History is rife with lost treasures, from Aztec gold hidden during the Spanish conquest to the Ark of the Covenant, which vanished during the destruction of Jerusalem over 2,500 years ago. In his book, "The Museum of Lost Things: True Tales of Fabled Treasures, Legendary Cities, and Mythical Creatures That Vanished From History" (National Geographic Partners, LLC, 2026), writer Sam Kean examines all things lost to time.

In this excerpt from the book, he looks at how the tomb of Genghis Khan, arguably the most successful ruler in history, has remained hidden for nearly 800 years and counting.

If archaeologists could vote on which lost grave they'd most like to find, Genghis Khan's would likely appear near the top of the list — in part to fact-check the gruesome legends surrounding his burial.

He was born in Mongolia around 1162, and supposedly emerged from the womb clutching a clot of blood in his fist. By all rights, the boy — whose original name was Temüjin — should have died young. His father, a nobleman in their tribe, was poisoned by a rival tribe when Temüjin was nine, and greedy schemers within his own clan banished the boy's family to the empty steppes, expecting them to starve. Historical accounts describe Temüjin as overly sensitive, terrified of dogs and prone to crying.

But he grew up fast. Even before adolescence, he'd already been enslaved (he engineered his own escape) and killed his older half brother. As a young man he discovered that soldiering suited him, and he ruthlessly eliminated all potential rivals among other nomadic tribes, until he was crowned Genghis Khan — universal ruler — in 1206. His other nickname was the Disturber of the Universe. His warriors were bold and battle-tested, and when they stopped murdering each other and turned their attention outward, they proved unstoppable.

They favored blitzkrieg tactics, sweeping in on horses and bombarding the enemy with arrows. But they could be surprisingly patient, too, and perfected the art of siege warfare. One notorious siege involved the city of Merv, in what's now Turkmenistan. Merv was the Alexandria of its day: a desert oasis teeming with gardens and libraries, famous for its silks and refreshing melons.

The Mongols couldn't resist it, and when the terrified artists and merchants inside surrendered after just six days of siege, a massacre ensued. "It was a memorable day for shrieking and weeping," lamented one chronicle. After burning Merv for good measure, Genghis Khan ordered his troops to count the corpses. There were 700,000. Yet however crazy it sounds, life under Genghis Khan had its benefits. He allowed the conquered to worship whatever gods they liked, a rare example of religious tolerance. He introduced the idea of diplomatic immunity to facilitate negotiations, and outlawed torture during interrogations. He promoted free trade, and founded history's first international mail system.

Over time, his empire also spread key technologies like the compass, abacus, printing press, and paper currency, as well as key social programs like universal education for children. No one was more ruthless when conquering (ask Merv). But if the vanquished people picked up the pieces and swore fealty afterward, life generally improved under Mongol rule. Genghis Khan's realm stretched from Korea to the Caspian Sea, an area twice the size of the Roman Empire. (Under his successors, it grew to the size of Africa.) And he accomplished all this with an army of just 100,000 warriors — fewer people than some modern stadiums hold.

Historian Jack Weatherford summed up his achievements thus: "[Imagine] if the United States ... had been founded by one of its illiterate slaves, who, by the sheer force of personality, charisma, and determination, liberated America from foreign rule, united the people, created an alphabet, wrote the constitution, established universal religious freedom, invented a new system of warfare, [and] marched an army from Canada to Brazil." Alexander, Julius Caesar, Napoleon — they weren't fit to carry Genghis Khan's saddle. If anyone in history deserved a grand mausoleum, it was him.

Genghis Khan wanted the opposite. Despite all the blood they shed, the Mongols were oddly squeamish about discussing d-e-a-t-h, so beyond the year 1227, contemporary sources say little about how Genghis Khan died. As a result, rumors multiplied. One story claims he died after tumbling off a horse. Others have him struck down by lightning or an arrow to the knee during battle (at age 65, no less). One source swears he was trying to ravish a conquered queen who, anticipating the crime, concealed a blade inside her vagina that sliced lil' Genghis wide open.

Regardless of the truth, his longtime wife Yesui dressed his body in a white robe, wrapped it in white felt with sticks of fragrant sandalwood, and clasped the shroud shut with golden straps. What happened next is impossible to say for certain. But according to lore, Genghis Khan received probably the most outrageous funeral in history.

After his wife bound him in white, a thousand soldiers took off on horseback to bury him atop a mountain. This cortege quickly turned into a rampage. To conceal their destination, the troops reportedly slaughtered every person they encountered on the 40-day journey, often with the cry "Go to the other world to serve our lord!" In some accounts, the soldiers killed every animal, too. Based on other Mongol burials, they likely interred him 20 yards deep, with the body oriented north-south and the head facing east. They probably tossed some treasures in — gilded saddles, gold rings, pearls wrapped in silk — along with slaves, concubines, and horses. (One tale has the soldiers burying a live baby camel with him, either so its bleating would serve as a funeral dirge, or so the grieving mother could lead them back to the site if necessary.)

After filling the grave, Genghis's soldiers either diverted a river to conceal it or trampled the ground with a thousand horses to obliterate all trace. Then they resumed the merry rampage on the return trip, butchering every unlucky hunter or merchant who wandered across their path. To their surprise, the thousand soldiers were themselves slaughtered when they reached home, as a further guarantee of secrecy — and then those slaughterers were also slaughtered, to make doubly sure.

Genghis Khan took privacy seriously. We have no idea how much of that is true. But it hasn't deterred the hunt for the grave. To the contrary: The elaborate concealment has made the pursuit all the more enticing. Four nations — Mongolia, China, Kazakhstan, and Russia — have claimed that Genghis Khan's bones lie within their borders. The strongest claim points to Burkhan Khaldun (God Mountain) in northeast Mongolia. Genghis Khan was born nearby, hunted there regularly, and worshipped the sky god Tengri there. He also once took refuge there while fleeing his enemies, and miraculously escaped. The mountain seemed charmed to him, and he'd mused during his life that it would make an ideal final resting place.

Strengthening the case for Burkhan Khaldun is the fact that later Mongol rulers proclaimed the land around the peak a forbidden zone and stationed a clan of ferocious guards there — the Darkhad, who murdered anyone who dared approach. (In exchange, the Darkhad paid no taxes and avoided compulsory military service.) Incredibly, the Darkhad kept this watch for 700 years, until the founding of the communist Mongolian People's Republic in 1924. The republic was a puppet state of the U.S.S.R., and Soviet leaders had a schizoid attitude toward the Disturber of the Universe. On the one hand, they admired his ruthlessness and gazed longingly at all the territory he'd gobbled up. On the other, they feared his memory would stir up nationalist sentiments in Mongolia and spur a revolt against the hated communists.

To forestall this, the Mongolian government banned the very mention of Genghis Khan's name. And to prevent Burkhan Khaldun from becoming a rallying point, officials fenced off a "highly restricted area" around the peak of 3,900 square miles (twice the size of Delaware), and parked a tank base at the site's entrance. The ban thawed somewhat after Joseph Stalin died in 1953, and one Mongolian official decided to celebrate the Disturber's 800th birthday in 1962 by putting him on a stamp. He overreached. Moscow ordered the man arrested, and he was chopped to bits with an axe. After the republic collapsed in 1992, the restricted area devolved into a nature reserve with some public access. But the land near Burkhan Khaldun remains daunting to explore. It's one of the most desolate places on Earth, with few roads and a population density down there with Greenland's.

Centuries of vegetation growth have choked off many areas, and the clear parts are prone to flash floods. Temperatures can swing from 100 degrees [Fahrenheit, or 38 degrees Celsius] in the summer to 50 below [minus 46 C] in the winter, so cold that even yaks drop dead. None of this has stopped Genghis Khan obsessives from searching out his grave. They've suffered snakebites and frostbite and been left stranded when their vehicles tumbled off cliffs. One man spent 40 years crossing and crisscrossing and re-crisscrossing the slopes and died without finding a thing.

In 2010, a few archaeologists tried a new approach. They posted satellite images of the Burkhan Khaldun region online and recruited volunteers to scour them for bumps, depressions, and other features that might indicate graves. Ten thousand people spent approximately 30,000 hours (3.4 collective years) poring over 2,300 square miles [5,950 square kilometers]. They flagged over a hundred spots worth checking out. While several proved inaccessible due to challenging terrain, 55 legitimate archaeological sites turned up among the rest, including megaliths, Bronze Age burial mounds, and an ancient city.

But there was zero trace of Genghis Khan. One archaeologist lamented that it was like looking for a needle in a haystack, except you don't know what the needle looks like. Call it Genghis Khan's final victory. The diverted river and trampling horses and the slaughter of all potential witnesses have succeeded in hiding him for most of a millennium now. His victims lay scattered across Eurasia, their skeletons long since ground to dust. But the bones of history's greatest warrior remain at peace.

Excerpted from The Museum of Lost Things by Sam Kean, published by National Geographic Partners, LLC. Copyright © 2026. All rights reserved.

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One of the most famous full moons of the year will climb into the eastern sky on Saturday, Sept. 26. This year, the Harvest Moon will make its appearance with Saturn shining nearby — and you'll have another chance to see it rise on Sunday, Sept. 27, too.

Officially full at 12:49 p.m. EDT on Saturday, the full moon will be best seen rising in the eastern sky later that day, at the time of moonrise where you are. It will appear in the constellation Pisces.

This month's full moon earns the Harvest Moon nickname because it's the full moon closest to the September equinox, which fell on Tuesday (Sept. 22). This year, it coincides with the Mid-Autumn Festival — also called the Moon Festival — which is held in Chinese and Vietnamese communities on the day of the Harvest Moon, according to Timeanddate.com. However, the Harvest Moon's significance goes beyond traditional nicknames, because the moon behaves a bit differently around this point in the calendar.

Typically, moonrise occurs roughly 50 minutes later from one day to the next. Around the Northern Hemisphere's autumnal equinox, however, the moon's path meets the eastern horizon at a relatively shallow angle. That geometry reduces the day-to-day shift in moonrise times, resulting in a string of evenings with bright moonlight arriving soon after the sun goes down. Before electric lighting and modern farm machinery, those brighter early evenings provided useful extra illumination during the autumn harvest.

That's not the case anymore, but skywatchers nevertheless have more than one night when the full lunar disk emerges above the eastern horizon into a sky still filled with twilight. Across North America, the moon will rise only about 25 minutes later on Sunday, Sept. 27 than on the previous evening.

Saturn will add another reason to watch. The ringed planet will appear close to the Harvest Moon, rising just beneath it as seen from North America and is easily bright enough to see without a telescope. However, a backyard telescope or stargazing binoculars can give you an even crisper view of both Saturn and the moon. To get the best chance of catching the moon as it appears, find an observing spot with an unobstructed view to the eastern horizon.

The next full moon, known as the Hunter's Moon, will occur on Friday, Oct. 25 or Saturday, Oct. 26, depending on your time zone. It will also be a supermoon, making it appear larger and brighter than average.

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

In modern times we tend to think of lithium as powering smartphones and cars, yet its historical fame comes from its role as a mood stabilizer.

Lithium was first used as a treatment for bipolar disorder in 1949. Yet despite decades of research and drug development, this simple medication remains the gold standard for treating one of the most complex psychiatric conditions. But why?

According to Becci Strawbridge, a senior lecturer in psychological medicine at King's College London, lithium's simplicity could be what helps it cut through the complexity of bipolar disorder, a lifelong disorder that affects about 36 million people worldwide.

Clinically, bipolar disorder is defined as a mood disorder characterized by specific, lasting changes to a person's mood and energy levels. Depending on the type of bipolar disorder, individuals can experience manic, hypomanic and depressive episodes — either individually, or in sequence.

However, "experiencing mania itself is sufficient to have a diagnosis of bipolar [disorder]," said Dr. David Cousins, a clinical senior lecturer and honorary consultant psychiatrist at Newcastle University in the U.K. "It's probably easiest to think of that as the opposite of depression — people become elevated in mood, extremely energized, driven, motivated, and engage in hedonistic behavior with lots of risk taking," he said. "It's a highly detrimental, highly damaging, highly disruptive state."

Treating an illness that operates at such extremes is a difficult balance to strike, with any intervention to treat one emotional state needing to factor in how it could impact the other. "For example, if you gave somebody antidepressants without an antimanic drug, you might either trigger mania or destabilize the illness," Cousins explained.

A combination of antidepressants, antipsychotics, and mood-stabilizing anticonvulsants are often prescribed in combination to juggle these highly variable symptoms. "There are really very few medications that have an overall effect against both poles," Strawbridge said. Once stabilized, the challenge then becomes preventing relapse back into this destructive cycle.

Lithium, by contrast, does not suffer from these limitations, Strawbridge added.

"It's often considered the gold standard for bipolar disorder; it's helpful for the depression and for the mania, but its main benefit overall is in preventing relapse, so stopping either of those two types of episodes from coming back."

Psychiatrists usually prescribe lithium as either lithium carbonate tablets or a lithium citrate liquid, both of which dissociate inside the body into lithium ions and their corresponding counterion (either carbonate or citrate). This simple active form is part of what gives lithium its powerful, broad-ranging mood-stabilizing effect, Strawbridge said.

"Because lithium is quite a simple ion, it's able to disguise itself as sodium, and that means it can slip inside of brain cells, whereas most medications act on the surface of cells," she explained.

Lithium's simple form enables it to spread throughout the brain and rest of the body. Once inside, it interacts with many cellular processes, but doctors still don't really understand the underlying mechanism behind its beneficial effects.

"We know that the monoamine system and the neurotransmitters in the brain that are involved in reward emotions and cognition are disrupted," Victoria Wing, a clinical lecturer at the National Institute for Health and Care Research at Newcastle University and CNTW NHS Foundation Trust, told Live Science. Included in this disruption is the regulation of crucial mood molecules, such as dopamine and serotonin, which may be underactive or overactive depending on the nature of the bipolar episode.

The same small lithium ion also blocks an enzyme called glycogen synthase kinase 3. This enzyme has wide-ranging downstream effects, such as controlling gene activity, regulating the body's circadian rhythms and managing inflammation and cell survival.

"Lithium can also help with autophagy, which is the clearance of debris and toxins in cells, and it has antioxidant effects and boosts mitochondrial function, which are important for cell energy processes," Wing said.

However, despite its manifold therapeutic benefits, lithium does have some drawbacks. While around one-third of people experience profound benefits from the drug, another close third only experience intermediate effects, and the final rough third don't respond at all.

This means it's vital to identify which patients respond well to the drug as early as possible, especially because the cyclic nature of the condition means it can take years to ascertain whether lithium is effective in preventing relapses in the long-term, said Cousins. The drug also has a narrow therapeutic window, which means it has a small margin of safety between doses that are high enough to be effective and those that are toxic to the kidneys and thyroid. Some patients who undergo lithium treatment also report having to urinate more frequently or experiencing slight tremors.

As with any medication, some side effects are unavoidable. The alternatives to lithium also carry their own risks. But if carefully and correctly managed, lithium medications can have a transformative impact for patients.

"I've met a lot of patients through patient involvement groups that have told me how effective and lifesaving lithium has been for them," Wing said. "We know it works, but can we fine-tune the use even better so more people can benefit from it?"

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

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NASA is moving forward with designing a new space telescope that can see even deeper into the infrared universe than the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can.

The new mission, called PRIMA (Probe far-Infrared Mission for Astrophysics), is continuing its development to Phase B — the preliminary design and tech phase — according to a NASA statement. Managers will review the mission's progress before officially beginning the telescope's journey to launch; if all goes to plan, PRIMA will embark on a five-year mission no earlier than 2033.

PRIMA's objective is to use a 5.9-foot [1.8 meters] telescope to examine the cosmos in the far-infrared, in a different set of wavelengths than the more famous JWST, which launched in 2021. (Other telescopes, such as Hubble and the newly launched Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, can also see some infrared wavelengths, but JWST was specifically designed to detect near- and mid-infrared light.) PRIMA's mission focus will be to uncover more information about exoplanet origins, galaxy growth and black hole evolution.

"The key science questions that PRIMA aims to address in relation to planet formation are to quantify the role of water in driving planet formation, [and to] determine the total gas masses and carbon and oxygen abundances in disks to reveal where exoplanets form," Meredith MacGregor, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University who studies how planetary systems form, told Live Science in an email.

"We can't actually address these science questions with JWST," MacGregor added, "because the spectral lines that are required are only in the far-infrared — longer wavelengths than JWST is sensitive to."

The University of Maryland (UMD) and Caltech, which helped develop the mission, each issued statements about the upcoming work.

"I'm most excited about the things I don't yet know," Alberto Bolatto, an observational astronomer at UMD and a co-investigator who leads galaxy evolution research for PRIMA, said in a statement. "I am elated to be part of the future of astronomy — to produce an instrument that is going to be an enormous tool for the astronomy community to move humanity's knowledge forward."

"I am particularly excited about how PRIMA will help us discover and understand the role of powerful molecular outflows in galaxies over cosmic time, and how they shape star formation and the growth of supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies," Lee Armus, a staff scientist at Caltech and the PRIMA co-investigator and science operations lead, said in a separate statement.

Dawn of the Probe Explorers

PRIMA has a project cost cap of $1.2 billion, excluding launch and other nonproject expenses; for comparison, JWST cost $10 billion at launch in 2021, not accounting for inflation or launch expenses.

PRIMA is also the first in a new class of spacecraft that NASA is calling Probe Explorers, which are meant to sit somewhere in between flagship, JWST-style missions and smaller agency efforts. Probe Explorers are a part of the decades-old Explorers Program that began with the Explorer 1 launch in 1958 and followed with more than 100 missions. Explorers perform "a wide variety of research and scientific exploration programs for Earth studies, space weather, the solar system, and the universe," according to the agency.

The Probe Explorers were implemented after a recommendation from astrophysicists through the 2020 Decadal Survey, which is a consensus report issued by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on behalf of the community. NASA funded two concepts at $5 million apiece in 2024 and considered both PRIMA and the Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite before announcing the decision to proceed with PRIMA this week.

"NASA selected PRIMA for development after detailed evaluation of concept studies for Probe Explorer missions, based on their scientific merit in alignment with the Decadal Survey's recommendations, feasibility of their development plans on cost and schedule, and use of technologies that could support the development of future large missions," the agency stated Wednesday (Sept. 23).

Should the mission fly as hoped, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory will manage PRIMA, with contributions from numerous other NASA centers and international agencies.

MAUI, Hawaii — Engineers have built a first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence (AI) audio chip for wearable devices that they say will let users engage with AI assistants without needing to maintain a smartphone connection. Devices with the new chip will also harvest audio ‪—‬ and even video ‪—‬ data from the world around you to better serve these virtual agents.

The new chip, called Snapdragon Sound Elite Gen 2, will pave the way for new features that are currently unavailable directly in portable devices such as headphones, smart glasses and speakers. Qualcomm representatives announced the new chip at the company's annual Snapdragon Summit, hosted here Sept. 21-24.

Unlike current earbuds, devices with the new chip will be able to host apps right on the memory of the devices themselves, without relying on a continuous smartphone connection, as well as sync with cloud-based services like ChatGPT when connected to Wi-Fi. In practice, the chip will enable users to make vocal queries and requests, with an AI model taking actions such as setting up entries in an online calendar or making online purchases. Unlike existing devices that can perform similar functions, this would be possible without a smartphone connection.

Beyond earbuds, company representatives want to integrate the chip into other "hearables," such as over-ear headphones, open-ear audio devices, audio glasses, camera buds (headphones that use tiny built-in cameras) and hearing devices, as well as "future personal AI wearables," like pendants or clips.

What features will the chip enable, and how does it work?

For users who wish to connect hearables to a smartphone or computer (to interact with a visual user interface, for example), the new chip uses a specialized component within the platform to establish connections over micropower Wi-Fi channels alongside Bluetooth. This technology harnesses architectural improvements at the chip level to consume much less power than standard Wi-Fi connections — but at the expense of higher latency and lower peak speeds. For audio devices, however, using Wi-Fi rather than Bluetooth generally improves playback quality, given that Bluetooth compresses data during transmission, Qualcomm representatives said.

Adaptive and selective active noise cancellation also means users can filter out audio on command. For example, it allows listeners to hear key sounds, such as emergency sirens, while walking through a city or highlight people's voices during a conversation, while blocking out everything else. This noise cancellation is achieved through standard machine learning algorithms, rather than transformer-based large language models that power AI systems like ChatGPT.

Devices could also allow lossless audio streaming — a high-quality audio standard that's usually available only if you subscribe to premium streaming services, like Spotify or Tidal — thanks to another built-in subsystem.

Qualcomm representatives also highlighted the chip's "always-on intelligence," in which an on-device eNPU AI accelerator component powers virtual assistants, transcription and translation, as well as the building of "contextual awareness." With contextual awareness, the system would constantly monitor the user's environment to harvest data to add to a personal profile, which representatives say helps it answer future queries.

Although the system is audio-centric, it's also built to interface with hardware that includes sensors and cameras — like earbuds with built-in lenses that passively capture footage of a wearer as they go about their daily lives. This forms part of the data harvesting to build contextual awareness for the agentic AI systems people can access. Qualcomm representatives attempted to assuage privacy concerns by saying camera lenses on future earbuds would be low resolution and wouldn't identify specific individuals due to an AI mask that automatically obfuscates them.

There's no information yet about the likely impact of these features on battery life compared with conventional non-AI devices. But Qualcomm representatives noted that device makers will no longer need to choose between audio quality, AI features and battery life. That said, Andrew Laister, staff product manager at Qualcomm, added in a media Q&A session that there's likely to be an impact on how a user experiences battery drain. That's because, unlike conventional earbuds that are used sporadically for calls and music playback, these new devices are designed to be used continuously.

How does Qualcomm's new AI chip compare with similar technologies?

AI-enabled headphones already exist in some capacity. For example, manufacturer Viaim launched its Rise and RecDot devices this year. These are designed to record, transcribe, translate and summarize conversations, although details on the chips powering them are not publicly available. Apple's AirPods, for example, let users tap into the Siri AI system, but they require a continuous iPhone connection to perform complex tasks.

Devising smart audio features and getting them to work in real devices have also been at the heart of several recent research projects. For example, in 2024, University of Washington scientists embedded a computing system into off-the-shelf earbuds to zero in on individuals speaking in noisy environments while blocking all background noise.

The previous year, the research team put a deep learning system into headphones so wearers could use voice commands to engage with a selective active noise cancellation system, choosing which sounds to hear and which ones to block out.

Other companies have explored building new kinds of digital audio platforms for headphones. Three years ago, xMEMS unveiled Cypress, an audio chip that generates ultrasonic sound using the "piezoelectric effect," in which a material moves when a current is applied to it. Although the chip entered "mass-production readiness" in September 2025, consumer devices fitted with the platform have yet to be announced.

Apple also may be working on a similar technology. This could manifest as AirPods with built-in cameras that will perform similar data harvesting as users go about their day-to-day lives, according to Bloomberg Managing Editor Mark Gurman.

Qualcomm's new chip is a spiritual successor to the 3-year-old Snapdragon S7 Gen 1 system, which featured in devices such as the Xiaomi Buds 5 Pro series. The previous chip also used AI for conventional active noise cancellation, audio customization and lossless audio streaming while connecting to devices via micropower Wi-Fi.

However, the new chip has twice the AI power, completing 128 billion operations per second, compared with the previous one's 64 billion operations per second. It also uses 40% less power and is 30% smaller.

A crucial aspect of the new system is its capacity to store apps on the device itself in the chip's onboard memory. Because the device will have its own IP address, it can communicate with servers using the https protocol, without needing to go through another phone or computer.

Laister told journalists in the Q&A session that the company is currently scoping out whether the device could run two apps in RAM (short-term memory) at once — an AI agent and an audio streaming platform, for example — while keeping the rest in flash memory (long-term storage). He added they had to overcome a communication hurdle with micropower Wi-Fi foron the launch of the previous chip (specifically, that its power consumption is on a par with Bluetooth's). Now, he said the communication hurdle is actually being able to run apps on the device.

"It's like the first smartphone moment with the Play Store, but in this sense, that app store for your earbuds is currently owned by the device maker," he added. "They will be the guys that will choose which apps they will pre-bundle, and then we'll go from there."

No details were available on when the system is likely to be found in devices, but representatives said Qualcomm is working with other companies, including HP and Bose, to explore headphones and speakers that feature the chipset.

Live Science was invited to attend Snapdragon Summit 2026 courtesy of Qualcomm, with the company covering travel and accommodation.

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Fusion-powered space travel has long held the promise of rapid trips across the solar system: Mars in weeks, Saturn in months, Pluto in years.

For decades, such possibilities have remained theoretical, like something plucked out of a science fiction novel. But several companies are now working to build practical nuclear fusion propulsion engines, with significant milestones being hit.

Pulsar Fusion, a U.K.-based startup, hopes to launch a demonstration mission to space in 2027, while Princeton University and Helicity Space in the U.S. are continuing their own work on fusion drives.

If any of these efforts prove successful, missions across the solar system for robots and humans could be unlocked like never before, turning us into a true spacefaring species.

"If we continue on the current trajectory, everything we know about space travel is going to change within a decade," Stephane Lintner, CEO and co-founder of Helicity Space, told Live Science.

But is it too good to be true? Can the dream of nuclear fusion propulsion ever be fully realized, or will it remain a sketchbook fantasy? After decades of dreaming, we might be on the cusp of finding out.

Fusion power

Nuclear fusion is a process whereby two atoms combine, or fuse, to form a heavier one, releasing excess energy in the form of light and heat. The best-known type of fusion is the process that occurs inside the sun at up to 27 million degrees Fahrenheit (15 million degrees Celsius), where atoms of hydrogen fuse to form helium.

If this process could be replicated on Earth, it would provide us with huge amounts of energy. "The holy grail is free energy for everyone," Lintner said. Entire cities and countries would be transformed, bringing about a new age of clean and abundant power.

Many experiments and tests have been performed, and large fusion experiments, like the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in France, are under construction. However, commercially viable fusion reactors have yet to be built. One of the main problems is keeping the turbulent, superhot plasma required for fusion confined and at the right temperature. The record is currently 22 minutes.

If you take the same concept and put it in space, you suddenly have a means to power a spacecraft. What's more, the same problems with sustaining the plasma don't arise. Instead, the plasma can be fired out of the spacecraft, providing a steady thrust that can be used to accelerate a spacecraft to enormous speeds in the frictionless vacuum of space.

"Fusion propulsion in some ways is harder, and in some ways is easier, than terrestrial energy production," Bhuvana Srinivasan, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the University of Washington, told Live Science.

A fusion-powered spacecraft could be accelerated to hundreds ‪—‬ or even thousands ‪—‬ of miles per second through this method, multiple times faster than any spacecraft in history. In the most optimistic scenario, such a spacecraft could reach significant fractions of light speed, making interstellar travel a possibility.

There are tremendous challenges, of course. A space-based fusion reactor must be small enough to fit inside a spacecraft on a rocket. That's no easy feat, considering fusion reactors like ITER are the size of houses. You also need a way to create the immense heat required for fusion to occur, a source of fuel and propellant, and powerful magnets to keep the plasma from burning through the engine's walls.

Producing meaningful thrust requires staggering numbers of fusion reactions every second. A quintillion reactions would provide about 10 newtons of thrust ‪—‬ equivalent to the weight of a 1-liter bottle of water in your hand. But a fusion-powered engine would provide this thrust for months, rather than minutes for typical chemical propulsion, allowing large speeds to be reached eventually.

At first glance, this might sound nearly impossible, but some recent tests have shown it could be plausible

First plasma

In March, Pulsar Fusion demonstrated "first plasma" inside a nuclear fusion engine for the first time. In the test, which took place at the company's facility in Bletchley, one of Pulsar's Sunbird engines briefly transformed krypton gas into a plasma, demonstrating how the company might confine plasma within its exhaust system.

The demonstration showed "the plasma will sit in the system where you want it to sit," confined by an electromagnetic field, Richard Dinan, the company's CEO and founder, told Live Science. "The difficult work now is to be able to heat the plasma to temperatures nearer to fusion."

Dinan founded Pulsar Fusion in 2011 with the goal of building a fusion-powered propulsion system. The company's plan is to fuse helium-3 and deuterium, a lighter form of helium and a heavier form of hydrogen, and use the energy produced to heat helium-4 and expel it as propellant to produce thrust. The amount of thrust that can be produced depends on "how good you are at diverting those particles out the back of the spacecraft," Dinan said. "And right now, nobody knows how efficient we can be."

Just a few hundred grams of deuterium and helium-3 fuel would be needed to sustain the fusion process on a trip to Mars, Dinan said, but he claims their rocket would need 10 to 20 metric tons (11 to 22 U.S. tons) of deuterium propellant to provide the thrust to reach the speeds they're hoping for.

If they can make it work, their plans are ambitious. The company imagines fleets of its Sunbird vehicles traversing the solar system, taking people and cargo to and from destinations at speeds of up to 329,000 mph (529,000 km/h) ‪—‬ about 10 times faster than the Voyager 1 spacecraft currently traveling outside the solar system.

At those speeds ‪—‬ which aren't reached instantly, as the spacecraft need months to accelerate and decelerate ‪—‬ travel time to Mars could be halved from the nine months it takes with conventional chemical propulsion. Weight could be freed up for equipment because fusion is more efficient and needs less fuel. Quicker missions to farther destinations, such as to Saturn's moon Titan or the metal-rich asteroid Psyche, would also be in reach.

"I think we will see fusion as a propulsion system pretty soon," Dinan said. "The demand is certainly there."

A billion degrees

Pulsar Fusion's method of propulsion is known as dual direct fusion, where the plasma from the process is directly used to provide thrust. Samuel Cohen, a physics professor at Princeton University, is working on a similar concept, the Direct Fusion Drive, as part of a project called Starfire.

Cohen and his team have been investigating this concept for more than 20 years. Their idea is to fuse deuterium and helium-3, which is rare on Earth but abundant on the moon. His team has built a prototype fusion thruster at Princeton with plasma that reaches 18 million F (10 million C).

"It's a start, but you've got to get to a billion degrees" Celsius for deuterium and helium-3 fusion to occur, Cohen told Live Science. There are a few promising approaches to reaching those temperatures, including squishing the plasma or heating it up with radio or neutron beams.

Using their current plasma, Cohen claims the team has demonstrated a small amount of thrust ‪—‬ a few milligrams, or a few hundred-thousandths of a newton. Now, they hope to get more funding to take their concept further. "We need a few million dollars to start things off," Cohen said.

With enough support, Cohen said, they could have a working fusion propulsion system in 10 to 20 years. Meanwhile, Pulsar Fusion, which has received support from the European Space Agency and the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority, hopes to perform a demonstration of its thrusters in orbit by 2027.

Helicity Space is targeting a launch of its fusion propulsion system in the 2030s. The company, which raised $5 million in 2023, is developing the Helicity Drive, which relies on pulses of plasma, rather than continuous fusion, to provide thrust.

"If you get a reaction every few seconds, that's an amazing science experiment on Earth, but you can't do anything with it," Lintner said. "In space, you have the most advanced electric propulsion drive ever built. You change the game for propulsion."

Lintner said the company is aiming "for fusion temperatures very, very soon," and is then "planning on flying a first prototype within three years." By the 2030s, Lintner hopes to reach net gain in its fusion engines ‪—‬ producing more energy than is put in ‪—‬ to have a true fusion drive ready for use in space.

Going interstellar

But not everyone is convinced that fusion drives will propel us through the solar system. John Slough, who is working on his own fusion rocket design called the Fusion Driven Rocket (FDR), said he is wary of "false promises" in the field. He noted that much of the underlying physics around fusion propulsion remains extremely difficult.

"It still relies on scientific discovery for us to push it," Srinivasan said. "We need to figure out, how do we keep this fuel stable? Have we sorted a lot of the engineering and scientific challenges? It's not going to happen next year."

Remaining challenges include not only keeping the plasma stable, but also developing walls that can sufficiently contain the plasma, and shrinking the fusion system to fit inside a spacecraft, she added.

Other forms of nuclear propulsion might be more promising. NASA is developing SR-1 Freedom, a spacecraft powered by nuclear fission, not fusion. The goal for the spacecraft, announced in March, is to launch to Mars by December 2028, where three small robotic helicopters would be sent to explore the surface. The fission reactor would split uranium-235 to generate thrust.

"SR-1 Freedom will pave the way for space nuclear hardware," Steven Sinacore, the Space Reactor-1 Freedom Program Director at NASA, told Live Science in response to questions via email. "To sustain a presence on the Moon, send crews to Mars, and explore the outer solar system, the nation needs power that works everywhere, independent of the sun, and fission is that power."

However, fission-based propulsion, while extremely useful, cannot match the speeds promised by fusion propulsion. That's because fusion systems magnetically confine the plasma, meaning much higher temperatures can be reached. Fission temperatures, by contrast, are limited by the materials of the reactor where the fission reactions take place.

If any of the proposed fusion concepts were to become a reality, however, the possibilities would be enormous. Last year, Elena Ancona, a flight dynamics engineer at the Polytechnic University of Bari in Italy, and her colleagues described how a direct fusion drive could enable a mission to Sedna, a remote icy dwarf planet far beyond Neptune. For that mission, time is of the essence.

The dwarf planet will reach its closest point to the sun in 2075, and it will not be that close again for another 11,000 years. "If we want to make this mission, it's either now or in 11,000 years," Ancona said. With a traditional chemical spacecraft, a mission would need to be launched 30 years in advance. But with fusion propulsion, it could get to Sedna in just 10 years.

Many more destinations would be within reach if fusion propulsion were to become a reality. Perhaps even interstellar travel would be possible much further down the line. "People have known that fusion is the answer to deep-space travel since the 1960s," Lintner said. "It's only in the last decade that, commercially, people started to spend a lot of time on cracking the fusion code."

But there's a long way to go. "It's not for the faint of heart," Lintner said. But if fusion propulsion is ever going to happen, the next few years look as good a bet as any.

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The problem when you're buying a new pair of binoculars is that you need different specs and characteristics for different purposes, and if you don't know exactly what you need, it's easy to buy a pair that's totally wrong for you. Birdwatching requires sharp, chromatic aberration-free optics, while astronomy needs large objective lenses and tripod compatibility — and a general purpose binocular should sit somewhere in the middle.

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The global fishing industry is plagued by problems. Overfishing remains a severe threat, while production and consumption have increased to record levels. Illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing continues to thrive, thereby disrupting marine ecosystems and attempts to manage our oceans sustainably. All the while, climate change is warming the seas, shifting marine populations and shrinking fish body size.

It's amid this background that journalist and author Rose George wrote "Every Last Fish: A Deep Dive into the World of Fishes and Fishing" (Granta Books, 2025). George had previously written an award-winning book on the shipping industry, "Deep Sea and Foreign Going: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry that Brings You 90% of Everything," (Granta Books, 2013) and had become more aware of the significant issues facing the fishing industry.

For the book, she traveled across continents, joining trawlers, fishers and aquaculturists (fish farmers) to learn more about the problems they face, while delving into fish intelligence and welfare with scientists. Finally, George also reveals some of the atrocities that take place at sea, including slavery and murder, as she tells Live Science in this interview about the book. "You can't police the sea; it's too big," she said.

"Every Last Fish" has been short-listed for the 2026 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize.

Hannah Osborne: You're a vegetarian who gets bad motion sickness. What made you want to write a book about the fishing industry?

Rose George: When I wrote my shipping book, I had a lot of skepticism about how the shipping industry works. But whenever I spoke to shipping people, they would say, "Well, if you think we're bad, you should look at fishing." And they were right. Fishing is way more complicated, and baffling, and a difficult industry in many ways.

One of the other big triggers was that when I was doing my initial research, two things struck me. One was that for the first time in history, we're going to be eating more farmed fish than hunted fish. We have switched from hunter-gatherers to settled farmers, even though in this case, it's fish. There are all the horrible statistics about how many fish stocks are overfished and depleted and under pressure. People kind of know that, and I think they kind of switch off from it — it's quite hard to enthuse them about the fact that the ocean is in such a terrible state.

One of the things that really fascinated me was the research into fish abilities and fish sentience. I definitely wanted this book to be not just about fishing but about fishes, the creatures, the animals. Because I don't think we think of them as animals. Most people think of animals as kind of furry, cute things that they can empathize with or sympathize with, whereas sympathizing with fish, I mean, Samuel Coleridge called them "slimy things in the water." And, you know, they're not slimy, but I still think that's an overwhelming attitude [among the public].

In the last 20 years or so, [scientists have] looked at what their abilities actually are. They live in a very complex environment. They have to have complex abilities. I absolutely loved the research. In one study, scientists had goldfish steering around in an aquarium. It was nuts but fascinating.

I wanted to look at the industry and look at the animals. I wanted to make it more than a dead thing on the plate. And I hope I did that.

HO: You traveled to so many places for this book. Were there common themes among fishers from across the world? And if so, what were they, in terms of their problems, their work ethic, the things that they have to deal with?

RG: I didn't go fishing in Norway, but I did go to salmon farms, which is quite different. But I would say that there is a sense that it's a unique profession. It's a dangerous profession because you are in a dangerous element and every single ship can sink, no matter what size.

People die, and people get injured. There's all the heavy machinery if it's a sizable fishing vessel with winches and chains and everything under tension. And, of course, accidents happen. The fishing industry has gotten a lot safer in some parts of the world, but it's still dangerous.

For example, let's compare the small-boat fishermen who I went fishing with in England and the Senegalese fishers. There's a lot of similarity in that there's a pride in what they do and the sense of being beleaguered. Definitely in Senegal, it's very pronounced in that a lot of their fish has just been stolen by European and other nations, and has ended up as fish meal in European countries. In Senegal, Sardinella — a variety of sardine — is a staple fish, and it's just not there anymore. What happens is, the more you fish, the more you tend to fish the smaller fish. So you'll fish down. You'll end up fishing juvenile fish. And then, of course, you've got no fish to grow up.

I think West Africa, in general, is a very sad case of how the fishing industry works because hardly any of it is illegal. In Senegal, the government sold all the licenses to the Chinese trawlers and Spanish trawlers and what have you. A lot of the problems are from legal fishing.

Rex was banned from fishing wild salmon, and his fishing season was curtailed. [Editor's note: Rex Harrison is a small-scale fisher in England whom George spent time with for the book.] They definitely feel they're drowning in paperwork. I think that it's made it a very defensive industry, particularly in the U.K. because it is such a tiny industry. The biscuit industry is bigger. Yet fishing has this massive kind of cultural place that is really quite a nostalgic thing. There is an industry, but it's nothing like it was and the number of fishermen is much smaller. Young men don't want to go into fishing; young women don't want to go into fishing.

There's this sense of feeling beleaguered, but there's still pride in the fact that they do this activity, which is unique. They are the last hunters, really.

HO: What did you think was the biggest disconnect between the regulations and the reality of being on a boat?

RG: The fishing industry is so complex. It could mean a 3-foot [1 meter] wooden boat with no engine or one of the massive trawlers. That's all the fishing industry. But routinely, across the board, what the fishing industry needs is more and better monitoring.

You can't monitor a vessel at sea. It has to be self-reported. So what goes on at sea? All we have are fishing observers doing an extremely risky job. I think it's only about 2% of the fishing fleet that has an observer on board. There are some fish stocks that have much better, higher rates of observers. For example, in the U.S., Alaska — the Pacific Coast — has a very good observer system. [Editor's note: Fishing observers are independent specialists who travel on commercial vessels to monitor compliance and regulations.]

But then you look at Eritara [Aati Kaierua], the fishing observer from Kiribati who was pretty obviously murdered. There are observers of a lot of those big tuna boats in the Pacific. But routinely, what happens when a fishing observer goes missing or is injured or dies is, you get these forensic reports that say they all died of hypertension ‪—‬ it's like it's an epidemic down there. But they're all we have — the fishing observers — because there's no remote electronic monitoring yet. That would be much better. I think what we need is more data. But then again, you need someone to process the data, and you need a way for the data to be accurately sent. Self-reporting has its limits as a robust monitoring tool.

It's why you might find that the fish you're eating is not what you think it is, because there are so many opportunities for swaps. One fisher may have reached his quota on a particular stock of fish. There are lots of opportunities, particularly when you get into illegal fishing. You get something called trans-shipment, which is two fishing vessels exchanging catches at sea.

HO: You just touched on the observers, and there are some awful stories in the book. What did you find most shocking while you were researching and writing the book?

RG: What shocked me the most was meeting the four Ghanaians who had taken jobs on a scalloper, thinking that the U.K. was reputable and everything was aboveboard. All their safety training had been done. Then, they got to work on this scalloper, and it was just a horror show. This was a scalloper that was working in the U.K. EEZ. [Editor's note: An EEZ, or exclusive economic zone, is the region between 14 and 230 miles (22.5 to 370 kilometers) from a country's coast that can be explored for its marine resources]. It was never on the high seas. It was always off the U.K., and yet these men were treated appallingly.

This is a particular company that was known to be rogue and has been somewhat prosecuted. What arose at that point was — and what the International Transport Workers' Federation highlighted around the time — that these cases were coming to light, and a lot of fishing vessels were using what was called trans-shipment visas.

What that essentially means is, if you're working on a ship and you call in at one country but you immediately get on your ship, you get a trans-shipment visa. Because [the crewmembers are] on these visas, they couldn't really come ashore; they were basically imprisoned on their boats. And that's in the U.K.

There are lots of perfectly good operators on the seas. But if you do want to be a criminal, there is no better place to do it. That is a problem. You can't police the sea; it's too big.

HO: On the flip side, you spent so much time with fishers. What was the most moving story for you?

RG: I really loved Rex's story of saving the birds. Rex looks like a Viking. He's such a nice guy, but he's quite eccentric. He had been fishing in Filey Bay [off the eastern coast of the U.K.] for 40 years and had just accepted that bycatch is a huge problem in fishing. When you catch one species, often you have to catch others. And often they end up just being chucked back into the water and they won't survive. It's just needless slaughter.

But another problem is seabird bycatch, because obviously the seabirds want the fish. Filey is right next to Bempton Cliffs, which is an RSPB [Royal Society for the Protection of Birds] reserve that's very famous for its puffins, but it's also got guillemots and kittiwakes and all sorts. Rex was just really sort of inured to this death toll of seabirds in his net. Then, this beautiful friendship arose between him and this guy from BirdLife International, Rory [Crawford].

Rory remembers turning up, and Rex and all his fellow fishers are kind of standing there with their arms folded, which is kind of typical. But they managed to become friends. And because Rex respected Rory, and Rory respected Rex, Rex changed his nets to a darker filament so that birds would see them more clearly, and changed the design of them so that they wouldn't get caught. It reduced bird bycatch in Filey Bay by 90%. It's just extraordinary.

I [also] really liked the fact that Captain Tom McClure [a trawler from the English county of Cornwall] and I managed to be friends, even though we disagree so profoundly about bottom trawling, and we always will. I think it's a terrible fishing method, but you don't have to be adverse. He still invites me out on his trawler, but given I was sick on it last time, I don't think I'm going to do that anytime soon. But the offer's there, which is nice.

HO: I really liked the story of Lillian Bilocca and everything that she did to try and improve the safety standards for fishers in the '70s and '80s. Do you think that safety has improved enough, or is there still a long way to go?

RG: It's definitely improved a lot. Lillian Bilocca was just a wonderful woman — a working class hero. She was a fishwife, worked in a fish processing factory, and it was a terrible time. In 1968, three full trawlers went down with only one survivor ‪—‬ about 50 or 60 men dead from one town.

It was a very close-knit town. Lillian became this astonishing campaigner. They ended up going to London to meet ministers, and this raft of measures was put through with astonishing speed just because of the publicity and the ministers were embarrassed.

But she had to face such enormous hostility. The trawler industry hated her. The trawler owners — their incentive was obviously to get as much fish as possible — so they would send out their boats to really unsafe Icelandic waters in the deepest winter. It was ludicrously unsafe, and at the time, the boats had no radio operator. There was no medical ship nearby. There was no help, and they just went down.

Since then, there have been loads of measures, but there are still serious issues.

HO: There's a lot of grim reading in the book about the state of the oceans, the industry, the things that happen at sea, and there doesn't seem to be an awful lot of change on the horizon. Did you see any signs of hope or signals that things could change that will make the fishing industry more sustainable and less destructive?

RG: Yes and no. I mean, if you learn anything about fishing, I don't think you're going to come away from it particularly optimistic. But then there are people who are absolute experts about fishing who do find some optimism, so we have to learn from that.

One of the biggest pieces of environmental legislation passed last year was the Global Ocean Treaty, which was amazing and astonishing and had all the NGOs doing press releases with exclamation marks. They were all absolutely delighted. The reason that is important is that most international legislation operates on consensus. So you have to wait for like 180 countries to agree, which is why the International Maritime Organization is so slow, because it operates on consensus. The Global Ocean Treaty does not, so states can nominate parts of the high seas that they want to be protected. It can be a lot more flexible, a lot more nimble, and it could protect the high seas.

The downside is that only 10% of fishing happens on the high seas. So although we need to protect as much of the ocean as possible, it may be that's not where the major problem lies, but it's a really good start.

The other thing that gave me hope is … that it is quite impressive how quickly the ocean can recover when given the chance. When there have been no-take zones established … they are astonishing because sea life recovers very quickly.

Also, it expands because obviously the fish move; the populations recover; they move; things grow. It's such a win-win situation just to protect small pockets of the ocean and see that protective effect expand. But to do that, we have to stop taking everything from the ocean and assuming it's got an infinite bounty, because it clearly doesn't.

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

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Archaeologists have unearthed a monumental 2,700-year-old tomb at Vulci, an important ancient Etruscan town north of Rome. Despite repeated attempts by tomb robbers to loot this burial over the centuries, the tomb still contained a massive collection of grave goods, including weapons, gold and bronze plates, chariot parts, a rare pair of women's shoes, and a complete banquet set.

The burial, nicknamed the Tomb of the Stone Chamber, was excavated this summer, according to a translated statement from the Italian Superintendency of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for the Province of Viterbo and Southern Etruria (SABAP-VT-EM). But the discovery builds on work that French archaeologists carried out in the late 19th century.

In 1889, archaeologist Stéphane Gsell identified the circular enclosure of the Etruscan burial mound in the cemetery at Vulci. But while Gsell delineated what he thought was the perimeter of the grave, he never found the tomb itself because he ran out of time and money to dig further.

Now, archaeologists with the Return to Vulci project think they've finally found the burial chamber inside the "Gsell tumulus" — and it's much larger than they, and Gsell, expected.

"This is the burial. We are absolutely certain of it," Christian Mazet, an archaeologist at the British Museum and co-director of the project, told Etruscan Times. The discovery of weapons, parts of a chariot, gold objects and high-quality ceramics means "there is no doubt that this is a tomb of the very highest rank," he said.

The new excavation revealed the Tomb of the Stone Chamber, which dates to the seventh century B.C. Archaeologists uncovered the walls of the tomb's three burial chambers and found numerous artifacts preserved beneath the chambers' collapsed roofs, including jewelry, clothing and shoes.

In the side chambers of the tomb, archaeologists recovered much rarer items, according to the SABAP-VT-EM statement, such as a bronze tripod made on what is today the Greek island of Rhodes, just off Turkey's southwest coast. They also found a nearly complete banquet set, and some of the vessels were still in their original positions after spending centuries underground.

The Etruscan cemetery at Vulci is well known for its wealthy tombs, thousands of which were discovered in the 19th century. But although the Indigenous Etruscans ruled over central Italy for several centuries, their society began to decline in the fourth century B.C., owing to the rise of Roman civilization. Their language is only partly understood today, meaning most information about the Etruscans comes from archaeological sites such as Vulci.

The Tomb of the Stone Chamber was built in Vulci's heyday. Gsell had estimated the size of the tumulus at around 102 feet (31 meters) in diameter, calling it a "new Cuccumella," referring to the largest Etruscan burial mound previously discovered at Vulci. (The giant Cuccumella tumulus had a diameter of roughly 230 feet, or 70 m.) According to Etruscan Times, the Return to Vulci project experts' initial calculations suggest that the Tomb of the Stone Chamber may have been similar in size to Cuccumella, ‪or perhaps even larger.

"Everything tells us that it is one of the most monumental at Vulci," Mazet told Etruscan Times.

The tomb and burial mound have been covered to preserve them, according to the SABAP-VT-EM statement, but research will continue in 2027.

Rare fossils discovered in Japan more than 30 years ago are from a new species of armored dinosaur — one whose ancestors likely reached Asia by trekking across a land bridge, a new study finds.

The newly named dinosaur, a type of nodosaurid, is now one of just three species of its kind found in Asia to date. The scarcity of nodosaurids in Asia, and the fact that the newly described beast is similar anatomically to those from North America, hint that its species likely arose from a migration from North America to Asia via the Bering Land Bridge, an ancient strip of land that connected present-day Alaska and Russia, researchers reported in the February 2027 issue of the journal Cretaceous Research.

"It's super cool to see [the specimen] getting a new look and a new name," said Victoria Arbour, manager of research and collections at the Royal B.C. Museum in Canada. Arbour was not involved in the new work.

Nodosaurids are armored dinosaurs covered in bony plates. They are closely related to ankylosaurids, but they lack the heavy tail clubs ankylosaurids used to protect themselves from predators. Nodosaurid fossils have primarily been found in North America and Europe, though a few have been uncovered in Asia.

In the new study, a team of researchers revisited one such fossil specimen originally discovered in 1995 on Hokkaido, the northernmost main island of Japan. The scientists performed computed tomography (CT) scans of the fossils, which are somewhere between 93 million and 100 million years old, and include the back of the skull, part of the lower jaw, and several teeth and bony plates.

CT scanning enables researchers to make digital 3D models of specimens, and "lets you just get more information than you'd be able to have otherwise, because you can look inside without breaking [the fossil]," Arbour told Live Science.

Based on the CT scans and an anatomical analysis, the team determined that the fossils represented a new species of nodosaurid, which they dubbed Nipponopelta yezoensis. "Nippon" refers to Japan, and "pelta" means "shield" in Greek. "Yezo" is the traditional name for Hokkaido.

N. yezoensis is closely related to North American nodosaurids, the team found. The dino's ancestors may have migrated from North America to Asia via a land bridge in what is now the Bering Strait 100 million to 110 million years ago.

Coastal dinosaur?

A separate team of scientists originally uncovered the N. yezoensis specimen in marine sediments — rocks that formed under ancient seas. Nodosaurids didn't live in the ocean, so the findings suggest that after the animal died, its corpse may have been swept out to sea along a river or estuary and eventually sank to the ocean floor.

Several other nodosaurid fossils have been found in similar marine deposits, suggesting the creatures lived along coastlines. That may have helped them migrate along the Bering Land Bridge and disperse by following the coast, study co-author Darla Zelenitsky, a dinosaur paleobiologist at the University of Calgary, told Live Science.

But just because nodosaurids are most commonly found in coastal environments doesn't mean that they couldn't have lived further inland as well, said Jordan Mallon, a paleontologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature who was not involved in the research. Upland and mountainous regions tend to produce few fossils because erosion wears down rocks in these biomes, Mallon told Live Science. So it's possible nodosaurids lived there, even if there's no fossil record of these armored dinosaurs at these locations.

"The nature of the fossil record is that it's patchy and incomplete," Mallon said. "It's very hard to tell a comprehensive story when you've only got a few pages out of a phone book's worth of time."

It's also not clear from the fossil record why so few nodosaurid species have been found in Asia compared with North America, Zelenitsky said. While several ankylosaurid species have been found further inland in Asia, few nodosaurid fossils have been unearthed on the continent.

"It could be the rock record, or just that [nodosaurids] weren't able to diversify as much in Asia," Zelenitsky said.

In future studies, "I hope that we find more of this animal," Mallon said. "It incites us to keep digging so that we can learn more about this animal and test some of our ideas about just what it is."

In July 2025, a large, bright cosmic object visited from beyond our solar system. Only the third interstellar object ever discovered, the comet — named 3I/ATLAS — swooped through the inner solar system for about four months, briefly making it one of the biggest science celebrities in the world.

The interstellar object's fame stemmed in large part from controversial (and unsubstantiated) claims that it could be a source of intelligent alien technology, even though 3I/ATLAS behaved like a natural comet. However, according to the astronomers who are studying its mysteries in the data collected by dozens of telescopes and spacecraft, the ancient object may still have lessons to teach us about life in the cosmos.

3I/ATLAS is likely a preserved fragment of a planetesimal — a building block of a planet — from a distant system, Martin Cordiner, a researcher in astrochemistry and planetary science at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told Live Science. Therefore, the comet's composition could offer clues to the prevalence of life's building blocks around distant stars. Some astronomers even hope this cosmic interloper will help constrain how likely life is elsewhere in our galaxy.

Blast from the past

Comets like 3I/ATLAS are important because scientists think they help "seed" planets with carbon-containing chemicals, Darryl Seligman, an assistant professor of astronomy at Michigan State University, told Live Science in an email. Some of these chemicals, like methanol, have simple structures. Others, like amino acids, are more complex. Together, these carbon-containing, or organic, compounds form the basis for biomolecules, like proteins and nucleic acids, that interact to produce life.

Samples returned from space rocks in our neighborhood strongly support the idea that they transported such molecules within the solar system. For instance, fragments from the solar system asteroid Bennu obtained during NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission contain all five nucleotide bases, the building blocks of nucleic acids. Matthew Belyakov, a postdoctoral researcher in planetary science at Caltech, noted that the Bennu samples also contained 14 of the 20 amino acids that form naturally on Earth.

Inferences about such deliveries are possible only because the rocks are like time capsules: They emerge from the same swirling disk of gas and dust from which planets are born, and the chemical compositions of asteroids and comets don't change much after that. So, by studying space rocks that originate in other exoplanetary systems, "we can learn if they also contain the building blocks of life and could have helped to start life in exoplanetary systems," Seligman said.

Simulations suggest that comets that circle one planet before moving to another could similarly deliver such prebiotic molecules to baby exoplanets. However, there was no supporting observational data to back up this claim.

A chemical potpourri

To figure out which chemicals 3I/ATLAS contains, astronomers have been recording the comet's light intensity across a range of frequencies, using more than a dozen instruments on Earth and around the solar system. This was possible because the comet spewed tons of gas and dust to create a fuzzy bright halo, or coma, after the sun warmed it. Observations of this coma have turned up an eclectic group of chemicals essential for life as we know it.

One is hydrogen cyanide (HCN), which was detected by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Despite its notorious reputation as a poisonous gas, HCN is important for creating life. A commentary noted that laboratory experiments dating back to the 1950s ‪—‬ including the famous Miller-Urey experiment, which attempted to recreate the conditions of primordial Earth ‪—‬ have found that HCN is involved in building molecules like amino acids.

The list of ingredients goes on. ALMA data also revealed that 3I/ATLAS released gigantic amounts of formaldehyde and methanol. Additionally, observations from the James Webb Space Telescope showed 3I/ATLAS spewing the greenhouse gas methane. This is important because, assuming the methane formed on planets in the comet's home system, it could have trapped heat on those planets, thus warming them and making them more hospitable to life.

The presence of all these molecules is significant, Cordiner said, because they are "heavily implicated in terrestrial prebiotic chemistry studies as key carbon and nitrogen feedstocks [raw materials] for helping build life's molecular precursors," he said. 3I/ATLAS is proof that these "feedstocks" also exist in pastures far beyond our solar system's fences.

These findings are especially important because astronomers couldn't study the previous two interstellar objects to the same extent, Seligman said. He noted that 1I/'Oumuamua, the first interstellar object ever detected in the solar system, was observable for only a few weeks.

"The second interstellar comet 2I/Borisov was discovered right before COVID, so a lot of observations were canceled because of that," Seligman added. (Cordiner noted that the few observations conducted on 2I/Borisov showed that it, too, appears to contain HCN.) In comparison, researchers had almost a year to study 3I/ATLAS with telescopes. These observations have shown that "3I/ATLAS is unique in terms of the *measured* chemical inventory," Cordiner said.

Not indicative of life

All of the chemicals that 3I/ATLAS appears to possess give us data about just one planetary system. But when combined with observations of other astronomical phenomena, 3I/ATLAS shows that the chemical building blocks of life are abundant across our galaxy. For instance, giant molecular clouds — dense regions of gas and dust that give rise to stars — contain nitriles and sugar acids that can form amino acids. The stuff of life, it seems, is plentiful in space.

Ingredients aside, these findings don't prove that life itself has developed in 3I/ATLAS' home system (or anywhere else). All of the organic molecules that 3I/ATLAS appears to contain have simple chemical structures. Cordiner said mixtures of such molecules in the lab have transformed into more complex ones via processes like ice irradiation. However, such compounds have not been found on 3I/ATLAS, despite the billions of years the comet likely spent exposed to the unabated radiation of interstellar space.

Most of the chemicals 3I/ATLAS released while zipping past the sun come from the comet's radiation-exposed upper layers and not from its pristine interior, a January study found. This would mean that what astronomers have measured may not be present in the comet's home system.

Nonetheless, many astronomers, including Seligman's group, are continuing to study 3I/ATLAS' composition. There is also the exciting possibility of future interstellar visitors, which are all but guaranteed to make an appearance, thanks to the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which is expected to spot dozens more. The elements and isotopes found in these objects will help in "building a map of where bio-precursors reside, across the history of the Galaxy," Cordiner said.

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Researchers in Japan have switched on "Shunkai," a neutral atom quantum computer that scientists hope to scale into a 10,000-qubit behemoth by March 2031.

Shunkai is the first full-stack system of its kind in Japan, meaning it features the software, control and hardware layers needed to read user inputs and return a result — not unlike a conventional PC. In theory, that means it should be easier for researchers to get some meaningful use out of the machine, with the team behind Shunkai planning to open it up to external users over the coming years.

In a statement, project lead Kenji Ohmori, a professor of photo-molecular science at the Institute for Molecular Science, said researchers' use of Shunkai would "lead to ripple effects on various fields in industry, academia, and government around the world."

The team behind the new machine plans to integrate it into an existing shared supercomputing facility to create a quantum-GPU hybrid computing center.

Quantum computers: Powerful but impractical

Unlike traditional, or "classical," computers, quantum computers operate according to the strange laws of quantum physics. In quantum systems, qubits — in the form of superconducting circuits, trapped ions or photons (among other modalities) — represent the fundamental building blocks of quantum information. These can exist as a 1, 0, or a "superposition" of both states at once.

However, qubits are notoriously fragile. Even minor environmental interference can destabilize or destroy the information they contain, making accuracy an ongoing challenge in the world of quantum computing. The error rate in qubits is thought to be roughly 1 in 1,000, compared with around 1 per billion or even 1 per trillion operations in classical computing bits.

It's why a huge amount of research is dedicated to quantum error correction. This field seeks to alleviate this inherent unreliability by building redundancies into the way information is encoded in qubits so that small errors don't scrap entire computations.

The broad aim is to create higher-quality qubits and then scale up the number of qubits in a system so quantum computers can finally compete with the world's fastest supercomputers.

This thorny issue, combined with quantum systems' need for elaborate cooling systems to keep them operational, makes them impractical outside of finely tuned lab environments.

A more reliable quantum system?

Shunkai, named after 17th-century Japanese astronomer Harumi Shibukawa, shirks at least some of those constraints. Rather than using supercooled circuitry, Japan's new system incorporates neutral atoms as qubits, captured and suspended using "optical tweezers."

These tightly focused laser beams capture atoms and arrange them inside a vacuum chamber, while microwaves or laser light are used to manipulate the atoms' quantum states and perform calculations. The results are then read by observing the fluorescence from each individual atom with a camera.

Importantly, Shunkai's use of neutral atoms as qubits instead of superconducting circuits means it can operate at room temperature. Because the arrangement of qubits in neutral-atom systems can be fine-tuned during calculations, researchers can also adjust which qubits interact with each other and create entanglement — a bizarre state of information sharing between particles over time and space — between different pairs.

This could help overcome two of the biggest obstacles facing practical quantum systems: scaling machines to large numbers of qubits, and correcting the errors that inevitably creep into quantum calculations.

To that end, Shunkai will be partially opened to external researchers to develop applications and test and improve the system's quantum error correction capabilities, representatives from Japan's National Institutes of Natural Sciences said in the statement.

The quantum system will initially operate with around 50 qubits before expanding to roughly 500. The longer-term goal is considerably more ambitious: By March 2031, the team aims to scale Shunkai into a "large-scale, high-performance neutral-atom fault-tolerant quantum computer, with 10,000 physical qubits and quantum error detection and correction capabilities." Doing so would place it comfortably above the 6,100-qubit, neutral atom array demonstrated by Caltech researchers in October 2025.

"Neutral atom-based quantum computers have recently been rapidly attracting attention around the world as a new modality that could exceed the limits of the superconducting modality," Ohmori said. "I think it is extremely significant that now we have developed Japan's first full-stack quantum computer in this cutting-edge modality and started its operation."

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

Editor's note: This article was updated at 06:31 EDT on Sept. 24 with news that Polo had intensified back to a Category 5 storm.

A Pacific cyclone dubbed Polo exploded from a tropical storm into a powerful Category 5 hurricane in less than 24 hours on Tuesday (Sept. 22), with winds reaching speeds of 180 mph (290 km/h). The storm, drifting off the southwest coast of Mexico, was downgraded to a Category 4 storm on Wednesday (Sept. 23) but intensified back to Category 5 as of Thursday (Sept. 24) morning, according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC).

As Polo moves northwest, it is expected to drive torrential rainfall on parts of Mexico's southwest coast, with up to 8 inches (20 centimetres) in some areas. Although the storm is not predicted to make direct landfall, the NHC has warned that heavy rain may produce life-threatening flooding and mudslides, as well as extremely hazardous ocean conditions.

Polo is one of the strongest hurricanes on record in the Eastern Pacific, second only to Hurricane Patricia in 2015, according to Accuweather. But what causes a hurricane like Polo to intensify so rapidly? And what role has the "super" El Niño played in the storm's development?

How El Niño contributed

"Rapid intensification of tropical cyclones is something we see several times per year across the globe," Julian Heming, an environmental scientist and researcher at the U.K.'s Met Office, told Live Science in an email. "The main requirements are high sea temperatures, low wind shear and upper air conditions which allow air to escape quickly from the top of the hurricane."

Hurricane Polo intensified rapidly as it moved over exceptionally warm Pacific waters associated with an extremely strong "super'" El Niño that has taken hold off the Pacific since June.

El Niño is a naturally occurring climate pattern that develops in the tropical Pacific Ocean, typically every two to seven years. It begins when waters in the eastern tropical Pacific become unusually warm. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration identifies El Niño conditions when these waters are at least 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit (0.5 degrees Celsius) above average, alongside changes in winds, surface pressure and rainfall that are consistent with the phenomenon.

El Niño events are then classified by strength, ranging from weak to very strong. Although "super El Niño" is not a scientific term, it refers to a very strong El Niño, where the warming of sea surface temperatures is higher than 2C above normal.

The unusually warm ocean supplied Hurricane Polo with abundant heat and moisture, while very moist air and weak winds higher in the atmosphere allowed thunderstorms to organize and strengthen without being disrupted, Hemming said.

Polo also developed a compact, well-defined core, which concentrated the storm's energy into a relatively small area and enabled it to intensify extremely quickly. Together, these conditions created an efficient atmospheric "heat engine" that allowed Polo to strengthen at an exceptional rate.

"Polo's rapid and sudden growth is testament to the dominance of this year's so-called super El Niño, which set a record on Monday as the most extreme on record and has amplified a number of extreme weather events globally," Heming said.

The latest data from the World Meteorological Organization suggests that the current El Niño could be the strongest on record and last until at least February 2027. This will lead to more extreme weather, pushing some areas into drought while others experience stronger storms, rainfall and flooding.

If the system moves northward, Southern California could see intense rainfall and coastal regions may experience hazardous rip currents and large swells. As of Thursday morning, the NHC reports the core of the storm is expected to stay offshore and move towards the northwest. However, "There is currently a lot of uncertainty in the long term as to whether Polo will move further out to sea or turn north-eastwards towards Mexico," Heming said.

Scientists may have settled a decades-long debate about bat evolution, including controversial questions about when bats began to communicate and fly, a landmark study shows.

The new research, published Wednesday (Sept. 23) in the journal Nature, is the biggest bat DNA and fossil study ever conducted. Researchers created new, top-quality genome assemblies for 41 bat species, which they analyzed together with 62 existing sequences, providing a record dataset of 103 bat genomes and 44 bat fossils.

"It is extraordinary," study co-author Emma Teeling, a professor of molecular evolution and mammalian phylogenetics at University College Dublin, told Live Science in an email; "after decades of research and conflicting findings, we finally have uncovered how and when bats evolved."

The analysis suggests that bats arose in Europe around 65 million years ago, contradicting previous hypotheses proposing Asian, African or North American origins around 50 million years ago. Additionally, the researchers found that echolocation and true flight evolved early in bats, roughly 50 million years ago, rather than multiple times after modern bats began to diversify.

"This study transforms bat evolution research because it finally gives us a robust, resolved family tree and biogeography, something that's eluded scientists for decades," study co-author Sonja Vernes, a professor and head of the Neurogenetics of Vocal Communication Research Group at the University of St Andrews in the U.K., told Live Science in an email. "Get the tree right, and everything else about bat evolution starts to fall into place."

The study included members of all 21 recognized bat families, as well as some of the most remarkable bat species known on Earth. For example, the dataset contained the bumblebee bat (Craseonycteris thonglongyai, also called the Kitti's hog-nosed bat), which, at about 1 inch, or 2.5 centimeters, long, is thought to be the smallest mammal on Earth; and the Madagascar's sucker-footed bat (Myzopoda aurita), which has suction cups on its wrists and ankles to help it cling to smooth surfaces.

The research team — which comprised 137 scientists affiliated with Bat1K, an international project to map the genomes of all living bat species — used advanced DNA sequencing and computational techniques to identify individual genes and redraw the bat family tree.

"The value we bring is in innovative methods and unparalleled data that together yield an evolutionary tree that includes all these key fossils," study co-author Liliana Dávalos, a professor of phylogenetics and tropical deforestation at Stony Brook University in New York, told Live Science in an email.

Among other discoveries, the researchers found that a 50 million-year-old fossil from southern France of the extinct species Vielasia sigei, which shows signs of advanced echolocation, sits within the oldest branch of the bat family tree, indicating that echolocation predates the diversification of modern bats. This finding, together with the result that true flight appeared early in bats, helps to explain why this lineage has been so successful and evolved into more than 1,500 species worldwide today, according to the study.

After emerging in Europe, bats quickly dispersed into Africa, establishing a Europe-Africa hub from which they expanded into Asia, the Americas and Australia, the results suggest. Bats are the only mammals capable of true flight, meaning they flap their wings and don't simply glide or parachute. Throughout their evolution, they have acquired longer lifespans than other mammals of similar body size, surviving eight to 10 times longer than might be expected and showing few signs of aging and cancer, according to the study.

"Some bat species live remarkably long lives for their size, and can shrug off diseases that would make us seriously ill," Vernes said. "Until now, we didn't have a solid enough foundation to properly understand how bats evolved their most extraordinary traits, from flight and echolocation to their remarkable lifespans and resistance to disease. Now we do."

The genomic resource built for the study lays the foundation for future research into bats' longevity and disease resistance, with potential benefits for humans, Vernes said. "If we can understand how they do this at the genetic level, it could eventually help us design bat-inspired approaches to improve human health," she said.

The findings could also aid bat conservation through genomic methods. Protecting bats is important because they help to maintain healthy ecosystems by pollinating plants, dispersing seeds and consuming huge numbers of insect pests, Vernes said. There is also more work to be done to identify the ancestor of all living bats, whose genome the researchers took a first stab reconstructing.

"For me, this isn't the end of the story," Vernes said; "it's just the first chapter."

Archaeologists excavating a Paris hospital's courtyard, a stone's throw from Notre-Dame, have discovered the first evidence of a Celtic fort that Julius Caesar tried to conquer in 52 B.C. The ancient walls show evidence of a violent fire, seemingly confirming the claim that the Celtic group who lived there, known as the Gauls, burned down their own town so that it wouldn't fall into Caesar's hands.

"The wall's architecture, with its large blocks and interlocking beam system, immediately led us to believe it was a wall of Gallic tradition," Dorothée Chaoui-Derieux, chief curator of heritage at the Île-de-France Regional Archaeology Service, said in a translated statement. Traces of fire and first century B.C. artifacts further suggested the archaeologists had finally found material evidence of Lutetia, a Celtic settlement mentioned in Caesar's Gallic Wars.

In the first century B.C., Lutetia was a Celtic pre-Roman settlement, known as an "oppidum", in what is now Paris. Lutetia was the capital city of the Parisii tribe, who lived along the River Seine. As part of the Gallic Wars, which ran from 58 to 50 B.C., Julius Caesar and his troops fought the Battle of Lutetia in 52 B.C. The Romans won a decisive victory, but the Gauls burned Lutetia and cut the bridges so that Caesar could not take the town. As a result, the ancient fort had never been found.

But in February, a team of archaeologists began excavating in the courtyard of the Hôtel-Dieu, which is Paris's oldest working hospital. On the small Île-de-la-Cité island in the middle of the Seine, close to Notre-Dame, the archaeologists discovered a 65-foot (20-meters) stone and timber wall typical of Celtic fortifications. Charred facing, burnt seeds and a burned wooden building discovered nearby suggested the site had been destroyed by a fire.

"The initial results of carbon-14 dating of the wooden elements suggest a date range between 200 and 10 B.C. Furthermore, a Gallic spearhead was found at the foot of the wall," Chaoui-Derieux said.

These new discoveries provide solid archaeological evidence that Lutetia was indeed centered on the island in the Seine and that its occupants burned it down, as Caesar noted in his Gallic Wars more than two millennia ago.

"This discovery fills an archaeological gap. For centuries, the location of Lutetia has been debated," Stéphane Deschamps, regional curator of archaeology at Île-de-France Regional Archaeology Service, said in the statement. "Today, with this wall and its context, we may hold the key to the mystery."

But the remains of the wall and other artifacts are extremely fragile because of their exposure to fire, according to the statement. The wall cannot be fully preserved, so archaeologists will create a replica using 3D photogrammetry to ensure the discovery is accessible to everyone.

See how much you know about the Celts with our Celtic quiz!

For the first time, astronomers have detected radio signals coming directly from a planet outside our solar system, according to a new preprint study. Spoiler alert: It's not aliens. But astrophysicists are still very excited about this discovery.

"Astronomers have been looking for radio signals from exoplanets for some time," Suzanne Aigrain, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. "There have been tentative, indirect detections before, but this is the first truly convincing direct detection, and it hopefully paves the way for many more."

Artificial radio signals are a key focus in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), which involves scanning the cosmos for signs of alien life. Such "technosignatures" could suggest advanced technologies built by intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations. However, radio signals can be emitted by natural sources, too.

"There are two natural processes that can produce radio emission in exoplanets," Aigrain said. "One is magnetic reconnection, when the planet orbits really close to the star and its magnetic field interacts directly with that of the star. The other is aurorae (like those we have on Earth and on other solar system planets like Saturn, but much stronger), when energetic charged particles streaming from the star interact with the upper atmosphere of the planet."

"This second effect is what the authors of the paper believe they have detected," Aigrain added.

In the study, a research group led by Kevin Ortiz Ceballos, a graduate student at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, turned MeerKAT, a radio telescope array in South Africa, toward a massive gas giant called Beta Pictoris b, an exoplanet that's 64 light-years from Earth and has a mass roughly 10 times that of Jupiter, according to NASA. They picked up rapid, repeating bursts of radio signals coming from the planet.

At first, it wasn't clear whether the signal was coming from the planet or the star it orbits (named simply Beta Pictoris). However, after comparing the radio images of both the planet and the star with the positions of distant background quasars (bright, active galaxies that act as fixed reference points), the team confirmed that the radio bursts were indeed emanating from the gas giant.

"No radio detection has previously been unambiguously localized to an extrasolar planet rather than its host star," they wrote in the study, which has not been peer-reviewed yet.

Aigrain emphasized that "this is definitely not aliens!" The signals are consistent with what would be expected from auroras, and this finding offers insight into the planet itself. From these measurements, the team calculated the planet's magnetic-field strength, which they estimated to be roughly 1,250 gauss. For comparison, Jupiter's magnetic-field strength is only about 4.3 gauss and Earth's is a measly 0.5 gauss, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com.

Magnetic-field measurements like these are important because we don't fully understand how planets' magnetospheres are generated and what controls how strong they are, Aigrain said. The ability to measure a planet's magnetic field could also help in our search for potentially habitable exoplanets.

"[A] planet's magnetic field shields its atmosphere from the 'wind' of charged particles from [its] star, which might otherwise carry material away from the atmosphere," Aigrain said. "On Earth, for example, the magnetic field has played a key role in retaining the atmosphere and shielding life on the planet from harmful high-energy radiation.

"The planet in this paper is quite massive and has a thick atmosphere, so even without a strong magnetic field it could probably hold on to its atmosphere, and it is not expected to host life," Aigrain added. "But in the future we might be able to make similar measurements for smaller planets, for which this shielding effect would be more important."

MeerKAT is a pathfinder instrument for a new large telescope called the Square Kilometre Array, which is expected to come online in the next few years. This observatory "will be significantly more powerful," Aigrain said, "so there will be many more systems where we can look for this type of signal."

Earth's continents are losing fresh water much faster than scientists thought, mostly because aquifer pumping in regions like northern India, southern Iran and parts of the U.S. is 45% more pronounced, on average, than previous estimates suggested, new research shows.

The study used satellite data to map freshwater trends across the globe between 2002 and 2025. Thanks to a high-resolution rendering method, researchers revealed regional gains and reductions in terrestrial water storage that were 33% more marked, on average, than in previous studies. The amount of fresh water lost was much higher than the gains overall, highlighting the urgent need for better water management to stave off a global water crisis.

"It has become very dire in a lot of places," Hrishikesh Chandanpurkar, a hydrologist and the co-founder of the nonprofit Evergreen Resilience Institute, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science.

The study also attributed the changes in freshwater storage to different human and climate drivers, said first author Mary Michael Forrester O'Neill, a researcher at the University of Maryland's Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center and the Hydrological Sciences Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

"Earlier studies could see broad patterns of long-term freshwater loss or gain but couldn't reliably tell how much was due to human activity versus climate swings, in part due to resolution limitations," Forrester O'Neill told Live Science in an email. "This study sharpened the picture and used geostatistical methods to rank the impacts of human causes, like irrigation and dam building, against climate factors, like rainfall and drought."

The researchers found 94 regions with above-background shifts in freshwater storage, 40 of which were influenced mainly by human land or water use, rather than climate variability and global warming. The team then focused on these 40 hotspots to pinpoint exactly where people can act to conserve water.

"Water managers and downstream communities need to know which aquifer, reservoir, or irrigation district is responsible for a given trend in large-scale freshwater storage, not just that 'somewhere in this country, water is being lost,'" Forrester O'Neill explained.

Freshwater gains in 22 regions were due to rain-fed agriculture, irrigation with surface water, reservoir impoundment and deforestation, which decreases evapotranspiration and plants' groundwater consumption, according to the study. In contrast, freshwater losses in the remaining 18 hotspots were caused by irrigation with groundwater and the construction of canals, diversions and other water infrastructure.

The findings, published Sept. 14 in the journal PNAS, show that human water use is a significant driver of water storage changes on every continent except Australia and Antarctica, where climate factors are more influential, O'Neill said. Local freshwater gains and losses may cut freshwater availability downstream or in the surrounding region, she and her colleagues noted in the study.

One example of a region that gained fresh water in the study is the area of central Russia that hosts the Boguchany Reservoir, a giant artificial lake that was filled in 2012 after the construction of a hydroelectric dam. And three stark examples of places that lost fresh water are northern India, southern Iran and the southern High Plains (a region at the intersection of Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas), because these regions host major breadbaskets that tap aquifers for irrigation, O'Neill said.

The results are concerning because the places with the worst groundwater depletion overlap with areas that irrigate crops unsustainably, O'Neill said. Previous research shows that critical food-producing regions ‪—‬ such as the U.S. High Plains, California's Central Valley, northern India, Pakistan, North China and the Fertile Crescent ‪—‬ consistently overuse groundwater. "Within these regions, we found the pace of depletion is considerably more severe than earlier estimates suggested, reinforcing food security concerns," she said.

One of the novelties of the paper is its very high resolution, said Chandanpurkar, who last year led a study describing "mega-drying" regions across the world and co-authored a report on continental drying. The new study used data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission and its Follow-On successor (GRACE-FO), which have measured subtle redistributions of mass on Earth. But unlike previous studies, the new research resolved the data in high resolution, he said, like correcting blurry vision with glasses.

"This is not a brand-new method, but it's the first time they're applying it to these regional hotspots and then trying to figure out what they mean," Chandanpurkar said.

Scientists already knew that groundwater depletion and other human water uses are "quite staggering," and this study is a reminder that continental drying is "a very big deal," Chandanpurkar said. "Water is really undervalued," he said. "Giving it its proper dues would be essential for this [freshwater loss] to really be acknowledged by leaders and economists."

It's impossible to say exactly how many years or decades humans can go on consuming this much fresh water before it runs out, partly because the climate can be unpredictable and partly because it's hard to tell how much water remains in Earth's reservoirs, Forrester O'Neill said.

"GRACE satellites measure the rate of change in water mass, not the total volume stored in an aquifer, so we have no independent basis for estimating time to depletion or a timeline for systems to collapse," she said.

However, there will come a point when the cost of pumping groundwater, for example, will be too high to pay in some regions. Water table declines of just a dozen feet (a few meters) or so can cause a substantial share of wells to run dry, research shows, and the expense of drilling deeper will affect at-risk communities most of all, Forrester O'Neill said.

"We are most concerned about the rising cost and inequity of continuing to reach water that keeps retreating deeper underground, paired with strain on existing surface water resources," she said. "Of course, water-scarce regions exhibiting acute groundwater depletion are at risk, like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Türkiye, Iraq, and Libya. Another one to keep an eye on would be Mexico, simply because of the documented, progressively increasing well depth paired with the observed terrestrial water storage loss."

Google DeepMind has revealed a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool that can predict the molecular impacts of tweaking any one of the billions of letters that make up our genetic code.

On Sept. 8, Google's AI powerhouse announced a freely available database called AlphaGenome Atlas, which contains data on 9 billion possible changes to the human genetic code and estimates how these changes will affect different tissues and cellular processes. What's more, the tool spits out a simple score to help scientists quickly weigh the knock-on impacts of these changes.

How a sequence of 3 billion or so letters of chemical code is packaged, delivered and read to create a human life is a major question in genetics research. Last year, DeepMind announced a tool that could propel researchers toward an answer. The tool, called AlphaGenome, predicts how changes to a DNA sequence alter proteins, cells and, ultimately, the human experience.

Now, one year later, DeepMind has released AlphaGenome Atlas, which the tech giant hopes will make AlphaGenome accessible to more researchers.

"It looks like a great resource," Greg Findlay, a group leader at the Francis Crick Institute in London who isn't involved with AlphaGenome Atlas, told Live Science. However, other experts said that, although the tool is a step forward, it still can't answer all of the big questions in genetics.

"It's not this holy grail," Tuuli Lappalainen, a professor in genomics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and a senior associate faculty member at the New York Genome Center who isn’t involved with AlphaGenome Atlas, told Live Science.

Reading the future of genetic variants

Lappalainen's lab has been using AlphaGenome to study the effects of variation in genomes over the past year. She pointed out that this technology is not new. However, according to Google DeepMind, AlphaGenome outperforms previous models in the resolution at which it can predict the impact of changes to the genome. Around 98% of our DNA is noncoding, meaning cellular machinery doesn't directly read it to make the proteins that keep our cells functioning.

Geneticists now appreciate that this code, once thought to be "junk" DNA, is instead needed to manage how and when to read the parts of the genome that do encode our molecular building blocks, or coding genes. However, evolution hasn't produced an ordered genome. Instead, some regulatory instructions are distributed widely throughout the code.

AlphaGenome allowed researchers to explore how changes in a single pair of DNA "letters" could influence up to 1 million pairs of surrounding code ‪—‬ a far greater spread than previous models were capable of and one that captured much of each gene's regulatory network.

But this power came at a price. Until the release of Atlas, AlphaGenome required users to have enough bioinformatics experience to access and use the models' automated programming interface ‪—‬ an area of expertise not all geneticists have. What's more, calculating the effects of each change was a strenuous workout for academics’ computing resources.

To create AlphaGenome Atlas, DeepMind researchers computed every possible base ("letter") change and made the resulting data ‪—‬ totaling 1 petabyte, or 1 million gigabytes, of information ‪—‬ freely available. This takes the load off academics' overworked personal computers. What's more, the technology is now wrapped up in an easy-to-access, user-friendly web portal.

"You really do not need to be an expert in these methods to be able to go there and look something up in a browser," Lappalainen said.

Another simplification is the AlphaGenome Variant Impact score, a metric that predicts how much biological effect a change will have. In an accompanying preprint paper, DeepMind showed that the score could separate disease-linked mutations from harmless ones in a clinical dataset. While the score's simplicity might make it harder to interpret in certain cases, Lappalainen said, it would be useful for researchers who want to investigate a list of gene variants.

Clouds in the crystal ball?

The tool still isn't a perfect predictor, however. A Sept. 11 preprint study from a research team led by Katie Pollard, director of the Gladstone Institute of Data Science and Biotechnology and a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, suggested that while AlphaGenome was adept at finding causal mutations, it persistently underestimated their impact.

Pollard's team found that the model couldn't always link changes in regulatory elements to the genes they controlled, especially when they were not close together on the genome. "My perhaps naive hope would be that people take these predictions with an appropriate grain of salt," Lappalainen said.

Despite these limitations, Lappalainen said advances like AlphaGenome Atlas are part of a wider move toward more collaborative, data-led genomics. But she warned that the field would need to give equal focus to "wet-lab" experiments, which work out the accuracy of variant predictions.

Although these tests are tedious and consume much more time than a search on AlphaGenome Atlas' interface, she said, they are essential for generating the data that AI models need to improve their predictions.

"We're still very much data-limited in biology, and that data needs to be created," Lappalainen said.

Archaeologists have unearthed a 3,000-year-old burial of a horse, likely used for military purposes, inside an ancient fort on the western Nile Delta in Egypt.

The horse was a young male of medium size that may have pulled a chariot or worked in other military activities. Archaeologists also found remains of the chariot horse's harness fittings nearby. Given these discoveries, it's likely that this was a ceremonial burial, according to a translated statement from the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

The fort, which was found at the archaeological site of Abqaa' in Egypt's Lake District, dates to the New Kingdom period (circa 1550 to 1070 B.C.) and was used to guard against hostile Libyan tribes to the west. Among the finds from the fort excavation was a tablet depicting a Libyan prisoner whose clothing signifies his membership in the Meshwesh tribe, a group that Egypt was often in conflict with.

The prisoner is shown with his hands bound behind his bent body, a posture that signifies his submission, the statement noted.

A hieroglyphic tablet with the name of pharaoh Ramesses II was also found; he reigned from about 1279 to 1213 B.C. A second tablet included the name of the pharaoh Merneptah, who reigned from about 1213 to 1203 B.C., and compared his strength to that of Seth, an ancient Egyptian god associated with the desert and storms.

"An amazing find"

The horse burial is a unique discovery, scholars not associated with the excavation told Live Science.

"It is an amazing find, simply because we have so few horse remains from Pharaonic Egypt," especially complete skeletons, Lonneke Delpeut, a researcher at the University of Vienna who has conducted extensive research into ancient Egyptian horses, told Live Science in an email.

Archaeologists have found the remains of horse stables, such as those at the ancient Egyptian capital of Pi-Ramesses, but horse remains have been scarce, Delpeut said. "This horse will therefore surely contribute to what we know about the use of horses in military forts, of which there are many in the region."

But Delpeut cautioned against definitively calling it a war horse, "mainly because we do not have a definition of what a war horse is in ancient Egypt," she said. "It was certainly a chariot horse. Horses revolutionised mobility and warfare in ancient Egypt, so this horse was without a doubt a valuable animal, reflected by its careful burial."

Carolyn Willekes, an expert on ancient horses at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Canada, told Live Science in an email that the discovery is exciting. "Well-preserved horse remains have the potential to provide important information about the life of that individual horse," she said. The "fact that this appears to be an intentional horse burial also gives tantalizing hints about the equine-human relationship in ancient Egypt and the cultural importance of the horse," Willekes said.

An archaeological team from the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities made the discovery. Live Science contacted the team for comment but had not heard back at time of publication.

Are you a fan of mummies and hieroglyphs? Find out with our ancient Egypt quiz!

The crust under Italy is "unzipping" and falling away into the mantle, new research finds.

This process is the driver of much of the seismic activity in the Apennine Mountains, the long chain of peaks that runs like a spine down the Italian peninsula. This area provides a unique look into the swan song of subduction, or the movement of a slab of oceanic crust under a neighboring chunk of continental crust, said study lead author Stefano Tavani, a geoscientist at the University of Florence.

"We are experiencing the very, very late-stage to the subduction, and the tectonics is driven by a different engine, which is this unzipping," Tavani told Live Science.

The Mediterranean region, between Africa and Eurasia, is a patchwork quilt of tectonic microplates and mountain ranges, making the geology of the region extremely intricate. The big-picture geology is driven by the fact that the African plate, to the south, has been pushing northward, squeezing the crust and driving the sinking of an ancient ocean, the Tethys, into the mantle beneath the Apennine Mountains. This process has been ongoing for about 50 million years.

Along the Apennines, this process created a push-and-pull of forces. As the African plate subducted under the Eurasian plate, the boundary of the subduction zone was making its own march toward the African plate, causing the crust on the Eurasian side to stretch and thin, creating two large basins: an older one in the Mediterranean Sea west of Corsica and Sardinia, and a younger one, the Tyrrhenian Sea segment of the Mediterranean east of Corsica and Sardinia, which formed roughly 10 million years ago. Until now, the driver behind the extension creating these basins and the compressional forces building the Apennines has not been entirely clear, Tavani said.

To better understand this unusual tectonic movement, Tavani and his colleagues integrated earthquake record and ground movements from GPS and satellite measurements with the tectonic models of the plate movements and found that under the Apennines, the lower crust is peeling away and dropping into the mantle — a process called delamination. It is this delamination, and not the subduction of one plate under another, that causes most of the seismic activity in the Appennines, the researchers reported in their study published this month in the journal Communications Earth & Environment. In a few more million years, Tavani said, the lower crust will finish dropping away and the two plates will weld together.

There are other places around the world where similar processes are happening, such as in the Hellenic trench south of Greece, Tavani said. The findings "could be applied to other several systems," he said, "because in the end, it is a kind of very late-stage plate tectonics."

As of Aug. 30, 2026, NASA's Curiosity rover has officially seen the sun rise and set over Mars' reddish horizon more than 5,000 times in its quest to discover if life ever existed there. The rover was originally planned to operate for only two years, but the mission is still going strong more than 14 years after landing on Mars in August 2012.

During that time, the rover has weathered global dust storms and climbed more than 3,200 feet (1,000 meters) up a mountain — although its tires have gotten some rather large holes in them in the process. The rover still uses its 17 cameras to take hundreds of photos every single sol (Martian day), beaming a total of more than 780,000 photos back to Earth for scientists to analyze while mission controllers decide where the rover should roam next.

In honor of the intrepid rover's 5,000th day on the Red Planet, here are 10 of the most iconic photos Curiosity has snapped for Earthlings to admire.

Sol 548: Mount Sharp on the horizon

Curiosity snapped this photo of Mount Sharp on Feb. 19, 2014, about a year and a half after it landed on Mars. At the time, scientists were hopeful the rover could make it to the base of the 3.4-mile-high (5.5 kilometers high) mountain to explore interesting terrain previously seen from space. As the years passed, Curiosity more than surpassed that goal; the rover has climbed more than half a mile up into the mountain's foothills, traveling a total of more than 23.6 miles (38 km) from its landing spot, all while conducting important science along the way.

Sol 956: Blue skies on Mars

Curiosity took a photo of the Martian sunset in color for the first time on April 15, 2015, revealing a brilliant blue sky just before the sun dipped behind the shrouded mountains in the distance. The Martian sky is usually yellow to orange, according to NASA. Fine dust particles in the atmosphere scatter red and yellow light across the entire sky. However, the dust is just the right size for some blue light to slip past, so most of the light in the sky near the sun is blue. The effect is much more pronounced when the sun is low in the horizon.

Sol 1128: Curiosity Selfie at Namib Dune

Curiosity has taken numerous selfies over the course of its mission, although the process is a bit more involved than holding up a camera and smiling. This selfie was made from 57 separate images taken on Jan. 19, 2016 using a camera attached to its robotic arm. Here, Curiosity is standing next to Namib Dune, one of the many dark sand dunes that make up the Bagnold Dune Field near Mount Sharp. Curiosity sampled the sand for analysis and scuffed the dune with its wheels so scientists could see how the sand moved.

Sol 1819: Curiosity leaves a thumbprint in the dust

Mars is extremely dusty. The reddish dust gets swept into the atmosphere and cast across most of the planet's surface, making it difficult for scientists to figure out what materials are on the surface just by looking at them. On Sept. 17, 2017, Curiosity dusted off the surface of a rock at Vera Rubin Ridge and took a picture for geologists to compare to rocks on Earth. Based on the reddish purple color, geologists think this rock is fine-grained hematite split by fractures filled with calcium sulfate minerals. It hints that Mars might be a lot more colorful underneath its dusty blanket. Scientists have since discovered ruby-like materials embedded in Martian rocks.

Sol 3466: Totally not a door for aliens

On May 7, 2022, Curiosity sent a curious photo back to Earth that appears to show a small door carved into the face of a cliff. It's hard not to imagine little green people entering it after taking their little green dogs for a stroll across the dusty landscape, but it's not actually a doorway for Martians. The 3-foot-tall opening's boxy shape is caused by vertical fractures intersecting with horizontal layers in the rock, according to NASA. The cliff is highly fractured, and a large chunk of rock that likely fell from the "doorway" is clearly visible nearby.

Sol 3724: Iridescent feather in the sky

Just after the sun went down on Jan. 27, 2023, Curiosity took this photo of a noctilucent (night-shining) cloud that formed much higher in the Martian atmosphere than most other clouds do. Any clouds on Mars are rare, but this one is extra special. Since this cloud is so high up, it's much colder — making scientists think it's made of carbon dioxide (dry ice) instead of water ice. The iridescent colors in the cloud indicate the ice particles making up the cloud are all around the same size, which means the cloud likely just formed at the time of the photo.

Sol 3725: Curiosity finds "Cacao"

The very next day after cloud-gazing, on Jan. 28, 2023, Curiosity found an iron-nickel meteorite measuring about a foot across. The meteorite, nicknamed "Cacao," is one of a handful of meteorites Curiosity has photographed. The rover zapped part of the meteorite with a laser and measured the vapor released to identify what materials the rock was made of. Since Mars is cold and dry compared to Earth, meteorites last much longer on its surface than they do here, and they give clues about how the Martian atmosphere has changed over time. Large iron meteorites discovered on Mars indicate the planet once had a denser atmosphere than it does today.

Sol 4208: Elemental sulfur crystal surprise

In June 2024, Curiosity unintentionally ran over a rock and crushed it, revealing a yellow, odorless surprise: rare crystals of elemental sulfur. While Mars has plenty of minerals that contain sulfur, like sulfate, this was the first time pure sulfur was found. The crystal fragments are about 5 inches (12.7 centimeters) across. On Earth, pure sulfur is formed from volcanic and hydrothermal activity, along with other geologic processes. It's not clear yet how these crystals formed on Mars.

Sol 182 - 4263: All 42 drill samples

Curiosity has collected and analyzed 42 rock samples so far using a small drill attached to a robotic arm. The drill powders the rock so that the samples can be transported to Curiosity's science instruments, which measure their chemical composition. Each sample site is carefully chosen because the rover can only do a limited number of samples before it runs out of special sample cups. This mosaic image shows the impressive variety of materials that Curiosity has sunk its drill into.

Sol 4671: Exploring Martian spiderwebs

Researchers have been intrigued by large geologic structures like stone "spiderwebs" on the Martian surface, previously seen by spacecraft orbiting the planet. Curiosity visited them on the ground, taking this picture of the low ridges and hollows, called boxwork, on Sept. 26, 2025. The ridges, made from hardened minerals deposited by water seeping into cracked rock, are what's left after billions of years of erosion wore away the softer rock around them.

Curiosity's journey continues today. After leaving the boxwork structures last March, the rover set off to explore more of the Martian landscape with its cameras as busy as ever, looking for more evidence that Mars once had the water and chemistry to possibly support ancient microbial life.

What do you know about the Red Planet? Test your knowledge with our Mars quiz!

The patient: A 16-year-old boy in India

The symptoms: The teen developed swelling on his left upper eyelid that persisted for a few months but was painless. However, he later noticed two sharp, white projections poking out from the skin above his eye.

About a month after these projections appeared, he went to a hospital.

What happened next: Doctors examined the teen's eyelid, noting that the spikes had a "fairly smooth surface and were hard on palpation," said Dr. Meghana Tanwar, a medical consultant at the Aravind Eye Hospital in India who co-authored a report of the case. The texture and color of the projections suggested they might be teeth, she told Live Science in an email.

Initially, the doctors thought the points also might have been related to a teratoma, a rare type of tumor that can include different types of tissue, including bone and tooth tissue. They also wondered if the projections might be a foreign body in the eyelid. They conducted a CT scan to take a closer look.

The diagnosis: The scan revealed that the projections were indeed part of a tooth.

"The structure of a lone tooth in the superior orbit was quite obvious," Tanwar said. "Superior orbit" refers to the upper eye socket, and the tooth had poked out in the small space between the boy's eyelid and eyebrow.

Teeth that develop and erupt in abnormal locations are known as ectopic teeth. This umbrella term includes teeth that are in the mouth but erupt outside their typical positions; for instance, in about 2% to 6% of people, their first permanent molars grow "out of place" in the expected line-up of teeth.

In this case, though, the patient had an ectopic tooth that appeared completely outside the dental arch, which is far rarer.

The treatment: The doctors surgically removed the ectopic tooth from the patient's eyelid and found that it was a mature canine tooth. It didn't have any features that suggested it was part of a teratoma.

"Since the imaging done did not show the presence of any other ectopic teeth, the likelihood of him having another one are unlikely," Tanwar noted.

What makes the case unique: This is not the first ectopic tooth in the medical literature, but it was in a very notable location.

"To the best of our knowledge this is the first and only ectopic tooth reported in the superior orbit," Tanwar said. Previously, they've been reported in the nasal cavity and the bottom of the orbit, under the eye, she noted. According to MedPage Today, they've also been found in the nostrils, chin and maxillary sinus, which is located inside the cheekbone.

"This was a first not just for us but the world over," Tanwar said of the case. "We were very surprised by it."

Prior to the case, Tanwar had personally seen a tooth in the bottom of the eye socket of a different patient, but it was part of a rare type of mass called an odontogenic choristoma.

In this teen's case, the underlying cause of the ectopic tooth was unknown. Hypotheses suggest that, in general, ectopic teeth may grow out of place due to developmental disorders, physical trauma, infection or genetic factors.

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.

The hunt for extraterrestrial life on distant planets may be operating with a big blind spot.

That's because we aren't accounting for the nature of the light coming from the host star itself when we interpret the chemical signatures of life, or biosignatures, on some of the most promising candidate planets beyond the solar system. If we don't consider that crucial factor, we could be led on a wild-goose chase across the cosmos.

Despite having discovered thousands of exoplanets, we have not detected convincing evidence of alien life on any of them. But astronomy is reaching a point where powerful telescopes can zoom in on many more potentially habitable worlds. Planets that orbit M dwarfs, which are small stars cooler than the sun, are particularly promising targets because they have a unique observation window. When a planet passes in front of one of these stars, it blocks a relatively large fraction of the star's light, making the planet and its atmosphere easier to detect.

There are also a lot of them. M dwarfs are the most common type of star in the Milky Way. However, if we misunderstand how these stars interact with planetary atmospheres, we may misinterpret the significance of observations from some of the most promising planets.

The most-studied biosignatures are methane, oxygen and ozone. On Earth, these are often produced by biological processes, with ozone acting as an indirect indicator of oxygen. But even on our home planet, molecules typically associated with life are not unambiguous biological fingerprints. These molecules can be produced by geological and chemical processes, as well as via atmospheric reactions with light from the sun.

A potential biosignature detection found elsewhere in the cosmos is therefore a clue, not proof of life. We can't interpret the chemical signals coming from a potentially habitable planet without understanding the star that illuminates it. M dwarfs produce ultraviolet radiation that can break apart molecules and trigger chemical reactions in the atmosphere of an orbiting planet. The intensity and wavelength of the radiation influence which molecules form and survive, as well as how abundant they become. Two planets with otherwise identical properties could develop very different atmospheres simply because they orbit stars with different ultraviolet emissions. Radiation from a star could therefore make the same level of biological activity appear stronger on one planet than on another, or make nonbiological chemistry look like life. A recent study submitted to the preprint server arXiv Aug. 19 demonstrated this using entirely simulated planets. The researchers, led by University of California, Santa Cruz astronomy graduate student C. Evan Davis, simulated Earth-like planets orbiting two different types of M dwarf with ages ranging from 650 million to 5 billion years.

The team considered atmospheres resembling that of Earth during the oxygen-rich preindustrial era and the Archean eon (about 4 billion to 2.5 billion years ago), during which the first life-forms emerged but atmospheric oxygen was scarce. The models considered the stars' usual, or "quiescent," ultraviolet emission rather than short-lived flares. By changing the modeled stars' ages and ultraviolet radiation while keeping the planets comparable, they investigated how a star's evolution changed an atmosphere and the signals astronomers might observe.

One of the clearest differences the team found appeared in methane. Simulated planets with preindustrial atmospheres orbiting 5 billion-year-old M dwarfs accumulated up to 10 times more methane than equivalent planets simulated to orbit the younger 650 million-year-old stars. The methane signals produced in the simulated data were up to 68% stronger for the older systems. The weaker UV emission from the older M dwarf allowed methane to survive longer and accumulate in the simulated planetary atmospheres. The stronger methane signal could make a planet orbiting an older star appear to support more biological activity, when this difference was actually caused by the UV emission of the host star.

An even more striking result came from ozone. For the simulated Archean Earth-like planets, which were low in oxygen and rich in carbon dioxide (CO₂), the stronger UV radiation from younger M dwarfs broke apart more CO₂. This kick-started reactions that created oxygen and ozone without any life involved. Some model planetary atmospheres contained more than 100,000 times as much ozone as equivalent models around older stars. A hypothetical observer could misinterpret the resulting ozone signal as indirect evidence of biologically produced oxygen. Ozone is not useless as a biosignature, but these simulations show that it cannot be interpreted confidently without knowing the UV environment that shaped the atmosphere.

Of course, astronomers are already aware that a single molecule would not prove the existence of life on an exoplanet. Researchers use atmospheric models, look for combinations of gases, and consider nonbiological explanations before describing a signal as a potential biosignature. These methods remain valuable for identifying the most promising planets for further investigation, even when our knowledge of their stars is incomplete. Some might argue that these methods provide a sufficiently reliable first assessment and we should reserve more detailed stellar observations for the strongest candidates.

But even the best atmospheric model can mislead us if the stellar radiation isn't accounted for correctly. Ultraviolet observations of M dwarfs remain limited, so researchers often rely on estimates from similar stars. However, two M dwarfs that might appear similar can produce very different levels of UV radiation. Atmospheric models based on currently available stellar measurements may be sufficient for selecting promising targets but not for deciding whether the origin of a signal is biological. Simply acknowledging that the star matters isn't enough; we need accurate information about the specific star hosting the planet.

So before we train our telescopes on promising exoplanets, we need to study their host stars. This requires repeated UV observations, typically with different telescopes or instruments or at different time periods than you'd use to study the exoplanet. These observations can characterize how the host star's emission varies over time, while better stellar-age estimates — which can be calculated from properties such as rotation and magnetic activity— will reveal how that radiation has evolved.

Then, once we do start studying an exoplanet, potential biosignatures must be analyzed and interpreted using models informed by accurate measurements of the host star. As recommended in the preprint study, astronomers should also search for accompanying molecules, such as carbon monoxide, that could reveal whether ozone arose through reactions between light and carbon dioxide rather than from biology. The first convincing discovery of life on another planet will depend on an understanding of not only that planet but also the star that shaped the atmosphere we observe.

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A metal detectorist in the west of Germany has discovered one of the largest hoards of Roman silver coins ever found in that country from the reign of the Emperor Hadrian.

The pile includes more than 900 silver denarii — the denarius was the standard coin of the early Roman Empire — and weighs almost 7 pounds (3.1 kilograms).

The stash was discovered about a year ago in a field near the small city of Wesseling, a few miles south of Cologne, according to a translated statement from Germany's Rhineland regional government. It's now on display at the Rhineland Regional Museum in Bonn (LVR-Landesmuseum Bonn).

Archaeologists think the hoard was buried at the time of the Emperor Hadrian, who ruled from A.D. 117 to 138, because the most recent coin was minted in 124 or 125.

But the coins span more than three centuries: the oldest was minted in 148 B.C., during the time of the Roman Republic; while most of them are from the time of the Flavian emperors — Vespasian and his sons, Titus and Domitian — from A.D. 69 to 96.

Silver signal

The statement praised the metal detectorist, Oliver Riedl, who found the hoard and stopped digging after unearthing 15 of the coins. At that point, his metal detector signaled that something much larger was hiding underground.

"It was clear to me that there was something bigger in the ground here," Riedl said in the statement. "I therefore immediately informed the office."

Riedl is licensed by the state to use his metal detector and has been trained by regional archaeological authorities, the statement said. (Illegal metal detectorists also operate in Germany, but are known to often disrupt the archaeological value of their finds).

Archaeologists from the Rhineland regional government soon investigated the find and excavated the entire hoard of 934 Roman silver coins. The block of earth that contained the coin hoard was removed whole and X-rayed before it was opened, the statement noted.

Erich Claßen, the head of archaeology for the Rhineland regional government, said it seemed that the original owner collected most of the coins in about A.D. 100, but didn't actually bury them until Hadrian's time.

"We can only speculate about the motives, but very likely someone wanted to keep this money safe," he said in the statement. "Banks did not exist at that time."

But whoever buried it never came back. "It is possible that the owner died beforehand without being able to pass on the knowledge of the coins," Claßen said.

Buried treasure

Marjanko Pilekić, a numismatist, or coin expert, at the German Historical Museum in Berlin who wasn't involved in the find, said it was significant that the hoard was unearthed just inside the northern frontier of the Roman Empire demarcated by the Roman limes, which ran along the Rhine nearby.

He told Live Science in an email that the location suggested when the hoard had been purposefully buried: "In this case, we can cautiously assume that the hoard was buried not long after the most recent coin was minted," Pilekić said.

Outside the Roman Empire, however, in the Barbaricum – the "barbarian" regions beyond, according to the Romans — such hoards of coins were often buried much later, he said.

While its historical value is priceless, the worth of such a hoard during the second century A.D. would have been considerable: 300 denarii was the yearly pay of a Roman legionary at the time of Hadrian, of which around half was deducted for food and equipment, regional archaeologist Rahel Otte, who led the excavation, said in the statement.

This means that a legionary "would have had to save all his available money for about six years to accumulate the Wesseling treasure find," she said.

She added that it was unclear who had buried the hoard, but it may have been someone who lived on one of the Roman estates in the area.

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

Archaeologists have discovered a 3,400-year-old fragment of the world's oldest known peace treaty, the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism has announced.

The agreement, known as the Treaty of Kadesh, was signed around 1269 B.C. by Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II and Hittite king Hattusili III. Other parts of the treaty have already been found, but the new fragment was unearthed during an excavation at Hattusha, in north-central Turkey.

"We have found traces of peace, thousands of years old, in the soil of Anatolia," Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, Turkey's minister of culture and tourism, said in a Sept. 21 translated statement. The newly discovered cuneiform tablet fragment contains text from a section of the treaty related to the treatment of refugees, according to the statement. "It reminds us of our responsibility to protect human life and dignity," Ersoy said.

Archaeologists unearthed the fragment from a building in the ancient Hittite capital of Hattusha. The Hittite Empire controlled central Anatolia from about 1650 to 1200 B.C. during the Bronze Age. Archaeologists have discovered numerous examples of diplomatic documents at Hattusha that were written in Akkadian, the earliest documented Semitic language, including other fragments of the Treaty of Kadesh.

The royal leaders signed the treaty around 1269 B.C. to mark the end of a lengthy war between the ancient Egyptians and the Hittite Empire, and it is regarded as the world's oldest known peace treaty. Although known as the Treaty of Kadesh, the document does not actually mention the Battle of Kadesh, which occurred several years earlier, so it is also called the Egyptian-Hittite peace treaty, the Eternal Treaty or the Silver Treaty.

The treaty was preserved by inscriptions in two ancient cities. In the early 19th century, archaeologists first discovered the treaty inscribed in hieroglyphics on the walls of a temple dedicated to Ramesses II in Thebes (modern Luxor). Fragments of the Akkadian cuneiform text of the treaty were first identified at Hattusha in the early 20th century.

Marking the end of a two-century-long war over lands in the eastern Mediterranean, the Treaty of Kadesh marks a military détente between Ramesses II and Hattusili III. According to a translation of the treaty provided by the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism, it includes lines like, "He is a brother to me and he is at peace with me; and I am a brother to him and I am forever at peace with him," referring to the two leaders. "The country of Egypt and the country of Hatti [Hittite Empire] will be forever in a state of peace and of fraternity as it is with us."

The treaty has further provisions for coming to a country's aid if it was invaded and on how to treat refugees. The text mentions that any refugee from Egypt to Hattusha will be returned to Egypt, and any Hattusha refugee to Egypt will be returned to Hattusha, as fleeing was considered a crime.

However, the treaty specifically forbids punishing refugees: "Their tongue and their eyes are not to be pulled out; their ears and their feet are not to be cut off; their houses with their wives and their children are not to be destroyed." Part of this text appears on the newly discovered cuneiform fragment. Ongoing excavations may help uncover the remaining parts of the treaty, according to the statement.

A copper replica of the Treaty of Kadesh is displayed prominently today in the United Nations Conference Building in New York City. According to the U.N., "the treaty pledges eternal friendship, lasting peace, territorial integrity, nonaggression, extradition, and mutual help. The pledges in this treaty are similar to the United Nations ideals."

Are you a fan of mummies and hieroglyphs? Find out with our ancient Egypt quiz!

A newly-discovered amoeba has set the record for the hottest temperature at which complex life can thrive.

The amoeba, found in Lassen Volcanic National Park in California, grows and divides at temperatures up to 145 degrees Fahrenheit (63 degrees Celsius) and can survive brief stints in up to 158 F (70 C) environments, a new study finds. Prior to the discovery, no complex cells were known to replicate at temperatures above 140 F (60 C).

"I was very surprised," study first author Beryl Rappaport, a microbiologist at Syracuse University in New York, told Live Science. "We definitely had to go back and check to make sure that our incubators were calibrated correctly … It really was amazing."

Amoebas are single-celled organisms that move by pulling themselves forward with tendrils of cellular fluid. They are eukaryotes, which means they store their DNA inside a membrane-bound nucleus. Amoebas are neither plants, animals nor fungi, but they are more complex than prokaryotic organisms such as bacteria and archaea, which have no nucleus.

Past research had suggested that amoebas could thrive in warm geothermal springs, Rappaport said, but few of these organisms have been studied in laboratories. To investigate, Rappaport and her colleagues travelled to Lassen Volcanic National Park to collect and study these heat-loving creatures.

The team discovered the newfound amoeba in samples collected along a tributary of Hot Springs Creek inside the park. Dubbed Incendiamoeba cascadensis, or "fire amoeba from the Cascades," the species thrive at temperatures between 131 and 135 F (55 and 57 C). In fact, they stopped growing below 108 F (42 C), indicating that the amoebas need high temperatures to flourish.

Using a heated microscope that kept the amoebas toasty, the scientists watched the cells divide and replicate at temperatures as high as 145 F (63 C) — the highest temperatures known for eukaryotic cells (although prokaryotes have been known to survive temperatures as high as 250 F, or 122 C).

At 158 F (70 C), the amoebas created protective shells around themselves and went dormant. The cells recovered when the researchers left them at 158 F for five minutes, then brought the temperature back down to 140 F. But the amoebas didn't survive heating to 176 F (80 C).

I. cascadensis proteins also have positively charged amino acids, or protein building blocks, on their surface, the team found. Other heat-loving prokaryotes share the same feature. This adaptation may help keep proteins stable at high temperatures, the researchers noted.

The researchers reported their findings on Tuesday (Sept. 22) in the journal Cell.

This is not the first time we have seen specialized eukaryotic life-forms survive in extreme temperatures. For example, some fungi can tolerate temperatures up to 140 F in deserts. However, these figures still pale in comparison to the scorching temperatures that some bacteria can survive, and it's not yet clear what factors prevent eukaryotes from tolerating these higher temperatures, Rappaport told Live Science.

Part of the difference in heat tolerance between heat-loving prokaryotes and eukaryotes comes from their differing ability to genetically adapt to heat stress.

"When you're a bacterium … you can reshuffle your genome" by scooping up DNA from other prokaryotes, Debashish Bhattacharya, an evolutionary biologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. That ability helps prokaryotes adapt relatively quickly to stressful environments.

But because DNA in eukaryotic cells is confined in the nucleus, "eukaryotes are not able to simply grab a bunch of genes and switch their lifestyle," at the same rates as prokaryotes, Bhattacharya said. "It takes far, far more evolutionary change to turn a eukaryote into an extremophile."

In future research, Rappaport plans to study Incendiamoeba's closest relatives to learn how they evolved to tolerate heat. Understanding these adaptations could help scientists grasp the limits of life on Earth as well as where else complex life could exist in the universe, she said.

In one of the first major discoveries from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, scientists have revealed a previously unknown galaxy orbiting the Milky Way. Described in a study that hasn’t been peer-reviewed, the galaxy, named Aquarius IV, is one of the lightest, faintest and farthest satellite galaxies ever seen.

This dim cluster of ancient stars was discovered on the extreme periphery of the Milky Way in early test data from the Rubin Observatory, offering a glimpse of the telescope's impressive abilities and shedding new light on our cosmic neighborhood.

Ultrafaint dwarf galaxies (UFDGs) are among the tiniest and faintest galaxies in the universe. These dim little clusters contain at most a few hundred thousand stars, compared with the Milky Way's approximately 100 billion, said Joshua Simon, an astronomer at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science who was not involved in the new research. Instead, "these galaxies are composed almost entirely of dark matter: 99 to 99.9% of their mass is dark, and only 0.1 to 1% is made up of stars," Simon told Live Science in an email.

Because UFDGs are so small and faint, even ones in the Milky Way's vicinity are difficult to detect. Such dwarf galaxies orbit ours, similar to how Earth orbits the sun. In a 2020 study, scientists estimated that hundreds of these satellite UFDGs may exist. However, only around 60 have been found so far, Aashay Pai, a graduate student in physics at the University of Chicago and a co-author of the new study, told Live Science in an email.

But the Rubin Observatory's supersharp vision is poised to increase that total. The telescope's 3,200-pixel, car-sized camera can detect objects up to 100 million times dimmer than those visible to the naked eye as it takes repeat observations of the night sky every few nights. This makes the observatory well equipped to find UFDGs.

However, the data analyzed in the new study wasn't from the LSST; it came from an earlier test run. This test data, collected between April 2025 and January 2026, was called Early Data Preview 2 (EDP2) and covered roughly 7% of the night sky.

The researchers used computer models on the EDP2 data to identify UFDGs as groups of stars whose brightness and colors suggested they had evolved together. The researchers assumed that these stars were around 13 billion years old, Pai said — nearly as old as the universe itself. This framework allowed them to distinguish UFDGs from stars and other galaxies in front of or behind the observed areas.

With this approach, the researchers detected the previously unseen UFDG. Their findings were published in August in the journal Research Notes of the AAS, which presents non-peer-reviewed work in progress. In the research article, the team states that the newfound UFDG was detected at the eight-sigma significance limit, meaning the chance that this group of stars is a random collection is about 1 in 1.6 quadrillion.

The researchers also verified the galaxy's discovery using older images snapped by the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera on the NSF Victor M. Blanco Telescope in Chile; the photos showed faint stars that had been overlooked. Although this analysis had a lower significance limit of six sigma — giving it about a 1-in-100-billion chance of being a random fluke — it still supported the tiny galaxy's existence.

The newly discovered satellite galaxy, which the researchers named Aquarius IV, lies in the direction of the constellation Aquarius. Pai described it as "one of the faintest and most compact UFDGs at a large distance." The analyses suggest that the galaxy lies approximately 359,000 light-years from the Milky Way's center. (For comparison, the Milky Way itself is roughly 100,000 light-years long.)

Pai estimated Aquarius IV's mass at about 1,500 times that of the sun. That makes it lightweight relative to the Milky Way, whose mass equals that of 1.5 trillion suns, according to NASA. Furthermore, the absolute magnitude — or intrinsic brightness — of Aquarius IV is -1.9, making it 14 million times dimmer than the Milky Way.

Simon described the discovery of Aquarius IV as robust. However, Pai cautioned that follow-up observations will be required to confirm the object's identity.

Besides fleshing out our map of the nearby universe, studying UFDGs can reveal more clues about the mysterious nature of dark matter, which makes up about 85% of all matter in the universe but doesn't interact with light. Additionally, "the stars in ultra-faint dwarfs are also extremely old, dating back to just after the Big Bang, so they give us a unique window to the properties of the first galaxies that formed," Simon explained.

Pai noted that the Rubin Observatory is expected to find up to 100 such UFDGs during the LSST survey, which officially began in June. The survey will create the most detailed time-lapse video of the universe ever recorded and is expected to reveal millions of changes in the night sky every night, leading to an untold number of discoveries.

How well do you know our home galaxy? Find out with our Milky Way quiz!

The ongoing El Niño is breaching the "super" threshold as Earth crosses into unprecedented climate territory.

El Niño, officially underway as of June 11, is a climate pattern that's injecting extra heat into our already-warming world, threatening disruptive weather across the globe and a humanitarian crisis in some regions.

While El Niño is part of a natural multiyear climate cycle, scientists have noticed that it has been rapidly strengthening like never before, intensified by human-driven climate change, and putting stressed natural systems under extra strain.

In a new update this week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center continues to forecast a 75% chance that this El Niño event will be stronger than any previous El Niño since 1950, the earliest year from which NOAA has data to make historical comparisons. Furthermore, this El Niño appears to be going "super" ‪—‬ something that has been expected for weeks.

Weekly NOAA data from the eastern Pacific's El Niño region reveal that sea surface temperatures have reached 3.8 degrees Fahrenheit (2.1 degrees Celsius) above average, hitting the more than 3.6 F (2 C) threshold for a very strong or "super" event. Strictly speaking, NOAA uses three-month averages to categorize strength, as weekly data is more prone to temporary anomalies. But the latest data once again signals where this El Niño is heading, with NOAA forecasting a more than 90% chance of a very strong event emerging in the fall and winter.

How will El Niño impact the U.S.?

During El Niño, warmer waters gather east of the equatorial Pacific, forcing the jet stream south. The patterns associated with El Niño bring exceptionally stormy winter weather and a higher chance of rain and snow across California and Southern states, with Northern states experiencing fewer storms and a milder winter, according to the Climate Prediction Center. El Niño can also increase the risk of high-tide flooding, particularly on the West Coast, according to NOAA.

However, as with climate change in general, El Niño doesn't have the same impacts on all regions. Furthermore, while a more intense El Niño typically increases the certainty of expected impacts, they are not guaranteed.

The last "super" El Niño happened in 2015 and 2016. Associated impacts included a historic hurricane season in the central North Pacific and record drought in the Caribbean, according to Climate.gov. Before that, the last El Niño to go super was in 1997 and 1998. That winter was marked by a variety of extreme weather events, including flooding in the Southeast, an ice storm in the Northeast and tornadoes in Florida, according to a report by the National Climatic Data Center.

Already this year, tropical storms in Hawaii have been attributed to El Niño, with warming in the waters where storms typically form there, CNN reported. Meanwhile, the strengthening of El Niño in the Pacific appears to have left the Atlantic unusually calm. Ars Technica reported that the Atlantic hurricane season passed its traditional peak without a tropical storm or hurricane in what is becoming a historic period of quiet.

What is El Niño?

El Niño affects the whole planet, but it begins with unusually warm waters in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. NOAA recognizes El Niño conditions when these waters are at least 0.9 F (0.5 C) warmer than average, while wind, surface pressure and rainfall in the region are also consistent with El Niño conditions. An El Niño is then categorized based on its strength, from weak to very strong. Very strong El Niños (above 3.6 F, or 2 C, warmer than average) are nicknamed "super" El Niños, though this isn't a scientific term.

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts' El Niño models suggest that temperatures are sailing past the 2 C threshold and will exceed 6.3 F (3.5 C) by the end of the year. On Sept. 20, the daily El Niño temperature was 5.5 F (3.06 C), according to The Climate Brink. But while this year's El Niño is certainly supercharged, there's still uncertainty about its impacts.

El Niño forecast

On Sept. 3, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) released a fresh set of El Niño warnings along with a Global Seasonal Climate Update, which the WMO said offers a more refined picture of expected conditions in the coming months.

"For September-November 2026, WMO multi-model forecasts indicate an increased likelihood of above-normal temperatures across almost all land areas, alongside rainfall patterns showing a pronounced and classic atmospheric response to the strong Pacific El Niño," WMO representatives wrote in a statement.

In other words, much of the world is likely to be hotter than normal, while some areas will experience more rainfall and others will see less. The most severe El Niño impacts will likely be felt outside North America.

Liz Stephens, a professor in climate risks and resilience at the University of Reading in the U.K., recently noted that the Indian monsoon season had seen less rainfall than normal and that satellite data revealed that parts of East Africa, Central America and Southeast Asia are experiencing record-dry conditions. The human impact of such weather can be devastating.

"During the large El Niño event of 1997/1998 the associated flooding in Somalia killed over 2000 people," Stephens said in a statement released Sept. 3. "With a bigger El Niño event on the way, and global temperatures now 0.7°C [1.26 F] higher and capable of holding even more moisture as a result of climate change, scientists are concerned that there is potential for even more severe flooding."

Scientists have identified a "sweet spot" in Earth's deep past when conditions were optimal for a proposed early stage of life to take hold — a phase known as the RNA World.

The sweet spot was 4.33 billion years ago, although Earth may have become suitable for the RNA World as early as 4.4 billion years ago, given that extreme bombardment by asteroids, comets and other rocky leftovers of planet formation had largely stopped by then, the researchers reported in a study published Tuesday (Sept. 22) in the journal Nature Communications.

The findings give a more precise estimate of the RNA World's onset than previous studies based on geochemical modeling, biomolecular analyses and simulations of early atmospheric chemistry did, study first author Oleg Abramov, a senior scientist at the Arizona-based Planetary Science Institute, told Live Science in an email.

"The timing is consistent with previous estimates of approximately 4.35 billion years ago, but our range of uncertainty is significantly narrower," Abramov explained, adding that "previous ranges included 4.46 to 4.26 billion years ago, and 4.45 to 3.9 billion years ago."

The RNA World is a hypothetical time in Earth's history before the emergence of the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA), the single microbe from which all living things on Earth descend. RNA, or ribonucleic acid, is a single-stranded molecule that is structurally similar to DNA and performs vital functions in living cells. Scientists think the RNA World preceded the emergence of DNA; in that early epoch, RNA would have been the primary replicating substance, carrying genetic information across generations of basic lifeforms by copying itself independently.

RNA evolved into its more chemically stable cousin, DNA, sometime before the emergence of LUCA. Scientists think the RNA World first developed into an RNA-and-protein world, and that DNA then appeared in two distinct stages nicknamed the U-DNA and T-DNA worlds.

While researchers have suggested alternative and hybrid scenarios for the emergence of life on Earth, the RNA World is a leading hypothesis, Abramov said. To determine when it might have existed, he and his colleagues built a computer model of Earth's interior that simulated how giant impacts on the planet's surface between 4.5 billion and 3.5 billion years ago affected conditions in the crust and Earth's overall compatibility with life.

"We constructed an impact bombardment model constrained by observables such as the lunar cratering record," Abramov said. "We examined both detrimental effects of impacts, such as temperature-induced degradation of key biomolecules, and effects conducive to life, such as generation of hydrothermal systems."

The model showed that space rocks measuring hundreds of miles across — an order of magnitude larger than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, but far smaller than the impactor that created the moon — went on slamming into Earth and sterilizing its surface until 4.4 billion years ago. Life could not have survived such intense bombardment, which probably triggered widespread melting of the crust, ocean vaporization, extreme temperature gradients in the crust and continuous showers of burning material and rock-vapor rain at the surface, Abramov said.

However, the conditions stabilized after 4.4 billion years ago. And as a result, hydrothermal vent clusters appeared within the near-surface crust that concentrated the ingredients for RNA, including nucleotides, short amino-acid chains called peptides and fat-like compounds known as lipids, Abramov said.

"These criteria point to the Earth becoming suitable for an RNA World between 4.4 and 4.3 billion years ago, with optimal conditions at approximately 4.33 billion years ago," he said.

The results suggest there was a gap of roughly 130 million years between the heyday of the RNA World and the emergence of LUCA, which scientists think lived about 4.2 billion years ago. However, there are still large uncertainties around both events, so the interval could be as big as 240 million years, Abramov noted.

"The duration of the RNA World is highly uncertain, and our study did not explicitly constrain it," he said.

Mysterious trenches stretching for miles across the vast Nullarbor Plain in Australia are the surface scars of huge ancient caves collapsing deep underground, according to new research.

"They look like some kind of river channel, but they start and end so abruptly that it triggered us to investigate them," Matej Lipar, a researcher at the Anton Melik Geographical Institute in Slovenia and first author of the study, told Live Science.

The Nullarbor Plain is an arid, flat, almost-treeless expanse in southern Australia. Nestled between the Great Victoria Desert and the Great Australian Bight coast, it has existed for more than 14 million years. Along the eastern edge of the Nullarbor Plain are five long trenches with similar north-to-south orientations. They range from several miles to more than 12 miles (20 kilometers) long, span 330 to 1,640 feet (100 to 500 meters) wide and extend between 3 and 30 feet (1 to 9m) deep.

Despite their large size, the trenches aren't always easy to spot. "You don't really notice them when you are on the Nullarboor because they are really flat," Lipar said.

How the trenches formed wasn't clear. There is no evidence that they were created by the wind, Lipar noted. And it's.unlikely that they were carved out by flowing water, because unlike typical valleys, the trenches don't have connected streams or other signs that water once flowed through them, Lipar explained.

To investigate the mysterious trenches' origin, Lipar and his colleagues ran exaggerated digital models of the terrain to make the trenches easier to see and identify where the team needed to focus. Then, they used an imaging technique called electrical resistivity tomography ‪—‬ which measures how electrical currents flow through the ground ‪—‬ to distinguish rock from sediment.

The results revealed that the trenches were dips at the top of what seemed almost like canyons stretching down more than 130 feet (40 m) below the surface. They were filled with sediment, with sand dominating the upper layers and higher proportions of fine particles of silt and clay below that.

When the team looked at a database of known caves, they found that some big, deep caves were lined up along the trenches. The accessible ones can often be reached via sinkholes — also known as dolines — and contain massive passages that can stretch for hundreds of metres. Their similar orientation to the trenches suggests the caves were formed in the porous, karst limestone area by groundwater flowing toward the coast during the Oligocene (33.9 million to 23 million years ago) and Early Miocene (23 million to 16 million years ago), Lipar said.

"Over time, the cave roofs progressively collapsed, causing sagging of overlying material, eventually creating these shallow depressions at the surface," Lipar said. The work was published Sept. 17 in the journal Communications Earth and Environment.

"What this also tells you is that when the trenches end, we might still have a cave that hasn't collapsed yet," Lipar said, and that might help us locate big caves that have never been seen by human eyes before.

The team confirmed their ideas by entering Clay Dam Cave, which is accessible by a sinkhole within a trench, finding that its sagging strata and sandy sediment infill matched what they'd detected in the other trenches.

"The authors skillfully show that the linear depressions along the margin of the Nullarbor Plain are probably the surface expression of the progressive collapse of ancient underground cavities," Andrea Zerboni, an Earth scientist at the University of Milan who wasn't involved in the study, told Live Science.

The fact that some trenches are fragmented implies this process is ongoing, and there might be more collapses in the future, Lipar said.

Maximilian Dröllner, a geoscientist at the University of Göttingen in Germany who wasn't involved in the study, told Live Science that the work "could help identify similar caves elsewhere and may be particularly valuable for the study of caves and potentially habitable environments on other planetary bodies."

Similar features have been seen in other deserts, including parts of the Arabian Peninsula, where networks of collapsed caves can be recognized at the surface as elongated depressions, Zerboni noted.

And beyond Earth the implications could be particularly intriguing. "Elongated depressions on Mars have often been interpreted as collapsed lava tubes," Zerboni said. "However, this study shows that superficially similar structures may also result from the collapse of underground systems formed by karst-like rock-alteration processes."

This insight might help scientists pinpoint good places to look for signs of extraterrestrial life. "Subsurface cavities are among the most promising environments in which past life — or traces of it — might have been protected from radiation, extreme temperatures and surface weathering," Zerboni said.

The school where Alexander the Great was educated by Aristotle more than 2,300 years ago has been uncovered in the ancient Macedonian city of Mieza, now in northern Greece, the Hellenic Ministry of Culture said in a translated statement.

Archaeologists unearthed a building complex containing two banquet halls, a sporting arena, a stadium, a roofed porch and a lecture hall with stone desks, according to the statement. Mosaic floors and columns decorated the complex. The banquet halls had raised pedestals where nearly a dozen couches would originally have been placed.

The decoration and architecture of the school is similar to that of the Macedonian royal palace at Aigai (modern Vergina in northern Greece), where Philip II and his son Alexander the Great lived, the statement noted.

Among the building ruins, which date to the fourth century B.C., archaeologists discovered coins, ceramics and four styluses that ancient pupils used for writing, providing clues to who might have been educated there.

Alexander the Great and Aristotle

Alexander the Great was educated at a school in Mieza where Aristotle taught, the ancient writer Plutarch (who lived circa A.D. 50 to 120) wrote in his biography "Life of Alexander." Because of this, Angeliki Kottaridi, an archaeologist and director emerita of antiquities with the Hellenic Ministry of Culture who is leading excavations at the site, believes that the building complex is the very school where Alexander the Great studied.

According to Plutarch, Philip II, had this school built "for the education of his son Alexander and the children of the noble Macedonians," Kottaridi told Live Science in an email. Schools in the ancient Greek world, called "gymnasia," taught students a variety of subjects and also trained them physically.

The discovery of the school was a bit indirect, Kottaridi said. "A few years ago, I identified the ancient remains next to the ancient theater of Mieza," she said, and her team began excavating the building complex in 2024. But some excavation of the complex had been done more than 20 years earlier, she explained, when a monument dedicated to the nymphs was found nearby.

Scholars supportive

Live Science reached out to scholars not involved with the excavation, and they were supportive of the idea that Alexander the Great studied at this school.

"I agree that all the evidence suggests this is the school Philip provided for Aristotle to tutor the young Alexander and his fellow students," Jeanne Reames, the director of the Ancient Mediterranean Studies program at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, told Live Science in an email. Reames hopes that more information will be released and that the discovery will "shed more light on elite education in Macedonia in the second half of the 4th century" B.C.

Graham Wrightson, a history professor at South Dakota State University, told Live Science in an email that "Alexander studied there under Aristotle so it is exciting to excavate the very school rooms where his teacher shaped his formative years." The discovery of "four stylus writing implements allows us to dream that one belonged to Alexander," Wrightston said, even if none of them truly did. "Still, it allows us to put ourselves in the shoes of the young Alexander and understand more how he became the famous king."

It's unsurprising that the school was so opulent given Philip II's great wealth, Elizabeth Baynham, a senior lecturer at the University of Newcastle in Australia, told Live Science in an email.

Political assassinations weren't unheard of in those days — for instance, during the Roman Empire, which arose after Alexander's death, about 20% of Rome's 82 emperors were assassinated while in office. So safety may have played a role in the school's location. The distance from the school to Macedonia's ancient capital at Pella — about 27 miles (43 kilometers) away — was "far enough away to potentially give Alexander a chance for escape if his father was assassinated," Baynham said.

The education that Alexander and his school mates received from Aristotle would have been excellent, Baynham said. "Alexander — who by all accounts was highly intelligent — was taught by one of the finest minds of the ancient world in terms of range and insight. Aristotle would have only been in his early 40s."

But more archaeological information on the site is needed, historian Miltiades Hatzopoulos told Live Science in an email. While this is likely the school where Alexander was taught, "the excavator has given interviews, but has not yet published a paper with the relevant testimonies," Hatzopoulos said.

See how much you know about Alexander the Great with our Alexander the Great quiz!

Since launching in 2009, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) — a robotic satellite about the size of a minivan — has taken more than 3 million photos of the lunar surface. This week, scientists studying a few hundred of those photos announced what they're calling a "once-in-a-century" discovery: the biggest, freshest impact crater ever seen in the solar system. ‪It's the result of a building-size meteorite that slammed into the moon just two years ago.

The new lunar pockmark, named McGetchin crater after the late geologist and lunar scientist Tom McGetchin, is about 728 feet (222 meters) wide, on average, and 141 feet (43 m) deep ‪—‬ imagine a hole as long as two American football fields and deep enough to fit a 14-story building inside.

"We know generally that there's more small things in space than there are large things, so that means we tend to get a lot of small craters on the moon and very few large craters," Julie Stopar, a senior scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute and deputy principal investigator on the LRO's camera team, told Live Science. "So something the size of this crater, we only expect to encounter that once every 130 years, approximately."

McGetchin is nowhere near the moon's largest crater; that honor goes to the South Pole-Aitken basin, a gargantuan gouge about 10,000 times wider than the newly discovered crater. But McGetchin is the largest new crater. Appearing seemingly out of nowhere in images from spring 2024, it's the biggest one scientists have seen in the 17 years that LRO has been active. And now that it's known to the world, some intrepid skywatchers think they've spotted the crater's bright, white debris ring from Earth.

The team described their findings in two papers published Sept. 16 in the journal Science Advances. Live Science spoke with Stopar to find out what this fresh crater can teach us about lunar geology, impact rates and potential risks to the future human visitors to the moon.

Brandon Specktor: The moon is riddled with craters. What's so interesting about this new one?

Julie Stopar: On one hand, it's a nice crater because it's so fresh and new. It hasn't been weathered. On Earth, we see the remnants of impact craters, but a lot of the original details are lost through weathering and degradation and time. But the moon preserves all of that much better.

This crater, in particular, is so fresh and young — it's only about 2.5 years old. It's in really, really good condition. We can study it to understand how impact cratering occurs and all the processes that go along with it.

The other cool thing is that it impacted on the boundary between two different types of deposits on the moon. There's the volcanic mare deposits [dark patches visible from Earth] and there's the highlands, which are ancient crustal material. The highlands are brighter and tend to be hillier, more mountainous, whereas the mare are flat plains, and they're very dark. This impact seems to have occurred right on the boundary between those two areas, so that's reflected in the materials that are excavated by that crater.

BS: The meteorite that made this crater was the size of a three-to-six-story building, according to your team's estimates. Could we have seen this impact from Earth?

JS: Yes. This is a relatively large impact, and from Earth, we have observed flashes associated with smaller impacts. So I think it's possible, under good conditions, that this may have made a flash. We don't know if anyone was watching, though — so if somebody out there has videos that they can dig through, they could go back and look for it.

BS: This impact happened in April or May 2024. One of your colleagues discovered the crater in LRO data in October 2025. Why did it take so long?

JS: LRO orbits the moon about 12 times each day. While we're going around, we can only image a really small portion of the moon on each pass. So you can imagine it takes many, many orbits to go around the moon and to reimage each part of the surface. When we don't have an impact flash to help us decide where to look for these craters, it's basically a random search.

Over time, we eventually will get repeat imaging [of the same area], but it takes years to get that. On top of that, the processing that it takes to make the before and after images

takes a lot of work; basically, you're looking through all the images that have been taken of the moon under the right conditions, and it just takes a lot of time and effort to process that.

BS: Your colleague, Robert Wagner, says he "stopped and dropped everything" when he discovered the crater in LRO's data. What was your reaction when he first showed it to you?

JS: I was surprised that it was so large! But I've seen a lot of similar craters on the moon, so my actual first thought was, "Oh my gosh; this crater might actually help me constrain how old all of these other craters are!"

BS: So because you know this crater is so fresh, it's helping you date other craters you've seen too?

JS: Yes, I've been looking at a bunch of craters, which I think look morphologically [their shape] and albedo-wise [how much light they reflect into space] very fresh. They have the bright ejecta [the material that gets blasted out from the meteor impact]; they have crisp rims. But I don't know how old they are, because they were there before the LRO. I think they're young, but I don't have any proof of age. So that was my first thought: "Oh my gosh; this makes me feel so much better if all these other craters I'm studying are still in really good condition like this one is."

BS: What, specifically, do you hope to learn about the moon from this crater?

JS: There's hope that we can use this to help understand the current impact cratering rate. How much and how often do different sizes of debris in the solar system impact the moon?

And that's important, because people want to go to the surface for exploration, send landers, start building moon bases and so forth, and there's some concern that impactors will be a hazard. So it would be helpful to have a better idea of whether that's a really frequent concern or only a once-in-a-while concern. We can also study things like how the impact angle, the target materials, and the velocity and type of impactor play a role in forming craters.

This crater will help us better interpret all of the others as well. I think this would be a really good crater to go get samples from, because we know when it formed and we have a lot of questions we can answer with that.

BS: How do you see human-made impacts fitting into this? In recent years, several spacecraft have crashed into the moon. Do you see any risks there or more opportunities to study craters?

JS: At this point, it's not too much of a concern to myself about human-made objects destroying natural habitats on the moon. Other spacecraft impacts, like the boosters from the Apollo program, made craters a long time ago. But I think, as there are more people and countries and even companies going to the moon, they'll have to get coordinated so as to not interfere with each other's activities — because that would be a problem. It's just a reminder like, "Hey, guys; you need to talk to each other and get coordinated and make sure you're keeping track of these impacts and your debris, and you're working together."

Otherwise, those craters are interesting because we know the impactor's mass and shape beforehand. It gives us a new insight into how craters form when you have irregularly shaped masses, like hollow cylinders and things like that. They'll also tell us about the moon's surface as well, because it's a different type of impact and it's got a different kind of energy to it and a different shape. So we do learn a lot about the cratering process in general from those.

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

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

A 700-year-old female skull found in a Chinese cemetery is the world's first archaeological example of punitive nose amputation, according to a new study. The middle-aged woman survived the ruthless punishment, which may have been administered for stealing or for adultery.

"We believe this woman was a kind of cast-off after death. She was buried face-down, suggesting a discriminatory attitude," study co-author Qian Wang, a biological anthropologist at Texas A&M University, told Live Science in an email. "Her burial, alone, in a place without her family or community, could be a decision of disapproval."

The woman's skeleton was discovered among 300 others in 2019 during an excavation of the Sanzhiyuan cemetery in China's eastern Henan province, according to Wang and colleagues' study, which was published in the November issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. She had been buried face down in a wooden coffin on the southern edge of the cemetery, with only a copper hairpin. Radiocarbon dating revealed she lived between 1298 and 1404, which corresponds to either the Yuan dynasty or the early Ming dynasty.

But because the original excavation was a rapid salvage dig ahead of construction, the unique skull was not recognized as a possible case of nasal amputation until study first author Yawei Zhou, an archaeologist at Zhengzhou University, analyzed the skeletons from the cemetery in 2024.

The most obvious indication that the skull was unique was its enlarged piriform aperture, the anatomical term for the nose opening, the researchers wrote in the study. They noticed that the woman's two nasal bones had been partially amputated, leaving only about half of the bridge of her nose. Upon closer examination, they noted that several bones inside the woman's nose had been broken, with signs of healing at the edges. These injuries would have given the middle of the woman's face a "hollow appearance," the researchers wrote.

Although they could not completely rule out the possibility that this woman's facial disfigurement was the result of a disease or a birth defect, the researchers concluded that the most likely explanation, particularly in light of her unusual face-down burial position, was a case of nasal amputation as punishment for a crime.

"In ancient China's agriculture-based economy, theft of livestock such as cattle and donkey was not uncommon, yet there could be other reasons, such as adultery," Wang said. "At the end of the Yuan Dynasty, such a felony was punished by nasal amputation."

Archaeologists know about punitive nasal amputation because it was first recorded in ancient Chinese oracle bone inscriptions. In the Shang dynasty (1600 to 1046 B.C.), the punishment was depicted in Chinese characters as a knife on the left or right side of the nose, the researchers wrote in the study.

"I was surprised by this discovery," Wang said, "because so far no scientific report or description of any cases of penal nasal amputation" in archaeological skeletons has been published. But since nasal amputation without anesthesia was one of the "Five Punishments" in early dynastic China — along with tattooing, foot amputation, castration, and death — "there could be many cases in history," Wang said. "People of any walk could be driven to livestock stealing for reasons such as poverty or making quick money."

Elizabeth Berger, a bioarchaeologist at the University of California, Riverside who was not involved in the research, told Live Science in an email that the study makes a convincing case for punitive nasal amputation as the cause of the woman's disfigurement.

Given this case study, Berger said, "researchers can look for other cases, and hopefully more evidence can be found of who was subjected to this punishment, how it was carried out, and how it was medically managed afterwards, including the use of prosthetics."

The unusual skull from the Sanzhiyuan cemetery was assessed within the framework of the Global History of Health Project's Asia Module, which Wang leads. "Many more skeletons will be screened in the future for diseases and trauma," Wang said. "Hopefully there will be similar cases to be found in the future in a clearer archaeological context."

This intriguing astronaut photo shows a bright-white, salty surprise lurking at the summit of a giant volcano in the Sahara. The ancient, lava-covered peak also holds hidden, shadowy waterways, despite its extremely arid environment.

Emi Koussi (also known as Emi Koussou) is a pyroclastic shield volcano in northern Chad. It's located within the Tibesti Massif, a volcanic mountain range that straddles the border between Chad and Libya. The volcano's dome-shaped cone is up to 43 miles (69 kilometers) across and reaches a maximum elevation of 11,204 feet (3,415 meters) above sea level, making it the tallest peak in the Sahara, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

Emi Koussi is classified as extinct, and there are no historical records of it erupting, according to the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program. However, scientists know that it was once highly active because its gradual slopes are covered with ancient lava. Some experts think this once-molten rock is around 2 million years old and likely flowed with low viscosity, "more like motor oil than toothpaste," Earth Observatory representatives previously wrote.

At the volcano's summit lies a complex caldera system that spans up to 9 miles (15 km) across and is covered with various volcanic vents and cones (see photos below). A second, smaller crater, dubbed Era Kohor, lies at the caldera's southern end.

Nestled within Era Kohor, a thick crust of brilliant-white salt covers the lowest part of the caldera's floor. This crystal layer, which reaches up to 3,300 feet (1,000 m) across, reflects light in such a way that astronauts commonly confuse it for snow, which rarely falls in the area.

The salty compound, known as natron, is a mix of sodium carbonate decahydrate, sodium bicarbonate, sodium chloride and sodium sulfate. It was left behind by an ancient salty lake that once filled Era Kohor but has long since evaporated.

This is not the only notable natron deposit in the Tibesti Massif. Around 150 miles (240 km) northwest of Emi Koussi (also in northern Chad) lies a volcanic caldera known as Trou au Natron (or Doon Orei), which contains a layer of the salty substance that is arranged with a pair of cones in a way that makes it look like a giant skull when viewed from above. This unusual deposit lies next to another hefty volcano, dubbed Toussidé, which is also covered with tendrils of ancient lava.

While Emi Koussi's ancient activity was mostly centered at its summit, a pair of volcanic cones can be seen on the mountain's northern flank. The lava that quickly flowed from these openings likely helped to create a series of ravines between the mountain and a volcanic plateau, dubbed Tarso Ahon, which is partly visible in the top left of the photo.

These ravines are very narrow and deep, meaning they are near-permanently cast in shadow and much cooler than their surroundings. As a result, they can often hold liquid water, despite the Tibesti Massif receiving as little as 0.8 inches (20 millimeters) of rain a year. Two of the largest canyons — which are 2,000 feet (600 m) and 700 feet (250 m) deep, respectively — contain permanent waterways that flow east and west of the volcano, according to the Earth Observatory.

Emi Koussi's slopes are covered with dry "stream channels," which were carved out by millennia of rain flowing down its flanks. Current rainfall patterns would struggle to create such structures. However, thousands of years ago, during the mid-Holocene, the average rainfall was at least 10 times greater, according to a 2025 study that compared the ancient lakes of Era Kohor and Trou au Natron. (The Holocene is the current geological epoch, which began about 11,700 years ago, at the end of the last ice age.)

This is not the first time that astronauts have gazed down upon Emi Koussi. In fact, the volcano was one of the first geological formations photographed from space, when the crew of NASA's Apollo 7 mission snapped the imposing peak in October 1968.

See more Earth from space

Researchers in China have developed a sensor that could reduce the amount of energy that drones and other autonomous hardware use to process visual data.

In a study published Aug. 19 in the journal Nature Sensors, scientists detailed the architecture of a new 2D chip dubbed "LightTok," which can convert raw light into tokens used by artificial intelligence (AI) models on the chip itself. The device skips several energy-intensive steps that conventional sensor systems depend on, the scientists said.

"Our design idea was to move token generation onto the sensor itself, allowing the chip to directly produce tokens that AI models can process once light reaches the sensor," Miao Feng, director of Nanjing University's Institute of Brain-Inspired Intelligence, said in a statement. "These tokens contain complete image information."

Collapsing the visual perception process

In conventional visual perception, light signals have to go through multiple stages. A sensor captures the signals, and an analog-to-digital converter turns the light into pixels. That data is then stored temporarily before it's shuttled to a separate chip, where the image is cut into square "compartments" — much like dividing a photo into a grid of tiles. Each compartment is then converted into a token for an AI model to read.

One study widely cited by other academics found that an analog-to-digital converter is responsible for 66% of an image sensor's energy consumption, on average. Moving visual data processing off the chip and into the cloud can increase overall energy consumption further.

LightTok's solution to the energy problem is to collapse the five stages into one by building the sensing, memory and computation processes into the same pixel. The researchers achieved this through an array based on a technology called a single-layer molybdenum disulfide floating-gate phototransistor that can sense light, remember what it sensed, and then factor that into a calculation.

Molybdenum disulfide is a 2D material that reacts well to light and can be grown in sheets one atom thick. The phototransistor converts incoming photons — particles of light — into an electrical current, while the floating gate is an isolated component inside the phototransistor that can trap and hold an electrical charge, rather than disappearing after the light goes away.

Liang Shi-Jun, a physics professor at Nanjing University, summarized the chip to Chinese state-run news agency Xinhua. "The chip physically eliminates data movement, which is the main source of energy waste," Liang said. "Light comes in, tokens come out" — hence the name "LightTok."

LightTok achieved 87.3% accuracy in image recognition during tests — compared to the conventional, multi-step process described above —- while being 10 times more energy efficient at converting light into tokens, the researchers reported in the study.

A more efficient physical world

At present, LightTok's maximum resolution is just 32 by 32 photosensitive pixels — the light-sensitive compartments on an image sensor that capture the visual data. This is far inferior to the quality of current smartphone cameras, let alone drones and autonomous hardware.

Nevertheless, Miao said in the statement that there's an opportunity for the technology to be scaled up using the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor manufacturing process — the same method used to fabricate chips found in smartphones and laptops as well as sensors in drones.

The researchers believe that if LightTok can eventually scale successfully, it could transform the operation of remote sensing technology. For example, a drone scanning a disaster zone or remote area could potentially fly longer because less energy is required for visual processing.

Kumar Sokka, CEO of Acre Security, a company that provides real-world sensing for critical infrastructure, described the work as a "small-scale demonstration." However, "the direction [of the research] matters to anyone working in the physical world," added Sokka, who was not involved in the new research.

Sokka, who previously spent 15 years at industrial automation company Rockwell Automation, told Live Science in an email that too much of the conversation around physical AI has centered around AI models. In truth, the bigger challenge has been the energy cost of "getting what a sensor sees into a form a model can actually use, right where the sensing happens," he said.

The massive amount of energy typically required to turn raw data, such as light, into tokens "is wasteful when you're running perception on a robot or an edge device with a tight power budget," Sokka noted. However, processing at the point of detection may be "an enabler for pervasive physical AI, and a clever one, but it's not a cure for the whole problem," he added.

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

NASA's latest space telescope has officially taken its first photos of our universe. Launched on Aug. 30, the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope is on its way to Lagrange point L2, a "parking spot" in space about a million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth where it will begin scanning deep space.

Using its 300-megapixel camera, Roman captured hundreds of stars as green rings of light. The telescope's Wide Field Instrument hasn't been fully focused yet, which is why these balls of gas appear blurry in the debut test image. But once the instrument is calibrated over the next few months, it should produce images as clear as those taken by the Hubble Space Telescope — but which cover an area 100 times larger. Astronomers hope to use these images to help solve some of the biggest mysteries in our universe, including the possible source of dark energy and the search for alien life.

With Roman's first test images now available, what are you most excited about for the future of this space telescope? Answer in the poll below, and let us know your thoughts in the comments!

Lab mice who spend time in space seem to bear offspring with reduced reproductive capacity, a new study suggests. But what that might mean for human astronauts and their families is still unclear.

The research, published June 30 in the journal PNAS, looked at female mice that had spent extended periods on the International Space Station (ISS). These mice had similar levels of fertility as Earth-bound mice. However, their children and grandchildren produced smaller-than-average litters, had fewer litters overall and had lower levels of key reproductive hormones, among other measurable differences.

"The offspring of those that came back from space were altered in their behavior, their muscle, their ability to reproduce further," study co-author Lane Christenson, a professor of cell biology and physiology at the University of Kansas Medical Center, told Live Science. And "just about every marker we looked at had some differences."

As the study was conducted in mice, it’s difficult to determine whether the effects might carry over to human astronauts. However, mice are good biological models for understanding the health impacts of space travel, given that they are mammals with a similar reproductive system to humans, experts told Live Science.

As scientists explore the feasibility of long-term space travel, this study highlights the need for further research on the impact of long-term spaceflight on the reproductive system, the study authors argue.

A "void" in research

Past research, such as the NASA Twins Study, has suggested that short-term spaceflight has modest effects on human health. That study compared astronaut Scott Kelly, who completed a year-long mission on the ISS, to his identical twin brother, Mark Kelly, who remained on Earth.

However, few studies have explored the long-term health impacts of spaceflight, including those that might affect reproduction.

A 2019 study looked at male mice that spent time aboard the ISS and found they could father healthy offspring. The new study, by contrast, was conducted to "fill a void" in research investigating how space travel might impact the female reproductive system, Christenson said.

Such investigations are especially important because hormones like estrogen affect more than just reproduction; they "influence almost all organ systems in the female body," he added. For example, estrogen supports processes like bone maintenance, too.

For the new study, 20 female mice lived on the ISS for 42 days. The female mouse reproductive cycle is very short, only about four to five days long, while the human menstrual cycle is 28 days on average, Christenson noted. "But a lot of the molecular background is very similar" in terms of how hormones fluctuate each cycle, he explained.

Upon their return to Earth, the mice could still get pregnant and give birth to live offspring. Their litters were slightly smaller than those of comparison groups of mice that did not spend time in space. But that difference was not statistically significant, meaning it could be coincidence.

Researchers saw clearer differences in the next generation of mice. The offspring of the spacefaring mice had about 15% less muscle strength than the control groups' offspring. Additionally, the female mice in that second generation were more prone to stress than the female offspring in the control groups, based on a behavioral experiment.

"We were pretty surprised that a relatively short period of time, 42 days, was able to induce these striking changes," Christenson said.

The second generation of mice could also get pregnant, but these mice had fewer litters and much smaller litters than the control mice did. Further testing also showed that the offspring of spacefaring mouse mothers had lower levels of anti-müllerian hormone (AMH), a hormone whose levels correlate to overall egg count. Higher AMH means higher egg reserves and vice versa. The subsequent third generation also had lower levels of AMH compared with mice in the control groups.

Christenson theorizes that this pattern may be the result of an "acceleration of aging" caused by the mice's predecessors being exposed to microgravity. Previous mouse and human-tissue studies have suggested that a lack of gravitational force may leave cells more vulnerable to stress. This has been tied to dysfunction in mitochondria, the powerhouses of cells that contain special DNA that's exclusively passed from mother to child.

This theoretical mechanism and its relationship to mice's reproductive capacity still needs to be confirmed, though.

For now, "this study adds to the growing body of literature on the effects of space travel in general on the reproductive system," said Dr. Ulrike Luderer, director of the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health at the University of California, Irvine, who was not involved in the research.

Luderer noted that, given that the research was conducted on the ISS, which has less exposure to cosmic radiation than deeper regions of space do, the impacts of traveling in deep space — say, on a journey to Mars — may be even more consequential. Earlier this year, Luderer published research that found that exposing mice to radiation levels similar to the ones an astronaut might experience on a trip to Mars lead to a "very significant decrease in the number of eggs and follicles in the ovaries."

She hopes that further research can focus on additional reproductive markers, such as hormonal levels, to pinpoint the long-term consequences of deep-space travel. Those will be especially relevant if "humans spend long periods of time in [space] or colonize some other planet."

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

How much do you know about the process of pregnancy? Find out with our pregnancy quiz!

Scientists built a swallowable paper battery that can power medical devices inside the body and then gradually break down after its job is done.

So far, the battery has been tested only in pigs, in which it powered devices for up to three days. If proven safe and effective in people, the battery could someday power temporary devices inside the gut while avoiding surgery to retrieve a conventional battery from the body when the device is no longer needed.

"I'm very excited about this work," said Reza Ghodssi, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Maryland who was not involved in the study. "The battery is one component that takes up most of the space in an ingestible device, so anything that can provide the required power while reducing the size of the capsule is very promising."

Examples of ingestible medical devices include those that detect bleeding, dispense medicines, or stimulate specific tissues or organs.

How does the battery work?

Conventional batteries used in ingestible devices are not only large; they also need to stay sealed to prevent their internal materials from leaking into surrounding tissue and causing damage. The new battery, described Monday (Sept. 21) in the journal Nature Chemical Engineering, is made from materials that gradually dissolve in the acidic gastrointestinal tract and can then be safely absorbed without leaving behind harmful fragments or toxic byproducts.

The battery is built in layers. A magnesium alloy forms the anode (the battery's negative terminal), while the cathode (positive terminal) contains molybdenum trioxide and activated carbon. Between the two sides is a biodegradable electrolyte that allows the battery to generate electric current. These materials have been used in earlier biodegradable battery prototypes for temporary medical and wearable electronics.

The new design adapts them into a thin, porous, paper-like battery using cellulose nanofibrils as a binder, whereas earlier versions used larger binders. "The paper structure improves the battery's strength and control over degradation while still allowing it to produce electricity," study co-author Giovanni Traverso, director of the Laboratory for Translational Engineering at MIT, told Live Science in an email.

To keep the battery from breaking down too quickly in stomach acid, the researchers coated it with beeswax. Some versions also got a layer of candelilla wax — derived from the desert shrub Euphorbia antisyphilitica — for longer protection.

"The wax coating is not simply packaging," Traverso said. "It is a key design element that controls the functional lifetime."

The team made two versions of the battery, including one that was small enough to fit inside a standard gelatin capsule. In lab tests, it produced about 1.77 volts and could store and deliver 2 milliampere-hours per square centimeter, which is enough capacity to power low-power electronics.

A larger version of the battery produced about 1.84 volts and had a maximum capacity of 3.5 milliampere-hours. That could power devices that need a bit more power. However, the battery's capacity is still low, Ghodssi noted. "They need to have an order of magnitude higher capacity for this technology to be even more promising," he said.

Testing the battery inside the body

The researchers placed the battery prototypes inside 3D-printed capsules and administered them to pigs orally using an endoscope — essentially a long tube. Both versions of the battery worked for up to three days, although their voltage and capacity dropped as they gradually degraded. The larger battery's voltage dropped from about 1.8 volts to 1.6 volts after one day and then down to about 1.45 volts by the third day, while the smaller battery fell from 1.7 volts to 1.35 volts over the same period.

The team used the batteries to power two types of medical devices inside the pigs. The smaller battery powered a wireless RFID (radio-frequency identification) tag. Similar RFID-based sensors have been tested in people before, but the one used in this study was experimental. Researchers positioned it in the esophagus, where the tag communicated with a receiver up to 5 feet (1.5 meters) away and allowed researchers to detect when the pigs swallowed a medication.

The larger battery powered a swallowable capsule that electrically stimulated the stomach; this increased levels of the hunger-stimulating hormone ghrelin in the blood without causing visible tissue damage at the stimulation site. Gastric electrical stimulation is already used in people with severe gastroparesis, a condition that slows the rate at which the stomach empties; the battery-powered capsule tested in this study is experimental.

"It's quite impressive that the battery can operate in a stable and reliable fashion as the overall device passes through the GI system in a large animal model," said John Rogers, a pioneer in bioelectronics and a materials scientist at Northwestern University who was not involved in the study.

The battery and its biodegradable components broke down, but the electronic circuit board used for the stomach-stimulation experiment did not; instead, the pigs passed it naturally. "Making every part of the device bioresorbable could eliminate the risk of a leftover component becoming lodged in the gastrointestinal tract," Rogers said.

The researchers' biggest remaining challenge is controlling the battery's working lifetime and making its breakdown more predictable, Traverso said.

The researchers also found some variability between the batteries, which they attributed to factors in their construction, including the amount of contact between layers, their electrolyte distribution, and differences in the thickness of the wax coating. The team is now working to standardize manufacturing and adjust the coating so the batteries can be designed to function for specific periods of time, ranging from hours to days.

The team also plans to conduct longer tests under conditions that more closely mimic the human gastrointestinal tract. They are working toward an initial clinical trial of the RFID system that could begin in about two years, Traverso said.

One of the longest-running meteor showers of the year began on Sunday (Sept. 20), as the Southern Taurids start sending occasional "shooting stars" — and, potentially, spectacular fireballs — across the night sky.

The Southern Taurid meteor shower runs from Sept. 20 through Nov. 20, peaking overnight on both Oct. 13-14 and Nov. 4-5, according to the American Meteor Society. Although only about five to 10 meteors per hour can be expected during the shower's peak, the Taurids have a reputation for producing fireballs — very bright meteors that appear as flashes while falling through the atmosphere.

Patience is often rewarded with some of the most impressive meteors of the year, partly because the Southern Taurid meteors strike Earth's atmosphere at the relatively leisurely pace of around 17 miles per second (27 kilometers per second), meaning they can be visible longer than most meteors and leave glowing trails.

The Southern Taurids are associated with a trail of rocky debris left in the inner solar system by Comet 2P/Encke, according to NASA, and they form half of the broader Taurid meteor complex. Their companion shower, the Northern Taurids, becomes active later in the fall, creating an extended period when Earth encounters debris associated with the same complex.

Although meteor activity begins this month, you'll have to wait a little longer to see the Southern Taurids at their best. An early increase in activity is expected around Oct. 13-14, with rates of regular shooting stars potentially slightly stronger than usual this year, while the principal peak for fireballs will arrive around the night of Nov. 4-5.

The sky conditions will be ideal for the Southern Taurids, with a moonless night sky on Oct. 13-14 and an 18%-lit waning crescent moon rising in the early morning on Nov. 5, though you will also need a clear night to see any shooting stars or fireballs. However, the rates will be too low for most urbanites to justify a trip to a dark location.

Southern Taurid meteors appear to radiate from the constellation Taurus, which climbs higher as the night progresses, but there's no need to stare directly at it. Meteors can appear anywhere overhead, so a wide, unobstructed view of the sky is more useful. Stargazing binoculars and telescopes will not help you spot meteors — however, they may come in handy for some of fall's other skywatching treats, including some rare planetary appearances.

Because the shower's radiant lies close to the ecliptic (the apparent path of the sun as seen from Earth), the Southern Taurids are observable from both hemispheres. However, Northern Hemisphere observers generally enjoy more favorable viewing conditions.

Don't expect celestial fireworks; the Southern Taurids are a slow burn. But with brilliant fireballs possible, they're worth keeping an eye on whenever you're outside after dark this fall.

This gold mask was made on the Indonesian island of Java around two millennia ago and was likely used to cover the face of a corpse, possibly with the aim of "confusing" the deceased's spirit so that it did not torment the living.

According to the Yale University Art Gallery, which has the prehistoric artifact in its collection, the mask measures roughly 8.9 by 6.7 inches (22.6 by 17 centimeters) and weighs about 2.1 ounces (60.9 grams). The mask has openings at the mouth, eyes and nostrils, along with slits and slashes representing eyebrows, eyelashes and teeth. A series of holes punched around the edge of the mask suggests that it was once attached to a corpse or funeral statue, archaeologist John Miksic wrote in a book titled "Old Javanese Gold" (Yale University Press, 2011).

To create the mask, an ancient artisan would have procured high-purity gold from the nearby islands of Sumatra or Borneo, hammered the metal into a thin sheet roughly the size and shape of a human face, and then cut the incisions with a chisel, Miksic wrote. Because of the simple technique used to create the mask, Miksic dated the artifact to Java's Preclassic period (500 B.C. to A.D. 200). During this era, prehistoric Javanese people inhumed their dead, before they switched to cremation in the following period. Gold face coverings were therefore most likely part of a prehistoric burial tradition, Miksic noted.

The custom of using gold to cover part or all of the deceased's face has been found in prehistoric India, China and other parts of Southeast Asia, according to Miksic, coinciding with inhumation burials made just before the advent of cremation. But it is unclear whether one culture learned the practice from another or if it was invented independently. Other gold death masks predate the Asian examples, including the famous 3,500-year-old Mask of Agamemnon from Bronze Age Greece.

Scholars have argued about whether Javanese gold death masks were meant to be realistic or idealized versions of the deceased. In a 1990 book on Indonesian traditional masks, archaeologist Wahyono Martowikrido noted that the Javanese mask was unusually naturalistic and was likely created to resemble the deceased.

It is unclear why the ancient Javanese created and used death masks, Miksic wrote, but experts have three main ideas. The ancient Javanese had high regard for the spirits of their ancestors, so they may have used precious gold as the most suitable material for honoring those departed ancestors. Another possibility is that only high-status people merited gold masks, which would have separated the elite from the commoners in the next world.

Miksic also learned from ethnographic accounts of people who lived on eastern Indonesian islands that spirits of the dead could be hostile. To prevent these malevolent spirits from attacking the living, people would turn the corpse around during the funeral procession and even place the corpse's head in a pot to confuse the spirit and make it unable to find its way back. This sort of belief may have led to the use of gold face covers, Miksic wrote.

The gold burial mask is one of the oldest artifacts in a collection of nearly 500 gold objects from Java donated to the Yale University Art Gallery by collectors Hunter and Valerie Thompson in 2007.

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

Can you put together last week's Astonishing Artifact?

The massive Nepal-Tibet flood on Aug. 26 showed just how devastating glacier-related disasters can be. As of Sept. 16, the event killed at least 1,400 people, with more than 6,000 people still missing.

The Himalayas, with their steep slopes studded with rapidly melting glaciers, are high risk, but areas across much of the world carry the risk of glacier-related disasters, including one tropical region that is at particular risk, experts told Live Science.

"Slope failure from glacier shrinkage is occurring everywhere," Mark Carey, a professor of environmental studies and geography and director of The Glacier Lab at the University of Oregon, told Live Science in an email.

Nepal-Tibet flood

The recent Nepal-Tibet disaster unfolded when a large mass of bedrock and glacial ice detached from the mountainside. The ice and rock accelerated rapidly, reaching speeds of 500 feet per second (150 meters per second) as it dropped 6,500 feet (2,000 meters) directly into the Lhende River in Tibet, according to the Stimson Center think tank in Washington, D.C.

The rock, ice and water that then raced rapidly downstream eroded the riverbanks and collected debris and water along the way.

Carey noted that this disaster was exacerbated by a combination of factors.

"This particular event in Nepal-China was so profound because of the scale of the landslide, the quantity of water in the flood, the speed of the flood, and the number of people, communities, public works/infrastructure in the flood path," he said. "There was also little warning."

Risks in the High Mountains Asia

The Himalayas and the wider High Mountains Asia — an area that includes parts of China, Afghanistan, Nepal, India, Pakistan, Bhutan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan — are among the major epicenters for future glacier-related disasters, experts said. More than 9 million people in this region are at risk from glacial outbursts — when a lake bursts through or overtops its dam and drains rapidly — a 2023 Nature study found.

The region is nicknamed the "third pole" because it has the third-highest amount of ice in the world, after the Arctic and Antarctica.

Compounding this, any water, ice or debris can be channeled down the steep slopes into narrow valleys, meaning water and material can move quickly and travel huge distances, potentially inundating the downstream valleys where many people live.

For instance, in the recent Nepal glacial collapse, the resulting flood caused damage more than 60 miles (100 kilometers) away. The 2025 collapse of Birch glacier in Switzerland, by comparison ‪—‬ in which rock and ice also detached from a slope and destroyed the village of Blatten —‬ traveled just 2.6 miles (4.2 km).

The Himalayas are also among the most seismically active places on Earth, and glaciers are frequently weakened by tremors, which can trigger avalanches, glacial lake outburst floods or glacial collapse.

The Himalayas are also warming twice as fast as the global average, reducing ice cover and increasing meltwater. "Permafrost and glacier cover help stabilize mountain slopes," Carey said. "They hold the rock in place." So as glaciers melt, the mountain slopes become more prone to avalanches.

Glacial meltwater can also act as a lubricant as it seeps into the bed of the glacier, which, in turn, can facilitate sliding, Bethan Davies, a professor of glaciology at Newcastle University in the U.K., told Live Science in an email.

The region's large population makes the geographic hazards there riskier, she added.

And with some of the biggest dams in the world going up in seismically active regions of the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau, new hazards are being introduced, Live Science previously reported.

A planet-wide risk

But another region on the other side of the world is also at very high risk of glacier-related disasters. Peru has 68% of the planet's tropical glaciers and has experienced disasters for decades, experts told Live Science.

"In Peru in 1970, 6,000 people died when an earthquake shook loose part of the glacier and rock on Mount Huascarán," Carey said. "The same slope had failed in 1962, causing a massive rock-ice landslide that buried the community of Ranrahirca, killing about 2,000 people in an event similar to the one recently in Nepal-China."

The Cordillera Blanca portion of the Andes in Peru is considered a particular hazard as a result of glacial lakes that are rapidly expanding due to glacial melt, fueled by increased temperatures driven by climate change. One such lake, called Lake Palococha, sits above the town of Huaraz, which is home to about 130,000 people. All told, experts have identified 528 lakes in Peru that are at risk of overflowing, with 58 considered "very high risk" due to their proximity to populations.