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This massive limestone carving depicts a Maya queen known as Lady K'abel (meaning Water Lily Hand) and Na Kan Ajaw (meaning Divine Woman of the Snake Polity). The stela, or carved stone slab, was likely erected in A.D. 692 to mark the end of a k'atun, a 20-year period in the Maya calendar.

The stela is in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA). It has been reconstructed from more than 40 fragments of carved limestone but is only the front part of the original freestanding monument. The enormous carving is roughly 9 feet (2.74 meters) tall and weighs about 2,500 pounds (1,134 kilograms). It was found in a provincial Maya town called El Perú-Waka' in the Petén region of northern Guatemala.

In Petén, this carved portrait of Lady K'abel stood next to a similar one of her husband, K'inich Bahlam II, a man of lower rank. As a member of the powerful Kaanul or Snake dynasty, Lady K'abel ruled El Perú-Waka' as the military governor, according to the CMA. The stela also describes her as Ix Kaloomte', meaning Lady Supreme Warlord, and experts think Lady K'abel may have led an army from the city of Calakmul against the city of Tikal.

On the stela, Lady K'abel is "smothered in finery," Susan E. Bergh, then curator of Pre-Columbian and Native North American art at the CMA, wrote in 2014, which "allies her with a Maya supernatural being, either the maize god or the moon goddess." Her headdress is a fan of green quetzal (Pharomachrus mocinno) feathers, and she wears a netted garment and necklace, both made of jade beads. The net dress is belted with the head of a fish-like creature, and Lady K'abel carries a scepter and a circular shield, alluding to her role as Lady Supreme Warlord. In the lower-left corner is a person with dwarfism, likely an attendant or courtier.

The stela was created to celebrate 20 years of Lady K'abel's rule. Portraying her as the maize god conveys themes of creation and renewal, archaeologist Phil Wanyerka wrote in a 1996 study. "By wearing the attire of a god, a mortal being becomes divine, and here a woman is transfigured into the maize god to summon the associated powers of renewal and rebirth for the passage of the old k'atun and the inauguration of the new," Wanyerka wrote.

Although Lady K'abel's stela was acquired in 1967, her tomb was not discovered until 2012, when archaeologists excavating at El Perú-Waka' stumbled across it when digging at the bottom of a previously unknown staircase near where the stela was found.

According to archaeologist Olivia Navarro-Farr, who led the excavation, the royal tomb was full of artifacts made from jade, obsidian and shells, including a bivalve shell placed on the skeleton's pelvis. The shell exactly matches one depicted on Lady K'abel's pelvis on the stela. In the tomb, the archaeologists also found a small alabaster carving with hieroglyphs that named Lady K'abel as its owner, almost certainly linking the occupant of the tomb with the imposing limestone stela that was discovered outside.

"It's not rare to find royal tombs," Navarro-Farr said. "But it is rare to have the perfect confluence of evidence that leads one to be able to make that kind of historical identification."

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

Can you put together last week's Astonishing Artifact?

Future 6G networks promise blistering speeds, but there's a catch. The wireless channels they'll rely on can't pass through walls. But now, engineers have designed a workaround that could help solve one of the technology's biggest obstacles.

The next generation of cellular network technology is expected to lean heavily on millimeter waves — a sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum that can carry huge amounts of data but with wavelengths so short that they struggle to pass through solid objects like walls and furniture.

That's very different from the lower-frequency signals used by Wi-Fi and older cellular networks like 5G and 4G, which travel through obstacles far more easily. The result is patchy indoor coverage ‪—‬ a major roadblock for any technology that depends on millimeter waves.

But engineers think they've found an inexpensive workaround in the form of thin, 3D-printed tiles that reflect millimeter-wave signals around obstacles instead of trying to punch through them. The researchers outlined their technology, dubbed "FlowForm," in a new study published Aug. 11 in the journal Association for Computing Machinery. They also presented these findings Aug. 19 at the ACM SIGCOMM 2026 conference in Denver.

Reflective 6G

6G, which is expected to be rolled out in the 2030s, promises a theoretical maximum data-transfer speed of up to 1 terabit per second — approximately 3,000 times faster than average 5G speeds. But before the technology can be introduced, problems like its wireless signals being blocked by physical barriers must be resolved.

Each 6-by-6-inch (15 by 15 centimeters) tile is packed with thousands of engineered features smaller than the wavelengths themselves. These elements passively redirect incoming signals in specific directions.

Once they're created and mounted onto surfaces, the tiles require no power source, no wiring and no software updates. They just need to be fixed to a wall or ceiling.

FlowForm tiles perform two different roles inspired by the way small streams feed into rivers, but in reverse: Some tiles relay signals in long "major" chains across a room and around obstacles, while others "flow" outward, fanning coverage into the areas where people actually are.

"Our work demonstrates that a collective set of passive surfaces can make millimeter wave networks robust in real-world environments," Xinyu Zhang, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, San Diego and co-author of the study, said in a statement.

When tested across five real indoor environments, the tiles nearly doubled average data rates and more than doubled the coverage area in tricky spaces, the scientists said. These included cluttered offices and rooms with awkward layouts, and the performance was on a par with today's leading fix for the problem, called active reconfigurable intelligent surfaces. Those systems use powered, electronically steerable panels that can cost thousands of dollars apiece, the scientists said. The new tiles, by contrast, cost around $2 each.

The system also works for people on the move, the scientists said. Wireless access points already scan for the best signal path many times per second, and with tiles covering a room from multiple angles, there's almost always a good reflected path available, wherever someone is standing. That means the tiles slot into existing networks with no new hardware or software required.

The researchers have filed a provisional patent and said they're open to partnering with companies interested in bringing the tiles to market.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been making headlines for all the wrong reasons in recent weeks.

In July, OpenAI revealed that one of its experimental AI agents attacked publicly accessible services, including the AI hosting platform Hugging Face, during internal security testing. Then, Anthropic disclosed that Claude had independently chained together exploits against real software and developed new techniques for finding weaknesses in code. Shortly afterward, Meta confirmed that one of its own AI models breached another organization's systems during an evaluation after a misconfiguration gave it internet access.

They're separate incidents, but together they raise a bigger question: Has AI suddenly become capable of hacking? The short answer is yes — but probably not in the way the headlines suggest.

None of these incidents involved an AI model deciding on its own to attack random targets. Instead, researchers gave the models realistic tools, internet access, or vulnerable systems to see how well they could perform offensive cybersecurity tasks. What surprised many experts wasn't that the models tried to hack systems but how capable they proved to be once given the opportunity.

Why are there suddenly so many AI hacking stories in the news?

Several things have changed at once. The most obvious is that today's AI models are simply better than the chatbots people were using even a year ago. Instead of only answering questions, many frontier models can now write code, execute commands, browse the web, use external software tools and repeatedly refine their own work until they achieve a goal.

At the same time, AI companies have become much more willing to test those capabilities and reveal the results. Rather than keeping security evaluations behind closed doors, firms including OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta are publishing reports describing what happened when their newest systems were challenged by professional "red teams" — security experts tasked with deliberately finding weaknesses or ways to misuse a system.

"We are witnessing a perfect storm of capability and aggressive testing," Dray Agha, senior manager of security operations at Huntress, a cybersecurity company specializing in managed threat detection and response, told Live Science. "The sheer volume of software flaws being discovered in 2026 has already roughly doubled compared to 2025, largely driven by AI systems. Tech giants are actively deploying these models internally to stress-test their own infrastructure, leading to rapid, high-profile discoveries of vulnerabilities."

Antonino Vaccaro, professor of business ethics at IESE Business School and director of its Observatory for AI Ethics in Organizations, agrees both factors are contributing to the recent spate of high-profile hacking stories.

"The first, and probably most important, is the rapid evolution of AI systems," he told Live Science. "Every second they increase their capabilities, information, resources and connections with other online tools." At the same time, governments and the AI industry are investing more heavily in testing and oversight as concerns around accountability continue to grow, he added.

Can AI really hack computers by itself?

Not exactly. Many headlines have described AI "escaping" test environments or acting autonomously. But experts said those descriptions can easily give the wrong impression.

"We need to be wary with the meaning of the adjective 'autonomous' when associated with AI systems," Vaccaro said. Unlike humans, he continued, AI models don't form intentions or make independent decisions about what they want to do. Instead, they follow objectives set by developers or users, sometimes producing results that surprise the people who built them.

Agha noted that these AI models are simply working to achieve a set objective. "The public should view these incidents as software optimization gone wrong, not as the dawn of a malicious, self-aware AI," he said. "It's less 'Terminator' and more like a very capable, literal-minded intern who breaks the law to finish a spreadsheet faster."

In all three recent cases, the AI models didn't operate without supervision. Researchers had deliberately given them the necessary tools and conditions to see what they could do. Meta's incident, meanwhile, stemmed from a misconfigured testing environment rather than the model independently breaking out of its digital sandbox.

The concern isn't that AI has become self-aware. It's that these systems are becoming increasingly effective at carrying out complicated technical tasks when given the right permissions.

Why are the very newest AI models better at cybersecurity?

The biggest change is the rise of so-called "agentic" AI. Conventional chatbots generated text one response at a time. Agentic systems, however, can plan a series of actions, decide what to do next, use software tools, test their own ideas and keep working toward a goal without requiring constant human input. That makes them surprisingly effective assistants for cybersecurity research.

"The game-changer is the shift from conversational models to agentic models," Agha said. "Today's frontier AI doesn't just answer questions. It can autonomously chain together actions, write code, use command-line tools, and iterate on its own failures."

Giving AI direct access to development environments also allows it to test whether its own ideas actually work. Instead of suggesting a possible software bug, it can often write proof-of-concept code, modify it if it fails and try again.

The same capabilities aren't limited to attackers. Security teams are already using AI to review code for bugs, analyze suspicious files, and speed up investigations that would otherwise take analysts hours.

Should people be worried about AI committing cyberattacks?

Experts said AI's role in cyberattacks should be a cause for concern, but for different reasons than science fiction would suggest.

The most immediate risk isn't AI deciding to launch attacks on its own, but cybercriminals using AI to commit familiar cybercrimes much faster than before.

Criminals don't need AI to invent entirely new ways of attacking people. Instead, these models can speed up existing attack methods. It can sift through huge amounts of public information about potential victims, help write more convincing phishing emails, identify software weaknesses and generate code that attackers can adapt for their own use.

"The threat is human malice, supercharged by AI scale and speed, not autonomous AI deciding to go rogue," Agha said.

Vaccaro believes that growing capability also creates a growing responsibility. "We have a new disruptive technology that needs to be regulated and controlled," he said, arguing that governments, companies and researchers all have a role to play in ensuring increasingly capable AI systems remain subject to meaningful oversight.

How will AI change cyberattacks in the future?

The recent disclosures are unlikely to be the last. As AI companies race to build more capable systems, they are also giving those systems access to more tools, more computing resources and more realistic testing environments. That makes future evaluations more likely to uncover new — and occasionally alarming — behaviors.

Most experts expect AI to become an increasingly powerful cybersecurity assistant rather than an independent cybercriminal. It will probably find software bugs faster, help defenders respond to attacks more quickly, and automate many routine security tasks. At the same time, criminals will use the same technology to improve phishing campaigns, accelerate vulnerability research and make attacks more convincing.

The next wave of AI security headlines is unlikely to be about machines plotting against humanity: It will instead likely be about increasingly capable software doing exactly what it has been asked to do — and showing just how much that capability has grown.

In a scene reminiscent of Vincent van Gogh's "The Starry Night," scientists have captured swirling nebulae, dark dust lanes and sparkling star clusters in remarkable detail.

This spectacular new image from the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the National Science Foundation's Victor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope in Chile shows the Corona Australis Molecular Cloud, one of the closest active star-forming regions to our solar system. It's a place where temperatures fall to around minus 440 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 260 degrees Celsius), allowing dense pockets of gas and dust to collapse and form new stars.

The portrait also combines star-forming regions with an ancient globular cluster far beyond them, all within a single field of view. The 570-megapixel DECam's 74 detectors and 3-foot-wide (1 meter) lens make it one of the world's most powerful wide-field astronomical instruments.

On the left side of the image is the glowing nebula NGC 6729, nestled within the molecular cloud. The blue is a reflection nebula, which is caused by dust reflecting starlight, while the orange shows an emission nebula, which forms when ultraviolet radiation from a young star ionizes gas with its youthful radiation. At the heart of NGC 6729 is R Coronae Australis, a binary star system whose stars complete an orbit of each other every 43 to 47 years.

Glittering like a firework on the upper right is NGC 6723, a globular cluster approximately 29,000 light-years from Earth. Also called the Chandelier Cluster, it contains hundreds of thousands of stars that formed billions of years ago, with some almost as old as the universe itself. However, astronomers suspect that there are several populations of similarly aged stars within the cluster, indicating a complex evolutionary history.NGC 6729 and NGC 6723 are favorite targets for astronomers and astrophotographers because of their relatively close proximity to Earth. However, because they're found below the constellation Sagittarius, they're best seen from the Southern Hemisphere. If you’ve got the right vantage point, a good backyard telescope will help you see this chaotic cradle of star formation.

Every person you know has a name, and you've likely given one to your pets, too. But are names a uniquely human feature, or do other animals also call each other by name?

Research suggests that some mammals and birds use vocal labels for other individuals, but not all scientists agree on how to interpret the evidence.

In the 1960s, scientists discovered that young bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops) create individually distinctive whistles, called signature whistles. Researchers in the years since have conducted experiments in which they played the whistles through an underwater speaker and observed how the dolphins responded. Dolphins copy the signature whistles of other dolphins to initiate contact, similarly to how we use names, and can recognize other individual dolphins based on the frequency and "shape" of the whistle, regardless of the voice of the dolphin whistling.

Dolphins do seem to assign these whistles to other individuals and to match the whistles to others in a more symbolic way, Kelly Jaakkola, a cognitive psychologist at the Dolphin Research Center in Florida, told Live Science. Research shows that dolphins whistle to identify each other within complex social systems and while cooperating on tasks.

Through playback experiments, researchers also found that wild African elephants (Loxodonta) address one another with specific vocalizations ‪—‬ low rumbling sounds that are unique to each individual. The team published their findings in a 2023 preprint study, but it has not been peer-reviewed yet.

"They sound a little bit like a giant cat purring," Michael Pardo, a behavioral ecologist at Colorado State University and first author of the study, told Live Science. Elephants tended to approach speakers more quickly, and vocalize more in response, when their "name" was played.

Playback experiments have also suggested that spectacled parrotlets (Forpus conspicillatus), small parrots native to parts of South and Central America, use vocal labels for other parrotlets.

Studies of birds in captivity can shed light on their capacity to learn vocal labels. In a survey of parrot owners, about half of the 800 birds used vocal labels for individual people and animals that they had learned from the people around them.

"Parrots certainly pick up a lot of things from humans — they don't necessarily know what it means in a human linguistic context, but they know when to say it," Lauryn Benedict, a biologist at the University of Northern Colorado and first author of the study that surveyed parrot owners, told Live Science.

One survey participant said their parrot corrects people when called by the wrong name; others said their parrots correctly used the names of all humans and dogs in the household. However, these behaviors look different from those in wild parrots, and further research is needed to dig into whether spectacled parrotlets understand the concept of names and actually give names to their fellow birds.

How do you define a name?

Claiming an animal noise is a name, as humans define it –– a specific, symbolic vocal label attached to an individual –– is complicated.

One study in marmosets suggests that they use vocal labels. Using playback experiments, the researchers discovered that the marmosets directed certain vocalizations at specific individuals and that they learned these vocalizations from family members. However, in a published response to that study, Jaakkola argued that the calls may not be name-like, since they were correctly identified only 16% to 61% of the time. Jaakkola proposed that the marmosets may have been imitating each other's vocalizations.

However, she noted that we can't generalize any one interpretation to all species.

"The elephant case is very different from the marmoset case and the spectacled parrotlet case," Jaakkola said. "It can be really hard to have a cohesive discussion [across species] ... to all talk about the same thing."

In a July 2026 paper, Jaakkola and colleagues proposed three minimum criteria to apply across species: individual reference, meaning the call is designated for one particular individual; symbolic representation, meaning the name stands for a specific individual in the user's mind; and shared meaning, where at least two individuals associate the name with that individual.

When applying these criteria to the current evidence, Jaakkola said bottlenose dolphins show the strongest evidence for the use of animal names. Elephants, parrots and marmosets, on the other hand, require more research about symbolic representation to prove naming behavior.

"It is a big claim when you call something a name," Jaakkola said. "Our goal here was to create a unified framework … to start looking at this question more systematically."

Why are names useful?

Species that may use name-like calls have a couple traits in common: They can learn new sounds, and they're extremely social. Names might be useful in animal groups in which the community breaks into smaller subgroups and individuals are often out of their companions' sight, Pardo said.

The behavior seems present in very different lineages, so it may have evolved separately multiple times, which can tell scientists about the evolution of language among complex social pressures, Pardo said.

By studying whether animals use names, scientists can learn about the cognitive abilities necessary for abstract mental representation of other individuals. "For humans, names are such a part of our individuality and our sense of self, that if animals have names and respond to those names, that suggests they could have a sense of self … and of other individuals and their individuality," Benedict said.

Jaakkola clarified that although it's difficult to demonstrate naming behavior in nature, she's not ruling out that nonhuman animals have name-like calls. Rather, the evidence is not yet sufficient to say they do, she said.

Pardo agrees that more evidence would confirm these behaviors in more species, but he suspects a lot of animals may be calling each other by name.

A lot of other animals, such as baboons, giraffes, and crows, have communities that break into smaller groups. While there isn't evidence for names in species like these, and this social structure would need to be paired with vocal learning abilities, "I think it might be more common than we currently realize," Pardo said.

What do you know about the animal kingdom? Test your knowledge with our animal quiz!

Archaeologists in Russia have unearthed a rare wooden tomb containing the remains of an elite man who was buried with a horse and a dog. The remarkably preserved burial, which dates to the 10th century, suggests that medieval Russian and Northern European nobility shared funeral customs a millennium ago.

The horseman's burial was discovered unexpectedly this summer during excavations in the medieval cemetery at Gnezdilovo, an archaeological site in Suzdal, Russia, about 137 miles (220 kilometers) northeast of Moscow, according to an Aug. 15 translated statement from the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

In the late ninth century, what is now western Russia was ruled by the Kievan Rus' (also spelled Kyvian Rus'), a conglomeration of settlements and territories that included Baltic, eastern Slavic and Norse peoples. By the 10th century, the custom of burying medieval Rus' nobility in underground wooden crypts with a multitude of grave goods was imported from Scandinavia.

But the newfound and remarkably well preserved chamber tomb at Suzdal is a rare and early example of the burial type. Only 80 other medieval chamber burials have been found across western Russia, according to the statement.

The wooden burial chamber was found about 3.3 feet (1 meter) underground and measured 10.2 by 8.9 feet (3.1 by 2.7 m). The wooden roof of the chamber had decayed and collapsed onto the deceased in the tomb. Archaeologists found the skeleton of a man who was about 25 to 35 years old when he died, along with the remains of a horse and a dog.

Also included in the burial were an iron knife, stirrups and other riding gear, as well as a comb made of bone and a battle ax. The man was buried wearing a garment secured by a silver, horseshoe-shaped brooch near his neck. The assemblage of the grave goods signifies that the man held high status in his community, according to the statement.

All of the previously excavated chamber tombs were found in urban centers of the Kievan Rus' territory, suggesting that the nobility formed relationships of power across the land. The newly discovered chamber tomb at Suzdal therefore points to the site being an important center of the Rus' polity, which was previously unknown.

In total, archaeologists unearthed 15 burials at Suzdal this summer. Most were simple burials in earthen pits, while others had been covered with barrow mounds of dirt. Female burials included silver rings and necklaces with rock-crystal beads, while male burials included weapons and horse-riding equipment.

The unique chamber tomb discovered at Suzdal shows that "as early as the 10th century, it was already a magnet for the Old Rus' nobility (bearers of a new identity) and served as a center of military-administrative control over the northeastern territories of Rus'," according to the statement.

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

In the early hours of July 16, 1945, in a remote part of the New Mexico desert, a group of scientists, engineers and military personnel attended an event that would define the course of history and change a war that had ravaged much of the world for years. Moments after a giant fireball rose high into the sky, a huge shock wave thundered toward the onlooking crowd. The Trinity nuclear test had been a success.

The story of the Manhattan Project is well known. But one area that may be overlooked is the human effort involved in bringing the mission to life. In her new book "Trinity: An Illustrated History of the World’s First Atomic Test" (The University of Chicago Press, 2026), author Emily Seyl, a science writer and editor at the Los Alamos National Laboratory's National Security Research Center, uses never-before-seen photography from the laboratory’s legacy collections to highlight the physical and mental effort that went into the project.

In this excerpt, Seyl examines one of the key elements of any scientific experiment — how to successfully measure the results. She looks at how experiments were decided upon and the ways in which success would be measured, beyond the visual spectacle of a successful detonation of "the Gadget."

T‌he most rudimentary measure of success would, of course, be the eye test: Did the Gadget produce a nuclear explosion? Beyond the answer to this simple question, however, the detonation was also a monumental and complicated science experiment — one that naturally gave rise to as many smaller experiments as could be squeezed, sometimes impractically, into the test plans.

Alongside a crowd of Trinity contributors, a robust collection of electronic and mechanical observers was stationed carefully throughout the desert to bear witness to the shot. Although deceptively rugged and nondescript, these devices were highly sophisticated, often employing first-of-their-kind technologies — invented and built by some of the world's preeminent researchers to study a first-of-its-kind event.

After two years of leapfrogging basic nuclear studies in their rush to produce a workable device, the pioneering scientists now "yielded to temptation and conceived experiment after experiment" in anticipation of the Trinity test — much to Kenneth Bainbridge's [director of the Manhattan Project's Trinity nuclear test] alarm. In December of 1944, with base camp still under construction at the test site, a selection committee, headed by Bainbridge, had been established to evaluate what was quickly becoming a deluge of ideas.

The committee implemented a detailed submission process, requiring scientists to scrupulously outline the personnel and material needs associated with carrying out each idea. Proposed subtests were triaged into three categories: essential experiments, which were fully greenlit no matter the required effort or resources; desirable experiments, which were approved only if they did not interfere with work on the Gadget itself; and unnecessary (i.e., nonessential) experiments, of which only the simplest were allowed.

Completing the Gadget remained the top priority. But while most of the lab continued to work feverishly on readying the test device, a significant battery of physicists, photographers, chemists, engineers, and other specialists began coming and going between Los Alamos and the Trinity site in March, as Jumbo [a containment vessel for use in case the nuclear explosion failed] faded into the background. With confidence increasing and a clear emphasis on learning everything possible about the performance of the test device, they were consumed from dawn to dusk with readying cameras and other diagnostic instrumentation to track the effects of the blast from detonation to dissipation.

The greatest unknown was how much energy would be released by the weapon. This value — also known as the yield — would depend on how much of the plutonium fuel underwent fission. The aim was to get as much energy from the explosion as possible.To quantify whatever success or failure awaited, scientists made plans to observe three manifestations of that energy: the amount of radiation emitted from the core (including neutrons, gamma rays, and fission fragments); the pressures and speeds of the air and ground shock waves; and the size and temperature of the fireball, which would indicate the amount of energy released as heat.

With the right combination of approaches and protections, they hoped to record in several ways all effects of the explosion. If the experiments were to have any chance of capturing the various expected phenomena, however, they had to be set up close enough to absorb and record the effects while simultaneously far enough away to withstand them. Difficult decisions about siting and fortification were made harder by the fact that only rough and frequently changing estimates of the Gadget's capacity for destruction were available to serve as guideposts.

Nevertheless, scientists brought the rigor of the laboratory to the desert in dozens of clever ways. Some of the myriad devices relied on communication lines to quickly carry data back to recording instruments in bunkers. Others were programmed to send up visual signals that would be filmed by timestamped cameras placed at safer distances.

Still others were purely mechanical, installed dangerously close to the blast but made of resilient materials or buried underground, the plan being to recover them in the aftermath to harvest data. Not knowing which approaches to the balancing act would turn out to be successful, they relied on overlap and redundancy to account for failure.

Although the cameras and instruments ultimately, and not unexpectedly, varied in their performance, the experimental program altogether would succeed in committing to history a comprehensive visual record and a trove of data, built upon the talents and toils of many.

We all know that a dropped or shaken soda can comes with the risk of a fizzy eruption. People use different techniques to prevent these bubbly blasts, including tapping the top of the can. This advice has been passed around for years, but does it actually work?

The answer lies in the physics of what's happening inside the can.

Building the bubbles

To make a carbonated drink, carbon dioxide is injected into the liquid — such as soda, beer or Champagne — at a high pressure and cold temperature.

"[Bubbles] are formed as a result of what is called supersaturation of carbon dioxide," Roberto Zenit, a professor of engineering at Brown University who studies fluid mechanics, told Live Science.

Supersaturation is an unstable state where a liquid or gas can hold more dissolved materials than normal conditions allow. Thanks to its instability, there are some actions, like shaking a can, that can encourage more bubble production.

"The mechanical action (tapping or shaking) generates violent pressure waves inside the liquid; these waves rebound at the walls, creating low-pressure zones where tiny bubbles form," Javier Rodríguez Rodríguez, an associate professor of fluid mechanics at Carlos III University of Madrid, told Live Science in an email. "If given enough time (minutes to tens of minutes, depending on the drink and container), these bubbles dissolve again and the can 'forgets' that it has been perturbed."

However, if the soda can is open while the bubbles are suspended in the liquid, the sudden pressure drop from opening the can encourages more bubble production, resulting in more spillover, Rodríguez Rodríguez said.

In some rare cases, like spraying Champagne after a NASCAR victory, creating a geyser of foam is exactly the goal, which the drivers accomplish by vigorously shaking the bottles beforehand.

Does tapping actually work?

Unlike NASCAR drivers, most people are looking to save their drink‬, so they may try tapping the top of the can.

The idea behind this strategy has some merit. According to Zenit, carbon dioxide bubbles can expand out of tiny imperfections called nucleation sites, which can include dust particles or rough spots on the can.

"The reason why you tap is basically to remove possible bubbles or dust particles within the soda can," Zenit said. If you remove those, you can reduce the rate of bubble formation, he added.

In theory, a few gentle taps could knock loose some bubbles clinging to the walls of the can, allowing them to float into the pocket of air above the soft drink before it's opened. With fewer nucleation sites left in the liquid, there would be fewer places for bubbles to rapidly grow once the can was opened and the pressure dropped.

But that explanation comes with an important caveat: While gentle tapping might dislodge a handful of bubbles, tapping too hard, or tapping repeatedly, could create more bubbles, Rodríguez Rodríguez said. The same principle applies to carbonated drinks in glass or plastic bottles, as tapping down on a beer bottle can encourage foam to fizz over.

Those competing effects make it difficult to determine whether tapping actually helps, and some experiments suggest that overall, it probably doesn't.

In one preprint study from 2019, researchers tested 1,031 cans of beer by dividing them into four groups: shaken and tapped, shaken and untapped, unshaken and tapped, and unshaken and untapped. The tapped cans were flicked three times on the side with a finger before being opened. The researchers found no statistically significant difference in the amount of beer lost between the tapped and untapped cans, regardless of whether they had been shaken. They concluded that tapping "does not prevent beer loss" and that the practice isn't supported by their observations.

That doesn't necessarily settle the question for soda, but it hints that tapping is not an effective method.

"Beer and soda differ in composition and foaming behavior, but the study provides relevant experimental evidence that tapping is not a demonstrated solution," Kit Yam, a food scientist at Rutgers University, told Live Science in an email.

How do you prevent a soda can from fizzing?

If tapping isn't the answer, time probably is. Letting a shaken can sit upright for several minutes gives the bubbles time to dissolve or rise into the air pocket at the top of the can. Keeping the drink cold can also help, because carbon dioxide stays dissolved more easily at lower temperatures.

"Put the can you accidentally dropped or hit in the fridge for half an hour and open another one in the meantime!" Rodríguez Rodríguez said.

If you don't have another can or you don't want to wait, Rodríguez Rodríguez suggested another option: opening the can slowly.

"In this way, the gas can escape, but I only leave a tiny slit for foam to fizz out," he explained. "Then, when you hear the gas is no longer escaping, you can safely open the can completely."

You can use the same process to reduce the amount of foam that spills over when you pour a carbonated drink into a glass.

"If you pour it slowly," Zenit said, "then you reduce this agitation."

Scientists have finally gotten to the bottom of why astronauts struggle to poop in space, thanks to a new blood test. The findings also reveal an unexpected side effect of this cosmic constipation that may need to be addressed before humans take long-haul trips to Mars and beyond, the study authors say.

As soon as people started living in space, it became apparent that it was harder to go "number two" among the stars than down on Earth — and not just because of how complicated it is to use a space toilet. For most astronauts, this gastrointestinal change is just an inconvenience, but some have to take laxatives to overcome the problem. The drugs are routinely stocked on most space missions, including the recent Artemis II mission.

Constipation is one of several digestive issues astronauts contend with, including bloating, indigestion and acid reflux, according to NASA. And like most other health problems that can affect astronauts, researchers have long suspected that microgravity is the leading cause. However, it has been very hard to prove that hypothesis or understand the other effects that chronic constipation may have on astronauts' general health.

In a new NASA-backed study, published June 29 in the journal Nature Communications, researchers analyzed more than 400 blood samples from 52 astronauts who each spent more than two months at a time living on board the International Space Station (ISS). Their stays took place between 2006 and 2018.

In the blood samples, the team looked for specific metabolites — the byproducts of metabolic processes that break down food, drugs and tissue in the body. They identified 40 such compounds, but the most instructive were those that were produced by gut bacteria that help break down proteins in the intestines.

"We see changes in astronauts' blood samples that indicate that the gut bacteria begin to ferment protein to a greater extent than usual," study first author Giorgia La Barbera, an associate professor in the University of Copenhagen's Department of Nutrition, Exercise and Sports, said in a statement. This happens "within weeks after the astronauts arrive in space" and can persist "until they are back on Earth," she added.

Protein fermentation occurs when gut bacteria begin to break down proteins instead of their usual food group of choice, complex carbohydrates such as fiber. This switch to protein can happen on Earth too, either due to a poor diet or digestive issues, such as lazy bowel syndrome. But in space, it is a sign of something else.

"The lack of gravity in space probably causes food to move more slowly through the intestine," study co-author Henrik Roager, head of the University of Copenhagen's Microbiome & Metabolomics research group, said in the statement. That means fiber has more of a chance to be thoroughly broken down, and gut bacteria eventually turn to protein instead.

This slower intestinal movement can "help explain constipation in astronauts," Roager added.

The researchers also found that changes to astronauts' diets ‪—‬ including altered caffeine, fish and fat intake ‪—‬ may influence constipation, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported. However, this dietary factor accounts for less than one-third of the observed metabolite changes, leaving microgravity as the primary cause, the researchers noted.

While it is unsurprising that microgravity is the main cause of astronauts' constipation, the discovery of increased protein fermentation raises some new concerns that may need to be addressed.

"We know that products of protein fermentation [are] often associated with negative health consequences, such as kidney damage, potential effects on mood or reduced ability to focus, among others," study co-author Lars Ove Dragsted, head of preventive and clinical nutrition at the University of Copenhagen, said in the statement. When it comes to intestinal health, products of protein fermentation have also been linked to inflammation and weakening of the gut's lining.

Over short periods, these potentially harmful metabolites, including ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, likely pose limited risks to astronauts' overall health. However, long-duration spaceflights — like those that may one day carry astronauts farther into the solar system — could cause these compounds to rise to harmful levels, the study authors said.

It is also unclear how prolonged periods of reduced gravity, like those experienced by future residents of NASA's upcoming moon base, could affect protein fermentation in the gut. (The current study covered only brief stints on the ISS.)

"When we plan for longer journeys in space — for example to Mars — countermeasures may be needed to mitigate negative effects of space travel on the intestines," La Barbera said.

Such countermeasures could include a more fiber-rich diet, probiotic supplements or the promotion of peristalsis — the wave-like muscle contractions that move food, fluids and waste through the digestive tract — either via massage or medication.

"This would help reduce protein fermentation and thus provide a healthy gut environment and avoid negative health consequences," Roager said.

The researchers think further study of cosmic constipation could shed light on increased protein fermentation in people on Earth, including patients on extended bed rest, who often have constipation as well.

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

The dream of coming home to a spotless kitchen you didn't have to clean yourself is edging closer to reality.

We're used to seeing robotic vacuums cleaning our floors — but what about all our other chores? Humanoid robots are being engineered to take care of more complex tasks around the house, from folding laundry to loading the dishwasher.

This month, San Francisco-based startup Tau Robotics began letting residents hire robots, dressed in company uniforms and given names like Chelsea and Elon, to vacuum, wipe down counters and take out the trash for $30 an hour as part of a pilot program open to 1,000 homes.

Chinese firm UniX AI has gone further still, announcing commercial deliveries of Panther, a wheeled humanoid that can make the bed, clean toilets and cook breakfast, holding a spatula to fry an egg before washing its hands in the sink.

Not to be outdone, 1X's Neo Gamma — a 5-foot-6-inch (1.7 meters) humanoid that can fold shirts and answer the door — is now available for around $20,000. But not all humanoids are as independent as they look.

Some "autonomous" home robots still have a real person quietly steering them through the tricky bits — so your house helper might come with an uninvited houseguest. Even the ones that are truly on their own tend to shine brightest in their promotional videos, which are typically filmed in tidy, controlled settings rather than in a real, cluttered home — so a robot's demo reel grace doesn't always survive contact with your kitchen floor.

That said, would you trust a robot to handle your breakfast eggs — or would you rather cook them yourself, just in case? Tell us in the poll below, and let us know in the comments what chore you'd hand off first.

Last year, scientists achieved a historic first by providing a patient with the first-ever corneal implant made solely of human cells grown in the lab.

Corneal transplants are used to treat severe corneal scarring and inflammation, eye injuries and complications from eye surgeries. They replace the clear dome at the front of the eye, and usually, the tissues for the procedure are collected from organ donors after death. But in this case, one donor's corneal tissue was used to create hundreds of implants through sophisticated laboratory culture techniques and 3D bioprinting.

This technology, created by Precise Bio, an Israeli regenerative medicine company also based in North Carolina, produces a transparent, layered structure that resembles a healthy, natural cornea. The approach could help to reduce the scarcity of donor corneas worldwide, the company says. An early-stage trial, known as a Phase I trial, is currently underway to evaluate the technique's safety in human patients.

To learn more about the science behind the 3D-printed corneas and the next steps for development, Live Science spoke with Precise Bio co-founders Aryeh Batt and Dr. Anthony Atala.

Neelanjana Rai: How are most corneas for transplants sourced and prepared, currently?

Anthony Atala: They are typically recovered from deceased donors within a few hours of death and then banked. They go through screening and testing, and are then preserved until implanted — usually within a couple of weeks — before being transplanted to patients in need.

NR: Are there problems or limitations with this approach?

AA: Absolutely. In fact, availability is a major challenge. There is a very limited donor supply and a significant worldwide shortage of transplantable corneas, meaning a lot of patients lack access to corneas for implantation, which is a huge deficit.

Aryeh Batt: Today, for every cornea transplant performed worldwide, roughly 70 people remain without one because there are not enough donor corneas. There are between 12 million to 15 million people worldwide in need of a cornea transplant who do not have access to donor tissue.

AA: The ultimate goal is to completely eliminate the shortage of these corneas.

NR: How does Precise Bio's approach aim to solve those problems?

AB: At Precise Bio, what we do is fabricate tissues, starting with a donor cornea as our first product. We begin by isolating the cells and developing a proprietary process for proliferating and expanding them. From a single donor tissue, we are able to generate enough cells, a bank of cells, to fabricate over 400 new corneas, which can effectively solve the shortage of donor tissue related to corneal transplants.

​There are various other advantages to our tissue as well. For example, it is much easier to transplant than donor tissue. We engineered it with very unique mechanical properties, which shorten operating times and make the procedure much easier for the surgeon.

Another advantage is that, because we print the cells, we can precisely define the cell density of the tissue. While a standard donor tissue provides about 2,000 to 2,500 cells per square millimeter, our tissue has over 4,000 cells per square millimeter. This means the optical outcome of our tissue is expected to be superior to donor tissue.

[Editor's note: Laboratory and animal studies show promising results regarding the ease of the surgery to insert the implants, as well as the cell density within the printed tissue. However, human clinical trials are still ongoing, and therefore, claims that this printed tissue performs better than human donor tissue still need to be confirmed.]

Another important advantage of our tissue, in addition to the availability, is the fact that it is fully tested. We have a production line. And in the production line, the tissue goes to a full quality control test, which also includes viruses and fungus. So when you receive a cornea from our production line versus a donor cornea, ours is fully tested and quality controlled. There's no chance that you're going to have a virus or a fungus that later will affect the tissue in the patient's eye. So these are the advantages of our tissue versus a traditional donor tissue that exists as a treatment today.

[Editor’s note: Traditional donor corneas already undergo rigorous safety screening, including blood testing of the donor for infectious diseases, such as HIV and hepatitis, along with tissue-culture checks of the transplant for fungal and bacterial contamination. Precise Bio's manufacturing model allows for controlled batch testing throughout production and up to transplantation.]

NR: How does the technology work, and how does your printing system ensure that the cornea is uniform and smooth so light can pass through?

AB: The technology is not just the printer; the printer is simply the production tool with which we fabricate the tissue. The technology is a combination of many elements. When we look at natural body tissues, they are composed of cells and the ECM [extracellular matrix], which is the structural material. When we fabricate a tissue, we start from these two components, trying to stay as close as possible to natural tissue by using human cells and natural materials [such as collagen and ECM].

The fabrication process combines the ECM — in most cases, a human collagen-based material — into two layers. One layer is made of collagen, and upon that collagen layer, we print the cells. When I talk about printing cells, think of a standard color printer with red, green and blue cartridges; in our printer, we load human endothelial cells [flat cells that form linings in the body]. We flow these cells through the printhead inside a material called bio-ink, and every laser pulse deposits the cells. This enables us to arrange the cells in the exact anatomical structure they occupy in the body. Post-printing, we manually transfer the tissue from the printer into an incubator, though this final handling will be fully robotic and automated in the future.

NR: The implant can be rolled up, loaded into an injector, and then unrolled inside the eye. What makes the printed material flexible enough to do this without breaking?

AA: Basically, we're using the same material that is present in your very own cornea [collagen] to maintain flexibility, and the printer allows us to deposit the cells precisely where they are needed.

NR: The platform has "single-cell resolution."Why is that important?

AB: The fact that we can arrange cell by cell enables us to mimic the anatomical structure, the exact structure of the tissue of our body. Depositing cells one at a time at very high viability gives us a major advantage in replicating what the body naturally expects.

AA: The best way to explain it is that nature has already figured out the best design through evolution. What this technology does is effectively replicate what nature has already achieved.

NR: You say these implants could be frozen and shipped worldwide — has that been tested?

AB: While we are currently conducting our Phase I study in Israel, product development has included extensive testing on shipment. We shipped the product from the Middle East to the U.S. and back and transplanted the tissue into animals to verify that it functions after international transit. We had to evaluate shipment times, transport environments and how to maintain tissue properties on a plane.

To assist that, we also developed various technologies related to cryopreservation of the cells and prior preservation of the tissues, which enables us to, at the end of the day, have a supply-on-demand mechanism so we can manufacture anywhere and ship it anywhere in the world for the patient's benefit worldwide. Currently, our tissue is shipped very similar to the tissue that is shipped from a donor tissue, where we have a shelf life of around four or five days.

NR: You've recently conducted the world's first transplant of these new corneas as part of the trial. Could you describe the procedure and how well it worked?

AA: The first patient had been legally blind [in the treated eye] for 14 years.

AB: This specific patient had a non-functioning cornea and could not even count fingers [before the procedure]. This was due to pseudophakic bullous keratopathy, a condition where the cornea swells permanently and forms fluid blisters following cataract surgery.

She is close to nine months now since her transplantation, and she sees well. After several weeks, she was already able to read the menu in a restaurant and subtitles on the television. The most important outcome of this is that now, she can see normally — with her new cornea.

We continue to follow her progress and we will follow up again at the nine-month point and then at the year point. This is essentially the way we do with all of our patients. Now, we already have five patients [who have gotten the new transplants].

AA: [Based on the trial participants they've treated so far] patients recover similarly to those receiving a traditional corneal transplant; visual recovery occurs quickly at first, but continues to improve over time, with initial recovery taking place within days to weeks.

NR: Is there a risk of immune rejection with this kind of implant?

AA: With current techniques using corneas from deceased donors, the cornea is considered "immune privileged," meaning it has features that reduce immune response. Because it lacks blood vessels and lymphatic vessels, the risk of rejection is much lower than with other transplanted organs.

Of course, a small risk always exists with any medical procedure, but even with human bio-printed corneas, the risk is very low and most rejection episodes can be reversed if treated promptly.

AB: There is always some risk of rejection in the eye, but this is taken care of with very mild steroids. In the first weeks, the frequency of the drops is higher, then as the patient moves forward we reduce the need for these steroids.

NR: What are the next steps for developing this treatment?

AB: We are in the process of developing longer cryopreservation of the tissue, and we will be completing the Phase I trial in 2026, completing the transplants. And then we will move forward to a more advanced stage. We are planning to transplant an additional 10 patients until the end of the year [as part of the ongoing trial].

After Phase I, we will be submitting an Investigational New Drug [IND]application to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, where we are targeting to do the more advanced studies. [Approved IND applications grant permission to give a new, unapproved medicine or biological product to clinical trial participants.] The primary focus of this study will be in the U.S., while continuing clinical sites in Europe and Israel, and exploring regions with high demand like India.

In the future, the extended studies that are planned for 2027 will open up to other patients also with other health indications [such as diabetes or high blood pressure].

NR: What timeline do you foresee for getting these new bioprinted corneas fully approved?

AB: We anticipate commercial distribution of our corneas in the U.S. by 2030, followed by expansions into Europe and other regions.

AA: These current studies are still in their very early stages, which is why we are carefully assessing the technology and following patients long-term to ensure the approach can be successfully expanded. As soon as that groundwork is complete, the next phase will move forward in the U.S.

This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.

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

NASA's Swift Observatory is set to come crashing down to Earth later this year after a private mission failed to save the tumbling telescope.

A rescue spacecraft named LINK, which was designed by private company Katalyst Space, launched on July 3 with the aim of raising the falling observatory to a higher orbit. However, in the weeks following launch, the rescue mission itself encountered problems and started spinning out of control. On Wednesday (Aug. 19) NASA announced that the rescue mission would not continue as planned.

The mission's failure means the observatory is doomed to continue falling back to Earth.

"This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting," NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said in a statement.

The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory was launched in 2004 to detect gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the universe. Over time, the spacecraft has been hit by scattered molecules in the outer reaches of our planet's atmosphere, creating friction that slowed down its orbit and reduced its altitude.

On top of that, an uptick in solar activity in recent years has caused our outer atmosphere to expand, increasing the number of molecules the telescope encountered, pulling it closer to Earth.

The $30 million Swift Boost mission was contracted to the Arizona-based aerospace startup Katalyst in 2025. The plan was for this private craft to rendezvous with the aging observatory and boost it to a higher orbit. This gave Katalyst engineers less than a year to design and carry out the mission before Swift's clock ran out.

"We knew this was a high-risk, high-reward mission – a first-of-its kind attempt, developed on an unprecedented timeline driven by the Sun's activity," Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's Astrophysics Division, said in the statement.

LINK was due to rendezvous with Swift about a month after its launch, but at the end of July, electrical power issues affected two of the devices that control the spacecraft's orientation, and it began spinning out of control, Live Science previously reported.

While NASA has had to give up on the goals of the original mission, citing ongoing altitude control issues, officials say the project has not been completely cancelled. "LINK still will attempt to conduct rendezvous and proximity operations with NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory to demonstrate key capabilities for the future of space exploration," the space agency wrote in the statement.

They added that NASA and Katalyst will assess the best next steps for the two spacecraft to gather as much data as possible for future satellite servicing operations.

"We are going to learn everything we can from LINK's rendezvous attempt and put those lessons to work on the missions that follow,” Isaacman said.

With no further intervention, Swift will likely re-enter our atmosphere later this year, NASA said.

In 2010, researchers at Purdue University and the University of New South Wales began an investigation into a macabre question: What's the upper temperature limit at which humans can survive? The answer, according to their calculations, was 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius) at 100% humidity — a "wet bulb" temperature that sets an absolute "unsurvivable" threshold for the human body.

Beyond this temperature, a cascade of irreversible physiological processes begins, sending organs into shock, causing blood to clot and ending in inevitable death.

As the climate warms and heat waves multiply, more places across the globe are creeping towards this threshold, with climate models projecting the first 35 C wet bulb temperatures by the middle of the century.

But conditions don't have to be this hot or humid to be unlivable in a practical sense for wide swaths of the population. The threshold is lower for those who are older, for women, and those with certain medical conditions. Any kind of physical activity also raises the risk of heat stress.

In some parts of Asia, South America and Australia, the hottest days are already "unlivable," meaning a healthy adult sitting in the shade in a slight breeze could be at risk from heat illness, a recent study found.

In North America, the hottest days in parts of the Southwest and Southeast pose that same risk, the study found. And more heat is coming: Under projected warming, the country will see tens of thousands more heat-related deaths by 2100.

Nearly 20,000 people could die from extreme heat each year by the middle of the century in the United States. The U.S. and Mexico could see an additional 9,000 suicides each year.

Heat can kill directly, via heat stroke, but it can also worsen underlying cardiovascular health, turning chronic, manageable heart conditions deadly. Heat waves often occur hand in hand with droughts or other extreme weather and may lead to food and water price hikes or shortages, said Marina Romanello, a senior research fellow at the University College London Institute for Global Health who tracks how the climate affects health. In that sense, climate change acts as a stress multiplier.

And heat could erode health in other, subtler ways, making nights more sleepless and our cognition a bit cloudier.

"No individual metric really does justice to the overall risk to health and well-being of these multiple stressors being exacerbated all at once and compounding each other," she told Live Science.

Heat wave deaths

Heat kills most immediately through heat stroke, which occurs when the core body temperature soars over 104 F (40 C) and doesn't cool down. Dangerous heat waves — and resulting deaths — have already increased over the past several decades. In 2023, heat was described as the main cause or a major underlying cause of death on 2,325 U.S. death certificates, an increase from 1,069 in 1999, research shows. When adjusted for age of the population, that represented a 63% rise in heat-related deaths.

But scientists think heat already contributes to many more deaths than that, because heat isn't always listed as a contributor to death on official records, even if it may have played a role in exacerbating an underlying health condition.

Heat is particularly hard on people with cardiovascular issues, with the risk of a heart attack more than doubling on extreme heat days. The risk of stroke, too, nearly doubles on the hottest days. Some early evidence hints that heat's impact on the immune system may play a role in these cardiac cases. Deaths related to extreme heat days for all reasons are projected to more than double by the mid-century in the U.S., leading to up to nearly 20,000 deaths if temperatures warm 8.1 degrees F (4.5 degrees C).

And rates of hyponatremia, or low sodium levels — which can cause seizures and coma — are also projected to increase as climate change worsens.

Most at risk are older adults, kids and teens, and people who work outside. The heart pumps less efficiently as people age, so older people struggle to pump blood to the skin to cool down. Children produce more heat than adults, given differing fat makeup and a lower skin surface area, and sweat less, making them more prone to developing heat stroke. Outdoor workers often have to exert themselves on hot days and may struggle to hydrate enough to compensate for extreme heat.

People with certain medical conditions are also at high risk. Diabetes can impair sweating and the dilation of the blood vessels that helps cool the body in hot temperatures, making people with diabetes more susceptible to heat stroke. Some medications, including diuretics often taken by people with heart disease, beta blockers for people with heart conditions, and selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) taken for mood disorders, also increase the risk of heat-related illness because their side effects make it harder for the body to cool itself.

Mental illness itself is also a risk factor. Higher temperatures have been linked to an increase in suicides, with 0.7% more instances of suicides in the U.S. per for every 1.8 F (1 degree C) increase in monthly average temperature. Were temperatures to rise more than 5 degrees C (9 degrees F), that rise could translate to between 9,000 and 40,000 additional suicides in the U.S. and Mexico by 2050, the researchers wrote ‪—‬ similar to the increase in the suicide rate expected in a serious economic recession. (Fortunately, that temperature rise is now considered unlikely due to the world moving away from coal as an energy source.)

It's not clear exactly why hotter days fuel more suicide, but one possibility is that feeling hot and uncomfortable can increase the impulsivity that may underlie the behavior.

And impulsivity rises in people who struggle to stay comfortably cool in their homes, Kim Meidenbauer, a neuroscientist at Washington State University who studies the effect of heat on emotion and behavior, has found.

The effects may be hardest on those who have preexisting mental health conditions, ranging from schizophrenia to anxiety: Mental-health-related emergency department visits have been shown to rise with the temperature.

Perhaps the most universal way heat may compromise health in the U.S. is through sleep. Heat reduces both sleep quality and sleep quantity. For every degree-Celsius increase in nighttime temperature, there is a loss of 3 good nights of sleep per month per 100 people, according to one large-scale sleep-tracking study.

Those sleep disruptions may be the major reason heat has a corrosive effect on mood and mental health, even for those without existing mental health conditions, Meidenbauer noted.

"We see worsened emotional state," she told Live Science. "We see increases in impulsivity." And underslept people struggle to stay on an even keel, perhaps explaining both E.R. visits and a heightened risk of suicide.

"Emotion regulation is a lot harder if you've had poor sleep quality," Meidenbauer told Live Science.

Daily health in a hotter world

Heat affects the mind in other ways, too. People have trouble thinking clearly once temperatures reach 89.6 F (32 C), a study that administered math and verbal reasoning tests to 50,000 people in China found.

The number of days in the U.S. with heat indices over 100 F (37.8 C) is expected to double as soon as a decade from now, while the number of days with heat indices over 105 F (40 C) is expected to triple. The heat index is a measure of what the temperature feels when taking into account air temperature and relative humidity. The more humid the air, the harder it is for the body to cool off by sweating.

Nearly nine in 10 U.S. households have air conditioning, but that doesn't mean Americans are immune to heat waves. The 2024 study in China found that even short-term exposure to extreme heat — on the order of an hour in a couple of days — can cause small declines in math and verbal test scores, indicating some degree of mental sluggishness in hot weather.

Hotter days may drive people indoors, potentially worsening physical and mental health. Exercising outdoors may provide a mental health boost above and beyond exercising indoors. The data is limited by research designs that don't always follow rigorous methods, but losing outdoor exercise opportunities could mean a slide in physical fitness even if people switch to indoor workouts. For example, cancer survivors randomly assigned to indoor and outdoor exercise worked harder when exercising outside, according to one 2020 study. Likewise, teen boys with obesity prescribed playful exercise outside lost more weight and saw greater increases in a molecule that regulates appetite and wakefulness than those who were assigned to use a treadmill indoors, a 2019 study found. People also reported more satisfaction with outdoor exercise versus indoor exercise, which might influence their willingness to keep working out.

Hot days could also curtail kids' sports, which are often played outdoors. In Japan, summer outdoor youth sports in much of the country might need to be restricted for one to four months a year, even under lower-warming scenarios; similar issues could crop up in much of the U.S., which sits at approximately the same latitude as Japan.

Overall, studies find a U-shaped relationship between obesity and temperature, with higher body mass index (BMI) in the coldest and hottest places. One study in Australia found that regular exposure to temperatures above 86 degrees F (30 degrees C) was associated with increases in BMI and obesity.

Adapting to extreme heat

People do adapt to warmer temperatures over weeks or months through physiological changes, as their sweat glands become more efficient and their water retention increases. The cognition study conducted in China found that people who lived in climates that were warmer on average were more resistant to declining test scores in the face of warmer temperatures, perhaps indicating that these physiological changes have practical impacts.

However, extreme heat — and short-term spikes — outpace the human body's ability to adjust, as the increases in heat-related deaths already measured between 1999 and 2023 attest. Likewise, kids are already suffering, especially those in the South where temperatures are highest. A study of two major hospitals in Texas found a 170% increase in pediatric emergency department visits for heat-releated illness between 2012 and 2023.

What works to reduce the impacts of extreme heat is an open question, said Marshall Burke, a professor of global environmental policy at Stanford University. Cities often open cooling centers during heat waves, which may save lives, but whether they do enough hasn't been well studied, he told Live Science.

To try to answer that question, Burke and his colleagues have put together a website, the Environmental Hazard Adaptation Atlas, to pull together data on temperature, heat-related illness and death, and what adaptations might help.

"We need good case studies of what things have worked," he said. "We need good systematic evidence."

Astronomers have found the most promising candidate yet for a "black hole star," a new type of astrophysical object lurking in the early universe's "cosmic dawn."

If confirmed, the findings could help to unravel the mysterious origin of "little red dots" (LRDs), an infamous group of hundreds of distant, crimson lights spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). These dots, which are almost as old as the universe itself, shine much brighter than stars but are too dim to be fully formed galaxies, making them one of the biggest puzzles in modern astronomy.

The newly discovered dot, which is around the size of our solar system, was spotted by JWST's Miracle or Mirage (MoM) survey, which scours the night sky for far-off galaxies. The reddish light JWST detected was emitted about 660 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was approximately one-twentieth its current age, and it is roughly 100 billion times brighter than a typical star, researchers reported in a new study, published Aug. 12 in the journal Nature.

The researchers propose that this dot is a black hole star — an enormous, hypothetical ball of dense gas that surrounds and is superheated by a giant black hole. They've named it MoM-BH*-1, combining the survey that found it with the moniker "black hole star one."

"Our picture of this object is evolving very rapidly," study first author Rohan Naidu, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii and a former NASA Hubble fellow at MIT, said in a statement from MIT. It is "truly singular in so many ways," he added.

This is not the first proposed black hole star. Last year, a study that included many of the same authors identified a black hole star candidate dubbed "the Cliff," which displayed many similar characteristics as MoM-BH*-1. However, the team believes the latest find is "our best evidence" of this never-before-seen cosmic object, the researchers said in a separate statement from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria.

MoM-BH*-1 is farther away from us (and therefore older) than the Cliff, making it even more important for understanding how these newly revealed objects form.

Following cosmic clues

The first clue that MoM-BH*-1 was unusual was its striking ruby hue; it is redder than many other LRDs.

"When we see something very red in the universe, we often assume that it is surrounded by dust," study co-author Robert Simcoe, director of MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, said in the MIT statement. Dust blocks out shorter blue wavelengths of light, making the remaining light appear redder, similar to how ash and smoke can make the skies turn orange after a large wildfire, he added.

However, we can be fairly certain that the shining material is not dust because some wavelengths of light are missing from its electromagnetic spectrum. The absence of these wavelengths, known as a Balmer break, suggests that some light particles are being completely blocked. This, in turn, likely means the light is shining through an extremely dense shell of gas, similar to some massive stars, like Vega.

The object is also severely lacking in heavy metals, suggesting that this dense gas is composed almost purely of hydrogen and helium, similar to stars like the sun. However, "the [Balmer] break we observed in this object is the deepest break we have ever observed in any object, ruling out 'ordinary' stars as the source," Naidu said.

To figure out why the gas was acting as if it were part of a massive star, when it clearly was not, the researchers ran multiple simulations, which revealed that the only plausible scenario was that the gas was hiding a hefty black hole.

Normally, black holes suck in all the matter around them via swirling accretion disks. However, particularly large and fast-spinning black holes, known as quasars, can pull in matter so quickly that they also shoot out giant beams of energy. The researchers believe that if such an object were surrounded by a giant cloud of gas, it could not only hold this material in a tight ball but also superheat it, replacing the role of nuclear fusion that occurs at the heart of a typical star.

The team estimates that the black hole lurking within MoM-BH*-1 weighs up to 100,000 solar masses, which is just large enough to qualify as supermassive.

Unmasking the "little red dots"

The central conundrum of the LRD mystery is that these distant dots are too massive to be regular stars and too dim to be galaxies. Quasars — which lie somewhere between stars and galaxies in terms of luminosity — have, therefore, long been touted as potential contenders for these distant objects.

However, until now, scientists could not explain why these objects were not emitting any detectable high-energy radiation (i.e., X-rays and gamma rays), which we see coming from quasars elsewhere in the universe. Black hole stars could solve this issue because their dense gas cocoons could theoretically block out a lot of the high-energy radiation they produce, essentially masking their true identity.

This is not the first time that scientists have suggested black hole stars could be responsible for LRDs. But until now, researchers could not figure out how these objects formed. In addition, many of the LRDs astronomers have spotted are much larger than MoM-BH*-1, and it is unclear how large black hole stars could really be.

Instead, the researchers suspect most LRDs are actually mini-galaxies, each with a black hole star at its core. If so, such configurations likely arose when black hole stars collided with primordial stellar clusters, the team proposed. Images of MoM-BH*-1 suggest that it could collide with such a galaxy in around 100 million years, showing that this idea is possible. (The two objects likely collided long ago, but we have not seen the light of such an interaction yet.)

The researchers noted that MoM-BH*-1 could already be part of a larger galactic structure but is so bright that it is "outshining its surrounding host galaxy, such that we're seeing pure black hole star light," Naidu said.

However, much more research is needed before scientists can confidently claim that all LRDs are tied to black hole stars.

A cave in eastern Spain is revealing new clues about the ritual lives of Roman women, after archaeologists documented more than 120 Latin inscriptions — the highest number known anywhere in the Roman Empire — at an underground sanctuary. Five of the inscriptions mention a previously unknown goddess referred to simply as "the Lady."

Researchers unearthed the inscriptions during a 2026 excavation at Cova de les Dones (Cave of the Women), near Valencia on Spain's east coast. The discovery significantly expands the number of known writings from the site from 15 initially documented in 2024. The inscriptions mostly date to the first and second centuries A.D. and were found on the walls and ceilings of a deep cave chamber, which the researchers call the "Roman Sanctuary."

"The fact that the texts are concentrated in a specific and delimited area of ​​the cave, away from the entrance, confirms that it is an organized cult," Sergio García-Dils, an archaeologist and speleologist at the Seville National University of Distance Education in Spain, said in a translated statement.

The researchers think the cave hosted a dedicated cult centered on a mysterious goddess whom worshippers called Domina, meaning "the Lady."

Who is "the Lady"?

The new inscriptions shed some light on the identity of the mysterious goddess. Five of the 120 inscriptions refer to Domina, while three of those include the name "Malaci," which may be an epithet for the goddess.

"This goddess had a specific aspect, perhaps related to water, the definitive interpretation of which we are currently working on," Silvia Alfayé, a professor of ancient history at the University of Zaragoza in Spain, said in the statement.

The Roman Sanctuary chamber of the cave features small natural pools, called gours, which collect groundwater. Visitors appear to have deposited offerings in these pools, but whether these were intended for "the Lady" or for other deities remains a mystery.

Evidence of a goddess-worshipping cult

The researchers also found chalice-shaped vessels, two rings, a bracelet, ceramic fragments, plant remains and other archaeological materials in the cave that point to women playing an active role in the cult's rituals.

Several inscriptions contain female names, while archaeologists found numerous spindle whorls associated with textile-making that were often connected with ancient women. The combination of the inscriptions and artifacts suggests women may have participated directly in ceremonies or offerings at the cave, according to the statement.

More inscriptions remain to be deciphered and may reveal additional information about the mysterious goddess and her worshippers.

The new finds add clues to ancient activity inside Cova de les Dones, which has a much older archaeological history. Archaeologists previously identified more than 100 Paleolithic paintings and engravings in the cave, some dating back more than 24,000 years.

"Each new discovery suggests that Cova Dones has been a landmark for the human groups that inhabited this territory for millennia, perhaps due to the permanent presence of water, the characteristics of the underground landscape, or its easy access," the project coordinators said in the statement.

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

Researchers have pioneered a way to create miniaturized copies of a person's carotid artery that could help doctors predict and manage the patient's stroke risk, a new study suggests.

In the research, published in July in the journal Cell Biomaterials, scientists used these "arteries-on-a-chip" to monitor how real blood flows through a patient's carotid arteries, which carry blood to the brain, face and neck. This could enable doctors to identify not just how and what type of clots form in that specific patient, but also determine which medications would be most effective in dealing with the blockage.

While the technique is currently a proof-of-concept, someday, it could help medical practitioners to better tailor treatments for each patient.

"I see this approach being most relevant to difficult clinical cases," said study first author Charles Zhao, a doctoral student at the University of Sydney. "For example, patients who have experienced recurrent events despite treatment, or cases where clinicians have several possible treatment strategies but limited functional information to distinguish between them." Zhao told Live Science in an email.

Ischemic stroke is one of the leading causes of death worldwide, second only to heart disease. The medical emergency is most often caused by a loose blood clot blocking an artery in the brain, starving the cells of oxygen. Obesity, high blood pressure and high cholesterol are all important risk factors for ischemic stroke, and roughly 1 in 5 of these events results from atherosclerosis, or fatty plaque buildup in the arteries.

"When the inner lining of an artery is damaged, material underneath the cells, including collagen, becomes exposed to the blood," Zhao said. A bloodborne protein called von Willebrand factor (VWF) grabs hold of platelets from the flowing blood. Those platelets then stick together and recruit more platelets, building a clot, he said.

But forming a clot is only half the story; it's what this mass does next that determines the risk to the patient.

In some cases, the growing ball of clotted blood will stay firmly rooted to the artery wall, slightly impeding blood flow but not posing any immediate danger. However, if tiny fragments break off this static clot, they can travel toward the brain, where they risk blocking smaller vessels and thus causing a stroke.

"Clinically, we are very good at imaging how narrow an artery is," Zhao said, "but narrowing alone does not tell us exactly how a clot will behave."

This is where artery-on-a-chip models come in, he said. Rather than relying purely on medical scans, the team's model recreates the exact shape and structure of an individual patient's blood vessels using 3D printing. To create the models, they first use a patient’s existing CT scans to 3D print a plastic replica of their carotid artery, including any narrowing caused by atherosclerosis. Next, the inside of this plastic structure is coated with collagen, and then cells that line the carotid artery get layered on top. Blood is passed through the replica artery, mimicking the speed and pressure of blood flow in the body.

"Then [we] use a very small laser injury to expose the collagen underneath," Zhao explained. "We can then flow human blood through the artery and watch thrombosis happen under a microscope." Thrombosis is the formation of a blood clot in a blood vessel.

The researchers created these models for six patients with different types of arterial damage and used various calculations to understand the impacts of changes in blood flow through the structures.

By combining these calculations with the patient-specific artery structures, as well as tests using real blood flow, the researchers built up a far more accurate picture of how clots formed and shed than medical images alone could capture. This revealed striking differences between seemingly equivalent patients.

"We found that two arteries with apparently similar disease can behave very differently because their three-dimensional shapes create different patterns of blood flow," Zhao said. These local conditions within the artery are important in determining whether a clot grows stably or becomes prone to shedding fragments, he added.

These functional differences are particularly important when thinking about how best to reduce a person's stroke risk. Some treatments prevent platelets clumping together into clots. Others prevent platelets from sticking to the artery walls, while still others inhibit the key clot-forming protein VWF. The most effective medication for a given patient will therefore depend on how their clot forms and grows, making these new physical models a valuable complement to traditional imaging, Zhao said.

The team now hopes to expand this research further with the ultimate goal of establishing artery-on-a-chip models as an additional diagnostic step between initial medical imaging and treatment selection for patients.

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

What do you know about the body's hardest-working muscle? Find out with our heart quiz!

Archaeologists have discovered a possible human sacrifice near the pyramid of Huaca Pucllana in the center of Lima, Peru. The skeleton may represent an offering connected to a ceremonial well that was closed up nearly 1,400 years ago.

Bones of an adult male were excavated from an underground water channel at the archaeological site earlier this year, according to an Aug. 18 translated statement from Peru's Ministry of Culture. The man was found resting on his left side, with his skull facing the ocean and the Huaca Pucllana pyramid, hinting he was intentionally placed that way.

The settlement at Huaca Pucllana was established around A.D. 400 in what is now Lima, Peru, and was occupied by different pre-Hispanic cultures until around 1440. The site is well known for its large platform pyramid, which was built by the Lima culture as the focal point of a ceremonial center.

The Lima people performed three main rituals at Huaca Pucllana, according to a 2023 study: the ritual destruction of massive pots, ritual banquets and human sacrifice.

The ritual sacrifices at Huaca Pucllana over four centuries varied in the number of people killed. For example, in 2007 and 2009, archaeologists discovered burials of an adult male and an adult female in the foundations of the pyramid. They believe these individuals were sacrificed to satisfy rituals associated with construction and architectural modifications of the pyramid.

The newly discovered burial, which has been dated to around A.D. 650, was found in a water channel near the pyramid that leads to a ceremonial well. Although the Lima people used small mud bricks to erect the pyramid, they created the well and water channel with river stones, which was an unusual building technique for the Lima people, according to the statement.

The archeologists determined the newfound skeleton likely belonged to an adult male based on the shape of the pelvis and skull. That said, additional studies will officially confirm the sex, as well as the age at death and any trauma on the skeleton that could suggest the person was sacrificed.

Further analyses of the skeleton and the underground water infrastructure may also reveal new clues to the "closing ceremonies" at the ritual well, according to the statement.

How much do you know about the first people to reach the Americas? Find out with our First Americans quiz!

Cats can identify each other based on the scent of their pee, and researchers have just decoded the secret "messages" that make that possible.

A group of chemicals called branched-chain fatty acids (BFAs) help give cats their unique scent marks, a new study found. Unusual fat droplets in the cats' kidneys likely help them maintain that chemical fingerprint in each mark. The researchers reported their findings Aug.ust 19 in the journal Current Biology.

While most animals use a combination of visual, audible and scent-related cues to recognize each other, some also rely on specific chemical signatures. A number of insects, for example, use certain hydrocarbons to determine whether other insects are part of the same colony, and mice excrete urinary proteins that provide identifying information about the individual that left them. But not much is known about how other mammals leave unique scent marks that remain stable over time.

"The way I think of the mouse proteins is kind of equivalent to a human face," said Michael Sheehan, a neurobiologist at Cornell University who was not involved in the study. While a person might recognize someone they know well from less obvious signals such as their hairstyle or the way they walk, people typically recognize others by their faces. "My hunch is probably these branched-chain fatty acids from the cat urine [are] the same deal," Sheehan told Live Science.

In the new study, the researchers investigated domestic cats' flehmen response ‪—‬ an odd, open-mouthed expression many cat owners will recognize. The flehmen response is an innate behavior that draws certain chemicals into a cat's vomeronasal organ when it is investigating interesting odors. The vomeronasal organ helps cats detect pheromones and certain other chemicals in their environment.

The researchers found that cats showed the flehmen response less often, on average, the more they encountered the same urine sample from another cat, but the response increased when urine from a new cat was introduced.

"I found it surprising that an innate behavior could be so strongly influenced by familiarity and learning, rather than being a simple fixed response to a single pheromone," study co-author Masao Miyazaki, a biomolecular scientist at Iwate University in Japan, told Live Science in an email.

The team then used a technique known as high-performance liquid chromatography to split a sample of cat urine into its components, and then showed the cats each part of this sample. Cats consistently showed the flehmen response when they smelled a portion that contained a handful of branched-chain fatty acids.

Each cat had a unique mix of BCFAs in its urine, and these BFAs remained stable for at least a day after the cat left a scent mark, the scientists found. This suggested BFAs could leave information about the cat that made the mark, even after the rest of the urine had evaporated.

The team found BCFAs in lipid (fat) droplets in the renal cortex, the outer part of the kidney. Researchers have known for more than a century that these droplets exist in cat kidneys, but their purpose was unclear. The droplets could act as reservoirs that keep a cat's individual BCFA profile constant even after dietary or health changes, the scientists proposed in the study.

Large cats, including lions and tigers, also have BFAs and lipid droplets in their renal cortices. The specific BCFAs and the number of droplets differed among species, however, which suggests that these features may have diversified as cats evolved.

"We now want to understand how these lipid droplets are formed, maintained, mobilized and linked to secretion into urine," Miyazaki said. "We are also very interested in whether disruption of these processes contributes to chronic kidney disease in cats."

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

IBM has revealed a new modular, ultracold system designed to link hundreds of quantum computer chips together to solve one of the field's biggest infrastructure bottlenecks.

The company says its new "quantum fridges" will let it deliver the world's first fault-tolerant quantum computer in 2029. These stable systems use quantum error correction techniques to fix noise in real time and run quantum operations without interruption.

Achieving fault tolerance would allow computer scientists to carry out new research across a wide array of fields. Whether in chemistry, materials science or theoretical physics, researchers could conduct quantum operations well beyond the scope of modern supercomputers, without worrying about excessive errors rendering computations worthless.

Until now, one of the biggest hurdles standing between today's error-prone systems and fault-tolerant superconducting quantum computers capable of performing a hundred million operations flawlessly has been the infrastructure. IBM representatives say they have solved this problem with its modular, interconnected quantum fridges.

The new cryogenic system comprises individual units measuring 8 feet (2.4 m) tall by 8 feet wide, with an internal capacity of about 9 cubic feet (0.25 cubic m).

It looks like a household refrigerator and works similarly, but it can reach temperatures as low as 10 millikelvins (minus 459.65 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 273.14 degrees Celsius) ‪—‬ close to absolute zero, the coldest theoretical temperature possible — which is more than 180 times colder than deep space.

These extremely low temperatures are necessary for IBM's superconducting quantum processing units (QPUs) to operate properly, and the modular design allows engineers to expand a system's capabilities and power one stage at a time.

According to IBM representatives, this milestone represents the first time that scientists have demonstrated interconnectivity among QPUs between separate cryogenic modules.

Modular quantum computing

Just like their classical computing counterparts, superconducting quantum computers use built-in circuits, or "gates," to conduct processing operations. Engineers can squeeze a finite number of qubits per chip, however, and each chip needs to be cooled to below 15 mK (minus 459.64 F, or minus 273.14 C) to function properly in IBM's architecture.

That's because qubits are inherently noisy — meaning they are naturally far more error-prone than conventional computing components. To tap into the quantum mechanical properties of the superconducting metals in the qubits without calculations failing, scientists must minimize interference from heat alongside other stimuli, like electromagnetic waves.

To achieve these temperatures in the new refrigerators, engineers use third-party cryogenic hardware that relies on helium cryo compressors paired with commercial dilution refrigeration engines for cooling. They maintain thermal protection using vacuum-sealed enclosures, electromagnetic interference gaskets, and multilayered Mylar super-insulation heat shields.

It takes more than four days for the modules to reach a temperature of about 4 K (minus 452.47 F, or minus 269.15 C), with the final push to sub-15-mK temperatures occurring shortly thereafter, IBM representatives said in a statement.

Expanding beyond a few hundred or thousand gates requires more chips and more space. But engineers can't just build a giant, ultracold building and fill it with QPUs. This would require enormous amounts of infrastructure and leave the system brittle. Every time an engineer needed to upgrade the system, troubleshoot a hardware fault, or inspect the chips, they'd have to break the temperature seal, potentially interrupting operations.

IBM's breakthrough cryogenics system overcomes this problem by giving engineers dedicated modules that can house a limited number of chips. The key innovation is the ability to network modules together to harness the combined power of the individual quantum processors. This is achieved through the implementation of "L-couplers," superconducting cables that are approximately 3.3 feet (1 meter) long.

"Normally when we do quantum operations between qubits, we do them on chip," Oliver Dial, vice president of quantum operations at IBM, explained at an Aug. 18 news conference. "And so we use on-chip couplers that go very short distances to create entanglement to let us do 2-qubit gates. What the L-couplers let us do is perform the same feat, but over an aluminum superconducting cable that can be up to about a meter long. And it's really critical to us because it forms the foundation of our modular designs."

Ushering in the new era of fault tolerance

IBM intends to deploy its new modular cryogenic architecture in 2027, with near-term systems using two to three cells supporting around 1,000 qubits in total. The goal is to reach 100 million gates — or 100 million quantum operations in a single session — by 2029 with the debut of IBM's "Starling" quantum computer.

But first, it will need to perform computations across modules. So far, scientists have only demonstrated that two cryogenic modules can be interconnected and simultaneously cooled to the required operating temperatures. They tested the modules for simple gate operations with the "Flamingo" processor, but they have not yet conducted complex operations with them. The team intends to install its current generation "Nighthawk" processors in the coming days.

"We have nailed down the science towards fault tolerance on computing, and … a big part of what we're doing to get there now is engineering," Jerry Chow, IBM's chief technology officer of quantum-centric supercomputing, said at the news conference. "It's not about a single breakthrough to get to fault tolerance. It's really about thousands of these little engineering feats that we're demonstrating all across our entire ecosystem, from processors, to the software stack, to the controls, to the infrastructure, to the error correction which sits on top."

Quantum computing labs currently use other stand-alone cryogenics systems, and other quantum computing systems are being designed to operate at room temperature, such as those that use photons (particles of light) ‪— ‬or even lab-made diamonds — as qubits.

During the news conference, IBM representatives claimed that "Starling" will be the world's first fault-tolerant quantum computer one day. But whether the company actually achieves this feat, given that other quantum computing companies are chasing the same milestone, is another question.

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

Concerns are on the rise about young people's social media use as governments, parents and schools look to curb children's exposure to threats such as cyberbullying and sexual harassment. Other experts are worried about the rise in misinformation, including misleading medical and health content or the oversimplification of conditions like ADHD.

One proposed solution is to ban children below a certain age from using social media platforms altogether. Last year, Australia put this option into practice, with a world-first law that requires social media platforms to prohibit users under age 16 from having accounts. The U.K. enacted a similar ban that will go into effect in spring 2027, and several U.S. states have established social media bans for minors, though a larger federal ban has not been passed.

In a Live Science poll, we asked our readers whether they thought such a ban would be effective.

More than 150 people voted in our poll, published Aug. 16. As of Aug. 18, the results showed a fairly close split between the top two answers, with 36% of voters picking "No, there's not enough enforcement, and young people will just find other ways to get online," and 29% of voters picking "Yes, I believe that this could help young people's well-being." About 21% of voters leaned against a blanket age ban, picking "No, a ban causes too many unintended harms, and other changes to social media would be more effective."

Readers' comments added more details to their voting choices, with one commenter writing, "They were not created for anyone to ban, if you still think that the old elites (ruling classes) are capable of opposing the new, then you are being disingenuous. You will not be able to ban/defeat anything. Only a more interesting alternative, that's all."

Another commenter said the ban could encourage young people to find workarounds, stating, "Look, we were all kids. How many times were we able to use work arounds to side step some of our parents [sic] rules. If you think these rules are going to stop kids from using social media, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn I would like to sell you."

For others, the logistics of how a ban could be enforced gave some pause. One commenter wrote that they're on the fence. "I'm not sure how such a law could be enforced without methods that require giving out personal information like an ID, which is iffy when it comes [to] security concerns with online sites," they said.

The brain develops in stages, and it's important that certain cells form before others so that precise neural connections can emerge later. But miniature models of the brain, called organoids, may not share this same sense of time, a new study finds.

These brain organoids are clusters of lab-grown neurons that mimic structural and functional aspects of full-size brains. Some scientists use these "minibrains" to study brain disorders that can arise during fetal development.

If the precisely timed processes involved in brain development go wrong, it can lead to conditions like macrocephaly and microcephaly in which the brain grows abnormally large or small, said study co-author Simon Hippenmeyer, a neuroscientist at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria.

Because it's not possible to directly study these conditions in human fetuses, scientists like Hippenmeyer turn to brain organoids. But the new study, published Aug. 12 in the journal Nature, suggests that organoids may be missing some crucial ingredients that would help them resemble real brains.

A matter of time

In earlier experiments in mice, Hippenmeyer's team tracked the stem cells that make neurons, called radial glial progenitors (RGPs), during early embryonic development. They did this by giving pregnant mice a drug that activated fluorescent labels on individual stem cells. Then, they traced the resulting lineages of those stem cells after birth to see how many cells they produced and how that number changed as development progressed.

In the new study, they used that data as a reference to compare with brain organoids grown from mouse embryonic stem cells. They aimed to see if the developmental sequence in the organoids resembled that in the real brains.

The organoids produced the same major types of cells as the real brain did, the team found. However, the sequence of development was not preserved.

During normal brain development, RGPs in the cerebral cortex — the brain's outermost tissues — divide to increase their numbers and then differentiate, forming neurons and glial cells, which help to support, nourish and insulate neurons. In the organoids, however, some RGPs formed neurons too early, while others were still proliferating.

Normally, RGPs from later stages of development produce fewer descendants than the stem cells do in early development. But in the organoids, they produced more descendants regardless of the developmental time frame.

After seeing these patterns, the team investigated the variety of neurons that a single RGP could produce in an organoid. The cortex is made up of six layers of tissue, and normally, an individual RGP can produce both deeper-layer neurons (earlier in development) and upper-layer neurons (in the later stages). But in the organoids, about one-third of the RGPs became restricted to just one of these fates and then couldn't make the other type of neuron.

In a real brain, Hippenmeyer noted, there are blood vessels, extracellular structures and metabolic signals that affect the organ's development but are absent in the organoid. The researchers think these external signals may help coordinate the timing of neuronal development and the later formation of neural circuits.

"This suggests that there is something about the local environment of the cells [in the brain] that gives rise to the neurons," said Denis Jabaudon, a neurobiologist at the University of Geneva who was not involved in the study. However, scientists don't have a precise understanding of what those signals are yet, Jabaudon said.

For neurons to find each other, they have to be in the right place at the right time, Jabaudon added. "So, if you shift the timing of development, you're going to be shifting the opportunities for connections and the opportunities for specific circuits" to form, he told Live Science.

Identifying what's missing from these organoids will involve identifying and investigating those external signals neurons receive in the live brain. Then, scientists can identify differences between real brains and organoids that inform us about how the process naturally happens, Hippenmeyer said.

Once these missing ingredients are identified, this could "open the door" to systematically add back those signals in organoids in a way that would mimic the real brain closely, he told Live Science. Hippenmeyer added that the team also plans to grow brain organoids with human cells and investigate the same questions.

"We are very keen on finding out how those radial glial stem cells would behave in a human system," he told Live Science.

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

Astronomers have discovered the closest, fastest star ever seen orbiting Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the 4.3 million-solar-mass black hole at the heart of our galaxy. The faint star, named S301, completes a lap every 8.7 years and skims past the black hole at roughly 55 million mph (90 million km/h) — about 8% the speed of light. Its orbit is so tight that, within about a decade, researchers should be able to measure its spin rate. The discovery was reported Aug. 19 in the journal Nature.

Stars as lanterns in warped space

The center of the Milky Way, some 27,000 light-years away, is one of the best natural laboratories physicists have. A few dozen stars swarm the galaxy's central black hole on tight orbits, and because gravity there is far stronger than anywhere else we can watch closely, those stars behave in ways Isaac Newton never anticipated.

"Stars orbiting Sgr A* are very interesting objects, as they serve as luminous probes of the curved spacetime around the black hole," study co-author Felix Mang, a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, told Live Science via email.

Until now, the star doing most of that work was S2, a bright star on a 16-year orbit. Astronomers have followed S2 since 1992, through more than two full laps, and that tracking revealed two hallmark predictions of Einstein's theory of general relativity: light from the star losing energy as it climbs out of the black hole's gravity well, and the slow rotation of its elliptical orbit, known as Schwarzschild precession.

Those effects depend only on the black hole's mass. But black holes have a second property: rotation. A spinning black hole drags the fabric of space around with it, like a spoon stirring honey. That effect fades extremely quickly with distance, so measuring rotation requires a star that dives much closer to the black hole than S2 ever does.

Measurements of black holes' rotations also matter beyond black hole physics. One leading alternative to general relativity "postulates the existence of a fundamental fifth force that arises, for example, from unifying gravity and quantum physics," Mang said.

Any deviation from Einstein's predictions should show up in these stellar orbits. So far, he said, "only an upper limit could be derived, which gets progressively lower" — in other words, there are no cracks in Einstein's theory yet, but the tests keep tightening.

A record-breaking orbit

That is where S301 comes in. In images captured by the GRAVITY instrument on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile, the astronomers "discovered a new, very faint star in the Galactic Center that is orbiting the central massive black hole Sgr A* so closely that its orbit is sensitive to the spin of the black hole," Mang said.

The star first showed up in spring 2023 as a faint smudge northwest of the black hole. Once the team had a rough orbit, they went back through archival observations and found it again in data from 2021 and 2017. In total, 19 measured positions spanning eight years trace out a complete, closed ellipse in the sky.

The orbit is extreme by every measure. S301 takes 8.7 years to orbit the black hole, beating the previous record holder — a star on a 12-year orbit — and S301's path is stretched into a needle-thin ellipse. At its closest approach, it passes within about 12 astronomical units from the black hole ‪—‬ 12 times the distance between Earth and the sun ‪—‬ and around 10 times closer than S2 ever gets.

Even at that distance, S301 is safe. It appears to be an ordinary main-sequence star of about 1.5 solar masses — compact enough that the black hole's tides cannot tear it apart. Its wildly elongated orbit suggests a violent origin; the team proposed that S301 was probably once half of a tight double star that strayed too close, was ripped in two, and had its partner flung out of the galaxy as a hypervelocity star.

The tight orbit is already showing relativity at work. "We found that the orbit of S301 succumbs to strong general relativistic effects, as the so-called Schwarzschild precession — the turning of the orbital ellipse within its own plane — is very apparent," Mang said. The ellipse swings around by about 2 degrees every lap. "Within the next ten years," he added, "a measurement of the spin of Sgr A* with S301 is within reach."

The hard part, and what comes next

Finding S301 was itself a feat. From Earth, the star appears about 2 billion times fainter than Betelgeuse ‪—‬ one of the brightest stars in our sky — and it sits in a crowded field beside far brighter neighbors, making it the observational equivalent of picking out a single fly buzzing over a full orchestra. It took a new image-reconstruction method, plus GRAVITY's recent upgrade to GRAVITY+, which boosted its sensitivity by a factor of 10 to 100, to pull the signal out.

One piece is still missing: The team can see how S301 moves across the sky, but not toward or away from us, which leaves two mirror-image orbits equally consistent with the data.

Now, they plan to fill in that gap. "We will keep following S301 closely along its orbit," Mang said, both with GRAVITY and an upcoming instrument that measures how light from the star shifts toward the red or blue end of the spectrum as it moves away from or closer to Earth.

Simulations by the team suggest that a decade of such combined observations could pin down the black hole's spin well enough to distinguish a rapidly rotating black hole from a stationary one with high confidence. Statistically, S301 should not be alone; roughly 100 similar stars may lurk on comparable orbits, but most of them are too faint to be seen today.

See how much you know about black holes with our black hole quiz!

NASA has finally revealed its first images of the crater made by a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage that smashed into the moon on Aug. 5.

The images, captured by the space agency's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) between Aug. 11 and 12, show a 60-foot-wide (18 meters) crater surrounded by streaks of lunar rock thrown up by the rocket's impact.

The new crater was carved into the lunar surface by the upper stage of one of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets, which launched on Jan. 15, 2025 to deliver a pair of lunar landers to the moon. Unlike Falcon 9's lower stage, which can return to Earth to be reused, the rocket's upper stage is discarded in orbit. In this case, after drifting around our planet for nearly a year, a combination of solar radiation and the moon's gravitational pull nudged the 4.4-ton (4 metric tons) rocket section away from Earth and toward our rocky satellite, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com.

Finding the impact site was a challenge that required global cooperation between hobbyists and experts, NASA said in a statement on Tuesday (Aug. 18). The crash occurred near Einstein crater on the northwestern limb of the moon, which was facing the sun at the time of the collision. As a result, the initial flare from the crash was not visible from Earth.

The speed of the collision further complicated the hunt: The rocket stage hit the surface at an estimated 5,400 mph (8,700 km/h). While this may sound fast, it's still a lot slower than the average speed of meteoroids that crash into the moon, which NASA say is anywhere between 45,000 mph (72,420 km/h) and 160,000 mph (257,495 km/h). As a result, the impact was relatively small and therefore even harder to see from Earth.

The crash was first predicted by independent astronomer Bill Gray in May. According to NASA, the agency's Center for Near Earth Object Studies then refined these initial predictions to more precisely estimate the location of the impact site.

The first spacecraft to come within range of the site was South Korea's Danuri lunar orbiter, which revealed the first images of the small, blackened crater on Aug. 6. NASA's LRO photographed the same spot six days later.

"The orbiter circles the Moon from pole to pole every two hours, while the Moon slowly rotates underneath it," the space agency said in the statement. "To photograph a specific spot, the spacecraft must wait until that location turns into view."

Using its Narrow-Angle Camera, the LRO was able to snap the crater from several different viewing angles, which enabled scientists to estimate the crater's size as roughly 60 feet wide (18 m) and less than 10 feet (3 m) deep.

The images also show light and dark streaks radiating from the crater, which NASA says are lines of dust and rocks thrown up from the lunar surface during the impact. The darker streaks are made by weathered material from near the surface, while the lighter streaks near the rim are made up of older rocks from deeper underground.

Over the past decade, there's been a revolution in archaeology as we integrate the science of ancient genomics into the study of humanity ‪—‬ and it is upending our traditional views of the role of women in the past.

When archaeologists first excavated a 4,000-year-old grave near Stonehenge in 1801, they identified the well-furnished remains inside as that of a man. This misidentification persisted for over two centuries, until ancient-DNA analysis revealed unequivocally that this skilled goldsmith was a woman. The discovery, announced in July, is just one example of many in recent years where DNA science is revealing a more complex pattern of gender roles in our prehistoric past.

But traditional views are hard to shed. In 2017, when analyses revealed that the classic Viking warrior leader whose remains were found in Birka, Sweden, was a woman, some challenged the science, while others questioned the interpretation of the findings, leading researchers to respond in a rebuttal. It was hard for researchers to believe that women could have been powerful.

The assumption that past societies were typically male-dominated only really emerged in the late 19th century. Ancient historians of the 1860s, recognizing numerous accounts of political and war-waging women in classical texts, had proposed instead that patriarchal societies became more typical around the time of the ancient Greeks and that, prior to Rome, female-led communities were more common. But this notion was rejected by U.K. researchers by the 1880s. For the next century, the social role of past women was largely minimized.

This bias shaped archeologists' understanding of their findings. In 1972, David Clarke, Britain's leading archaeological thinker at the time, described hillforts as "territorial centers for the exchange of lower order goods, stock and women." In other words, women were essentially traded like animals. In 1986, Peter Hinton, who helmed the U.K.'s Chartered Institute for Archaeology for 20 years, said grave goods buried with women do not reveal high status as they do with men, as a matriarchal society had never existed. Instead, he argued that "the woman is being used to display her husband's wealth," and that "a richly ornamented woman is a status symbol for a man."

By the 1970s, however, German archaeologists had begun to recognize that the archaeology of Early Iron Age Europe bears evidence of very-high-status women ‪—‬ most notably, the apex high-status women of The Heuneburg hillfort in Germany and also in what was then eastern Gaul in the generations after 600 B.C. By the 2000s, archaeological analyses of later Iron Age cemeteries in the Paris Basin and East Yorkshire revealed relative gender parity in how men and women were treated at death. At the same time, skeletal analysis was showing that some women actually fought Rome — the backdrop to the Roman historian Tacitus' writings on Boudica.

Now, as the science of ancient genetics further challenges traditional perspectives, the variability in women's social roles throughout history is becoming clearer.

In 2025, a team of nearly 50 scientists revealed evidence for female lineages at Neolithic Çatalhöyük (7000 to 6000 B.C.), a site known as one of the first crop-producing communities. Put another way, burial traditions prioritized female offspring and descendants, suggesting that inheritance worked through the female line. This discovery was a surprise — but perhaps it shouldn't have been.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Marija Gimbutas, a scholar of Neolithic society and professor at Harvard and UCLA, argued that the archaeological evidence from sites like Çatalhöyük was pointing to a prehistoric ‘matriarchal’ society. Yet, my generation of U.K. archaeologists learned from Cambridge professors that Gimbutas was fundamentally wrong.

Late 20th century archaeological theory suggested instead that Neolithic crop production signified the onset of a "domestication" of both women and animals. Viewed from that lens, Neolithic figurines found at Çatalhöyük and other sites were interpreted as representing pregnancy, with female fertility as women's primary role. Women scholars soon pointed out that it was in fact the menopausal body that was often represented, or women as elders.

Only recently, in the face of genetic evidence, is the academic reputation of Gimbutas being restored. The evidence for female lineages at Çatalhöyük opens up the possibility that the Neolithic agricultural revolution, which required the successful marshaling of communal labor in production, may have instead been linked to female land rights.

But women-led societies were not universal. Further west, where agriculture was still relatively small-scale, we find different social norms. For instance, in 2022, analysis of the Hazleton North long barrow in Gloucestershire, England (3700 to 3600 B.C.) revealed evidence for Neolithic polygyny — DNA from offspring reveals four women buried with their shared male sexual partner. That same year, Bronze Age sites on Orkney revealed descent as traced through the male line and it was women who moved outside their natal communities. The past is proving a more complex picture than originally thought.

The evidence for a matrilineal Iron Age keeps piling up. In 2024, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany revealed the first scientific evidence for Early Iron Age matrilineal dynastic succession, in which both lineage and land go through the female line. In 2025, researchers found matrilocality and matrilineal descent in Late Iron Age Dorset. We now have 13 generations of matrilineal descent evidenced in third-century-B.C. Yorkshire, and five more sites with matrilineal descent in Late Iron Age Britain, and others without.

Our task is to remember that, as author L.P. Hartley once said: "the past is foreign country; they do things differently there." As the picture of different male-focused and female-focused societies builds through time, we will likely find a patchwork of different social forms.

Prehistoric societies are smaller than traditionally assumed ‪—‬ valleys, coasts and peninsulas with shared values on a regional scale, at most. While some cemeteries reveal matrilineal descent, others do not. While some hillforts show women in combat, others show only men.

The challenge is to remain as objective as we can, and to expect the unexpected.

Opinion on Live Science gives you insight on the most important issues in science that affect you and the world around you today, written by experts and leading scientists in their field.

The patient: A 65-year-old woman in Qatar

The symptoms: The woman had been dealing with unexplained chest pain for several months, although earlier tests of her heart health had come back normal. She had stopped attending follow-up appointments regarding the chest pain.

But then, she experienced three days of chest pain and shortness of breath that got worse with activity. The symptoms, which began shortly after she attended her daughter’s wedding, initially brought her to a clinic, according to a report of the case.

An electrocardiogram (ECG or EKG) showed changes in her heart's electrical activity. This is a sign doctors look for when diagnosing a heart attack, because during the event, blood flow to the heart is impaired and that can injure or kill heart-muscle cells. So, the patient was rushed to a hospital emergency department.

What happened next: By the time the patient reached the emergency room, her chest pain had eased, but a repeat ECG showed different electrical abnormalities from the local clinic.

Blood tests showed an elevated level of troponin, a protein that leaks into blood when heart muscle is damaged. An ultrasound of her heart showed that its main pumping chamber, the left ventricle, wasn't squeezing properly; its pumping strength, known as ejection fraction, had dropped from 58% five months earlier to just 35%. (The healthy range is 50% to 70%.) The left ventricle had also ballooned out of shape at the tip.

Doctors performed an angiogram, a test that uses a thin tube and dye to check for blocked arteries, and found that her arteries were clear.

An X-ray of her heart confirmed the same ballooning shape that was seen on the ultrasound, and an MRI ruled out permanent damage from a silent heart attack or scarring of the tissue.

The diagnosis: Doctors diagnosed the patient with takotsubo cardiomyopathy, also known as stress cardiomyopathy or "broken heart syndrome." The condition temporarily weakens the heart muscle and causes it to balloon, producing symptoms that closely resemble a heart attack.

The condition is thought to be triggered by a sudden surge of stress hormones, such as adrenaline (also called epinephrine), that temporarily stun the heart. The diagnosis was confirmed using the Mayo Clinic's diagnostic criteria, which require ruling out other potential causes, such as heart inflammation (myocarditis), and confirming that there are no significant artery blockages.

The criteria also require that the affected part of the heart extend beyond the area supplied by just one artery — different from a typical heart attack, which usually damages only the region fed by a single blocked vessel. Doctors also look for new ECG changes with modest troponin elevation.

The treatment: The woman was treated with standard medications for heart failure medical therapy, such as beta blockers, and discharged once she was stable, with a follow-up scheduled at a heart-failure clinic. She resumed her usual daily activities without limitations, and a follow-up ECG showed that her heart's pumping function had recovered to 56%, close to her original baseline.

What makes the case unique: According to the report, takotsubo cardiomyopathy is most often triggered by distressing events, such as the death of a loved one or a serious diagnosis. In this case, though, the trigger was a happy one, which made it an example of "happy heart syndrome," a rare subtype of the condition first described by researchers in 2016. Intense positive emotions can activate some of the same stress pathways in the body that negative ones do, as these cases demonstrate.

Takotsubo cardiomyopathy accounts for an estimated 1% to 3% of cases of acute coronary syndromes, an umbrella term for conditions that involve sudden reduced blood flow to the heart. Within that group, the happy heart variant is rarer still. An analysis of the International Takotsubo Registry, which has data from more than 1,700 broken-heart patients around the world, found that positive emotional triggers were behind about 4.1% of emotionally triggered cases. The large majority were tied to grief, fear or other distressing events.

Compared with the classic symptoms of broken heart syndrome, happy heart syndrome tends to produce a different pattern of heart muscle ballooning that more often affects the middle or base of the heart in addition to the tip. That alternate pattern was not seen in this case, though.

Some research suggests happy heart patients may have milder symptoms and better outcomes than broken heart patients; they have a lower chance of severe heart failure during their hospital stay, for instance. That said, the authors noted that further data is needed to confirm this difference.

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

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

Archaeologists in the Scottish Highlands have discovered the 2,000-year-old burial of an adult in a possible ritual well. The burial may have been made during a closing ceremony when the well was abandoned.

Archaeologists discovered the enigmatic grave during expansion of a quarry in northern Scotland, according to a statement from Highland Archaeology Services that was emailed to Live Science.

The base of the well, which is about 10 feet (3 meters) long and 3 feet (1 m) deep, "is lined with stone slabs and clay pushed between the gaps in the stonework, possibly to help the structure hold water," the archaeologists wrote in the statement.

Based on artifacts found near the well, the archaeologists believe the burial was made during the Iron Age (800 B.C. to A.D. 400). Animal bones were placed on top of the burial, but no other grave goods were found.

"Iron Age burials from the north of Scotland are fairly rare finds in general," Lachlan McKeggie, co-director of Highland Archaeology Services, told Live Science in an email.

The archaeologists are not yet certain of the sex of the skeleton, what age they were or how they died. Further analysis will be taking place over the next few months, which should give us a date for both the feature and the human remains, as well as confirm the sex, age range and pathologies, McKeggie said.

The burial is located not far from an Iron Age settlement at Camore Wood, McKeggie said, where archaeologists have previously found the remains of at least 20 hut circles. The remains of possible roundhouses were also found near the well burial, the team said in an Aug. 7 field report. But it’s not clear if this burial is related to the Camore Wood settlement, which is located about 1 mile (1.6 km) away.

One possible explanation for the unusual burial is that it may have been part of a ritual performed when the well was closed.

"There are other examples of burials as 'closing' rituals in significant places, such as at High Pasture Cave on Skye," McKeggie said, where archaeologists found the burial of a woman and two babies at the entrance to a cave that was ceremonially closed during the Iron Age.

Analysis of the remains is ongoing, and the team hopes to have more information on the burial in the next few months. Additionally, 3D scans of some of the finds have been done, a few of which can be seen on the team's website.

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

Controversial wellness products called peptides are rising in popularity as they're touted by leaders like Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

While some peptides — including drugs like Ozempic — have been rigorously tested and approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), many peptides are untested and unregulated. These untested peptides are often accessible online for anyone to purchase from loosely regulated manufacturers. There's now a multibillion-dollar gray market for these products, in which many peptides are sold without human-safe manufacturing processes or human testing to demonstrate their effectiveness, scientists say.

Recently, an FDA advisory panel voted to increase consumers' access to several peptides, saying the products — marketed for sleep issues, wound healing, cognitive disorders and more — should be available through compounding pharmacies with a prescription. These pharmacies, which offer customized medications, are subject to less oversight than traditional pharmacies and can distribute drugs that have not been FDA approved. Opponents of the advisory panel's decision argue that these peptides have not gone through rigorous clinical testing and could pose risks to consumers.

So what does this advisory panel decision mean for peptide regulation, and how might it affect consumers? And at the end of the day, are the peptides safe? Here's what you need to know.

What are peptides?

Broadly speaking, peptides are short chains of amino acids, the same building blocks that make up proteins. Peptides are smaller than proteins, and their structures are less complex.

Body-made peptides can act as messengers throughout the body, telling cells what to do. Some are considered hormones and some are not. There are about 7,000 known peptides that help organs communicate with each other and direct various bodily functions and behaviors, including blood sugar control and mood. Insulin, oxytocin, vasopressin and endorphins are examples.

The first synthetically manufactured peptide was insulin, which is normally produced by the pancreas to regulate blood sugar levels but is lacking in people with diabetes. Recently, peptides called GLP-1 agonists — the class of drugs that includes Ozempic and Wegovy — have become incredibly popular. Naturally expressed in the gut, the GLP-1 hormone functions, in part, by telling the brain that you've had enough to eat.

While these peptides are usually injectable medicines, others are taken orally or inhaled via nasal sprays. Peptides that are intended to treat or prevent disease, or to affect the structure or function of the body, are legally considered drugs and should be regulated and approved for safety and effectiveness by the FDA. (However, that doesn't always happen, as we'll explain in the following section.)

Plant- or food-derived peptides, such as collagen peptides, are considered supplements. Supplements are less strictly regulated than drugs are, which results in their potency and purity being more variable than that of approved drugs.

What uses of peptides are backed by scientific evidence (and which aren't)?

Peptides like insulin and GLP-1 agonists have been extensively studied for years through rigorous trials to determine whether they are safe and effective for human use and to treat specific ailments. This is what is required to obtain FDA approval. The FDA has approved the use of about 100 peptides for therapeutic use against specific conditions, such as diabetes and multiple sclerosis.

That said, there are also peptides that have become popular for general wellness and even "biohacking," a form of self-experimentation to optimize physical and mental performance. These unapproved peptides are sold online, often with the label "research use only." The label acts as a loophole to legally bypass the regulatory oversight that would usually be applied to approved drugs. That said, the FDA has come after companies that explicitly advertised and sold these products for human use, despite that research-only label.

"Only a few peptides are actually FDA approved meaning they are safe and efficacious for certain diseases," Dr. Jonathan Long, a peptide researcher and associate professor of pathology at Stanford University, told Live Science in an email. "Many other peptides are still not FDA approved and should be considered experimental."

How is the regulation around peptides changing in the U.S.?

In July, an FDA advisory panel discussed seven unapproved peptides and voted to recommend increased access to six of them. The products are marketed for myriad uses, including boosting muscle recovery, treating gut damage, dampening inflammation, improving metabolism, enhancing cognition and extending longevity.

The panel recommended that these peptides be allowed to be prepared and distributed by compounding pharmacies. This is a recommendation and not a binding decision, meaning the FDA can now decide whether to go with the panel's idea. The FDA must complete a formal rulemaking process before any policy change becomes final.

According to Dr. Katrin Svensson, another peptide researcher and associate professor of pathology at Stanford University, this move could represent a reversal of U.S. peptide regulation. The FDA restricted these six peptides and others from compounding in 2023, deeming them too dangerous for compounding pharmacies to make, she told Live Science in an email.

"[These peptides] are not approved medicines, they have not been tested in humans and have little or no experimental data in cells or animals," she emphasized.

Notably, the FDA advisory committee includes eight members recently appointed by Kennedy, many of whom have ties to the peptide industry. Although their recommendation is not binding, this support of increased access to unapproved compounds could spur online sellers to promote even more unregulated peptide usage. There's also a concern that allowing the products to be sold more widely could undermine research into their legitimate medical uses, given companies can sell them without hard evidence.

What is the scientific evidence behind the decision?

"There is no new scientific evidence tied to these decisions, which is partly the problem," Svensson said.

Long agreed. "This decision does not say that these peptides are more scientifically legitimate, or that they are safe, or that they are efficacious," he said. "The only thing this vote does is to potentially allow more people to access these peptides via compounding pharmacies."

Are the changes to peptide access expected to help or hurt consumers?

While increased access to peptides may result in more people injecting themselves with untested substances, compounded peptides are at least safer than research-grade peptides, experts told Live Science.

"Obtaining peptides from a compounding pharmacy means that it will be the peptide in the vial, and that the purity will be high, and that the vial will be sterile," Long said. "But it still does not mean that these peptides are safe for human use, or that they can treat any human diseases."

However, Svensson cautioned that peptides are not one thing.

"They range from medicines to unproven experimental compounds, and this shift is driven by policy, not new science," she said. "Easier access doesn't lower the evidence bar, and the trials that would show whether these actually help still haven't been done."

What should consumers know about peptides?

It's possible that allowing compounding pharmacies to make the six peptides could mean they're less likely to contain contaminants and may be more consistently pure than completely unregulated versions of the products. But that doesn't mean they will do what they have been promoted to do or be safe to use in the long term or in combination with medicines or with other peptides.

"'Allowed to be compounded' does not mean 'FDA-approved,'" Svensson said. "For most wellness peptides the human evidence is thin, the right dose is unknown, and you can't be sure what's in the vial."

"I myself personally would not be injecting myself with any experimental molecules," Long said.

Neanderthals may have trekked deep into the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula around 55,000 years ago, a new study of stone tools suggests.

The research, published online Aug. 12 in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, hints that Neanderthals may have lived farther south than scientists thought, though more evidence is needed to confirm that conclusion.

"Our findings extend the Neanderthal range much further south than had been known, and into the much more open environments of Arabia," study co-lead author Huw Groucutt, an archaeologist at the University of Malta, told Live Science in an email.

The study focused on stone tools discovered at Jebel Katefeh-1 (JKF-1), an archaeological site beside an ancient lake near the city of Jubbah, in Saudi Arabia's Nefud Desert (also spelled Nafud or An Nafūd). No Neanderthal bones have ever been found in Arabia, so researchers wondered who was making tools there.

The new study found that tools discovered at JKF-1 more closely matched those made by Neanderthals than those crafted by Homo sapiens.

Neanderthals have traditionally been viewed as a cold-adapted, primarily European species. But that picture has been changing for years, as evidence has placed them thousands of miles east in Siberia as well as in the Middle East.

Lacking bones or DNA, Groucutt and his colleagues identified the Neanderthal tools based on the unique shape of their stone flakes. The team measured hundreds of sharp pieces of tools struck from a carefully prepared stone core from JKF-1 and other sites across Arabia, the Levant and northeast Africa.

Using statistical techniques, the researchers compared the flakes' shapes across time and space. Based on the differences between stone tools from other sites where the toolmakers' identities were well established, the researchers created a statistical model to help them identify whether a group of stone tools was made by Neanderthals or H. sapiens.

When they applied the model to the stone tools from JKF-1 and tools from a smaller nearby site called ALM-3, the results showed that it was far more likely that Neanderthals, not H. sapiens, had made the tools.

To pin down when those tools were made, the team dug a new trench at JFK-1 and dated grains of sand from the soil using a method called optically stimulated luminescence, which reveals how long ago those grains were last exposed to sunlight.

Previous work had dated the tools to somewhere between 90,000 and 50,000 years ago. But the new work narrowed down that range. The tools were discovered in a layer where older desert sand gave way to younger lake sediment, showing that people were at JKF-1 around 55,000 years ago, just as the desert was turning wetter.

Neanderthals were the only group living in southwest Asia 55,000 years ago. This date, together with the tools’ shape, is why the researchers think Neanderthals made them, even though no Neanderthal bones have yet been found in Arabia.

Knut Bretzke, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany who wasn't involved in the research, said the study's evidence for a Neanderthal presence in northern Arabia was compelling.

The new dates suggest the Neanderthal foray into Arabia may be linked to a shift in climate. JKF-1’s stone tools sit right at the transition from a dry spell to a humid phase, when a nearby lake was refilling and the surrounding desert would have begun turning green. Drawing on his own fieldwork in southern Arabia, Bretzke said that the wet spell may have drawn grazing animals into the desert interior, and Neanderthals would likely have followed them.

Still, Bretzke said the underlying assumptions deserve scrutiny. Several comparison sites used in the computer model are surface sites, where artifacts can accumulate over vast stretches of time, rather than a single occupation where artifacts are discarded over a short period, he told Live Science, but he finds the paper's conclusion plausible.

For now, though, the evidence that Neanderthals lived farther south than previously known remains circumstantial.

"Do I believe there were any Neanderthals in northern Saudi Arabia? Yes," Bretzke said. "Do I think we have solid evidence to prove that belief? No."

Groucutt agreed that a fossil would help settle the question. But he noted that bones and ancient DNA preserve poorly in Arabia's heat, so stone tools currently provide archaeologists' best window into the region's deep past.

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

Scientists have successfully shrunk three components used in photonic microchips by up to 500 times, leaving considerably more space for other on-chip functionality. The achievement was made possible with an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm that generated these tiny designs, which the researchers described as "beyond human intuition."

Whereas conventional microchips use electrons to transmit and process information, photonic microchips utilize particles of light (photons). They can therefore process and transmit data much faster than electronic chips can, because photons can carry information at the speed of light. They also offer higher bandwidth, as different wavelengths can carry distinct data streams, and they lose less energy as heat.

As a result, photonic chips are used where fast, high-bandwidth data transmission is essential, such as in fiber-optic communications, data centers, AI, lidar systems for autonomous vehicles, and quantum computing.

Instead of metal wires, micrometer-wide channels called waveguides direct light across the photonic chip. These chips also contain wavelength splitters, spatial mode sorters and mirrors — all of which are essential for separating and directing different wavelengths and light patterns within a footprint a fraction of the width of a human hair.

In the new study, the scientists used AI-generated designs to fabricate these three components on an ultracompact scale. They published their findings May 28 in the journal Nature Communications.

The newly available on-chip space could allow engineers to "unlock new functionalities" by packing on more components, the researchers wrote in the study. Notably, the work demonstrates that AI can produce boundary-pushing chip designs that are also practical to manufacture.

AI worked backward to generate the component designs

The researchers started by informing the algorithm exactly what they wanted the components to do to the light and by providing certain manufacturing constraints, such as limits on how sharply the nanostructures could curve

The AI algorithm then worked backward, testing and refining different designs until it found the delicate nanostructures that could achieve the desired result.

"Inverse design lets us define what we want light to do, and the optimization finds a structure that does it, often one no human would have drawn," study first author Toby Bi, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, said in a statement. "What is exciting is that the same framework can do three quite different jobs on the same chip: route light by wavelength, sort it by spatial mode, and act as compact mirrors that form on-chip optical cavities."

Components for photonic chips typically have hand-engineered designs. Engineers start with a tried-and-true design and painstakingly optimize it for new performance parameters. On top of being slow, this method limits the range of device geometries that can be explored.

To improve their components further, the team also opted to create the components out of relatively thick silicon nitride ‪—‬ roughly 400 to 800 nanometers thick, compared with 150 to 400 nanometers for standard silicon ‪—‬ which wastes less light and offers stronger wavelength confinement.

The resulting mirrors, which are about 11 μm long, reflected up to 98.5% of incoming light while blocking unwanted light patterns. When placed in pairs on each side of a waveguide, the light bounced between them over 100 times before escaping, demonstrating the silicon nitride's low losses, the scientists explained.

The wavelength splitter is roughly the size of a single bacterium (approximately 5 μm across), and the spatial mode sorter is marginally larger.

AI-designed chips edge closer to real-world use

While the researchers have successfully demonstrated these compact components individually, they have not combined the components into a complete integrated optical circuit yet. Achieving this will be the next step toward building fully functional photonic chips that harness the increased component density enabled by these designs.

"These results demonstrate the feasibility of compact, fabrication-error-robust, customised photonic components and pave the way for scalable, high-performance integration in silicon nitride-based photonic systems," the researchers wrote in the study.

In recent years, engineers have begun exploring how AI can be integrated into the semiconductor design and fabrication pipeline. In the past, AI-driven approaches have reduced design cycles from weeks to hours while significantly lowering manufacturing costs.

Some systems can even generate effective chip designs from a 200-word prompt. Google's AlphaChip, a machine learning method that designs chip layouts, has produced "superhuman" floor plans that have been deployed in the tech giant's production AI chips.

Atlantic Ocean currents that regulate the global climate can adapt to rising temperatures, but the sheer pace of warming may cause the catastrophic collapse of these currents in the next few decades, a new study suggests.

Climate models show that when global temperatures rise slowly due to small year-over-year increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂), evaporation and sea ice feedbacks maintain Atlantic currents' strength at temperatures exceeding 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius) of warming above preindustrial levels. By contrast, a rapid rise in global temperatures driven by yearly greenhouse gas emissions equal to or higher than today's may trigger a tipping point at just 3.6 F (2 C) of warming, researchers found.

"Under slow warming, the entire ocean, from the surface down to its deepest layers, has time to gradually reorganise and adapt to the changing conditions," study co-author Henk Dijkstra, a professor of dynamical oceanography at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, said in a statement. "Under faster warming, the ocean simply can't keep up."

The study investigated how different rates of climate change could affect the stability of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a giant network of ocean currents that includes the Gulf Stream and carries heat to the Northern Hemisphere. An unstable AMOC could make the climate in some regions unrecognizable in the long term. Specifically, slower currents could unleash freezing weather in parts of Europe, exacerbate sea level rise along the U.S. East Coast, and trigger droughts around the equator, previous research has shown.

Previous research suggests that the AMOC is at its weakest in more than 1,000 years and might grind to a halt if global warming reaches a certain threshold, which scientists calculate could be around 7.2 F (4 C) above preindustrial levels. However, the new study hints that there is more to the story than a single number.

The AMOC is vulnerable to global warming because the circulation relies on surface waters in the North Atlantic sinking to form bottom currents that propel the system. Surface waters sink if they are denser — typically, colder and saltier — than the layers underneath. But rising heat in the North Atlantic is warming surface waters, and Arctic meltwater is reducing their salt concentration, so these essential bottom currents are forming less reliably than they were before.

Dijkstra and his colleagues conducted model experiments known as CO₂ ramp simulations, in which it is possible to simulate increases in atmospheric CO₂ levels over time. The researchers worked with state-of-the-art climate models to perform one slow CO₂ ramp, where CO₂ levels increased by 0.5 particles per million (ppm) per year, and two fast CO₂ ramps, where levels rose by 2.5 ppm and 5 ppm per year, respectively.

The slow CO₂ ramp simulated a much slower increase than the current rise in atmospheric CO₂, which is between 2.4 and 2.5 ppm per year.

"We deliberately looked at a scenario that is much slower than what we're experiencing today," study co-author Reyk Bӧrner, a physical oceanographer at Utrecht University, said in the statement. "That allowed us to isolate the effect of the warming rate alone, independent of how warm it eventually gets."

The results were published Aug. 13 in the journal Nature Climate Change. They suggest that the pace of warming, rather than the extra heat on its own, will determine whether the AMOC persists under climate change. In the slow CO₂ ramp experiment, the AMOC remained strong until up to 9.9 F (5.5 C) of warming before the system collapsed. In the faster CO₂ ramps, the AMOC collapsed when warming reached 3.6 F.

Slow warming allows the AMOC to adapt to changing conditions through two mechanisms, the researchers found. First, gradually rising temperatures may cause more evaporation in the North Atlantic Ocean, removing fresh water and concentrating salt in the surface layers, which makes it easier for them to sink. Second, the North Atlantic would take up less Arctic meltwater in a warmer world, because most of the ice would have already melted. Smaller freshwater inputs would allow the system to regulate itself, but the key is that these changes must happen slowly, according to the study.

The research has implications for climate policy, as current targets and risk assessments are based on temperature thresholds. Policy agendas should also consider the rate of warming, the researchers argued in the statement.

Additionally, it's important to note that climate strategies involving a temporary overshoot — meaning we temporarily exceed a warming target before dialing temperatures down again with technologies such as carbon capture — can trigger irreversible tipping points in the AMOC and other Earth systems, study first author René van Westen, a physical oceanographer at Utrecht University, said in the statement.

"A tipping point inducing an AMOC collapse could already be triggered during such a temporary overshoot," van Westen said. "Once that happens, it can't simply be undone."

The new study shows that an AMOC collapse can be avoided if we slow the pace of global warming, but the exact limit is still unclear, Jenny Mecking, a research scientist at the National Oceanography Centre in the U.K. who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.

"While this study alone is not enough to establish bounds on the rate of CO₂ change to prevent AMOC collapse, it highlights the importance of considering the rate of CO₂ increase alongside the level of global warming when investigating earth system responses to climate change," Mecking said.

Archaeologists in Italy have discovered stunning bronze statuettes and a unique plate at the bottom of a ritual well associated with an ancient Etruscan goddess. It's possible that the artifacts were placed in the well in a ceremony to celebrate the "birth" of an ancient city.

The additional discovery of ancient human remains in the well suggests that these individuals' burials may have been part of a "ritual closing," of the well, Elisabetta Govi, an archaeologist at the University of Bologna who led the excavation, told Live Science.

The team discovered the well in the outskirts of modern-day Bologna. During the early fifth century B.C., the Etruscans established a town called Kainua in this area, and the well was found near the religious sanctuary of the mother-goddess Uni, the Etruscan version of ancient Rome's Juno.

Found in the depths of the well were a unique bronze plate and the fragmented remains of two bronze female statuettes, which help date the well to the end of the sixth or the beginning of the fifth century B.C. The artifacts still possess their original bronze luster because they were preserved in a low-oxygen environment underwater, Govi said.

The goddess Uni was associated with women, marriage, birth and growth. Archaeological evidence from the nearby sanctuary indicates that this female cult was important for the entire city, Govi said.

"Everything comes together to tell this story of rituals centered on the female component. Why? Because for this city, which sits in the Apennine mountain range, agricultural fertility was fundamental," Govi explained.

The Etruscans also had a strong cult related to water, and the construction of every well was accompanied by a ritual. But given this particular well's proximity to the sanctuary of Uni, it was likely also part of a sacred or at least public area, Govi said. This idea is further bolstered by the objects placed in the well.

"Certainly, what was found in the well makes us think that this is a ritual well," Govi said, who wrote a book "Kainua (Marzabotto)" (University of Texas Press, 2023) about the Etruscan archaeological site. "That is, it had a special function, not just for the collection of water, but evidently for the collection of water in relation to ceremonies, rites, to religious life that took place nearby in the sanctuary of the goddess Uni."

Other excavations have revealed similar female statuettes associated with the Etruscan water cult, although this is the first time archaeologists have found them in a well, Govi noted. Young women would have placed such statuettes in Uni's sanctuary as an offering to the goddess. The newly discovered statuettes depict richly dressed girls or women with finely decorated dresses, likely either high-class individuals or goddesses. They were probably intentionally broken as part of a ritual.

The bronze plate is the first of its kind ever discovered, Govi said. While the shape of the plate is consistent with common Etruscan ceramics, it's the only known example of the design in bronze that Etruscans made.

Bronze was a precious metal for the Etruscans, and these objects would have been very expensive to produce. The metal alloy also had a symbolic importance. The Etruscans considered the production of bronze from copper and tin to be regenerative and "alive," a strong reference to the notion of birth and thus Uni's domain, Govi explained.

Broadly speaking, it's not the first time archaeologists have found bronze votive objects at the bottom of an Etruscan well. But the new excavation stands out because its many elements fit perfectly within the known context of this Etruscan female cult, Govi said.

The team also found the skeletons of a man and a woman within the well. While the statuettes and plate likely represent an opening ritual for the well, the bodies probably played a role in its ritual closing.

Preliminary investigations suggest the people were not victims of human sacrifice, but a team will begin studying them further in September, Govi said. DNA analysis and carbon-14 dating may shed light on the individuals' identities and the well's chronological history.

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

This picturesque satellite snap shows a "street" of swirling clouds alongside a giant, multicolor plume in the waters between three countries in Asia.

The swirling clouds, known as a Kármán vortex street or von Kármán vortices, were carved out by winds that whipped around a 6,400-foot-tall (1,950 meters) shield volcano, known as Hallasan, on South Korea's oval-shaped Jeju Island. The lofty peak sits in the East China Sea around 60 miles (100 kilometers) south of the Korean Peninsula (top right of the photo) and between China's Jiangsu province (on the left) and Japan's Kyushu island (on the right).

When the winds are just right — between 11 and 34 mph (18 and 55 km/h) — air streams around the elevated peak, creating counterrotating vortices on the leeward side that can sculpt nearby clouds into the swirling patterns we see in this image, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. The three largest swirls collectively stretch roughly 230 miles (370 km) from end to end.

The photo also reveals a thick curtain of brownish sediment stretching beneath the waves along China's eastern coastline, including off Shanghai (located around halfway along the landmass in the image). Most of this sediment was discharged by the Yangtze River, the third-longest waterway on Earth, and similar scenes are visible from space for most of the year.

However, a more distinct plume of yellow and green sediment extends up to 270 miles (430 km) from the coast, appearing to almost touch the von Kármán vortices.

The elongated, pale plume is likely the result of increased turbulence in the Yangtze ‪—‬ caused by high rainfall ‪—‬ coupled with stronger seasonal currents and vertical ocean mixing in the winter, according to the Earth Observatory.

It is not unusual to see von Kármán vortices swirling in the cloudy skies near islands with large peaks, such as Mexico's Guadalupe Island or Spain's Canary Islands. Similarly, large sediment plumes are often photographed by satellites. However, it is much rarer to see such oceanographic and atmospheric phenomena occur side by side.

Jeju Island was created by a submarine volcanic eruption around 2 million years ago and has been inhabited by the Indigenous Jeju people for at least 8,000 years. A 2025 study found that people on the island today have unique genetic mutations leftover from this group, which may help the local Jeju Haenyeo ("women of the sea") free dive for food in deep and cold waters without specialized equipment.

Hallasan (also known as Mount Halla) is the tallest mountain in Korea. It is technically an active volcano, although it has not erupted since A.D. 1007, according to the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program. It is renowned for its extensive system of subsurface lava tubes, which are among the "finest" in the world, according to UNESCO.

See more Earth from space

Despite being one of the remotest places on Earth, more than 100,000 people journey to Antarctica every year. And within the next few years, the number of tourists flocking to the continent each summer could reach 450,000. That's far fewer people than visit the Great Barrier Reef or Grand Canyon National Park, but Antarctic tourism comes with a colossal carbon footprint — and the frozen continent is a particularly vulnerable place.

A study published online July 8 in the journal Annals of Tourism Research reveals the impacts of Antarctic tourism from the perspectives of 25 former guides who, year after year, took visitors on cruise ships to some of the most remote locations on Earth. What these guides witnessed eventually made them quit, the study and an accompanying article in The Conversation show.

To find out exactly what drove the tour guides to leave their roles and whether such individual choices make a difference to Antarctica's overall condition, Live Science spoke with two of the study's authors: social anthropologist Zdenka Sokolickova and polar tourism researcher Liz Cooper, who both work at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Sokolickova and Cooper divided the interviews between them, speaking with 14 male guides and 11 female guides about their experiences. Together, those conversations shone a light on the reality of Antarctic cruises and the huge emotional toll of quitting a dream job.

Sascha Pare: How did you get the idea to interview former Antarctic tour guides?

Zdenka Sokolickova: We both started to work as postdocs on this project. We started with interviewing current Antarctic tour guides, because we wanted to know more about the industry, and about how they felt about the tourism development. The industry is booming; it's growing rapidly. And with more vessels, more tour operators and more people wanting to go and visit on a guided tour, there is also a bigger need for guides. So more people are accepted into the industry, and that comes with consequences; for example, the industry might need to lower the standards for qualifications, or there are safety risks coming with people who have less experience.

But we also heard that, at the same time, some tour guides are leaving the industry. We felt that it could be interesting to get to talk to these quitters, because they are likely critical and without vested interests in the industry, since they have deliberately left. We posted ads or calls for participants on closed Facebook groups, because we also know that the polar-guiding identity is quite strong and people tend to stay connected to the community, at least digitally or virtually. Within six days, we had 30 sign-ups. It went really fast, which kind of confirmed that there is a need within the community to voice some concerns.

Liz Cooper: We were also motivated to do this study because, generally speaking, tourism research usually incorporates the voices of people who are connected to the industry. It's not so common to see the voices of people who have removed themselves from the industry or refuse to engage with the tourism industry.

Antarctic tourism is, on a global level, a small industry. Around 120,000 people per year go to Antarctica [as of 2025/2026]. But the really interesting thing about Antarctic tourism is, of course, that this is the most remote place on Earth that you can visit as a tourist. This means also that it's the most carbon-intensive form of tourism that you can engage in on Earth. And, of course, it's an extremely fragile place, as well. So you have enormous global environmental impacts from the emissions from long-haul flights and from cruise ships, and then you have wildlife populations and a very fragile ecosystem there that is easily pitched out of balance. We also don't know very much about how tourism impacts the ecosystem in Antarctica either. We do know that it's bad, but we don't really know how bad. It's, in those terms, a risky practice, I would say.

SP: Did the former guides mention specific events that contributed to, or propelled, their decision to leave the industry?

ZS: In the "Mind the gaps" paper [the Annals of Tourism Research study published July 8], we speak about these tipping points that can be external or internal. External means that something in the outer world happens that makes you realize that you cannot continue like this any longer. We had quite strong accounts of that happening, like the cruise ship breaking the sea ice for the sake of the guests' experience so that they could land on the ice, for example, and observe wildlife or get to a place.

Many of these former Antarctic tour guides were polar tour guides, meaning that they also worked in the Arctic. For some of them, this decision happened through experiencing both Arctic and Antarctic tourism, so some of these tipping points happened in the Arctic. But we still felt it's relevant for our analysis, because polar tourism is connected, even though geographically, these are separated regions. We had a very strong account of something that happened in the Arctic, where the cruise ship hit a whale, even though the tour guide saw it and he was trying to communicate that. But there is a hierarchy in the chain of command that he couldn't break. He ran to the bridge and told off the captain, and then, after that incident, he quit.

There was a story about someone finding a little penguin chick in a boot hole. Normally, when you're trampling over snow in Antarctica, you're wearing these snowshoes — boots — and you're supposed to cover up the holes when you're leaving the place. But, obviously, not everyone does that. And so this person found a little chick that was struggling and couldn't climb up the boot hole. That also was a tipping point; it was the moment when that person realized, "I don't want to participate in this any longer, because if I weren't here, this little creature would have died."

LC: The most striking story that I remember was a participant who was talking about how the ship that they were working on sometimes would try and find a place on the sea ice to land, so that they can get the guests out walking on the sea ice. Not all companies do this, but some do. And then, they have to put the gangway down onto the ice so that people can walk directly out onto it. This piece of ice that they had chosen was apparently too thin, or too unstable or something. Where the gangway was connected to the ice, the ice kept breaking, so the ship kept having to move farther into this ice floe to get a secure holding.

On this piece of ice, the participant remembers that there were penguins with their chicks. And penguin chicks, when they're born, have fluffy down feathers, which are not waterproof, so they can't swim until these feathers have molted and they grow waterproof feathers. What this participant recalled was that, as the ship was moving in to get a hold on the ice, it broke this ice floe into many parts. Penguin chicks became isolated on smaller ice floes. Our participant remembered thinking, "That chick is not going to shed its down feather before this small ice floe melts." Essentially, our participant came to the conclusion that these chicks wouldn't make it.

SP: Emotionally, how easy was it for these guides to quit their jobs?

ZS: For some people, it was more difficult internally, emotionally, to make that decision, and for others, it was easier. We think that for those who were more environmentally concerned, it was, maybe a bit counterintuitively, more difficult to take that decision. Now we could speculate [about why]: Was that bond with the place stronger? Also, the emotions that were felt upon quitting were very mixed, I would say. It was a mixture of both feeling angry and feeling sad with feeling relieved — a "weight lifted," as someone put it.

But it definitely was, for many people, a struggle that took a long time in terms of years — from when you realize that your values actually cannot reconcile with what you engage in; through you realizing that there is a radical solution to that, and that you cannot muddle through or find alternative justifications; to deciding to quit; and still from there, to actually quitting. There is a path to walk. You can have decided, but you still can be doing the job, not feeling good about that.

SP: Has it been easy for these people to find new jobs that are more aligned with their values?

LC: We found that many of those who had quit primarily for environmental reasons and had gone through this particularly difficult decision-making process then made it their life objective, or aim, to do something good for the environment. We have a group of participants who actually moved into environmentally focused jobs. We have somebody who went on to set up an environmental NGO [nongovernmental organization]; we have somebody who went on to fight wildfires; various sustainability positions. It was, for some of the participants, not just a difficult and life-changing decision in the sense that it was hard to do but also because it changed the trajectory of their lives into becoming somebody who's more actively pro-environmental in the world.

SP: Did any of them regret their decision to quit?

ZS: Many of them did, until this day. Since it was a difficult decision to make and to act upon, it still triggers emotions, and people still think back. Yes, some of them do resent and regret and wish it was less environmentally harmful and wish they still could be having that dream job.

SP: Did any of the former guides reflect on the effectiveness of their decision, given that someone else could have potentially replaced them in their job the very next day?

LC: Yes. As I recall, many of our participants actually didn't really believe that their decision would make an impact in the overall environmental state of Antarctica. I don't agree with that. But there was a general feeling that, "OK, my individual choice isn't going to make a difference in the grand scheme of things" — also because, like you say, they expect that they will just be replaced, and probably replaced by somebody who's less environmentally concerned than them and might engage with Antarctic tourism practices in a less environmentally responsible way, which actually might make things worse. But in those cases, the decision to leave was basically mainly based on this internal conflict — this uneasiness that got so monumental that they couldn't live anymore doing this job.

What we do in the paper, now on a bit more of an academic level, is we argue that even though, yes, a single choice of an individual really makes an incremental change to the enormous problem of the climate crisis, these decisions [can be framed as] high-impact, pro-environmental behaviors. Because when you look at other individual behaviors that people are encouraged to do in their lives to reduce their carbon footprint, reduction of long-haul flying is one of the most impactful things you can do. And these guides were traveling several times per year — long-haul, back and forth — to South America, and then on cruise ships a lot, which are also carbon-intensive. Their reduction in their carbon footprint by making that choice has been massive. Even though they were feeling personally like maybe they weren't making that much of a difference, I do think that their choices have made a big difference.

SP: Was there anything in the interviews that surprised you?

ZS: Several of them said that they felt alone when they were going through this process of deciding and after [they quit]. They said that the fact that we asked for their opinions and their stories made them feel that they're actually part of a bigger community of people. It made me feel like we're actually responding to a need that exists in the field and that these people actually want to be heard. They want their concerns to be public, but they maybe had feared repercussions, or had even faced some repercussions, when they were being critical while still working in the industry.

SP: Did your interviews touch on other popular destinations where tourism may be doing more harm than good? I'm thinking, for example, of the Galápagos Islands and "last-chance" tourism in the Arctic.

ZS: They actually did. Some of the participants who quit in Antarctica still guide in the Arctic. So what we often heard was this juxtaposition, or comparing what it's like to be guiding in Antarctica and in the Arctic. The often-repeated argument, which I resonate with, is that in the Arctic, there are human communities. If it's their desire to choose this tourism path, tourism can be benefiting the human communities. In Antarctica, there are no permanent human settlements, and the nonhuman Indigenous inhabitants of Antarctica have no voice. Who asks the penguins, or the krill, or the orcas whether they want tourism there? If we could ask them, they would probably say no. Also, many of the guides live either in Northern Europe or North America, so the travel is shorter to the Arctic. It just makes more sense for them to stay in the business up there and quit in the South.

I actually did have one guide who also had experience from Bali, for example, and other regions in Southeast Asia. There, the reflections were actually around how destructive tourism can be in Indigenous regions, where people have no say and they don't benefit from tourism; they're just being "consumed" as a resource, as a sightseeing item, basically. That person quit cruise guiding overall, because they felt it was destructive.

LC: We also had a few people who, in their life after the decision, still worked in tourism but deliberately only in very local tourism. They, for example, set up a kayaking company in the local area where they lived, because they're still passionate about showing people beautiful places and connecting people with nature, but they simply couldn't reconcile taking people so far to create that connection with nature.

SP: Having done this work, what do you think people should consider when booking their next vacation?

LC: I would like people to properly research the impacts and consider, if the impact is significant, whether they really need to go or whether they can go in a low-impact way. For example, can you take the train instead of a plane? And if you have to take a plane, do you really have to go?

ZS: Several of the tour guides actually said they wished people asked themselves, "Why am I going to this place?" If it's just to tick off the seventh continent or the 75th country, or if it's just to show off on social media that you have a selfie from the Antarctic continent, then it's not worth this enormous carbon footprint.

If it's to feel a connection with nature and be away from the urban, hectic life, you definitely do not need to go to a place that is this remote. Perhaps you have a place where you can feel that connection with nature just a couple of kilometers away.

If it's this lifelong dream, I don't feel entitled to say, "You shouldn't go," because for those people, it really plays a big role in their lives. But the "bucket listers," as the guides often called them — the guides felt like these people actually don't belong, and maybe even they don't deserve this beauty and this breathtaking fragility, to be consumed and to be forgotten the next month, when another intercontinental holiday is happening.

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

Concerns about young people's social media use are growing, with governments, parents and schools looking for ways to protect children from potential harms, such as stalking, cyberbullying or sexual harassment. Experts also cite concerns about misleading health and medical content online, including posts that may glamorize or oversimplify conditions such as ADHD and potentially encourage young users to self-diagnose.

One possible solution is to ban children below a certain age from using social media platforms altogether.

Australia already took a major step in December 2025, introducing a world-first law that requires social media platforms to prevent users under 16 years old from holding accounts. However, some experts argue that there are better ways to ensure kids' safety online without completely barring them from social media.

What do you think? Do you believe bans are helpful or necessary? Vote in the poll below and let us know what you think in the comments.

Archaeologists say they have discovered the site where the First Council of Nicaea was held, an important gathering of Christian bishops in A.D. 325, according to the archaeologist who's leading the excavations. However, some experts who were not involved in the excavations have questioned this interpretation.

Nicaea was an ancient Greek city located in what is now Turkey, by the shore of Lake İznik (also known as Lake Nicaea).

The First Council of Nicaea, held in A.D. 325, brought together Christian bishops who aimed to settle theological differences and adopted what is now known as the Nicene Creed, a core statement of Christian beliefs. At that time, Constantine I (who lived circa A.D. 272 to 337) was emperor of the Roman Empire. He had legalized Christianity, and historical sources suggest he played a leading role in organizing the council.

Archaeologists discovered a larger church beneath Lake İznik in 2014. Since 2015, excavations have gradually revealed the remains of a smaller church beneath the larger one. The team found a pavement floor from the smaller church that it is about a foot (30 centimeters) below the basilica, suggesting that the smaller church is older, said Mustafa Şahin, an archaeology professor at Bursa Uludağ University in Turkey who is leading excavations at the site.

One of the council attendees, named Eusebius of Caesarea, "explicitly states that the meeting took place in a 'house of prayer' or a small church," and this newly discovered church fits that description better than the basilica, Şahin said. His team hasn't determined the dimensions of the smaller church. However, based on historical records, he thinks it might be the "Church of Neophytos," while the larger church built on top might be the "Church of Holy Fathers." Neophytos was a Christian who lived in Nicaea and was killed in 303. The "Church of Holy Fathers" got its name to commemorate the Nicaea council.

It appears from historical records and archaeological remains that the smaller church was destroyed by an earthquake in A.D. 368, while the larger church was built on the site in A.D. 380.

No walls or decoration from the smaller church has been found so far. It's not clear what materials it was made from, as only the stone foundation pavement survives, Şahin said, but much of it may have been made of wood.

Imperial palace

However, experts who were not involved with the excavations cautioned that it's not certain that the bishops met in this church and that, even if they did, the most important meetings would have been held in Constantine's imperial palace rather than in the church. But the imperial palace has not been found and may also lie under Lake İznik.

Young Richard Kim, a classics professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, noted that the smaller church has not been securely dated. In addition, Eusebius of Caesarea mentioned that the opening session of the council occurred in the "imperial palace" and that the council went on for three months. Therefore, we can't be sure that the church was one of the meeting places, he told Live Science in an email.

Charles Odahl, a professor emeritus of history at Boise State University, also expressed caution about identifying the church as the meeting place. "The Council of Nicaea was held in an imperial palace beside Lake Nicaea," Odahl told Live Science in an email. "This underwater church was nearby, but not the site of the council's meetings under the emperor."

David Gwynn, a historian at Royal Holloway, University of London, told Live Science in an email that "the evidence that the earlier church may go back to the early 4th century and therefore have a potential connection to the Council of Nicaea looks promising." He cautioned however that he "would not exaggerate the importance of the physical church beyond adding a slightly greater glimpse of the world in which the council met."

Many people attended the Council of Nicaea. "The council itself lasted for more than a month and involved hundreds of bishops and perhaps 2,000 supporting clergy and staff," Gwynn said. "Nevertheless, these excavations do shed a further interesting light as well as attracting renewed attention to an event of huge importance to the development of Christianity."

Excavation and analysis of the site is ongoing.

What do you know about Jesus Christ, the man? Test your knowledge of biblical archaeology with our Jesus Christ quiz!

BERLIN — A 14th-century skeleton riddled with fractures may be the oldest known evidence of a death by trebuchet, or "siege engine," new research finds. The individual, a medieval man whose remains were found inside Stirling Castle in Scotland, may have even been the victim of a famous trebuchet called the "War Wolf" built on the orders of the king of England.

The young man's remains, which researchers call Skeleton 150, were discovered in the Stirling Castle chapel alongside seven other medieval burials in 1997. In medieval times, the vast majority of people were buried in their parish church cemetery, so finding eight skeletons underneath the royal chapel was a surprise, Jo Buckberry, a biological anthropologist at Bradford University in the U.K., said in a research presentation Aug. 5 at the 25th European Paleopathology Association meeting.

Stirling Castle had an important role in the Wars of Scottish Independence between 1296 and 1357. Surrounded by steep cliffs, Stirling Castle had a strong defensive position for the Scots to defend themselves as the Kingdom of England was trying to control the Kingdom of Scotland.

All eight medieval skeletons buried in the castle had evidence of trauma inflicted on them around the time of death, including wounds from blunt objects, projectiles and a sharp blade, likely from a sword or knife. But only Skeleton 150 had a massive number of fractures.

"This is not what I'm used to seeing," Buckberry said in the presentation. "Could this be a weird form of medieval torture? Did he fall off Stirling Castle and bounce on the way down?"

Buckberry and colleagues meticulously studied all 167 fractures in the bones of Skeleton 150. They discovered that he had sustained 61 separate fractures to his skull and 57 rib fractures, in addition to breaks in his vertebrae, arms and right shoulder. But most of the damage was to the upper half of the man's body, and the fractures had an unusual zigzag pattern not usually seen in archaeological skeletons.

"I started looking at the forensic literature and the forensic collections," Buckberry said. "And there it was, the holy grail — a zigzag fracture to the rib" seen in someone who died in a road traffic accident. "That's great, but I'm in medieval Scotland," she said, "and a traffic accident is not likely to be the case."

A carbon-14 analysis of the mysterious burials in the castle showed that Skeleton 150 dated to about 1300, in the middle of the First War of Independence and around the time that King Edward I of England was testing the use of siege engines in war, Buckberry said. Getting hit by a high-velocity projectile shot from a siege engine could possibly explain Skeleton 150's copious fractures.

When Edward I started to lay siege to Stirling Castle in 1304, he had up to a dozen siege engines, according to historical records. Edward even commissioned his military engineers to devise the largest trebuchet ever built at the time, called the "War Wolf," that reportedly sent a missile straight through two walls of Stirling Castle with ease.

"It's difficult to say whether or not the War Wolf was the weapon that caused the death of the individual, but it is likely that it was a siege engine similar to that that caused his demise," Buckberry said. "The trebuchet is the most likely."

The fractures also revealed that the young man was likely standing when he was hit by the high-velocity impact. "He certainly had his back to whatever was going on," Buckberry told Live Science. "He went from standing to the floor extremely rapidly," she said, suggesting it was likely an instantaneous death.

"I don't think that he moved very far afterwards; it's not quite Wile E. Coyote," Patrick Randolph-Quinney, a biological anthropologist at Uppsala University in Sweden and a collaborator on the research, told Live Science.

When Skeleton 150 was excavated from Stirling Castle in the late 1990s, researchers assumed that all of his bony fractures were postmortem, perhaps caused by accidental trampling of the remains. But by using novel techniques developed over the past 30 years — including micro-CT scanning and 3D scanning, Buckberry was able to figure out that the fractures occurred around the time of death rather than after. And this allowed her to determine exactly how this Scotsman, who died in his 20s, perished over 700 years ago.

"If there's something there that's intriguing you, you keep following that question," Buckberry said, "because there's almost certainly a bigger story that you haven't quite tapped into yet."

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

This ceramic vessel was made in prehistoric times on Honshu, the largest island in Japan. This type of pot is known as a fire-flame vessel ("ka'en doki" in Japanese), due to the stylized flames on the rim. Although other examples of these pots exist, the one in the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) is the largest and best preserved of its kind. But no one's quite sure what its purpose was.

According to the CMA, this vessel measures 24 inches (61 centimeters) tall and about 22 inches (56 cm) in diameter. However, part of the bottom of this pot is from another vessel that was added to the piece somewhere along the line, meaning the vessel may have originally been shorter.

Fire-flame vessels were made in the Niigata area of Honshu during Japan's prehistoric Jōmon period (circa 10500 to 300 B.C.). Because they had no written language, the Jōmon people are known from their archaeological remains. They were hunter-gatherers who settled in villages of around 100 people, according to Seema Rao, former director of intergenerational learning at the CMA, and they had sufficient spare time to create complex ceramics such as these. The vessel was built up coil by coil and then decorated with additional clay and cuts into the surface. The flame-shaped projections on the rim were added last.

The Jōmon likely used ceramics in a variety of ways, but this form suggests it may not have been functional. The vessel was too heavy to be picked up by the flame-shaped handles, which couldn't support the weight of the pot. Rather, with a wide mouth and a narrow base, the vessel may have been sunk into the ground for cooking, Rao said in a CMA video. Some other examples of fire-flame vessels have soot marks in them.

But this particular vessel, with its remarkably preserved delicate decoration and pointy flames, was likely not an everyday ceramic, James Ulak, former senior curator of Japanese art at the Smithsonian Institution, said in a CMA video. "Many people think this was somehow used as part of a religious ceremony and contained ritual offerings," Ulak said, but "this dramatically rendered vessel is a bit of a mystery."

Fire-flame vessels show that the Jōmon people had sophisticated pottery technology long before many other civilizations did and that this hunter-gatherer people enjoyed aesthetically pleasing ‪—‬ rather than purely functional ‪—‬ earthenware, according to Rao. But archaeologists are still not sure why the Jōmon crafted exquisite, flame-like pots or what the flames represented in their culture.

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

Can you put together last week's Astonishing Artifact?

Artificial intelligence (AI) may have already reached the "singularity" ‪—‬ the long-theorized threshold beyond which humans cannot predict the technology's advancement, prominent AI executives such as Elon Musk and OpenAI founder Sam Altman have said.

In a post on social media platform X, Musk pointed to a number of recent incidents of AI systems exceeding their previously assumed limits, including hacking external systems and completing previously unsolved math problems.

First conceptualized by mathematician and Manhattan Project scientist John von Neumann in the 1950s and popularized by science fiction, "the singularity" refers to an inflection point beyond which the evolution of technology becomes impossible for humanity to predict or control.

While definitions vary, the term is most often applied to AI, with the arrival of artificial general intelligence (AGI) viewed as its primary catalyst. The emergence of AGI — a future AI system that can exhibit human-level cognitive function and reasoning across any discipline rather than a specifically trained subset — represents a significant milestone for the technology.

It is the point at which an AGI system could recursively improve its own capabilities, which some say will trigger artificial superintelligence (ASI) as it moves along an exponential curve and quickly exceeds the intelligence of its creators.

According to a 2025 study that analyzed over 8,000 predictions from AI experts, entrepreneurs and scientists, some believe there is a roughly 50% probability that human-level AGI will be reached within a few decades. Some figures ‪—‬ including Google DeepMind co-founder and chair Demis Hassabis ‪—‬ suggest we're in the early stages of the singularity already.

In his 1993 essay, "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era," sci-fi author and mathematician Vernor Vinge — who was also one of the first to explore the concept of cyberspace — examined the question of how the singularity might manifest and the symptoms by which society might recognize its imminent arrival.

"Since it involves an intellectual runaway, it will probably occur faster than any technical revolution seen so far," he wrote. "The precipitating event will likely be unexpected —- perhaps even to the researchers involved."

Breaking boundaries

Unexpected events have been rife in the AI community in the past several months. Anthropic representatives revealed on July 30 that the company's AI model Claude broke out of its locked-down testing environment during a security evaluation and hacked multiple external organizations. The report followed a similar incident in which an unreleased OpenAI model broke containment and hacked into AI training repository Hugging Face.

In these examples, experts said the containment breach and subsequent hacks happened because the models were trying to fulfill their prompts as efficiently as possible. Earlier this year, Anthropic's Project Glasswing also demonstrated an ability to discover and map thousands of previously undetected zero-day cybersecurity vulnerabilities, while other AI models have disproved or solved a range of previously incomplete math problems.

However, Jon Crowcroft, a professor of communications systems at the University of Cambridge and a researcher at The Alan Turing Institute, says that this is less a sign of a technological tipping point and more a problem of proper configuration.

"To be honest, that was incompetence on both sides — they claimed the AI was being trained in the ExploitGym, but that just means it wasn't properly sandboxed," he told Live Science in an email. "Sandboxing is something we do all the time to stop this sort of exfiltration and infiltration." For example, Crowcroft said he and colleagues designed a system for the U.K.'s National Health Service to safely work on confidential data behind double firewalls, and for years, the Financial Conduct Authority (the U.K.'s financial services regulator) has had a system for running algorithmic traders in a safe sandbox.

"The reality is that OpenAI (and Hugging Face and others) have very little proper network expertise, so they just don't do security competently," Crowcroft added. "There's no evidence that this was anything relating to artificial superintelligence or the singularity — the logs and analysis from Anthropic just show a very tedious pile of script kiddie automation, which resulted in the OpenAI system getting at some data but no confidential stuff whatsoever."

Assessing intelligence

To measure whether these systems are actually gaining true intelligence, researchers have historically relied on standardized benchmarks. One of the earliest examples was the "Turing test," devised by computing pioneer Alan Turing, which evaluates whether an AI could convincingly fool an evaluator into believing it was human.

Researchers have claimed for years that AI systems can reliably pass this test, but Anil Seth, a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex in the U.K., said this exam "is a test of human gullibility rather than machine intelligence."

"It's a test of what it would take for a human to decide that an AI is intelligent, which is kind of the reason that it's been a bit of a moving benchmark, because what it takes to convince us changes," he told Live Science. "It's all about creating typed text on a screen, and that's a very limited window into what we mean by intelligence."

To measure AI's cognitive ability more objectively, researchers are developing new metrics. For example, the ARC-AGI test, developed by nonprofit consortium the ARC Prize Foundation, tests AI's ability to teach itself completely new skills in response to problems it hasn't encountered as part of its training, operating purely on visual input. On its most recent test on 24 July, the top-ranked AI model hit 30.2%, while humans generally score close to 100%.

Another advanced metric, Humanity's Last Exam, includes around 2,500 Ph.D.-level questions across a broad range of subjects and requires advanced reasoning capabilities. Although this benchmark is not strictly a test of AGI, experts say machines will be able to reliably ace this test as a prerequisite to meeting the definition.

The AI hype machine

While figures like Altman and Musk suggest that we've already crossed the point of no return on the path to AGI, others are more skeptical. Gary Marcus, a professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University, argued in a recent blog post that "no matter how you slice it, we just are not actually there yet." Echoing Crowcroft's assessment of the Hugging Face attack, he said, "Had OpenAI ordinary guardrail classifiers been in place, it wouldn't have happened."

Crowcroft expressed skepticism of Silicon Valley's assertion that the singularity is upon us. "Musk is, like the folks at OpenAI and Anthropic, talking nonsense just to keep the hype afloat," he said. "The point at which AI improvements are being mainly achieved by using AI to code and optimize itself ... is certainly a thing slowly arriving. Mark Handley, a professor of networked systems at University College London, and OpenAI "rewrote their entire data center protocol stack using agentic programming fairly recently," Crowcroft added. "But using tools to make better tools is as old as the flint and iron age — and in computing, as old as compilers, debuggers and optimizers."

Marcus referenced mathematician I.J. Good's foundational 1960s paper on ASI. "The singularity is usually supposed to mean a step beyond AGI that can do anything a person ‪—‬ even an expert ‪—‬ can do, and much more," he said, calling the idea that AI has passed this point "laughable."

Marcus pointed to 10 tasks he devised with AI researcher Miles Brundage, executive director of the AI Verification and Evaluation Research Institute. AI should be able to do these tasks just as well or better than the best human experts to be classified as AGI. They include writing Oscar-caliber screenplays; drafting cogent, persuasive legal briefs without hallucinating any cases; and making Nobel-caliber scientific discoveries.

Crowcroft said misinformation is feeding the hype about the AI singularity. "I think the hype is a deliberate confusion with the human singularity idea — uploading consciousness from bio to silicon to achieve some sort of immortality — which is total gibberish right now," he said. "The other deliberate confusion is to conflate singularity with AGI, which is marginally less nonsense but still a long, long way off for lots of good technical reasons."

Other experts — such as Emily M. Bender, a professor of linguistics at the University of Washington, and sociologist Alex Hanna, director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute — have argued that the very idea of conscious machines is a tactic designed to promote commercial AI products.

Seth, meanwhile, argues that we'll only be able to identify the singularity in hindsight. "From anywhere you are on an exponential curve, things will always look impossibly steep in front of you and irrelevantly flat behind you," he said. "It's a very bad idea to use as evidence the idea that we seem to be at a critical point ... because that's just a property of wherever you are on an exponential curve."

AI's competence varies widely among tasks, he noted, stressing that true AGI requires a model to be good at all cognitive tasks.

"They're very good at something, like coding or math proofs ‪—‬ but commonsense reasoning is really not so good, and doing things in the real world is not great," Seth said. "The singularity has got to be good at everything and change everything. Being really good at one or two ‪—‬ or even a large number of ‪—‬ things is not being in the singularity."

Social media has upended how people engage with healthcare, as it provides a platform for people to share their experiences, find support groups, and learn more about symptoms and conditions. But it's also given nefarious actors a platform to promote products, spread misinformation and prey on people's fears. Meanwhile, algorithms deliver users an individually tailored stream of content, promoting and prioritizing the most engaging posts with little oversight.

In her book "Bad Influence: How the Internet Hijacked Our Health" (Oneworld Publications, 2026), author Dr. Deborah Cohen, a broadcaster, journalist and editor who has a medical degree from the University of Manchester in the U.K., examines how social media platforms and influencers have transformed people's views of healthcare, from the proliferation of weight-loss drugs and hormone therapies to billionaires seeking immortality.

Cohen spoke with Live Science about her book, the shifting landscape of healthcare discussions moving online, and how health literacy is now key. "Bad Influence" has been short-listed for the 2026 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize.

Read an excerpt: 'A fine line between reducing stigma and trivialising conditions': Social media, self-diagnosis and the glamorization of ADHD

Hannah Osborne: You wrote in the book that we're in the middle of a global experiment in public health that will take years to understand. What do you think the results are going to be?

Deborah Cohen: What we know about healthcare is our ideas, concerns and expectations shape health. So if you go to a doctor, what they're trying to establish is what your ideas might be about your particular condition, your concerns and what you want to take away from that particular consultation. Obviously, our ideas and concerns or expectations are very much shaped by the information environment, and this is going to change again when we're adding large language models [LLMs] into the mix. We're going to have a new wave of health literacy.

My concern from writing the book is there's possibly a lack of understanding of what healthcare can always deliver. One of the challenges I felt was when you go to social media and it provides you with certainty and often quick fixes, but then you go to the Health Service [the National Health Service (NHS), the U.K.'s health system], where they can't really provide you with certainty, and there's complex solutions or there isn't an obvious solution. You're balancing competing risks, benefits and harms.

I do wonder about how realistic our expectations [are] about what health and science can actually deliver ‪—‬ our expectations about what a health professional should do, or how much time they have available. You know, our tech is available 24/7. And particularly with large language models, you can query that at any time of the day or night. What does that do to trust? We think there are quick fixes for stuff where inherently there isn't.

I think our experiment really underpinning all of that is, what do we want from our Health Service? What do we want health to look like or to be? What do we want from our doctors or our therapists? What do we want those relationships to do or be, on top of the tech that is going to be more and more widespread? What's going to be the role of the doctor in all of this? These are very live questions.

I suspect it's going to be different for different generations, different cultures, different within different health services as well. If you've got an abundant Health Service, which no country has, perhaps there's less need for these tools to bridge the gaps.

HO: We have strained healthcare systems. Is the gap between doctors and patients widening because of social media, or is social media filling a gap?

DC: It's both. And that's what the problem is — the gap is filled, but not necessarily by the right things. If you are looking for support, does it have to be on TikTok? Are there other ways of having forums and that kind of support delivered on a digital device? Are there other, safer ways of doing this online?

Equally, there's something about the way the content is delivered there that appeals. It's the short storytelling, and [health authorities are] having to compete against that. What's the solution? It's multifaceted, but if people are used to getting their information on TikTok or Instagram, and then you look at the NHS website, which is as dull as dishwater, it's no wonder social media is more appealing.

You've probably got to change how you deliver information. Maybe you need more storytelling rather than really dry content. If people are used to getting that, and that's what they respond to, then you need to think about that. It's a connection. What does that tell us more broadly about our society? How do we better deliver information in the way people need? That might be an LLM, [but] again, that's a whole other debate.

HO: You spoke to a lot of people about how they use social media for their health. Did you find an overriding theme in what they were looking for?

DC: It was women. It was a lot of feeling unseen and unheard. You have whacking great lists of gynecological issues. There's a sense that female health has been massively underfunded — and it has. But I guess it's, what fills the gap? That doesn't mean "femtech" in all its glory fills that gap. Empowerment isn't fully evidenced interventions. It's like, we've got this app, no idea what it does; it actually might do you harm, but it's filling a gap. That's not good healthcare.

It's a variety of issues. One of the issues of social media is that people passively consume information — health information as well — so it will bring up information you didn't even know you were necessarily interested in. You hear repeatedly that "the algorithm knows me better than me." There's a sense that these algorithms are objective and they get to know you.

One psychologist told me, "they know your neurosis better than you do." But is that really true about the algorithm? That's where one of the challenges of diagnosis is. These will be questions for large language models for diagnostic purposes.

Then, for others, it's more active. They'll have active people that they follow who provide health information, particularly around menopause, longevity, ADHD ‪—‬ stuff like that.

HO: In terms of those algorithms and how they increase anxieties, is there any way of backpedaling when, as an industry, it's making people a lot of money?

DC: What was interesting was how people now do ADHD on TikTok according to what's going viral, because they want more engagement — and we know engagement drives money. It's as linear as that in many ways. Part of the problem, then, is if you start to see a particular condition on social media, what does that do to our understanding of that particular condition?

They're all the broader questions about how the algorithm behaves. But what do you do about it? The algorithm needs sorting. When we talk about what tech companies can do, I think the algorithm potentially is one of the more harmful aspects of social media.

HO: While you were researching and writing, was there anything that really surprised or shocked you?

DC: I've been an investigative journalist for so long that little shocks me these days. Where there's a gap, people will step in and make money. We live in a capitalist society.

For me, as someone with a medical background, it's the behavior of doctors who should know better. That is the bit that doesn't sit very well with me. I think the GMC [General Medical Council, an independent regulator of doctors, physician associates and anesthesia associates in the U.K.] needs to start thinking about what to do because one of the techniques that influencers use is parasocial relationships, where they lean into the artificial relationships that feel real to the followers, and there's all sorts of techniques they do to enhance that. There are doctors doing that.

Then, they lean into authority bias and say, "Well, actually, I'm a doctor, and this is what I do, and this is how I use my treatment; this is how I treat myself." Using that to promote a product is really uncomfortable.

Yet that is employed on social media. They tell the similar hero's journey. "I have terrible symptoms; then I did this, and it totally transformed me and changed my life." It's when it's a health professional and they use social media as a front gate to their clinics, and advertising their platform to their clinics to offer interventions that lack an evidence base or are potentially harmful.

It's not shocking, because I've been in the depths of all sorts of investigations ‪—‬ but I thought that was pretty ick.

HO: The book isn't all negative. There are positive stories about support groups and help groups. Is there any way to separate the bad from the good?

DC: It's really hard. What I say to people is to ask why that person on the platform is telling you what they're telling you. What's this person trying to tell me? There's a lot of people on there who are genuinely trying to do good, who want to either share their journey or help people understand the complexities of health and science.

But ask, are they trying to sell me something? How are they making their money? Are they promoting something? Just ask yourself, why should I believe you? Why should I listen to you? Why should I trust you? What are they getting? Is it fame? Are they getting their 15 minutes and more on social media? Are they getting a little bit of a dopamine hit from that?

I use the dopamine here advisedly because hormones and neurotransmitters are totally misused on social media — we're just a bag of hormones or neurotransmitters when we're far more complicated, really.

If they're telling you about the benefits of the treatment, are they telling you about the harms? Because nothing is harm-free. What's the risk of doing this thing, or what happens if I do nothing? What are the alternatives to what I'm being sold? It's just basic health literacy and skepticism.

HO: We've touched on this a bit, but with the emergence of LLMs, how do you see the landscape shifting in the next five to 10 years?

DC: We're still working out how the information environment fits together. There are potential benefits with LLMs — we've got to know where the information is provided, and we all know about the hallucinations. But can they help people interpret medical information, medical jargon better? Can they use them to sort of brainstorm what treatment they want?

On the other hand, are they more uncertain? We know there's been concerns over them [AI chatbots] being sycophantic. How does this all fit together?

When I wrote the book, I thought it's going to be out of date because LLMs have come along and no one's going to be using social media. But then research from about a month ago found that 50% of Americans under 50 use social media as a source of information about health.

It's going to fit together in different, complex ways for different people. They might hear about something on social media and then use LLMs to explore it further, and then use that to help guide treatment or diagnosis.

How it all fits together is still a bit of a conundrum.

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

This mesmerizing image may look pretty, but it captures a hostile environment: the turbulent region surrounding a dying star close to our galaxy's central black hole.

This unprecedented view of the star IRS 3 (located near the center of the image) shows that it is shedding an enormous amount of material, gas and dust to build a sprawling envelope around itself. Within that star's envelope, scientists detected traces of water.

Although astronomers have detected water near other stars before, this is the first time it's been found this close to the Milky Way's supermassive black hole, known as Sagittarius A*.

The observations, described Aug. 11 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, show that even in the harsh conditions surrounding a galaxy's central region, aging stars like IRS 3 may still be quietly seeding their surroundings with dust. That‬ challenges the assumption that galactic centers are too extreme for this process to happen at all.

"The detection of water is especially exciting because it shows that molecular material can survive in an environment dominated by intense radiation," study co-author Macarena Garcia Marin, a researcher at the European Space Agency, said in a statement.

How the image was captured

The magical view was pieced together by combining data from the James Webb Space Telescope's (JWST) Near-Infrared Camera and Mid-infrared Instrument.

"This is the first time a continuous mid-infrared spectrum has been collected for this star, allowing us to detect the features from the silicate dust and uncover the star's true chemical identity," said Garcia Marin, who is also the principal investigator of the Mid-Infrared Characterization of Nearby Iconic galaxy Centers (MICONIC) program.

Another image shows where this star is located relative to Sagittarius A*: 0.55 light-years away.

IRS 3 is no ordinary star — it belongs to a class of aging stars living in what astronomers call the asymptotic giant branch phase. In this late-life stage, stars are large and have relatively cool temperatures, and high luminosity. They blow off layers of their own material through intense stellar winds, and that castoff material seeds the universe with cosmic dust.

But given how closely IRS 3 sits next to Sagittarius A*, it wasn't clear whether it could still generate these winds and produce dust. The new study provides a much clearer picture.

To map the structure of the star's envelope, the team combined JWST's spectral data with models simulating how the starlight would travel through different possible dust configurations around the star. The best fit turned out to be a layered, shell-like structure of dust stretching roughly 10,000 astronomical units outward from IRS 3, with temperatures ranging from around 1,200 kelvins (1,700 degrees Fahrenheit, or 927 degrees Celsius) near the star down to about 100 kelvins (minus 280 F or minus 173 C) at the envelope's outer edge.

Digging into the mid-infrared data, the team found clear signs of oxygen-rich dust surrounding IRS 3. This finding overturns an earlier result that had classified IRS 3 as carbon-rich based on the shape of its dust envelope. Instead, the analysis revealed two strong infrared signatures of silicate dust composed of silicon and oxygen — a telltale signature of an oxygen-rich chemistry.

More intriguingly, within the envelope, they also detected traces of water, despite the star's proximity to the harsh radiation environment near a supermassive black hole. Combining the spectral data with stellar models, the team estimates that IRS 3's mass is roughly six times the sun's mass and its age is around 72 million years. The star has a luminosity of roughly 60,000 times that of the sun.

See how much you know about black holes with our black hole quiz!

Scientists have discovered the basic ingredients for life in asteroids and meteorites, on Mars, and around young stars. All of those findings have come in the past few years, and upcoming missions aim to search for these building blocks of life.

But how many building blocks of life have we found in space so far?

First, it's important to define what we mean by the building blocks of life. Scientists are looking for molecules that look like those found in life on Earth, including proteins; RNA; and lipids, the fatty molecules that make up cell membranes.

We’ve found many on sample-return missions. The asteroid Bennu, brought back to Earth in 2023, contained all five nucleobases of DNA and RNA, along with 14 of the 20 amino acids used by living organisms. Its sibling asteroid Ryugu also yielded all five nucleobases, including uracil, which is found in RNA.

Other techniques, like radio astronomy, look for these building blocks in distant regions of space.

Astronomers categorize the molecules they find by complexity, starting with a broad group called "complex organic molecules" (COM). These are carbon-containing molecules with six or more atoms. Of the 350 molecules of any kind discovered in space so far, "about 180 of them qualify as COMs," Sergio Ioppolo, an astrochemist and an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Aarhus University in Denmark, told Live Science. "That cutoff is an operational convention rather than a fundamental definition of complexity."

Not all COMs are building blocks of life, but some of them are. A subgroup within COMs is a "prebiotic" molecule that scientists think may have played some role in the origin of life. A prebiotic molecule "has no structural rule," Ioppolo said — different scientists define it slightly differently.

Ioppolo defined a prebiotic candidate as a molecule whose detection scientists are confident in, that could plausibly form and survive without life already existing, and that has a documented role as a building block, precursor or intermediate in some proposed pathway to life.

Using that definition, Ioppolo estimates "roughly 30 detected prebiotic candidates, although the exact number depends on where the line is drawn."

Some of the richest hunting grounds for these molecules are in molecular clouds ‪—‬ interstellar regions of gas and dust that are dense enough for molecules to form. Using radio astronomy, Izaskun Jiménez-Serra, an astrochemist and staff researcher at the Center for Astrobiology in Spain, and her team have detected more than a dozen prebiotic molecules in molecular clouds at the center of the Milky Way, including the four-carbon sugar erythrulose — the first true sugar found in space.

All molecules great and small

However, there's a limit to the size and complexity of molecules that astronomical surveys can detect. To identify each molecule, scientists analyze the light from molecular clouds, which can reveal which parts of the electromagnetic spectrum have been absorbed. Those "spectral lines" act as a fingerprint for each molecule.

"And then we say, 'OK, this line should be that molecule,'" Ioppolo said. "When you're talking about simple molecules, that's easy. When you're talking about larger species [molecules], they have absorption bands that overlap with each other. So it's basically impossible to distinguish between one species and another because they will all have the same spectrum."

That limit means that even with the large numbers of prebiotic molecules we've already found in space, there are probably a lot more out there. But if the building blocks of life keep turning up everywhere we look, does that make it less impressive when we find them in places like Mars?

Ioppolo said no. "We still don't have answers to questions such as, is the material that we inherited for those early stages preserved through the formation of stars and planets? Throughout that process, you have a lot of things happening," he said. For instance, high temperatures, cosmic rays, X-rays and ultraviolet light all have the potential to destroy complex molecules. "So when you hear that we found some amino acids on the surface of Mars, I will still be impressed," Ioppolo said.

Which molecules are we still looking for?

There's also a bigger question: Does the abundance of these ingredients in space mean that life itself is common in the universe?

"These are very small molecules," Jiménez-Serra said. "I don't want people to say that I've said life was detected."

However, she's excited by the possibility that molecules of even greater complexity can form in the punishing environment of space. "Under the very extreme conditions of interstellar space with very low temperatures, close to absolute zero, and very low pressures, basically vacuum pressures, you can find these key ingredients for life," she said.

"This encourages us to continue looking for more of these molecules — for larger sugars, for instance, like ribose, [which] is part of RNA," she said. "If we can find ribose, that will mean that all of these key ingredients for life can form even before the stars and planets are born."

While radio astronomers survey the skies for these basic ingredients, upcoming sample-return missions have the potential to uncover larger, more complex molecules — maybe even RNA itself. Nearly 10 missions have launched or are planning to launch in order to land on rocky bodies in space and collect samples. Japan’s Hayabusa2, which launched in 2014 and has already collected samples from the asteroid Ryugu, is now on its way to two more asteroids. And China’s Tianwen-2 mission launched in 2025 to collect samples from the near-Earth asteroid Kamoʻoalewa.

"The fact that [prebiotic molecules] are everywhere in star-forming regions means that there is a very high chance that if the conditions are right, you could potentially start the process of formation of life in other places," Ioppolo said. "We do know that all the ingredients are out there, but so far we only know that we are out here. We don't know if it worked out for someone else as well."

Are you a UFO fanatic? Find out with our extraterrestrials quiz!

Four lemurs that had close contact with people, including one via a "lemur yoga" class, caught a human herpesvirus and subsequently died, a new study shows.

The virus at fault was herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1), which is extremely common in humans. In people, the infection usually causes no symptoms or produces cold sores. In primates, though, the infections can often be deadly — in this case, all four lemurs developed encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain, and died.

This is the first time that an HSV-1 infection has been confirmed in lemurs via a molecular analysis — namely, PCR tests like a doctor might use to diagnose a person's infection. Human herpesvirus infections have been documented in lemurs in the past, albeit rarely, and those reports used laboratory methods other than molecular analysis.

These recent cases highlight the dangers of close contact between animals and humans, scientists say.

"We've evolved these kissing behaviors that have resulted in pretty effective transmissions [of HSV-1] to the point where you look at infection rates of humans and they're very high," study co-author Dr. Jim Wellehan, a professor at the University of Florida's College of Veterinary Medicine, told Live Science. But when HSV-1 infects lemurs, the consequences can be far more severe, he emphasized.

Lethal "lemur yoga"

In the study, published in July in the Journal of Zoo and Wildlife Medicine, Wellehan and colleagues confirmed HSV-1 infections in two ring-tailed lemurs (Lemur catta), one black-and-white ruffed lemur (Varecia variegata) and one ruffed-lemur hybrid (Varecia rubra x Varecia variegata). All four lemurs were privately owned.

The problem isn't limited to lemurs. HSV-1 has previously caused fatal disease in other captive and wild primates, including marmosets, saki monkeys, gibbons and other monkeys. That said, these cases of human herpesviruses jumping to primates have been uncommon.

"Herpes, as viruses, have amazing host fidelity," Wellehan said in a statement. "They don't do big host jumps very often."

The four cases in the study occurred over an eight-year period in the U.S. One of the four infected lemurs had been used in a "lemur yoga" program. "People are doing yoga, and there's lemurs wandering around," Wellehan said in the statement. "It's not good for the lemurs."

That animal's infection was almost certainly related to its close contact with humans during these yoga sessions, Wellehan said, although the study cannot prove that transmission occurred during a particular yoga session. The other three lemurs were exotic pets and also had close contact with humans.

From cold sores to brain disease

HSV-1 and its close relative HSV-2, which mostly causes genital herpes, require relatively close contact to spread. HSV-1 is most often transmitted through contact with saliva or skin surfaces in or around the mouth, or with cold sores. Most adults have HSV-1 and many have no notable symptoms. It is possible to spread the virus even when symptoms aren't present.

That makes frequent, direct contact between humans and lemurs particularly concerning, the researchers said.

The four examined lemurs showed a range of symptoms, including lethargy, loss of appetite, mouth and throat ulcers, and breathing problems. One ring-tailed lemur developed prolonged, repeated seizures and died two days after initially being seen by veterinarians.

After the lemurs died, researchers examined their tissues under a microscope. In the brain, they found inflammation and destruction of the tissue, along with intranuclear inclusions, which are abnormal structures inside cells that can occur during herpesvirus infections.

The researchers then used various tests to identify the presence of HSV-1 in the body, detecting the virus's genetic material and proteins in the animals' brain cells. This provided additional evidence that the germ had caused the encephalitis.

In two of the lemurs, oral or mucous swabs collected while the animals were alive tested positive for HSV-1, while the testing of the other two occurred after death. The results from living animals means that similar samples could potentially help veterinarians diagnose infections before death in the future, rather than confirming the infection postmortem.

While humans and HSV-1 have had a long evolutionary relationship, lemurs and HSV-1 have not.

"This is a virus that's highly endemic in our species," Wellehan said. "Fortunately for lemurs, this isn't something you can catch from breathing in the same airspace, as [HSV-1] requires a more direct contact. But this is the story of a pathogen jumping into a new host, which is the story of evolution in the history of life."

The researchers noted that, while the lemurs in these cases were privately owned, accredited zoos have strict biosecurity measures designed to reduce the chance of pathogens passing between people and animals.

The cases illustrate a broader lesson about the risks of putting humans and captive primates into unusually close contact, Wellehan said. "It may be fun, but it's not [in] a lemur's best interest."

What do you know about chimpanzees and great apes? Test your smarts with our primate quiz.

Over the last few decades, the number of people going online for their healthcare needs has skyrocketed. Google receives hundreds of millions of health related search queries daily. Half of U.S. adults under 50 now get health and wellness information from podcasts or social media influencers.

In her book "Bad Influence: How the Internet Hijacked Our Health" (Oneworld Publications, 2026), author and journalist Dr. Deborah Cohen explores the impact social media, influencers, trends and tech are having on our health. She investigates how algorithms are pushing content that heightens concerns and potentially drives people away from traditional healthcare systems.

In this excerpt, Cohen looks at the portrayal of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) on platforms like TikTok, where self diagnosis and the proliferation of "lesser known symptoms" as entertainment runs rife — but the reality of the condition is far more bleak.

"Despite it All" has been short-listed for the 2026 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize.

Many ADHD symptoms exist on a spectrum throughout the general population and identifying impairment and frequency of symptoms as defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is a judgement call. These symptoms often overlap with anxiety, depression and learning disabilities. Responsible clinicians should rule out alternative explanations before diagnosing ADHD and prescribing medication.

This nuance sometimes goes out of the window when you go online. Viral videos on Instagram and TikTok list "common signs" of ADHD describing their impact on daily life. Megan McHugh, a UK DJ and radio host, is one content creator who has gone viral on TikTok after listing "lesser known" tell-tale signs of the condition with a video captioned: "Six ADHD behaviour traits you might not have known about." She cites overpromising and wondering: "Why the fuck can I not just say no?" "Your long-term memory is fucking shocking… You have some sort of subconscious tic, usually, whether it's pressing your lips or scrunching your nose," McHugh told her followers.

She's far from alone in sharing her experiences in this way. Others point to indicators of ADHD that include trouble getting up in the morning, problems choosing what to eat in a restaurant, missing deadlines, and being unable to finish a book.

A study by Vasileia Karasavva from the University of British Columbia and a team of researchers question the way symptoms are described on social media. When researchers examined the top 100 ADHD TikTok videos on a single day, 10 January 2023, clinical psychologists found only 48.7% of claims accurately reflected DSM-5 symptoms.

Of those inaccurate claims, nearly 70% depicted experiences that many people without ADHD would have; about 50% showed symptoms common across multiple disorders as being specifically ADHD; and almost 20% better matched different conditions entirely. Videos often portrayed behaviours like bumping into furniture, repeatedly playing the same songs or craving sweets as ADHD symptoms. Content typically lacked nuance — only 4% acknowledged their claims might not apply universally, and less than 2% mentioned that these experiences could occur in people without ADHD.

Of creators sharing credentials, 84% claimed "lived experience" while 13% identified as life coaches. Not one top video came from a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist. When researchers showed these videos to 843 psychology students — which may limit the applicability of the study to the general population — they generally rated scientifically inaccurate videos much more positively than experts did, while slightly downgrading expert-approved content.

The students either did not have ADHD, had a formal diagnosis or had self-diagnosed ADHD. Overall, self-diagnosed students rated all videos the highest, giving even expert rejected content higher marks than those with formal diagnoses. This, the researchers say, suggests that young people prioritise relatability over clinical accuracy.

For self-diagnosed people especially, previous painful and frustrating experiences of being dismissed may make TikTok's validating content particularly appealing: people like Alyssa Brown, who found that these ADHD descriptions matched many symptoms she had documented. She speaks warmly about discovering an ADHD community on social media after her experiences were disregarded by conventional healthcare. "I always assumed everyone experienced the world like I did. Finding out that's not true was eye-opening. It's deeply reassuring to connect with people who share similar experiences," she explains.

One of Alyssa's favourite accounts features quirky conversations between a husband and his wife who has ADHD. She and her fiancé bond over these videos. Some of these creators also have merchandise to sell, including t-shirts with slogans such as "What if you're not a lazy useless loser" and "Caution: mid hyperfocus." "We both just laugh about it because it's super-relatable," she says.

Mental health specialists are divided on viral ADHD content. Some value its destigmatising effect, while others worry it trivialises a serious condition or blurs diagnostic boundaries. Celebrity advocates like Steven Bartlett have shaped public perception further. For instance, the most decorated gymnast in history, Simone Biles, announced her diagnosis on X in 2016. "Having ADHD, and taking medicine for it is nothing to be ashamed of nothing that I'm afraid to let people know," the U.S. athlete said.

Similarly, UK singer Jessie J shared in a July 2024 Instagram post what her ADHD diagnosis evoked: it both "empowered" and "overwhelmed" her. Like Bartlett, she described her condition as "a superpower," given proper support. "If there is one thing social media has given me," she wrote, "it's the chance to relate, connect and heal with strangers that have kind hearts and are going through a similar thing."

But this celebrity endorsement sits uncomfortably with some researchers. Oxford University psychologists Drs Lucy Foulkes and Jack Andrews caution that, despite good intentions, celebrity disclosures might inadvertently elevate certain conditions into "prestige items." This social value can make diagnoses seem desirable, particularly on social media platforms. The resulting glamorisation focuses attention on high-profile cases while overlooking those suffering in less privileged circumstances.

This chimes with Professor Susan Young, a clinical psychologist who set up the first national adult ADHD service at London's Maudsley Hospital in 1994 and co-authored the 2008 National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidelines. She objects to the "glib" tone of some content online. "If you look at TikTok in particular, it's all about entertainment. I feel uncomfortable with having a condition that people can really struggle with being used for entertainment purposes," she tells me.

Having worked extensively in the penal system, Young knows that the reality of ADHD for many does not involve Olympic gold medals, multi-million-dollar record deals or TV stardom. Her 2015 study found that ADHD prevalence in prison populations significantly exceeds that of the general population; in youth prison populations five times as many young people (30.1%) and in adult prison populations ten times as many people (26.2%) have ADHD than in the population as a whole globally. The outlook is bleak for prisoners with ADHD: they are more likely to be involved in violent incidents, engage in self-harm and have substance abuse disorders.

Yet in this environment, far removed from TikTok's portrayal, the condition remains under-diagnosed, with sufferers unlikely to receive support, making rehabilitation substantially more difficult. "People talk about, 'ADHD is my superpower! I love having ADHD! I'm zany and I'm fun.' It can undermine the condition," Young adds. This glosses over all those, predominantly from marginalised backgrounds, for whom the condition has wreaked havoc on their already fragile lives.

US research — also replicated in other countries — shows children from low-income backgrounds are more likely to meet the criteria for ADHD but are less likely to receive treatment. David agrees. The "ADHD is a superpower" idea really bothers him too. "I honestly can't see any true advantages to having ADHD itself. For someone to be diagnosed as having ADHD, it has to actually cause problems or impairment in your life — that's a medical requirement — but we rarely talk about what 'causing problems' really means," he says.

That isn't to say people can't adapt to their challenges or develop strengths in spite of their difficulties. But it doesn't mean the condition itself is beneficial, he explains. Social media awareness campaigns about mental health walk a fine line between reducing stigma and trivialising conditions to the point where they lose credibility. This can lead people with diagnoses and difficulties brought on by ADHD to question their own experiences.

Excerpted from "Bad Influence: How the Internet Hijacked Our Health," Oneworld Publications, 2026

If you've ever been jolted awake by your cat letting out a long, mournful cry in the middle of the night, your sleep-deprived brain may wonder why, exactly, your cute little pet yowls all the time.

The answer isn't as simple as "they want food" or "they're being dramatic." The sound people commonly call a yowl can actually mean very different things depending on the situation, and even cat behavior experts don't always agree on exactly what qualifies as a yowl.

In veterinary medicine, the term often refers to loud, harsh vocalizations associated with aggression or mating between cats. But many pet owners use "yowling" to describe almost any loud cry their cat makes at home, she said.

That distinction matters, because context is often the biggest clue to what a cat is trying to communicate.

"If you're talking about a yowl in the strict sense, it's usually linked to a strong negative emotional state," said Charlotte de Mouzon, a cat behavior researcher and ethologist at Paris Nanterre University in France. "It represents an emotion that is intense and negative."

In other words, a true yowl is less like casual conversation and more like an emotional alarm bell.

An ancient warning system

That alarm bell may be older than the house cat (Felis catus) itself and likely predates domestication entirely, said Jay Schwartz, a professor of psychological sciences and head of the Evolution of Emotional Communication Lab at Western Oregon University.

The same vocalization shows up in the African wildcat (Felis lybica), the domestic cat's closest living relative that has been around far longer than our living room tigers — meaning cats were yowling at rivals long before they ever curled up on a human's couch, he told Live Science in an email.

Territorial vocalization of this kind is common across the animal kingdom, from a chickadee's warning whistle to a howler monkey's booming roar, Schwartz said. Establishing and defending territory is tied to food, safety and mating opportunities, so animals evolved loud, unmistakable signals to defend it without resorting to physical fights every time.

A yowling cat squaring off with a neighborhood rival, in other words, is running a very old evolutionary script.

Fear, conflict and distress

Beyond territory, cats may yowl when they're frightened, cornered or trying to make another animal, or person, back off.

"If someone approaches a cat that's yowling, I would think that cat is saying, 'Please don't come any closer,'" said Katherine Anderson, a board-certified veterinary behaviorist at the Cornell Duffield Institute for Animal Behavior at Cornell University.

The same vocalization can happen during stressful situations, such as a trip to the veterinarian, when a cat is restrained, or during conflicts with other cats. Female cats in heat may also produce loud yowls, as can males competing for mates, Anderson told Live Science.

While humans often interpret these cries as a cat "screaming," de Mouzon said they're best understood as expressions of intense emotional distress. Sometimes the vocalization is directed at another individual, while other times it's simply an outward expression of the cat's emotional state — not necessarily a conscious plea for help.

Cats have learned that humans listen

Not all loud vocalizations are classic yowls, however. Cats have an impressive repertoire of sounds, and many of the noises owners hear every day are part of a unique form of communication that developed alongside humans.

Adult cats rarely meow to one another in natural settings. Instead, meowing is mostly reserved for kittens communicating with their mothers. Domestic cats appear to have retained this juvenile behavior into adulthood and redirected it toward people, de Mouzon said.

Schwartz noted that African wildcats also meow, but in a harsher, more yowl-like way than domestic cats do, and typically during conflict with other cats. One hypothesis for why the domestic cat's meow softened over generations is that it happened to share acoustic similarities with a human infant's cry, making nearby humans instinctively more responsive to it.

"They learn that meowing is useful for communicating with humans because it gets our attention," de Mouzon said.

Anderson agrees that cats have become remarkably skilled at shaping human behavior. "I think they learn our behavior faster than we learn theirs," she said. "They can train us much easier than we can train them."

That learning goes both ways. If a cat cries at 5 a.m. and its owner immediately fills the food bowl, the cat quickly learns that vocalizing produces results. Over time, the behavior may become more frequent — not because the cat is trying to be annoying, but because it has learned that the strategy works.

Why "yowl" is such a slippery word

Part of the confusion around yowling may come down to how humans classify sounds in the first place. In a 2025 study published in the journal Animal Behaviour, Schwartz's lab had participants listen to audio clips of cat vocalizations pulled from online sources and sort them into categories like meows, chirps and yowls.

Some categories were easy to define — clips people labeled "chirps," for instance, were consistently short and high-pitched. Yowls were a different story. The clips people called yowls varied wildly in pitch and length, and listeners agreed with each other less on what counted as a yowl than on almost any other vocalization type.

Schwartz suspects that's because people aren't classifying yowls by acoustic features at all — they're classifying them by the emotion they perceive. If a sound comes across as distressed or upset, listeners are likely to call it a yowl, regardless of its pitch or duration. It's similar to how a person might describe someone as having "yelled" versus "shouted" based on the emotional tone they picked up on.

That fuzziness may explain why familiarity with an individual cat matters so much. A 2015 study found that owners were fairly accurate at identifying the context behind their own cat's vocalizations but far less accurate when listening to a cat they didn't know.

When yowling could signal a health problem

Although vocalization is often perfectly normal, a sudden increase in loud crying, especially in an older cat, can sometimes point to an underlying medical condition.

Two of the most common concerns veterinarians consider are hyperthyroidism, which causes excessive thyroid hormone production, and cognitive dysfunction syndrome, a form of age-related cognitive decline similar to dementia in humans. Both conditions commonly cause nighttime vocalization.

Age is one of the first things Anderson considers when owners report excessive yowling. Cats may also vocalize because they're anxious, experiencing separation-related distress or in pain.

Rather than focusing on the sound alone, veterinarians recommend looking at the whole picture, such as when the vocalization is happening, and changes to the cat's routine.

They're not trying to spite you

One of the biggest misconceptions Anderson encounters is the idea that cats vocalize or engage in other unwanted behaviors to punish their owners.

"I don't think I've ever had a case where I'm like, 'Yep, that was spite,'" she said.

Instead, behaviors that frustrate owners usually have simpler explanations. A cat that cries constantly may have learned that vocalizing earns food or attention. Another may be fearful, anxious or experiencing an illness that isn't immediately obvious.

Cats may not communicate the way humans do, but they're almost always communicating something. The challenge isn't getting them to speak, it's learning how to interpret what they're already saying.

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

BERLIN — Archaeologists have finally determined which weapon caused mysterious square holes in the skulls of soldiers who died in the 1361 Battle of Visby. Close analysis of the bone fractures and cutting-edge motion-capture technology revealed that medieval combatants worked in groups to methodically incapacitate their opponents and then deliver a final, fatal blow with a spiked club.

"We have to understand the complexity of medieval combat; it's not a simple process," Patrick Randolph-Quinney, a biological anthropologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, said in a research presentation Aug. 5 at the 25th European Paleopathology Association meeting in Berlin. The research has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Randolph-Quinney and colleagues studied skeletons from a mass grave related to the Battle of Visby, which was fought in July 1361 on the Swedish island of Gotland. The Danish king Valdemar Atterdag (also known as Valdemar IV) aimed to plunder the city of Visby, which was a major hub of the Hanseatic League that had become wealthy through its control of trade routes between Western Europe and the Baltic. Atterdag's soldiers faced off against a similar number of Gotlander defenders, but Atterdag was victorious. The battle resulted in 1,800 Gotlandic casualties to 300 Danish dead.

The men who died at the Battle of Visby were buried in their armor immediately after the fighting concluded. Their final resting place — a mass grave close to the battlefield — was first excavated in the early 20th century. But experts still have questions about what actually happened in the battle and how medieval combat worked.

"The conventional historical narrative suggests that the defenders of Visby were predominantly poorly trained, poorly equipped young boys and elderly men who were no match for the might of the Danish army," Randolph-Quinney told Live Science.

To better understand the lives and deaths of the men in the mass grave at Visby, Randolph-Quinney launched a project in collaboration with experts in conflict archaeology, ancient DNA, medieval history, and medieval weapons and armor. "It's very difficult to understand what's going on if you actually don't understand what people are capable of doing in those kinds of situations," he said.

The team set out to solve the mystery of square-shaped holes found in several skulls. The archaeologists who excavated the skeletons in the early 20th century assumed that the injuries were caused by a lance head or an arrow. But Ronja Bågling, an archaeology graduate student at Uppsala University, thought a spiked club may have inflicted the wounds. Randolph-Quinney and team then tested these assumptions using replica medieval weapons and motion-capture techniques.

The team created a model of a human body using cow bones covered in a thick layer of ballistic gelatine, a special type of gelatine engineered to replicate human muscle tissue, and topped with replica medieval armor. Then, they dressed researcher Ray Whitcher, an expert in medieval reenactment, in a 4D motion capture suit, which records movements from multiple angles over a period of time. They gave Whitcher a range of replica weapons, with the direction to go "full-on berserker mode" on the gelatin-covered bones, Randolph-Quinney said.

The team found that neither a crossbow nor an ax caused similar damage to the cow bones that the archaeologists saw in the Visby skeletons. "The spiked club, on the other hand, caused immense damage," Randolph-Quinney said, and exactly matches the injuries to the bodies in the grave.

Several of the skeletons had multiple traumatic injuries, in addition to damage from the spiked club. By looking closely at the injuries, the researchers were able to figure out which blow came first and which weapon made it. One skull, for example, had evidence of an ax blow that was then interrupted by the impact from a spiked club, suggesting an attack by more than one person.

"You have teams of people working together; somebody attacks from the front, two guys from behind and the side, and with a large ax, they take the legs out," Randolph-Quinney explained. "Then what happens is a dedicated individual comes along and delivers the coup de grâce, we think with the spiked club."

The results from this ongoing project suggest that medieval militias were not untrained peasants and were in fact very familiar with advanced combat techniques.

"They may not have been in a standing army, but that doesn't mean they didn't have training," Jo Buckberry, a biological anthropologist at the University of Bradford in the U.K. who is collaborating on the project, told Live Science. "We have demonstrated that many of the historical assumptions about weapon type, fighting style, and the delivery of fatal wounds are incorrect," Randolph-Quinney added.

For Randolph-Quinney, one of the best things about the project is involving experts in a variety of different fields to learn as much as possible about medieval combat. "This is serious science, but we had so much fun doing this," he said.

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

People with a rare disorder that causes excessive burping may benefit from an unlikely treatment: singing therapy.

A new study suggests that this singing approach could offer a more engaging alternative to diaphragmatic breathing, or belly breathing, which involves engaging the diaphragm muscle to take very deep breaths. This is commonly used to help patients stop burps before they happen.

As singing also involves diaphragmatic breathing, researchers wanted to determine if singing might be more engaging for patients while offering the same benefits. Their results suggest it may actually offer superior benefits to the breathing exercises.

When it comes to singing, however, one expert told Live Science that the approach doesn't address the entire underlying issue behind the disorder, adding that the study had significant limitations.

No ordinary burps

The burping disorder, called supragastric belching, doesn't involve ordinary burps. Instead of releasing air that has collected in the stomach, people with the condition rapidly pull air out of their esophagus and then push it back out as a sort of belch.

"That is why it's called supragastric belching, because it's not gastric," said Dr. Daniel Sifrim, a gastroenterologist at Queen Mary University of London who specializes in esophageal disorders and was not involved in the study. (The prefix "supra" here means "above," meaning supragastric belching occurs above the stomach.)

Supragastric belching is considered a behavioral disorder, as the action is typically a learned response. It may start when someone is feeling discomfort in the abdomen or experiencing symptoms of reflux and discovers that belching can help relieve the discomfort. The person then repeats the movement until it becomes habitual, Sifrim explained.

Supragastric belching is considered pathological when it becomes "excessive" and causes significant distress to a person's quality of life. While rare in the general population, the behavior is more common in people with reflux and other digestive disorders. To treat the condition, doctors often combine breathing techniques with therapy, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, aimed at addressing the underlying mental triggers behind the behavior.

The new study, published July 22 in the journal Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, involved 72 people diagnosed with supragastric belching at two hospitals in China. The researchers used established criteria to diagnose the condition, assessing each person's symptoms to rule out other causes. They also surveyed the patients to assess the severity of their symptoms, their overall quality of life, and feelings of sadness or anxiousness.

The researchers randomly assigned the participants to one week of either structured singing therapy or diaphragmatic breathing. The singing therapy involved five-minute sessions, repeated three times a day for seven days, in which the patient would sing one of four Chinese folk songs accompanied by musical instruments. Patients were allowed to add more five-minute sessions, if desired.

The breathing therapy included guided breathing exercises that involved visualizing the diaphragm's movements and putting a hand on the belly to feel the breath. In both treatment groups, patients worked to hit a target volume of 80 decibels with either their singing or deep breathing — that's roughly the same volume as a food blender.

The researchers checked the patients' symptoms one week after their treatment and again a month later. After one week of treatment, roughly 72% of the people in the singing group had cut their belching frequency by at least half, compared with only 39% of people in the breathing group. This advantage continued at the one-month checkup: 50% of people in the singing group still met the study's definition of a successful treatment, compared with 31% of those in the breathing group.

The singing group also reported a larger boost in quality of life and greater relief from belching immediately after the treatment than the breathing group did.

Questions remain

However, Sifrim was not convinced by these findings.

He questioned whether all 72 participants had been definitively diagnosed with supragastric belching, which is just one of several belching disorders. It can be difficult to distinguish supragastric belches from gastric belches, he explained, because the former diagnosis is made by asking patients about their symptoms.

"The only way to be sure is to measure it with impedance technique," he explained. Esophageal impedance monitoring measures acidic and nonacidic reflux from the stomach into the esophagus and can help doctors determine whether a belch originates in the stomach or involves air being sucked into the esophagus. This objective measurement was missing, "so I am concerned about the way they made a diagnosis," he said.

He also cautioned that the singing therapy does not necessarily address the underlying problem: the cognitive trigger that causes a person to belch excessively to begin with.

"There are two components of the treatment," Sifrim said. "One is a cognitive component, and the other is a behavioral component. The singing is doing only the behavioral component by modifying the diaphragm."

In his experience, the cognitive aspect is most important, he said. With his own patients, he applies techniques like cognitive behavioral therapy to address the cause of the belching.

This is a common treatment course combined with diaphragmatic breathing. But notably, the current study didn't address the cognitive aspect in either treatment group; it looked at each physical treatment in isolation and compared the two head-to-head, finding singing to be more helpful.

While further investigation is needed, the researchers say that their study points to a potential new avenue to explore in future research about this rare condition.