of daily vaginal treatment with either the bacterium or the postbiotic, the mice had fewer signs of uterine aging, less inflammation and higher embryo implantation rates than the untreated animals did. (That said, the team did not measure how much of each treatment actually reached the uterus.)

When they tried the same test with a modified strain of L. gasseri that could not make EPS, they found that many of these benefits disappeared. That suggested that the exopolysaccharides were responsible for much of the benefit. LG-EPS also reduced signs of aging in artificially aged human uterine cells, improving their ability to support embryo implantation.

Further experiments suggested that the postbiotic works by modifying a signaling pathway that helps control cell growth and tissue repair. This pathway was overactive in aged mice and uterine cells, but treatment helped to normalize its activity. Blocking a key protein in the same pathway eliminated the treatment's effects.

Robles said postbiotic treatments could be especially interesting because they may be easier to manufacture than treatments containing live bacteria. "If confirmed in future studies, these treatments could potentially be used alongside IVF to improve the uterine environment before embryo transfer," he suggested.

But he cautioned that the study should not prompt people to try over-the-counter probiotics or other supplements as ad hoc fertility treatments.

"The reproductive tract is a delicate ecosystem, and introducing or eliminating certain bacteria could have unintended consequences," Robles said. "We do not fully understand what constitutes a 'healthy' uterine microbiome. As such, any intervention should be approached with caution."

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

Even though August 12's solar eclipse won't be much to look at for observers in the U.S., it'll be even less impressive if you can't look at it at all. In order to see the partial phases, you MUST wear a pair of certified solar glasses or solar binoculars to view the sun safely.

The American Astronomical Society states, "ISO 12312-2 specifies the properties that a solar viewer should have in order to protect your eyes from injury and provide a comfortable view."

With the eclipse fast approaching, there is still time to pick up some last-minute solar viewing equipment, but some retailers are already selling out and won't be able to deliver before Wednesday, August 12.

Here are the best options you can still get hold of before the solar eclipse.

Nestled within Brazil's Cerrado tropical savanna — the second-largest biome in South America, after the Amazon rainforest — Uberaba Geopark is a time capsule from the Late Cretaceous period (100.5 million to 66 million years ago).

The geopark boasts abundant, well-preserved fossils from the last chapters of the nonavian-dinosaur era, according to UNESCO, earning it the nickname the "Land of the Giants," or "Terra dos Gigantes" in Portuguese. Paleontologists have discovered more than 10,000 fossils belonging to dinosaurs, prehistoric crocodyliforms (a group encompassing living crocodiles, alligators, caimans and gharials, as well as their extinct relatives), turtles and other ancient creatures within the park's boundaries.

One of the best-known discoveries is the fossil of Uberabatitan ribeiroi, a titanosaur measuring 89 feet (27 meters) long and 33 feet (10 m) tall, according to UNESCO.

The finds were clustered in impressive geological features, including the Serra da Galga formation and Serra Geral mountain range. These structures formed from ancient basalt flows, which came from giant volcanic eruptions that predate the breakup of the Gondwana supercontinent 180 million years ago.

The park has the ideal conditions to preserve fossils because it alternated between shallow lagoons and river systems when the dinosaurs roamed the region, meaning the animals' remains were conserved in mud when they died.

Serra da Galga and Serra Geral also overlie one of the world's largest freshwater reservoirs, the Guarani aquifer, which supplies drinking water for more than 100 cities in Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay.

The Cerrado savanna, which houses the entire park, is a critical-yet-underprotected carbon sink that hosts more than 12,000 plant species and diverse animal life.

The "Land of the Giants" was added to UNESCO's list of geoparks in 2024 in recognition of the region's geological and natural heritage.

What is now the Uberaba Geopark was the birthplace of Brazil's modern livestock market, which is one of the biggest in the world. Farmers in the 19th century introduced zebu (Bos indicus) cattle from India because they are better suited to the climate in Brazil and require less food than common domesticated cattle (Bos taurus). Zebu cattle also produce lower greenhouse gas emissions than common domesticated cattle do, according to UNESCO.

Uberaba Geopark is open to visitors. There are several museums and trails to explore, including one that leads to the Vale Encantado, or "Enchanted Valley," which contains forests, waterfalls and prehistoric rock formations, according to the BBC.

Discover more incredible places, where we highlight the fantastic history and science behind some of the most dramatic landscapes on Earth.

Your favorite stretchy workout clothes may be much easier to recycle one day, thanks to a new type of elastic yarn that is as strong and stretchy as today's spandex-containing fabrics.

The yarn, described in a July 25 study in the journal ACS Materials Letters, is built entirely from polyethylene, the plastic used in milk jugs and single-use grocery bags. By contrast, most of today's stretchy fabrics blend spandex, a bouncy-but-weak polyurethane fiber, with a tougher fiber like polyester or nylon.

That combination gives clothes their stretch and durability. But because the fibers are chemically different, it's difficult and costly to separate them for recycling, and chemicals used to break down the fabrics are toxic. The result is that almost none of this material is recycled. An estimated 80% of textiles sold in the U.S. contain spandex, and most end up incinerated or in a landfill, study co-author Svetlana Boriskina, a research scientist in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, said in a statement.

To solve that problem, the MIT team turned to polyethylene, one of the world's most widely recycled plastics. For the yarn's stretchy core, the researchers created a soft, springy version of polyethylene akin to a rubber band. Around that core, they wound a second, stiffer polyethylene fiber, more like a fishing line, coiling it tightly the way a spring or a twisted phone cord is coiled. Because both materials come from the same plastic family, they don't need to be separated before they're recycled.

In laboratory tests, the researchers melted a spool of the yarn and respun it into new yarn 10 separate times. Each time, they tested its strength, and the recycled yarn performed just as well as the original in every case. In head-to-head tests, the new yarn even outperformed commercial spandex-polyester yarn in maximum load, meaning it could bear more force before breaking, according to the study.

The team has already shown that these lightweight polyethylene fibers can be engineered for other perks, too ‪—‬ like cooling, moisture wicking and stain resistance ‪—‬ building on their earlier work spinning polyethylene into wearable fabric. Even buttons, zippers and buckles could eventually be made from compatible plastics, so a whole garment could be melted down and remade without being taken apart first.

Scientists are preparing for an interstellar rescue of humanity's most distant spacecraft, Voyager 1, after fixing up its twin from billions of miles away.

According to a NASA statement released Aug. 4, a clever power-saving maneuver known as the "Big Bang" helped the agency avoid having to shut off another one of the Voyager 2 probe's three remaining science instruments later this year. The Big Bang procedure involves selectively shutting off some high-power instruments on the Voyager probes while switching on lower-power alternatives, all while keeping the spacecraft warm enough to operate in the frigid environment of interstellar space.

"The idea is to swap out a group of powered devices all at once — hence the nickname — turning some things off, and replacing them with lower-power alternatives, to keep the spacecraft warm enough to continue gathering science data," representatives from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the mission, wrote in an April blog post.

NASA carefully ran tests on Voyager 2 before implementing the procedure in May and June. Now, sharing the results of those tests in the Aug. 4 statement, NASA reports a successful power transfer that should keep Voyager 2 running a while longer.

"The savings should provide power to keep its three instruments operating for at least an extra year," NASA wrote of the Big Bang.

But power is dwindling on both nuclear-powered spacecraft, and Voyager 1 is in worse shape than its twin. Mission scientists were forced to turn off one of Voyager 1's last remaining science instruments in April.

Voyager 1's turn for a life-extending Big Bang will happen within a few months, to keep science operating there as long as possible, agency officials added.

Going out with a bang

Scientists decided to do the "Big Bang" on Voyager 2 first because it is in better health, and closer to Earth, than Voyager 1. Voyager 1 is nearly 171 astronomical units (AU, where 1 AU is the average distance between Earth and the sun) from our planet, while Voyager 2 is about 143 AU away. Both spacecraft are crucial for revealing clues about the region outside the heliopause ‪—‬ the sphere of influence the sun exerts upon our solar system ‪—‬ as they are the only working spacecraft at such a distance.

That distance is no small factor. In November, Voyager 1 will reach a milestone "light day" from Earth — when it takes 24 hours for a radio signal to travel one way from our planet to the spacecraft. Both spacecraft will also turn 50 years old in 2027, assuming they keep working.

Both Voyager probes launched in 1977, with Voyager 2 getting an opportunity for a "grand tour" of our solar system. An alignment of the outer planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — that occurs only once every 176 years allowed both Voyager probes to maneuver from one planet to the next with minimal fuel usage.

Voyager 2 flew by all four planets, finishing its Neptune encounter in 1989, while Voyager 1 was tasked with flying above the plane, or "ecliptic," of our solar system after its closest approach to Saturn in 1981. As each spacecraft finished its close-up imaging of these planets, some instruments were shut off to extend their mission for as long as possible. But as the two spacecraft aged, more instruments needed to go quiet.

Plutonium, which the spacecraft rely on for power, has a natural decay rate, with the spacecraft now losing roughly 4 watts of power a year, according to NASA. In recent years, power supplies have turned critically low on both spacecraft. Voyager 2 would have needed to shut off one of its remaining three science instruments later this year if measures were not taken, and Voyager 1 was in slightly worse shape after an unexpected power drop in February occurred following a planned maneuver in deep space. Only two of Voyager 1's 10 science instruments remain powered after the latest was shut down in April.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has helped uncover new weaknesses in two cryptographic systems, including a simplified version of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) that underpins much of today's internet. While these headline-grabbing findings don't put anyone's passwords or bank accounts at immediate risk, experts say the research could mark the beginning of a new era in which AI becomes a powerful assistant for discovering flaws in the mathematical foundations of digital security.

In a blog post published July 28, representatives from Anthropic's Frontier Red Team said Claude Mythos Preview independently developed new cryptanalytic techniques against two different targets: a version of AES-128, one of the world's most widely used encryption algorithms, and HAWK, an experimental post-quantum digital signature scheme currently being evaluated as part of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) effort to standardize cryptography for the quantum computing age.

It's tempting to interpret this news as AI cracking one of the internet's most important encryption algorithms, but the reality is less dramatic. Nonetheless, experts say the achievement could mark the start of a new age of digital security.

The power of encryption

AES protects huge amounts of everyday digital life, from encrypted websites and messaging apps to Wi-Fi networks and financial transactions. But the version Anthropic attacked wasn't the full AES-128 algorithm used in those systems. Instead, the researchers studied a seven-round version of AES, a deliberately weakened variant long used by cryptographers to test new attack techniques.

The full AES-128 algorithm uses 10 rounds of encryption, while Anthropic's research focused on a seven-round version. In a self-published study that has not been peer-reviewed, scientists Milad Nasr and Nicholas Carlini said Claude found a faster way to recover the encryption key from that simplified version, making the best-known attack between 200 and 800 times faster. However, the study stressed that the technique does not work against the full version of AES used to protect real-world systems.

The more significant result may instead involve HAWK. Unlike AES, which has protected data for more than two decades, HAWK is a relatively new digital signature scheme designed to resist attacks from future quantum computers. It's one of the remaining candidates in NIST's additional post-quantum signature standardization process, meaning it is still being scrutinized by researchers before its widespread deployment.

In a separate study, Anthropic scientists Zygimantas Straznickas and Stephen A. Weis found that Claude spotted a mathematical property that researchers hadn't previously exploited. Combined with existing attack techniques, this property made it much easier to recover HAWK's secret key.

Thomas Espitau ‪—‬ head of research at PQShield, a cybersecurity company that specializes in post-quantum cryptography, and a cryptographer who has published research on HAWK ‪—‬ described the work as "one of the most, if not the most significant, cryptanalytic result of the year."

"To say it plainly, this is great work, and it is exactly what the NIST process is designed to produce," Espitau told Live Science. "Candidate schemes exist to be attacked before they are deployed, not after."

Espitau said the attack combined previously known techniques with one missing mathematical insight that Claude identified, substantially reducing HAWK's estimated security margin. He believes the work demonstrates how AI could increasingly help researchers evaluate the strength of cryptographic systems before they are adopted.

"This development illustrates how AI can act as a powerful accelerator in cryptanalysis," he said. "Claude Mythos Preview identified the exploitation of the sign-flip symmetry, providing the final piece of a puzzle that the research community had been assembling."

Building defensive measures

However, not everyone thinks the announcement means AI suddenly outsmarted human cryptographers.

"There is nothing you need to change," Roberta Faux, head of cryptography at cybersecurity and quantum encryption company Arqit, told Live Science. "Both Anthropic and the outside cryptographers agree that you don't need to change your key sizes or switch your cryptography."

Instead, Faux said the bigger story is AI's ability to apply expert-level cryptanalysis across thousands of algorithms that relatively few researchers have had time to examine.

"The interesting prospect is not a model outdueling the world's best lattice theorist on one problem but a model applying solid, roughly expert-level analysis at scale to the several thousand ciphers nobody ever had the human-hours to examine," she said.

Faux also cautioned against attributing the HAWK breakthrough solely to AI.

"The HAWK attack used no exotic ingredients; it simply competently assembled tools that were already lying around," she said. "A post-quantum candidate is seriously scrutinized by maybe a few dozen people on the planet, so beating two years of review mostly reveals how thin that layer of review is."

For consumers, the immediate implications are reassuring. The encryption protecting online banking, shopping, messaging and cloud storage has not suddenly become obsolete. But for the researchers designing the next generation of cryptography, Anthropic's work hints that AI could soon help cryptographers test tomorrow's encryption schemes more quickly and more thoroughly than has previously been possible.

New images captured by the world's most powerful solar telescope have revealed something that was hiding in plain sight on the sun for 150 years: thousands of tiny whirlpools twisting across our star's surface. The ultra-detailed observations could help to explain some of the sun's most violent behavior as well as hint at the answer to a long-standing solar mystery.

The new time-lapse footage offers the first direct proof of a long-predicted phenomenon called Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. The effect itself isn't new to science; it's named for physicists Lord Kelvin and Hermann von Helmholtz, who described it in the 19th century. The physicists found that whenever two fluids slide past each other at different speeds, the friction between them, or shear, rolls into spiraling patterns. However, this is the first time this effect has been seen on the sun, where that shear plays out between neighboring streams of solar plasma.

Researchers captured the swirls using the U.S. National Science Foundation's Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii and then compared the images against computer simulations of the sun's visible surface, called the photosphere. The findings were published Aug. 5 in the journal Nature.

The resulting time-lapse footage from the telescope is unlike anything solar physicists have captured before. It shows dozens of tiny vortices clustering along the edges of magnetic regions, some accompanied by delicate, dark stripes known as striations, according to a statement from the National Science Foundation. The telescope's resolution is sharp enough to pick out structures just tens of miles across — a scale so fine that the vortices had gone completely undetected until now.

When the researchers lined the images up against their simulations, the match was close enough ‪—‬ down to the average spacing between vortices ‪—‬ to confirm that they'd finally caught the instability in action.

Beyond the impressive visuals, researchers think these swirls may serve an important function. By constantly twisting and mixing the sun's magnetic-field lines, these vortices may play a part in building up the energy behind solar flares and coronal mass ejections.

The effect also might help to explain the long-standing mystery of why the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, reaches temperatures of around 2 million degrees Fahrenheit (around 1 million degrees Celsius) while its surface remains hundreds of thousands of degrees cooler, Thomas Rimmele, chief technologist at the National Solar Observatory, said in the statement.

The team now plans to use computer programs to automatically track these vortices across future observations. This will help them measure exactly how much these swirls contribute to heating the corona and driving the explosive space weather that can disrupt satellites, communications and power grids on Earth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a new seasonal flu vaccine that uses mRNA as its base.

Moderna, the vaccine's maker, announced Wednesday (Aug. 5) that a vaccine advisory committee to the FDA unanimously agreed that the shot is safe and effective for preventing illness from seasonal influenza. The shot, called mFlusiva or mRNA-1010, has been approved for people ages 50 and older.

Similar to mRNA vaccines against COVID-19, the vaccine uses the genetic molecule mRNA to encode instructions for cells in the body. In this case, it prompts the cells to build hemagglutinin (HA), a protein found on the surface of influenza viruses. Flu viruses use this protein to infiltrate human cells, and it's the same protein targeted by conventional flu vaccines. Following vaccination with mFlusiva, the immune system learns to recognize the HA protein on targeted flu strains, thereby improving its ability to block the viruses from infecting cells.

The HA protein poses a major challenge for conventional flu vaccines because it mutates very rapidly as the viruses multiply and spread — and these existing vaccines take months to manufacture. That's one reason the resulting shots aren't always a great match for the flu viruses that end up circulating in any given year. A benefit of the mRNA platform is that vaccines can be produced very quickly and thus made to better match the season's dominant strains.

mFlusiva's approval was based in part on a late-stage clinical trial involving over 40,000 people ages 50 and up who were vaccinated for the 2024-2025 Northern Hemisphere flu season. Half received the mRNA-based shot, and half received a standard dose of a conventional flu vaccine (as opposed to the higher-dose option available to older adults in the U.S.).

Of the 40,000 participants, about 970 got sick with flu, including 2% of the mRNA group and 2.8% of the standard group. That means the mRNA vaccine was 26.6% more protective than the conventional vaccine against illness from flu in this trial.

mFlusiva also offered superior protection against each of the three flu subtypes included in the vaccine. And in participants ages 65 and up, the vaccine was 27.4% more protective, overall.

More people in the mRNA group experienced side effects like injection-site pain, headache, fatigue and achiness, compared with the standard group, but these effects were mostly short-lived and mild to moderate in severity. These side effects were consistent with what was seen in earlier trials of the vaccine.

An additional trial involved a group of adults ages 65 and older and directly compared mFlusiva to an existing high-dose flu vaccine, which is approved only for older adults in the U.S. The findings suggested that the mRNA vaccine generated superior immune protection than the conventional option, based on antibody levels.

These results led the FDA advisory committee to decide that the vaccine's benefits outweigh its risks, and the agency ultimately approved it. For adults ages 50 to 64, the vaccine earned standard approval, and for adults 65 and up, it earned "accelerated approval," meaning further trials will be conducted to confirm the benefit of the shot over the high-dose option for this population.

"Flu remains a significant public health challenge, and mFLUSIVA provides an important new option for America's seniors," Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said in a statement.

The approval appears to mark a shift in the government's stance on mRNA vaccines.

Under the second Trump administration, the federal government has been broadly retracting its support for mRNA vaccines, directly canceling hundreds of millions of dollars in funds for research and development and indirectly sending a chilling effect through the mRNA field, experts previously told Live Science. Even Moderna has been pulling back from investments, citing opposition from the U.S. market. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly voiced his opposition to mRNA technology.

When Moderna initially filed for mFlusiva's approval in February, the FDA declined to review the application — but then changed its mind one week later. The exact motivation for this reversal was unclear to experts.

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

In the dead of night on Wednesday (Aug. 5), part of a defunct SpaceX rocket slammed into the moon at more than 5,000 mph (8,000 km/h) — and a Korean lunar satellite has just shared the first images of the aftermath.

A series of photos snapped by South Korea's Danuri lunar orbiter on Wednesday reveal a small, blackened crater at the alleged site where a used Falcon 9 upper stage crashed into the lunar surface around 2:35 a.m. ET. The crash occurred near Einstein crater, on the northwestern limb of the moon, close to the terminator zone where lunar day and night meet. The photos were shared by the Korea AeroSpace Administration on social media on Thursday (Aug. 6).

Because this region was on the sunlit side of the moon at the time, the initial flare from the crash was not visible from Earth; however, scientists at the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile reported seeing evidence of a debris plume lifting off of the lunar surface shortly after the collision, according to the CBC. (At this time, no photos of the debris plume have been released).

A preprint study shared earlier this week predicted that the crash would create a new crater on the moon measuring roughly 90 feet (27 meters) wide and up to 16 feet (5 m) deep — a dent too small to be seen from Earth, even with a good telescope. No measurements of the newfound crater have been shared yet, but they are likely to arrive in the coming days as other lunar orbiters, such as NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and Earth-based observatories get a chance to examine the crash site.

What caused the crash?

The pesky piece of space junk that hit the moon on Wednesday is the second (or upper) stage of one of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets that launched into space on Jan. 15, 2025. It was carrying a pair of lunar landers: the Blue Ghost lander developed by private company Firefly Aerospace, which successfully touched down on the moon in March 2025; and the Hakuto-R lander developed by Japanese company ispace, which lost contact with Earth and crash-landed on the moon in June 2025.

Unlike Falcon 9's first (or lower) stages, which can return to Earth for reuse, the rocket's second stages are discarded in orbit. This rocket piece spent nearly a year drifting in an elliptical orbit around our planet before a combination of solar radiation and the moon's gravitational pull nudged it away from us, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. In May this year, independent astronomer Bill Gray first predicted the crash and when and where the collision would occur, before other experts confirmed his calculations.

The 4.4-ton (4 metric tons) rocket part is estimated to have struck the moon at roughly 5,400 mph (8,700 km/h). While many times faster than the speed of sound, that’s still much slower than the average meteoroid strike on the moon, making the crash that much harder to see.

More to come

This is not the first time that human-made objects have impacted the moon, nor will it be the last. Studying these crashes can lead to important insights about the moon’s composition.

For example, the 2009 crash of a Centaur rocket's upper stage near the moon's south pole was analyzed by NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite mission, which revealed subsurface ice in the area. As a result, the lunar south pole is now the most coveted location for missions that aim to establish a permanent human presence on the moon.

Studying human-made impacts like these will also be essential for managing the potential risks to future astronauts and missions, like the permanent moon base NASA hopes to build.

"Now that we're in an era where we're going to have more and more astronauts going back to the moon, perhaps permanently, we also want to understand how much of a risk these artificial impacts pose," Benjamin Fernando, a postdoctoral researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory and co-author of a recent study on the impact, told CBC.

"It presents a different set of hazards than say the Apollo astronauts faced on the lunar surface from the average background meteoroids that are striking the moon every day. And what we want to try and do with this event is understand both the direct [and indirect] hazards."

Physicists have built a crystal out of an "einstein" tile — an elusive shape mathematicians spent years searching for — and found that it bends light in a way no ordinary crystal can.

In the new study, published July 29 in the journal Nature Communications, researchers arranged this never-repeating tile shape into a pattern of nanoscale holes. This structure, known as a photonic crystal, is designed to control the way light moves through it. When the team shined a laser at it, the crystal produced a swirling, pinwheel-shaped scattering pattern that responded differently depending on which direction the incoming light was spinning.

The tile solves what mathematicians call the "einstein problem," a decades-old puzzle asking whether a single shape could cover a flat surface endlessly without ever repeating its pattern. (The name is a pun on "ein stein," German for "one stone," not a reference to Albert Einstein).

In the 1970s, mathematician Roger Penrose showed that two different shapes, used together like floor tiles, could cover a surface without the pattern ever repeating. Then, in 2023, geometry enthusiast David Smith and collaborators finally found one: a 13-sided shape that they nicknamed the "Smith hat"

Yuto Moritake, an experimental physicist at the University of Tokyo, first came across the hat tile in a popular science book in 2024. Moritake specializes in photonic crystals — materials patterned with repeating structures (often much thinner than a human hair) that bend and steer light for uses like lasers and optical sensors. Almost all photonic crystals rely on patterns that repeat in a regular grid. Moritake wondered what would happen if he swapped that repetition for the hat tile's never-repeating arrangement.

"I decided to include it in our photonic crystal structure," Moritake told Live Science, describing it as the starting point for the project.

To build the structure, Moritake and his colleagues used two precision manufacturing techniques, called electron beam lithography and etching, to punch hundreds of thousands of tiny holes — each just 100 nanometers in radius, or roughly 500 times thinner than a human hair — into a thin film of silicon nitride. This ceramic material is commonly used in computer chips. The holes were arranged according to the hat tile's pattern, covering a chip roughly half a millimeter across ‪—‬ about the width of a pencil tip.

When the team shined a laser at the finished chip, the light scattered, or diffracted, into a pinwheel-shaped pattern that appeared on a screen. Moritake first photographed the colorful pattern using his iPhone's long-exposure mode. The setting captured faint light over several seconds. Then, he switched to specialized cameras for more precise measurements.

The pattern was made up of well-defined bright spots, called Bragg peaks, that stayed in the same positions no matter where on the chip the laser hit. That consistency confirmed that the structure had the kind of long-range, predictable order found in a quasicrystal — a class of material whose atoms (or, in this case, holes) follow an orderly pattern that never repeats, unlike the repeating grids found in ordinary crystals such as table salt or diamonds.

Because the hat tile itself has no mirror symmetry — meaning it doesn't look the same as its own reflection, similar to how a left hand differs from a right hand — the scattering pattern it produced was also asymmetrical in this way. Scientists call this property chirality.

That chirality led to the study's biggest surprise. Light can be circularly polarized, meaning it spins either clockwise or counterclockwise as it travels, like a corkscrew. When Moritake tested the structure with both types of spinning light, he found a subtle difference in how each direction scattered off the crystal. Ordinary quasicrystals, which do have mirror symmetry, cannot produce this kind of effect.

"This structure can have some kind of circular polarization dependence," Moritake said, adding that the effect — made only possible by the tile’s asymmetry — was not something he initially expected to find .

Now, Moritake wants to apply this never-repeating pattern to control light traveling inside a photonic chip, rather than light that simply bounces off its surface. This could lead to future uses in optical communications and optical computing ‪—‬ technologies that use light instead of electricity to transmit or process information, Moritake said.

See how much you know about Albert Einstein with our Albert Einstein quiz!

A German startup has debuted the world's first diamond-based quantum computing system to exceed 10 qubits.

The machine, built by engineers at Saxon Q, is a nitrogen-vacancy (NV) quantum computer, meaning it uses defects in synthetic diamonds as quantum bits (qubits) to perform quantum operations. Qubits can be manipulated to represent the 0s and 1s of data, as well as quantum states that are superpositions of both the 0s and the 1s.

The hardware is currently available in rack-mounted systems featuring up to 128 qubits, with 512-qubit configurations available for delivery next year. According to the company's road map, the goal is to scale to 10,000 qubits and beyond after 2030.

Although the technology existed before this debut, scientists have found it difficult to build systems beyond 10 qubits due to the difficulty of creating nitrogen vacancy qubits.

Although Live Science saw a technical white paper outlining how the technology works, there didn't appear to be any published research demonstrating a functional quantum computer based on the NV architecture operating with more than 10 qubits before this launch. It's still unclear exactly how well the firm's quantum computers stack up against other platforms.

Quantum mechanics and flawed diamonds

In the 1970s, scientists discovered that certain diamonds shone with a brilliant red light when illuminated in a specific way. Subsequent research determined that the optical shift was caused by annealing radiation damage that attracted isolated substitutional nitrogen atoms. In other words, nature occasionally produces a diamond that has a nitrogen atom where a carbon atom should be.

The unintegrated nitrogen atoms are drawn to the vacancy in the otherwise perfectly ordered carbon atoms inside the diamond. Although these flawed diamonds occur rarely in nature, scientists can create diamonds with nitrogen vacancies in laboratories.

Functionally, the single nitrogen atoms inside the vacancies act as if they were "trapped," and their electrons can "spin" independently of the electrons inside the surrounding carbon atoms.

Scientists exploit this "spin" feature by using special lasers to put the nitrogen atom's electrons in a specific state they measure as "zero." They can then use microwave pulses to precisely manipulate the electrons into numerous configurations, including quantum states that binary "bits" can't achieve.

Marius Grundmann, a professor of experimental physics at Leipzig University and co-founder of Saxon Q, said the breakthrough that allowed his firm to push past the 10-qubit barrier was a materials discovery.

When the Saxon Q team creates the vacancy inside its lab-grown diamonds, they co-implant sulfur. Per Grundman, “That's the key technology point. Because the sulfur lifts the chemical potential to a point that it's negatively charged. The sulfur supplies the electron; the sulfur also makes the vacancy attached to the nitrogen with a very high yield."

In other words, by co-implanting sulfur atoms, the Saxon Q researchers can express greater control over the individual qubits. Once the qubits are set with lasers and subjected to microwave pulses, they're ready for error correction. In a statement, Saxon Q representatives said the qubits achieved a 99.92% fidelity rate — fewer than one error per 1,000 operations — before error correction.

However, Grundmann told Live Science that the latest numbers as of July 22 showed 99.98% fidelity in single-qubit operations. That's comparable to state-of-the-art error correction results reported by other quantum computing labs, such as those from IBM and MIT, although it wasn't possible to independently verify the results.

Room-temperature quantum computing

It's difficult to compare Saxon Q's diamond-based NV systems with more established quantum computing platforms, such as superconducting qubits. Most recent research on NV systems has focused on quantum sensing applications, though at least one preprint study discusses hybrid NV/superconducting systems.

"We have a fully functioning quantum computer," Grundmann told Live Science. According to Grundmann, the company's quantum computers are on a par with those using other modalities. "We have a quantum computer that can execute quantum code that you can reach via the network, and it is a multiuser, multitasking, multicore system," he said.

If the Saxon Q systems ultimately prove comparable to existing solid-state quantum computing architectures, they'd be among the first generation of room-temperature quantum computers to reach performance similar to systems that require cryogenics and on-site monitoring.

The ease of setup is notable. Saxon Q's devices can be slotted into a standard computer rack and plugged directly into alternating-current power.

This provides a clear near-term advantage for clients who want to run algorithms on a quantum system without operating through the cloud. Grundmann said this could be especially important in edge computing scenarios, such as autonomous driving or robotics, where cloud communication could produce unacceptable latency.

Research comparing solid-state quantum systems indicates that superconducting quantum computers would typically operate faster than diamond-based NV systems. It's unclear, however, what the trade-off between processing speed and cloud latency would be or whether it could be addressed through scaling.

The current challenge to scaling diamond-based NV quantum computers beyond the 512-qubit range is the size of the chips. Saxon Q's current chips are limited to supporting either eight or 16 qubits. For more powerful systems, scientists will need to squeeze hundreds ‪—‬ or even thousands ‪—‬ of qubits onto a single array to support operations requiring hundreds of thousands or millions of qubits.

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

A fleet of telescopes around the world just captured the first shocking moments of a supernova explosion in the most detailed-ever observations of their kind.

The explosive event was first spotted by China's Einstein Probe space telescope as a flash of X-rays in March. Ground-based telescopes jumped in within the hour and quickly identified the flash as a supernova, a powerful explosion of a massive dying star. Before long, a big team of observatories was on the job, including the wide-field Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which began its ambitious 10-year survey of the sky in late June.

With this fleet of telescopes, astronomers charted how the light of the supernova, located 500 million light-years away, changed over time. They reported their results in two papers published July 14 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Each science team verified the "shock breakout" ‪—‬ the point when a supernova emits its first light from the explosion as a huge shock wave. The recently detected supernova is only the second stellar explosion in the past 20 years in which a shock wave was observed, because these events tend to be short — only seconds to hours, the researchers noted.

They classified the stellar explosion as a Type Ic broad-lined (Ic-BL) supernova, meaning that the blast included jets with material moving close to light speed. This type of supernova is often associated with gamma-ray bursts, which are extremely powerful flashes of high-energy radiation from space. However, the recently detected supernova presented some surprises: Its shock breakout was the faintest seen in an Ic-BL supernova, and no gamma-ray bursts were observed.

"Follow-up observations using the most sensitive facilities found no evidence" of the gamma-ray bursts, Brendan O'Connor, an astrophysicist at Carnegie Mellon University and co-author on one of the studies, said in a statement. "One possibility is that the jet was 'choked,' either by the surface of the star or by circumstellar material surrounding the star."

Telescopes of the world unite

The Rubin telescope, located in Chile, happened to spot the explosion because it was viewing that particular patch of the sky at the time, known as the COSMOS Deep Drilling Field.

"Thanks to Rubin's rapid cadence and unprecedented sensitivity, continued observations are expected to provide detailed, long-term records of the supernova as it evolves for years to come," the science teams said in the statement. The Rubin Observatory will spend the next decade mapping the entire southern sky many times over, creating a time-lapse movie of the cosmos expected to reveal millions of supernovas, asteroids, comets, and other transient events.

As Rubin spots events in the sky, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument on the National Science Foundation's Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona is tasked with springing into action for follow-up observations. The instrument confirmed the recently detected explosion as an Ic-BL supernova.

When the scientists dove into 10 years of data from the 570-megapixel Department of Energy Dark Energy Camera on the National Science Foundation's Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope in Chile, they found a "blue source" just where the supernova later occurred, revealing clues about what the star system and its environment looked like before it exploded.

Meanwhile, a team led by Jillian Rastinejad, an astronomer at the University of Maryland, College Park and co-author of the second study, used the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrographs on two telescopes — Gemini North in Hawaii and Gemini South in Chile — to investigate the explosion, among other observatories. Those telescopes also confirmed the explosion as an Ic-BL supernova, without the jets, and the astronomers obtained archival details on the star's structure and environment before their demise.

"Our observations allowed us to study the physics of three pieces of this explosion: the X-ray shock breakout, the accompanying supernova, and the interaction of the supernova with material previously cast out by the dying star," Rastinejad explained in the statement. "With this information we were able to map out the structure of the material surrounding the star and understand the star's violent lifestyle before it collapsed."

The star was about 20 times the mass of the sun and was classified as a Wolf-Rayet — a star that used up most of its hydrogen early in its life. Just before the star exploded, it periodically ejected massive chunks of hydrogen and helium, leaving behind only carbon and oxygen. These chunks of material generated shells that were visible in telescopes as individual events, including the first X-ray shock.

"This is the first time we've mapped out the pre-explosion environment of a star that has been stripped of hydrogen and helium," said Gokul Srinivasaragavan, an astronomer on Rastinejad's team who was a doctoral student at the University of Maryland at the time of the study. "Going forward, I'm excited to observe more shock breakout events in similar detail to test if all stripped stars have a similar ‘lifestyle' prior to collapse and what, if any, differences we see."

Every total solar eclipse travels from west to east, because the moon and Earth move in the same direction — counterclockwise, or from west to east. Earth rotates eastward once every 24 hours, and the moon also travels eastward as it orbits our planet. Because the moon's shadow moves across Earth faster than the planet rotates beneath it, the path of totality (the route of the moon's umbra, the darkest part of its inner shadow) always sweeps from west to east.

But if you've looked at maps of the Aug. 12, 2026, total solar eclipse, you may have noticed something puzzling. At first glance, the eclipse appears to do the exact opposite. The path seems to begin in far northern Siberia, near the North Pole, before heading toward eastern Greenland, making it look as though the moon's shadow were traveling from east to west. It then appears to curve over western Iceland and northern Spain. So what's going on?

The apparent reversal from Siberia to Greenland is an illusion. It's created by geometry, but it's also a result of viewing the eclipse on a flat map instead of on a globe. The moon's shadow follows a smooth arc across Earth's curved surface and never changes direction, as shown by this animation. This eclipse passes so close to the North Pole that the distortion caused by map projections makes the track appear to bend back on itself, when in reality, the shadow is simply sweeping over the top of the world.

"The path of this eclipse also has a strong north-south component, the combined effect of Earth's rotation and the tilt of both Earth's axis and the Moon's orbit," experts at NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio explained. "Combined with Earth's rotation, the umbra's eastern motion during the first half of its travel is effectively canceled out."

This causes the shadow to sweep over the Arctic in a broad curve, instead of following the more familiar west-to-east path. On a flat map, that curved route can make it look as though the eclipse briefly reverses direction, even though it never actually does.

The moon's shadow has two parts — the narrow umbra, where observers experience totality, and the much broader penumbra, where only a partial eclipse is visible. The widths of these shadows depend on the moon's distance from Earth, while their speed is influenced by the moon's orbit, Earth's rotation and the geometry of the eclipse.

If you are among the millions of people who will be in the moon's penumbra on Aug. 12, make sure to always wear a pair of certified solar eclipse glasses (or use a solar filter on your telescope or binoculars) to view the partial eclipse. It is never safe to look directly at the sun, except during the moment of totality, when the sun is 100% covered.

If you aren't in the right spot for the total solar eclipse, fear not. A near-total lunar eclipse will be visible over most of North America just two weeks later, and there are plenty of other summer skywatching highlights to watch for.

An ichthyosaur fossil found in Australia's outback may preserve a rare snapshot of a prehistoric food chain. Around 100 million years ago, the enormous marine reptile swallowed a flying pterosaur before being attacked by a giant ocean predator, new research suggests.

The fossil set, nicknamed "BOB" or "Bag of Bones," belonged to a 20- to 23-foot-long (6 to 7 meters) ichthyosaur, an animal that belonged to a group of dolphin-shaped marine reptiles that lived alongside the dinosaurs during the Mesozoic era, from about 250 million to 90 million years ago. But in a new study, researchers discovered fragments of a pterosaur's jaw — along with fish and cephalopod remains — preserved inside the animal's body cavity.

The finding is the first confirmed evidence that ichthyosaurs ate pterosaurs, an extinct group of flying reptiles that ruled the ancient skies, according to the new study, published July 28 in the journal Gondwana Research.

The fossils may also hint at the ichthyosaur's violent end. Its skeleton — discovered in 2019 in Queensland's outback — contains shattered bones, missing ribs and large crushing injuries. Researchers think the gruesome wounds may have been inflicted by Kronosaurus queenslandicus, a colossal crocodile-like apex predator that lived 120 million to 100 million years ago in the ancient Eromanga Sea in Australia.

A rare prehistoric meal

Fossilized stomach contents are a rare find because they can be preserved only under very specific conditions.

"Rapid burial after death is essential to prevent decay and scattering of remains," study co-author Matt White, a research associate at the University of New England in Australia, told Live Science in an email. "The animal must have died soon after its last meal so stomach acids don't fully digest the prey."

Researchers used advanced neutron imaging to peer inside BOB's stomach contents without breaking any of the fossilized formations. The scans revealed hidden bones and helped scientists determine that the remains were likely associated with the ichthyosaur's digestive system.

White said that advances in imaging technology are making it possible to uncover evidence that would previously have remained hidden inside fossils.

"Scanning techniques have also improved, which has enabled us to see inside specimens and reveal what they potentially ate," White said. The methods can also reveal "the shape of various organs" and internal bone structures, he added.

The pterosaur remains were found near the front of the ichthyosaur's body cavity rather than in their expected position as digested prey, which White and his colleagues think may be because the ichthyosaur struck the seafloor headfirst shortly after its last meal, shifting some of its stomach contents forward.

"We believe the animal died in the water column — perhaps from a pliosaur (Kronosaurus) attack or natural causes — and then sank," White said. "It impacted the seafloor with its rostrum, and connected soft tissues kept most of the body in sequence."

Reconstructing an ancient ecosystem

The fossil offers a rare glimpse into the food web of the ancient Eromanga Sea, which covered much of central Australia during the early Cretaceous period around 145 million to 100 million years ago.

Although ichthyosaurs are known to have eaten fish and squidlike animals, evidence that they ate pterosaurs, a common predator of the ancient skies, has been elusive. The new fossil suggests that at least some ichthyosaurs may have fed on flying reptiles that landed on the water or died and floated to the surface.

"Such discoveries yield valuable information about trophic interactions and allow us to reconstruct ancient ecosystems in greater detail," White said.

A camera drone operator captured footage of a humpback whale giving birth off the north coast of New South Wales in what is thought to be a world first.

Alexander Forrest, a commercial drone pilot for the Organisation for the Rescue and Research of Cetaceans in Australia (ORRCA), was conducting aerial observations of migrating humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) on July 28. ORRCA is a nonprofit organization focused on the rescue, conservation and welfare of marine mammals.

During the survey, Forrest noticed a whale swimming slightly behind her pod and going unusually slowly. Then, he saw her give birth.

"It's incredibly rare to see a moment like this in the ocean. It's a very rarely documented encounter," Forrest told Live Science. "It's the first drone video as far as we know of a full humpback whale live birth. It gives critical inside moments in the first moments of a calf's life, and also discovers the behaviour of a new humpback whale mother and her freshly newborn calf."

An ORRCA spokesperson said that this is only the fourth time the phenomenon of a humpback whale giving birth had been filmed, in general. Scientists also have footage of other whale births, including a gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus) birth filmed off the coast of California and a sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) recorded giving birth in the Caribbean.

The drone video shows the newborn whale surface from blood-reddened water for its first breath. The mother then turns back to reunite with it. The scene was filmed around 0.4 miles (700 meters) from the shore at Kingscliff in northeastern New South Wales.

The birth is "a symbol of one of the strongest conservation efforts in history, returning humpback whales from near extinction to nearly 50,000 on the New South Wales coast," Forrest said. Gathering data on this humpback whale population is critical to "discovering more about where they birth, what happens when they birth, and what those early moments look like."

The footage will now be analyzed so that a report on the observation can be peer-reviewed and published in a scientific journal. Notably, the mother whale was trailing behind her pod when she gave birth, a detail biologists will compare with observations of other birthing whales that were accompanied by members of their pod. For instance, the 2023 drone footage of the sperm whale giving birth showed that she had 10 adult females near her that formed a protective circle and took turns lifting the calf up so it could breathe at the water's surface.

Throughout their first weeks, calves stay close to their mothers and learn critical behaviors, such as breathing at the surface.

"Humpback whales seem to have an incredible maternal bond with their offspring," Forrest said. "There is an 11-month period where this calf will be raised and feeding on very nutrient-rich milk until it is a yearling and can fend for itself."

A newborn humpback whale calf weighs 1 to 1.5 tons (900 to 1,360 kilograms) and measures roughly 10 to 16 feet (3 to 5 meters) in length. While feeding on its mother's milk, the calf will gain 100 pounds (45 kg) a day and develop the strength and food storage it needs for its first migration. Humpback whales undertake one of the longest migrations of any mammal, travelling up to 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers) each way between the cold waters of the poles to warm tropical breeding grounds.

In the past 20 years, an increasing number of bacterial infections caught by children have been resistant to antibiotics, a new study finds.

The research, published in July in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, looked back at the past two decades, as well as looked forward, to predict how resistance rates might change in the decade to come. By 2035, some critical antibiotics will be met with "steep increases" in resistance among common bacteria, such as Acinetobacter baumannii and Klebsiella, the analysis found.

Antibiotic resistance contributed to 840,000 deaths among children under 5 in 2021, global estimates suggest, so if resistance continues to increase, that number could grow.

"These forecasts are warning scenarios, not inevitable outcomes," said study co-author Dr. Yanhong Jessika Hu, a clinical epidemiologist and public health researcher at Murdoch Children's Research Institute (MCRI) in Australia. "The projections broadly assume that historical patterns continue without a major change in direction," Hu told Live Science in an email.

If significant action is taken, that trajectory could be altered, she said.

"Resistance increased across all regions"

Antibiotic resistance is sometimes called "a silent pandemic," as it poses a formidable threat without stirring as much concern as other health crises, such as viral outbreaks. Resistance has gained attention in recent years, but the data on how it has affected children is patchy, said study co-author Dr. Penelope Bryant, a clinician-researcher at MCRI, Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne, and the University of Melbourne.

"It's perceived as being a lesser problem in children," Bryant told Live Science. "It's not a theoretical problem; it's real, and it's happening. But I think the visibility is just substantially less than in adults."

That's partly because many resistance-tracking efforts combine adult and pediatric data, and the adult data ends up obscuring trends in children, Hu said. "Adult findings cannot simply be applied to children because children have different infection patterns, antibiotic exposure and treatment options," she noted.

Meanwhile, studies aimed only at children tend to vary in the age groups and clinical settings they include, making direct comparisons difficult, Hu said. This lack of granularity hinders efforts to counter resistant infections in children through changes in policy or clinical protocols. Children also have fewer antibiotic options than adults do at baseline, which makes preserving those options even more important, Bryant added.

To help fill the gap, the researchers turned to the Antimicrobial Testing Leadership and Surveillance database, which contains clinical samples from children and teens ages 0 to 18 across 82 countries. These bacterial samples were collected between 2004 and 2022 from a variety of medical settings, including hospital wards, intensive care units and outpatient clinics. The included countries ranged from high-income, such as the U.K. and the U.S., to low-income, such as Malawi and Uganda.

The analysis included over 106,000 bacterial samples and assessed which antibiotics these germs were resistant to. The antibiotics were grouped based on the World Health Organization's Access, Watch, Reserve (AWaRe) system: "Access" antibiotics target few bacteria and are recommended as the first choice for most bacterial infections, "Watch" antibiotics have broader effects and should be used selectively for more-resistant infections, and "Reserve" antibiotics are considered last-resort options to use when all alternatives have failed.

"Resistance increased across all regions, showing that this is not only a problem in lower-income countries," Hu said. "However, the highest resistance levels and some of the steepest increases were seen in lower-resource settings."

A wake-up call

Part of the analysis zoomed in on eight bacteria that are considered "critical" or "high" priority by the WHO, meaning they impose a particularly high healthcare burden due to their resistance. Across these germs, resistance rates were similar across high- and low-income countries in 2004, but those trends diverged by 2022.

Overall, resistance to Access antibiotics declined across the study period, but that improvement wasn't the same across all settings. In high-resource countries, resistance to Access drugs fell from 48% to 29% among the eight bacteria, while it rose slightly — from 44% to 47% — in low-income settings. These percentages correspond to the number of bacterial samples from each year that showed resistance to at least one Access drug.

The decline seen in some countries is "almost certainly because of the large investment that high-income countries have put into controlling MRSA," Bryant said, referencing methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. MRSA can cause painful skin infections as well as life-threatening complications, like sepsis.

Modeling future trends, the team predicts that resistance to Access antibiotics will stabilize or decline across most regions by 2035. However, resistance against Watch antibiotics rose between 2004 and 2022 and is projected to continue increasing. Among the eight critical and high-priority bacteria, it rose from 14% to 24% in high-income countries and from 16% to 48% in low-income nations.

Resistance to Reserve drugs also increased among these germs, rising from 9% to 25% in high-income countries and from 4% to 37% in low-income ones.

While the model predicted "steep increases" in Watch resistance, it projected slower increases in Reserve resistance over the next decade, by comparison. These trends were driven largely by increases in low-income settings, but high-income settings were not spared.

"With low-income countries, the problem is amplified because of poor sanitation and because of unregulated access to antibiotics," Bryant noted. Easy access to over-the-counter antibiotics makes it more likely for the medicines to be misused, which ultimately pressures more bacteria to evolve resistance.

This analysis gives a snapshot of how antibiotic resistance is affecting kids now and how it might do so in the future. However, the data it's based on has some limitations. For instance, the samples collected from each country aren't necessarily representative of the entire nation; they came from only certain participating medical centers and each country contributed different numbers and types of samples. So "the results should therefore not be interpreted as precise national prevalence estimates," Hu cautioned.

"But it's the first large dataset, really, to look specifically at children," Bryant said. And "it gives us an idea that things are getting worse."

The team has made their analysis freely available to other researchers on the website AMR in Kids, where "AMR" stands for antimicrobial resistance. Future steps include surveying resistant infections in children in a more representative way, as well as modeling how different intervention strategies could help drive down the rates.

"I'm hopeful that this is a little bit of a sort of wake-up call around children, that it really isn't a problem just in adults," Bryant said.

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

The patient: A 60-year-old man in Seattle

The symptoms: The man experienced paranoia, as well as auditory and visual hallucinations. He was also very thirsty but was fearful of drinking water that others offered to him.

What happened next: The man went to an emergency department because he was worried that his neighbor poisoned him. Doctors checked his vital signs and conducted a neurological examination, which did not highlight any immediate concerns.

That changed when blood tests revealed that his level of chloride ions — charged particles of the element chlorine — were above the normal range. This result suggested that the patient may have been suffering from hyperchloremia, a condition in which chloride ions build up in the blood. This usually occurs in people who are dehydrated or consume too much salt.

However, when doctors measured the concentration of other ions in the patient's blood, they realized that this initial interpretation was wrong.

In patients with hyperchloremia, the body cancels out the increase in negatively charged chloride ions by depleting negatively charged bicarbonate ions, which the body makes itself. In essence, the body tries to regulate the electrical balance of the blood.

However, in the man's case, tests revealed that his blood was too negatively charged overall. The most likely explanation was that a negatively charged poison had built up too fast for his body to buffer the change by depleting other ions.

The diagnosis: The man's doctors consulted the poison control department and figured out that he was experiencing a case of pseudohyperchloremia, a condition in which the lab test for chloride erroneously detects another negatively charged ion. This makes it seem like a patient's chloride is too high while masking the actual problem.

A common culprit behind this phenomenon is a high dose of salicylate (aspirin), but the patient didn't have high levels of this pain reliever in his blood.

The next suspect, and the more unusual one, was the poison bromide, a charged form of bromine. Bromine sits just below chlorine on the periodic table, meaning their ions share similar chemical properties, such as charge and size, and bromide has triggered the lab test for chloride in previous reports.

When the doctors measured the patient's bromide levels, they found that they were roughly 230 times higher than the normal range. They diagnosed him with bromide poisoning, also called bromism, which can cause neurological symptoms such as hallucinations and paranoia.

The treatment: The patient remained in a hospital bed for three weeks so doctors could monitor and replenish his electrolytes. On account of his paranoia, he tried to escape from the hospital, so the doctors had to hold him there involuntarily. They gave him daily doses of risperidone, an antipsychotic medication.

His symptoms improved, and he was weaned off medication and ultimately discharged. His condition remained stable during a follow-up assessment two weeks later.

What makes the case unique: After his condition improved, the patient informed the doctors that he had searched for a healthier alternative to table salt (sodium chloride) and had consulted ChatGPT for advice. The chatbot suggested he swap sodium chloride with sodium bromide, and he experimented with that suggestion for three months.

Medicines containing bromide salts used to be popular for treating various conditions, such as headache or upset stomach. These medications fell out of common use when doctors realized that bromide accounted for 8% of admissions to psychiatric hospitals in the early 20th century.

Because it is similar in size and charge to chloride, bromide can fill in for chloride's roles in the body — and that's a problem. For example, chloride contributes to the brain's electrical activity by passing through chloride channels in neurons. Bromide can also move through these channels and thus disrupt normal brain activity, bringing about neurological symptoms.

Bromide poisoning is rare nowadays, so doctors don't typically assume that their patients experiencing paranoia or hallucinations could have this form of poisoning. However, bromide supplements can be easily purchased online, opening the door to such cases, the doctors wrote in a report of the case.

The man's doctors wanted to see whether ChatGPT would again point to bromide salts if asked the same question. They prompted the chatbot with queries about ways to remove chloride ions from the diet, and once again, the bot suggested bromide salt as an alternative. This response didn't provide a health warning about the dangers of consuming too much bromide.

Given the willingness of chatbots to recommend bromide salts, the doctors argued in the report that it would be prudent to more seriously consider the possibility of bromism during psychological evaluations. This case highlights the dangers of relying on AI chatbots for medical advice, the doctors concluded.

Live Science contacted OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, about this case and is awaiting comment. According to the service terms at OpenAI, "You should always verify the information provided by ChatGPT for Healthcare and exercise independent professional judgment in decision-making about a patient without relying primarily or solely on the output."

(Live Science first covered this case when it was published in 2025, and at that time, an OpenAI spokesperson said that the company's safety teams were working to reduce the risk of using its services and to train its products to prompt users to seek professional advice.)

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!

Each year, tons of soil, silt and rocks flow into reservoirs in the U.S. and get stuck there, creating a "ticking time bomb" that threatens lives and livelihoods. According to a new study, around a fifth of the world's reservoirs are currently at high risk of filling with sediment, and by 2060, half could be inoperable as a result.

The sediment takes up space meant for water, putting additional pressure on structures that were not built to contain large quantities of sand and sludge. As the reservoir fills with the material instead of water, sediment-filled reservoirs pose a serious threat to water security and the safety of people living near or downstream of them — and as the climate changes, scientists expect the problem to worsen.

"We are losing storage space in our reservoirs faster from sediment accumulation than we gain space from new dam construction," Amy East, a geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, told Live Science.

What is dam sedimentation?

Dam sedimentation is not a uniquely U.S. problem. Rain pulls sediment down slopes into waterways. Normally, this sediment would travel through the river system, shaping the water flow, creating habitats, and fortifying coastal wetlands and estuaries against erosion. In many parts of the world, this sediment is also a vital natural fertilizer for crops. But after a river is dammed, this sediment can collect in the reservoir.

A 2023 study published in the journal Science found that sediment buildup was the greatest threat to global water storage in existing reservoirs — even more than drought.

New research, which includes smaller reservoirs, has offered a more nuanced and concerning picture. In the study, published June 5 in the journal Nature Sustainability, researchers assessed the state of reservoir sedimentation globally. They looked at more than 550,000 reservoirs, most of which spanned less than 0.4 square miles (1 square kilometre). They found that almost 1 in 5 of reservoirs globally are at high risk of filling up with sediment.

The researchers found that sedimentation is eating into global reservoir storage capacity at about 7.3% every decade. There are 16 global hotspots that are at high risk of reservoir sedimentation, threatening water supplies to more than 2 billion people and impacting more than a quarter of global irrigated land. One of these hotspots includes the western U.S.

The authors found that sedimentation risk was especially pronounced in regions with dense small-reservoir networks supporting key crop systems.

"Without intervention, we project that, by 2060, more than half of all reservoirs could become functionally inoperable," the authors wrote. This includes more than half of all small reservoirs and more than a third of large reservoirs globally.

Where is it a problem in the U.S.?

North America has the second largest number of reservoirs, after Asia, according to the global survey. And at 7.8%, its sedimentation rate is higher than the global average, ranking it third after Oceania (9.9%) and South America (8.1%),

The U.S. is home to many small dams, said Matthias Kondolf, a geomorphologist at the University of California, Berkeley who wasn't involved in the study. "All the focus tends to be on the big dams, and these many, many small ones have been neglected," he told Live Science.

From the 1940s to 1970s, there was a big push by the U.S. government to build "farm ponds," he said. In western Oklahoma, for example, "all these dams are now filling up with sediment, and there's nothing in place to assess the safety of these features, which have now become threats."

Some of these dams have already failed, following large storms as the ageing dams were not able to cope with the volume of water. A 2018 study found that since 1980, there have been on average 24 dam failures a year in the U.S.

Reservoirs in some regions are more at risk than others. The western U.S. is a natural hotspot because it has a steeper topography, meaning more sediment naturally ends up in watersheds, East, who wasn't involved in the new research, said.

And in areas where human activities like farming or logging disrupt the landscape, rainfall is likely to drag even more sediment into reservoirs, East said. "Those types of land use can create sediment-producing hotspots almost anywhere."

In California, for example, more than half of small reservoirs in maize-growing areas are filling up with sediment at a rate of more than 10% a year, which threatens local maize production.

The threat to water security will be particularly acute in places struggling with wildfires, such as the western U.S. After fires, rain washes the debris and sediment into watersheds. A 2024 study in California found that most of this post-fire sediment erosion occurred upstream of reservoirs, rather than in places where sediment would move downstream directly to the ocean.

The dam-sedimentation situation is likely to get worse as the climate changes, researchers said. As the climate changes, there will be more extreme weather events, such as droughts and wildfires, adding more sediment to watersheds. Dams are designed to cope with the pressure of water, not sediment which exerts more force on dam walls. Moreover, in seismically active areas, the sediment vibrates at a different frequency than the concrete of the dam, which creates further impact against the structure. Additionally, the dams are just getting older.

"What do we do 50 or 100 years from now when we have all these reservoirs across the landscape filled with sediment, sitting there as ticking time bombs?" Kondolf said.

What can be done about it?

For a reservoir to be sustainable long-term, the amount of sediment entering it and leaving it should be the same.

"A big part of preventing reservoir sedimentation problems is upstream soil conservation in the watershed," East said. Interventions include ensuring that land use, such as agriculture or timber harvesting, follow best practice to reduce the amount of sediment washing off the landscapes.

If sediment is already in the dam, it can be difficult to manage and expensive to remediate, Kondolf said. Some dams, such as Fall Creek Dam in Oregon, have mechanisms that enable engineers to release sediment. But in the past, reservoirs were not designed to manage sediment and little thought was given to how to decommission them.

"This is one of those issues that falls in the cracks between different agencies and responsibilities," Kondolf said. Some larger facilities fall under the remit of the federal government. Other dams fall under state governments. California, for example, recently launched a state-sponsored program to future-proof the state's dams.

But smaller dams often get overlooked, Kondolf said.

One option is to remove the dams entirely. For example, sediment-related concerns contributed to the decision to remove the Elwha and Glines Canyon dams in Washington. The Elwha River later carried most of the sediment to its river mouth.

For smaller dams with a relatively small amount of sediment, "you just blow up the dam and let the sediment work its way downstream", Kondolf said.

There are other technological solutions, but they are expensive, such as retrofitting dams to enable them to pass sediment; creating a bypass to route sediment-heavy water around the dam; and mechanical dredging.

Another option is to empty the reservoir of water and let the river cut a channel through the sediment, Kondolf said.

However, released dam sediment brings its own risks. If not managed carefully, sediment can flood the river system and disrupt downstream ecosystems.

"The economics of managing reservoir sediment long-term were not generally incorporated into dam design and planning in the last century when many western-U.S. water projects began," East said. This has "pushed the cost burden on future generations."

But the reality is that reservoirs around the country are filling with sediment. It is reducing their ability to store water and potentially endangering the communities living downstream of them — and unless addressed, the problem will only get worse.

Researchers have designed a material that can "program" the way it releases heat, paving the way for more efficient energy systems and, potentially, devices that store information using heat instead of electricity.

The design, described in a June 25 study in the journal Laser & Photonics Reviews, sidesteps a nearly 160-year-old rule of physics linking how materials absorb and emit heat. Under ordinary conditions, a material that's good at absorbing heat from one direction is equally good at emitting heat in that direction. This rule of reciprocity, first described by physicist Gustav Kirchhoff in the 19th century, has limited engineers' ability to control incoming heat independently from and outgoing heat.

In the new study, the researchers designed a theoretical device that could direct heat radiation in different directions and remember that setting even after the power was switched off.

The new device pairs two materials that don't normally work together. Using a magnetic field, the team broke the natural symmetry in a layer of indium arsenide ‪—‬ a material that absorbs and emits infrared light ‪—‬ so that radiation traveling in one direction behaves differently than radiation traveling the other way.

On top of that layer sits a grating made of germanium-antimony-tellurium (GST) — a phase-changing substance that can switch between two distinct physical structures and stay in whichever structure it's set to until it's deliberately switched again. Once the GST is set into position, it locks the directional difference of radiation in place and holds it there without needing continuous power, which is what lets the device's heat-directing behavior be "programmed."

"I was impressed by the elegant combination of magneto-optical nonreciprocity with a nonvolatile phase-change material," Juejun Hu, a professor of materials science and engineering at MIT who wasn't involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.

That's significant because earlier attempts at this kind of directional control typically worked only at steep angles, which made them impractical. It's "particularly noteworthy" that this device functions when radiation arrives just 3 degrees off an otherwise-straight line, making it far easier to fit into real-world optical systems, Hu said.

The researchers compared their design to computer memory, since it holds onto its programmed state after the power is cut. However, the device stores a material state rather than heat itself, Hu told Live Science. GST simply keeps its amorphous or crystalline structure without power, which preserves the programmed response.

For now, the device exists only on paper; it hasn't been built or tested. Still, Hu thinks it's realistic, since it relies on well-established materials and manufacturing methods. However, the GST layer is thick enough that switching it back and forth repeatedly would be difficult, though other materials could fix this problem. Once that hurdle is surpassed, Hu expects the first real-world use to be infrared sensing, where compact, direction-selective heat absorption is most directly useful.

The brain preservation paradox — the discovery of well-preserved human brains among otherwise skeletal remains — has puzzled archaeologists and pathologists alike for decades. Now, new research finally provides a scientific explanation for this longstanding mystery.

"We found that brain preservation isn't a rare anomaly, it's a novel chemical pathway," first study author Alexandra Seviour, a doctoral researcher of paleobiology at the University of Oxford, told Live Science in an email about the new work, published June 19 in the Journal of Proteome Research. "Under the right conditions, preservation actually arises from decay itself: the same reactions that degrade tissue can also weld the breakdown products together into something far tougher."

Despite being one of the first tissues to begin decomposing after death, human brains are surprisingly prolific in archaeology: more than 4,400 preserved brains have been discovered among human remains spanning the last 12,000 years, according to earlier work published by Seviour.

Mummification, freezing, and even saponification (where body fat turns into a greasy substance called grave wax) can all preserve soft tissues, sometimes for millennia. Usually, these processes conserve the structures of multiple body parts, including the internal organs and skin. But bizarrely, around one-third of the archaeological brains recovered don't fit this model, and a shrunken mass of protein is the only surviving tissue left among a cluster of bones.

The bulk of these unexplained brains were found in waterlogged, oxygen-poor (hypoxic) ground — anything from riverbeds and lake shores, to flooded caves and sunken shipwrecks. "Water, being nature's solvent, is typically associated with decomposition, not preservation, " Seviour said. "So the surprise is really the selectivity." In other words: Why is it only the brain which survives under these conditions?

Burying mice

Seviour's team hypothesized that this specific burial environment, combined with the brain's unique structure and chemistry, divert the normal decay pathway away from total breakdown — instead stabilizing the brain's proteins via a different chemical sequence. To test this theory, they buried mouse carcasses in four different water and oxygen conditions and evaluated their decay pathways over a period of six months.

"At 24 hours, 72 hours, one week, six weeks, three months, and six months, we dissected the brains and analysed them using high-resolution mass spectrometry to see exactly which proteins were still present and in what state," Seviour explained. "We were looking for which specific peptides survived and which vanished, and what chemical marks were left on the survivors."

Overall, their analysis yielded more than 1.26 million protein decay trajectories, enabling the team to draw patterns about how and when the chemistry diverged under the different conditions. Early analysis showed that the initial steps of decay were fairly similar, but that after a few weeks, oxygen levels became the controlling factor, with more oxygen leading to faster and more widespread decay. Conversely, wet, low-oxygen conditions favored the formation of toughened protein structures, which resisted further decomposition and preserved the remaining brain tissue.

The solution comes down to free radicals — extremely reactive particles with a single, unpaired electron. Abundant oxygen initiates a chain-like free radical chemical sequence in the brain proteins, which quickly degrades the entire protein structure, Seviour said. However, in hypoxic conditions, there is simply not sufficient oxygen for this same cascade to occur; instead, intermediates in the sequence form crosslinks with other neighboring parts of the brain protein, creating tough and insoluble aggregates that resist decay.

Brain tissue is particularly well-adapted to this localized and self-limiting pathway, Seviour added: it's rich in metals that promote free-radical chemistry, packed with membranes where radicals can accumulate, and contains many "redox-active" amino acids that can absorb free radicals to form crosslinks. The physical barrier of the skull also likely plays a part, restricting the exchange of fluid and oxygen compared with the rest of the body, the researchers said.

Richard Evershed, an organic geochemist at the University of Bristol who was not part of the study, was impressed by the team's comprehensive analysis. Evershed believes it would be fascinating to expand this to other proteins found in the archaeological record.

"Comparing more tissues — other organs and muscles — would be really useful to get an idea whether what was happening in the brain was special compared to what was happening elsewhere, and also to resolve questions regarding proteins preserved in other environments in archaeology such as pots or dental calculus," Evershed told Live Science.

But the implications of the work extend beyond archaeology. "For medicine, the more unexpected finding is that the molecular fingerprint of these decay-resistant peptides closely resembles the fingerprint seen in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's," Seviour said. One interesting future direction will therefore be to explore how far this similarity extends and whether preserved brains could ultimately help scientists understand the progression of these devastating diseases.

See how much you know about the most complex organ in the human body with our brain quiz!