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.

BERLIN — A Roman-era mass grave discovered underneath a soccer field near Vienna holds the skeletons of young men from all over the Roman Empire. And many of them suffered injuries to the groin before they died, archaeologists have found.

The grave, which held at least 129 people buried in an "extremely disorganized" manner, was excavated in 2024 and has been dated to the first to second centuries A.D. A new analysis is confirming what archaeologists initially suspected: These are likely the remains of Roman-era war dead.

"This is a spectacular find," Sheridan Strang, a bioarchaeologist with the archaeology firm Novetus, told Live Science. Strang presented new work on the skeletons on Aug. 6 at the 25th European Paleopathology Association meeting. The work is not yet peer reviewed.

The mass grave was discovered in Hasenleitengasse, a neighborhood in the outskirts of Vienna, which in Roman times was known as Vindobona. Archaeologists estimated that all 129 skeletons were males between the ages of 18 and 35. They did not find any typical grave goods in the burial but did discover a few weapons. At least two-thirds of the people buried in the mass grave had evidence of violent trauma inflicted around the time of death.

"We determined that these individuals were most likely soldiers, and they died from some kind of mass violence event, either a battle or a military campaign," Strang said in a research presentation attended by Live Science. "But we have no other evidence of a battle in this area around this time."

The Roman military camp of Vindobona was established in the late first century A.D. as part of the province of Pannonia. Situated on the Danube River, Vindobona was an important outpost that helped defend the border of the Roman Empire from Germanic tribes such as the Marcomanni. While historians know that battles were fought near Vindobona during the Marcomannic Wars (circa 166 to 180), nothing in the historical or archaeological records suggested there was ever a battle at Hasenleitengasse.

When Strang and colleagues investigated the traumatic injuries on the skeletons, they found evidence of sharp trauma, such as from swords or daggers, all over the skeletons, and blunt trauma mostly on the skulls. But projectile trauma was largely confined to the groin area.

The most likely scenario for these pelvic injuries is an attacker on the ground using a throwing lance and targeting a gap in an enemy's armor as he rode horseback.

"We have one individual where the lance head was still inside the pelvis when we excavated him," Strang told Live Science. "The people who caused these injuries were aiming for these sensitive areas," she said.

The Hasenleitengasse mass grave is an important site for understanding projectile weapon use, Patrick Randolph-Quinney, a biological anthropologist at Uppsala University in Sweden who was not involved in the research, told Live Science. The fact that projectile trauma was focused on the groin and lower limbs "tells us about a possible lack of armor and protection in those areas — but also that the attackers knew how to incapacitate based on soft-tissue anatomy," he said.

But with no historical records of a specific battle and no archaeological evidence other than the skeletons, the researchers are now trying to figure out who the combatants were.

"We don't know if they were Romans, if they were the Marcomanni, or another Germanic tribe that was in the area," Strang said.

Preliminary DNA analysis of 25 of the skeletons confirmed that they were all chromosomally male. Additionally, the DNA revealed that those 25 individuals had diverse ancestry. Strang said that some of the men came from the Italian peninsula, others from mainland Europe, and three from the eastern Mediterranean and the Levant, a part of western Asia.

"These individuals may have been Roman military personnel," Strang said. "But they might not all be Romans. There's a chance that it is a commingled grave, with Romans and another Germanic tribe."

Further research on the skeletons is ongoing, Strang said. "Now that we have the remains, we can look at health, diet, and disease, and we can answer questions that were previously unknown from the archaeological record."

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

Brazil is home to some of the world's largest aquifers, yet many of those groundwater stores — which provide 55% of the country's water — have shrunk so much over the past 25 years that they face irreversible damage. This groundwater depletion has been caused by drought, increased water evaporation due to climate change, and pumping for human consumption, new research suggests.

Most of the world's soybeans, sugarcane, oranges and coffee — as well as a big proportion of the world's cotton and corn — are grown in the areas with the most depleted aquifers, so the dwindling groundwater supply could have ripple effects for food markets around the world, including in the U.S.

The depleted aquifers may also collapse river systems that produce hydroelectric power for Brazil, forcing the country to turn to coal or biomass for electricity, experts told Live Science.

Groundwater declines probably won't lessen total agricultural production in the next 10 to 20 years. "The concern is what happens if these trends persist for several decades," study first author Augusto Getirana, a researcher in the Hydrological Sciences Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told Live Science in an email. "Brazil is one of the world's major breadbaskets, so its water security has consequences well beyond the country itself."

A clear geographical contrast

Brazil holds the world's largest renewable freshwater reserves by country, mostly thanks to the Amazon Basin and its rainforest ecosystem. However, compared with countries like the U.S. and India, which have thousands of groundwater measuring sites, Brazil's network of monitoring wells is extremely sparse. Therefore, for the study, Getirana and his colleagues trained artificial intelligence (AI) models to fill in the gaps in the data.

The researchers fed the models measurements from 398 monitoring wells, satellite data showing tiny shifts in gravity resulting from groundwater changes, and information about the geology and land cover in different areas, among other datasets. AI reconstructed monthly groundwater level changes between 2002 and 2023 across different aquifers in Brazil at a resolution of about 6 miles (10 kilometers), Getirana said.

"We then reconstructed groundwater levels to estimate aquifer recharge — how much water reaches and replenishes the groundwater system — throughout the country," he explained.

The results, which were published June 3 in the journal Science Advances, showed severe, persistent groundwater losses in parts of central, northeastern and southeastern Brazil — including portions of the São Francisco, Paraná, Southeast Atlantic and East Atlantic basins, which together cover 760,000 square miles (1.97 million square kilometers), or about 23%, of Brazil's land area.

Some of Brazil's most critical aquifers went years with no recharge. By contrast, the Amazon Basin and parts of southern Brazil showed either no change or localized groundwater gains attributable to shifts in rainfall and natural climate variations, Getirana said.

"There is no single trend for the entire country," he said. "We found a clear geographical contrast."

Climate change is the culprit

The study didn't attribute groundwater changes to specific pressures, but it is clear from the data that climate shifts played a major role in the observed patterns, Getirana said. Several of the sharpest declines in aquifers came after prolonged droughts and major climate events, such as an El Niño cycle between 2015 and 2016.

Due to patchy monitoring, it is difficult to untangle and quantify the impacts of agriculture, industry and households on groundwater levels. However, the results revealed a substantial overlap between groundwater losses and areas with intense irrigation, urban and industrial demands, mining, land conversion and high well density, Getirana said.

"The most scientifically defensible interpretation is therefore that climate creates the underlying water deficit, while extraction and land-use changes are probably amplifying its magnitude and duration in heavily used regions," he said.

Javier Tomasella, an environmental scientist and hydrologist at Brazil's National Institute for Space Research who was not involved in the study, agreed that the main cause of aquifer depletion in Brazil is climate change.

"Droughts are lasting longer and becoming more intense in Brazil, and this is affecting most of the country, particularly the central area and the Northeast of the country," Tomasella told Live Science. Harsher droughts reduce groundwater recharge and create a higher demand for water, meaning people extract more from aquifers during dry spells. "This is why the impact in irrigated areas is much higher," he said.

The findings suggest that if droughts intensify over the next few decades, major agricultural regions in Brazil could run out of water to grow certain crops. Groundwater provides a buffer when rainfall and surface water resources become unreliable, especially for agriculture and municipal water supply, Getirana said.

The worry isn't so much that aquifers will dry up completely but rather that water levels will drop so low that it will become too expensive to pump water compared with the returns from producing crops.

"This is the same type of progression already observed in intensively exploited aquifers such as the High Plains and [Central] Valley systems in the United States and aquifers in northern India and Bangladesh," Getirana said. "The water does not necessarily disappear overnight; it progressively becomes harder, less reliable and more expensive to access."

Supply-chain risks

Farmers will likely adapt to smaller water supplies by switching water-intensive crops, such as soybeans, to less-thirsty ones, such as corn and wheat, Tomasella said. Some may do this during the dry season to save water, as is already common in regions such as northern Paraná that have a "double-crop" system. But if current market conditions hold, farmers' decisions about what to grow will ultimately depend on how much money they can make from crops while covering extra irrigation costs, he said.

The total production of mostly rain-fed crops like soybeans and corn likely won't be affected any time soon, but the balance of these crops may change, Tomasella said. Conversely, the total production of irrigated crops such as coffee, sugarcane and oranges may decline, "but that depends on how droughts will evolve in the next two decades," he said.

Countries that rely on food imports from Brazil might experience supply disruptions, but the scale of these is hard to predict. The most-exposed country is probably China, because it imports roughly 80% of its soybeans from Brazil, Getirana said. The U.S. and Europe may see declines in imports of coffee, sugar and oranges, while Asia and the Middle East could be affected through cotton and corn, he added.

"The United States alone relies heavily on Brazil for coffee and orange-juice imports," Getirana said.

Assuming market conditions don't change, it's unlikely there will be a decrease in Brazilian beef production, because demand for beef is so high, Tomasella said. If anything, he said, beef production will increase, because Brazilian farmers haven't yet maximized the number of cattle per acre of pasture. However, cattle do emit huge amounts of methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas, he added.

Ripple effects

The study has implications beyond agricultural impacts, because aquifers are connected to river systems. Groundwater declines could cause rivers to dry up, and this would hit Brazil's hydropower network, which supplies 60% of the country's electricity, Tomasella said.

The alternative to hydropower is burning fossil fuels and biomass to produce electricity, he said. This comes with huge carbon dioxide emissions, which would worsen climate change and further amplify Brazil's water issues.

In the short term, groundwater losses are more likely to affect drinking-water supplies in big Brazilian cities like Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo than they are to impact agriculture, Tomasella noted.

"If droughts intensify, it might reach a point where you have to make very tough decisions," he said. "The real question is, 'Is this the new normal?' If this is the new normal, then we are in very deep trouble."

Long-term memories may not "stick" in the brain for the reasons we thought, a study of mice in artificial hibernation reveals.

Instead of relying on many individual, strong links between neurons — which would typically be pared down during hibernation — long-lasting memories seem to require higher-level patterns in connectivity, the study found.

"This topological architecture of the broader network seems to be more important" than individual, sturdy connections, said study co-author Kazumasa Tanaka, head of the Memory Research Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology.

The findings, published Thursday (Aug. 13) in the journal Science, may complicate the picture of how memory retention works.

Tanaka and colleagues used hibernation to study memory because past studies of hibernating animals have found that their brains shrink and pare down cell-to-cell connections during these extended periods of low metabolic activity. At the same time, the brain's activity slows to a crawl, and the loss of connections is thought to be related to this energy-saving mechanism.

Despite this brain shrinkage, hibernating animals, such as alpine marmots (Marmota marmota) and European ground squirrels (Spermophilus citellus), still retain memories they formed before they went into hibernation. "Some studies report their memories are intact, even after, so they can remember conspecifics [members of the same species], like their friends, or they can remember the locations of their food," Tanaka told Live Science.

The new study aimed to tackle the question of what allows those memories to stick around even after many connections between brain cells disappear.

A "switch" in the brain to turn on hibernation

A central dogma of neuroscience holds that memories are made when connections between neurons grow stronger.

Through a process called long-term potentiation (LTP), neurons that send frequent chemical messages to their neighbors start to release more of those signals. In turn, their neighbors grow more sensitive to the signals by increasing their number of receptors and the size of their dendritic spines — the physical structures that receive inputs from other neurons. Ultimately, LTP forges a strong bond at the point where two neurons meet, called the synapse.

An old adage in neuroscience sums up the idea: "Neurons that fire together, wire together."

"I don't think our study argues against this LTP hypothesis," Tanaka said, noting that many studies support the idea that LTP is critical for the brain to forge new memories. However, when it comes to holding on to memories over time, LTP may not be the most essential ingredient.

Recent studies have found that the structures of memories in the brain are actually very dynamic. Rather than relying on a strict and consistent set of connections between specific neurons, these physical traces of memories "drift" over time, within days, Tanaka noted. As a memory drifts, the original LTP-strengthened connections that made that memory can be lost — and yet, the memory persists.

The question is how.

The new study zoomed in on the hippocampus, a major memory processing hub in the brain. It focused on episodic memories, meaning those concerned with specific events and personal experiences. These memories are born in the hippocampus, remain there for a time, and then get transferred to other parts of the brain for super-long-term storage. That transfer can take weeks, months or more, and some neuroscientists think contextual details of the memories — such as the environment where they were formed — remain forever embedded in the hippocampus.

In this case, the researchers were interested in that initial period of memory storage in the hippocampus, so they ran lab mice through several experiments to imbue them with new memories. In one experiment, they'd been taught to associate a specific setting with a mild shock to their paws; in another, they'd learned the locations of sugar pellets placed within a maze.

Then, they pushed those mice into artificial hibernation for two days, by switching on a special set of neurons in the brain that had been identified in past work. In mere minutes, the mice's brains started to change.

"We knew that some degree of the remodeling happens, but the degree was much bigger than what we expected," Tanaka said. Within 30 minutes, the brain was already paring down synapses, and within 24 hours, they "found more than half of the synapses were already gone," he said.

Completely intact memories

Despite this drastic change in the hippocampus, the mice remembered what they'd learned prior to hibernation. After hibernation, the mice froze in place when they were placed in the setting where they were shocked, ‪and in the maze, they navigated to the food as easily as they did before hibernation ‪—‬ indications that they remembered both events.

"To compare the animals with or without hibernation, their behaviors are not different whatsoever," Tanaka said.

To get to the bottom of how that could be possible, the team compared the hibernating mice to another set of lab mice, which were instead put under long-term anesthesia and treated with a molecule that blocks neurons from strengthening their synapses. The latter group of mice also saw dramatic synapse loss, but unlike the hibernating mice, their memories didn't linger after the treatment. What made the difference?

Peering closer into both sets of brains, the scientists spotted a distinction: In the hibernating mice, certain clusters of synapses appeared to be resilient and survived the culling.

These spared connections tended to be hubs where a single neuron sending outgoing messages linked up with several neighboring cells, broadcasting its messages. They also appeared in places where many dendritic spines — the points where neurons receive messages — were bunched close together and received messages from multiple neurons at once.

"That unique structure is preserved during hibernation, Tanaka said. "Under anesthesia, we found they're completely disrupted."

The size of the dendritic spines didn't seem to matter, he added. It was this clustering pattern that seemed to be key for memories' survival.

Looking forward, there's much more to learn about these clusters and their relationship to memory retention. The scientists are now working to characterize the clusters at a molecular level. Eventually, they hope to manipulate the clusters' structure and formation to see what that does to memory. They are also running experiments to figure out how the brain preferentially spares these clusters while pruning away so many other connections in the hippocampus, Tanaka said.

Beyond neuroscience, the research could help engineers design better ways to store data in computer systems, he noted. But when it comes to the memory of living creatures, the study furthers scientists' understanding of how the physical traces of memory in the brain can change so much without sacrificing the memories themselves.

"With this study," Tanaka said, "we just opened up another door to tackle this problem."

Losing mature trees from a neighborhood may be a matter of life and death, a new study suggests.

The research, published Aug. 5 in the journal GeoHealth, tracked tree canopy cover and mortality across Chicago neighborhoods over 11 years. It found that it wasn't the number of trees in a neighborhood that was most strongly linked to residents' survival — it was whether the overall tree canopy was shrinking or growing from one year to the next.

Neighborhoods that kept losing tree cover tended to see death rates climb, especially in the hottest parts of the city, while neighborhoods that kept gaining canopy saw death rates fall.

The study can't say for certain that losing trees is what spiked death rates; it only shows the two trends moving together. But the finding adds to growing evidence that urban tree cover plays an outsized role in protecting people from extreme heat as the planet warms. Trees cool city blocks by shading pavement and buildings and releasing water vapor that lowers the surrounding air temperatures.

The new study's finding is less about discovering trees are good for people's health — scientists have suspected that for years — and more about how the researchers tracked it, said Vivek Shandas, a professor of urban studies and planning at Portland State University who wasn't involved in the work.

Much of the past work linking tree canopy to mortality relied on a single snapshot of a neighborhood's greenery, including a 2022 analysis of heat-related mortality tied to tree cover across dozens of U.S. cities. In this new study, researchers followed how canopy actually changed year to year, and it was that change rather than the raw number of trees that tracked with mortality.

The finding "reinforces what we've found in other cities," Shandas, who studies heat exposure and tree canopy loss in the U.S., told Live Science in an email. "Across 33 U.S. cities, nearly three-quarters were losing greenery, and the hottest neighborhoods were generally losing more — or gaining less — than cooler neighborhoods."

The effect size in the new study was notable: each year-over-year percentage-point increase in canopy was tied to roughly a 10% drop in mortality, with the greatest reductions in cardiovascular, respiratory and mental health-related deaths.

To reach their conclusion, the researchers combined annual satellite measurements of tree canopy for every Chicago census tract from 2011 through 2021 with more than 220,000 death records from state and city health departments. They built statistical models that controlled for factors like summer temperature, air pollution, income and residential segregation, which past studies show are tied to higher levels of mortality.

The team then grouped neighborhoods by their degree of canopy cover, and teased out how the heat and mortality data related to that metric. That helped them pinpoint where the effects of canopy loss or gain were strongest.

It's a rigorous design, Shandas said, but like any observational study it has limits: it can show canopy loss and mortality moving together, not prove that one causes the other. Plus, satellite measurements can miss newly planted trees and thus underestimate canopy cover, whereas finer-resolution tools could potentially pick up young, small-canopied trees that coarser satellite data misses.

It's still not entirely clear why tree cover seems to help, although the data suggest that the shade provided by trees isn't the whole story. That's because canopy loss was tied to higher death rates from a range of conditions, not only those strongly related to heat.

Geographically, the patterns highlighted in the study echoed Chicago's history of disinvestment. The South Side and West Side saw the sharpest canopy losses, hottest summers and highest mortality rates, despite sometimes starting with above-average tree cover. Lakefront neighborhoods stayed cooler by contrast, with lower mortality.

Study co-author Harrison Garcia, a Northwestern medical student, said the project began with a walking tour of sparsely treed Chicago blocks. "I noticed how much more exhausting it felt to walk through areas with little tree cover compared to nearby blocks lined with mature trees," he said in a statement.

The team modeled a hypothetical citywide canopy increase of 0.03% a year — roughly matching Chicago's current pace of planting 14,000 trees annually — and estimated it would prevent about 105 deaths per year, thanks to canopy growth.

Shandas said that figure is best read as a useful estimate of scale rather than a precise promise, since it comes from a statistical model rather than a count of trees planted and lives actually saved. He added that a newly planted tree doesn't deliver a mature tree's shade overnight, and prior research in Portland found planted trees were tied to greater reductions in human mortality as those trees aged.

This pattern, Shandas said, only reinforces the study's central point that protecting existing, mature trees may matter more than planting new ones.

BERLIN — Nearly four dozen skeletons recovered from a deep well in the Croatian city of Osijek may be the remains of people who perished during the historic Plague of Cyprian that ravaged the Roman Empire in the mid-third century A.D.

"We have a whole bunch of these used Roman-period wells that were dug in antiquity," Mario Novak, a bioarchaeologist at the Institute for Archaeological Research in Zagreb, told Live Science. "They basically used these dried-up wells just to throw people in — either from battle or from epidemics."

Novak presented new research on the enigmatic burial Aug. 6 at the 25th European Paleopathology Association meeting in Berlin. It has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

The burial was excavated in 2008 near a Roman necropolis in Osijek, which was founded by Emperor Hadrian in A.D. 133. At the time, the city was part of the province of Pannonia and named Mursa. The city of Mursa was important in Roman times because soldiers stationed there helped protect the Danube and the limits of the Roman Empire, but much of the ancient city still lies unexcavated beneath modern Osijek.

Novak and his team previously found two wells full of young male skeletons that had suffered violent injuries around the time of their deaths. This led the researchers to conclude that the men may have been involved in the Battle of Mursa in 260.

But the newly analyzed skeletons were very different from the previous mass burials, Novak said in his presentation. At least 43 people were buried in the well, and the dead included adults and children of both sexes. None of them had any major injuries.

"I would say this is a typical demographic cross-section of a civilian population. So nothing resembling those two battle-related mass burials," Novak said. "Our working hypothesis is that these individuals might be victims of a plague."

Historical records mention one major epidemic in the middle of the third century — the Plague of Cyprian. The disease outbreak first affected Roman troops on the Danube and likely caused mass mortality events in various parts of the Roman Empire. Experts don't yet know what caused this plague, but hemorrhagic fever and smallpox are possible contenders.

"This provides some really interesting data," Patrick Randolph-Quinney, a biological anthropologist at Uppsala University in Sweden who was not involved in the project, told Live Science. "These weren't really mass graves — instead, the bodies were dumped into a series of pre-existing wells at the site."

The skeletons show evidence of non-life-threatening conditions like osteoarthritis on the vertebrae and dental cavities, Novak said. He also found a couple of possible cases of tuberculosis and scurvy. But so far, the skeletons have not revealed their cause of death.

"Obviously, harder data are needed to better contextualize this finding," Novak said. Results from DNA analyses are forthcoming, he said, which may confirm whether the people were hastily-buried locals rather than Roman soldiers who were conscripted from all over the Roman Empire.

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

Scientists have engineered a new artificial intelligence (AI) system that cuts reaction delays in robots by over 10 times without using additional computing power.

Many robots controlled by vision language action (VLA) models move in fits and starts: reach, pause, adjust, pause again. The problem largely stems from how these models are typically run: After completing one set of instructions, the robot waits for the model to calculate the next set, creating a stop-and-go rhythm. This reaction lag is a major barrier to using VLA-controlled robots for tasks that demand continuous, real-time interaction.

A new system called "VLASH" tries to eliminate that wait by planning the next actions while the robot completes its current ones. In tests, robots using VLASH completed some tasks 1.5 to 2 times faster while retaining most or all of their accuracy. Maximum reaction latency fell by up to 11.8 times, depending on the computer hardware used.

Researchers from MIT; Nvidia; Caltech; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California, San Diego; and Tsinghua University in China described the system in a paper uploaded to the arXiv preprint server and will present at the Intelligent Robots and Systems Conference this fall.

An earlier version of the paper reported a speedup of more than 30 times, but the researchers told Live Science that those tests used longer action sequences and slower hardware. The newer experiments used shorter, more common action sequences and more powerful GPUs. "The 11.8x figure may better represent recent practical settings," the study authors told Live Science in an email.

Robots are getting a brain upgrade

VLA models act as the brains of many advanced robots. They combine images from a camera with human instructions and information about the robot's current state, and then translate that information into physical movements. As the robot completes one group of actions, VLASH uses its current position and scheduled movements to estimate where it will finish. From that projected state, the AI plans the next group of actions.

VLASH predicts the robot, not the world around it. Predicting the entire environment with a world model can take more computing time, making it less useful when a robot needs very fast reactions. The two approaches could eventually work together, the researchers said.

It is like planning your next step before your foot touches the ground, rather than waiting for it to land before deciding where to go.

Researchers tested two VLA models on two robot platforms, using a laptop with an Nvidia RTX 5090 GPU. They tested pick-and-place, stacking and sorting tasks, running 20 trials per method, plus fast-reaction challenges, including table tennis and Whac-a-Mole. They separately measured reaction latency on various processing units.

Because VLASH estimates the robot's future state from movements that have already been scheduled, it does not require a separate prediction model or additional inference step at runtime.

Priming machines for the real world

The researchers also reorganized existing training data to speed up fine-tuning. In one benchmark, each training step was 3.26 times faster while reaching comparable accuracy. That does not mean total training becomes 3.26 times faster or cheaper, the researchers cautioned, because the overall cost also depends on the model, hardware, data and number of training steps.

Table tennis and Whac-a-Mole put VLASH's reactions to the test. In both, the target could move while the robot was still calculating what to do.

VLASH does not try to predict those movements. Instead, it processes new observations 15 to 30 times per second, allowing it to quickly spot changes such as an object being moved, the researchers said.

This increased speed doesn't address the robot's safety around humans, however. Roshni Lulla, co-founder and chief research officer at the Institute for Humane Robotics who wasn't involved with the research, cautioned that faster reactions do not necessarily make a robot safer. "Reacting sooner is a real benefit, but the case for improved safety is unclear to me," she explained.

The researchers said manipulation tasks that require continuous motion and rapid responses would probably benefit first. That could eventually include manufacturing and other environments where objects move and plans change. But Lulla said the more revealing test would be putting these robots around people. "The real question is how this changes robotic performance in human-centered environments," she said. "I would want to see testing done with a human present in the room, when the state of the environment could be changed by another agent."

Search and rescue is a more distant possibility. VLASH has not been tested in poor lighting, smoke, unstable terrain, or with damaged cameras or unreliable communications. How it performs under those conditions would largely depend on the underlying VLA model, the researchers said.

VLASH could eventually be paired with more advanced world models that predict changes in the wider environment. First, however, researchers need to test it across more robots, VLA models, tasks and environments, as well as in longer experiments and with unexpected disturbances.

Lulla said the results support a relatively narrow conclusion. "We can fairly claim that this new methodology removes a bottleneck in terms of processing time and preserves capabilities," she said. But, she added, "What I would not claim is a meaningful advance in safety or in intelligence."

"Rather than any single demonstration, we would look for consistent gains across many robots, tasks, environments, and long-running trials, together with appropriate reliability and safety validation," the study authors said. For now, VLASH shows that robots can spend less time waiting to decide what to do next. Whether those faster reactions hold up outside the lab remains to be seen.

Astronomers have discovered a close pair of actively feeding supermassive black holes, seen when the universe was just 1.3 billion years old. Collectively known as LID-1166, the two monsters are separated by only about 4,900 light-years (1.5 kiloparsecs) inside a merging galaxy, offering the first clear view of a phase that's critical for understanding the growth of supermassive black holes.

Most large galaxies we can see formed over billions of years by merging with other galaxies. Most galaxies also have central black holes, so a merger between them would produce a system with two black holes. These "dual black hole" systems are thought to be common in the early universe. However, given that they're buried in dense gas and dust, these black holes are too close to be observed separately.

In a new study uploaded to the arXiv preprint server July 21, Hyewon Suh, an astronomer at the International Gemini Observatory/NSF NOIRLab, and colleagues reported the discovery of the closest-together dual black hole system ever confirmed this early in the universe's history. The team used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a collection of radio telescopes in Chile, to study this system. The paper has been accepted for publication in the journal Nature Astronomy.

"What makes that discovery special is that we may be seeing these two black holes growing and interacting in a system that is only about 1.3 billion years after the Big Bang," Anna Trindade Falcão, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center who was not involved in the study, told Live Science.

A distant "close" pair

LID-1166 first caught the astronomers' eyes as an X-ray source in the Chandra COSMOS Legacy Survey, but it remained completely undetected in even the deepest Hubble Space Telescope images. The strong X-ray signal hinted at the powerful feeding activity.

To understand what was producing these strong emissions, the team turned to JWST's Near-Infrared Spectograph (NIRSpec) instrument, which revealed two compact, glowing sources sitting 4,900 light years apart. Although astronomers have spotted other dual black hole candidates even earlier in the history of the cosmos, those pairs were separated by tens of thousands of light-years or more. LID-1166 is the first confirmed case of two black holes existing this close together.

"This step of the discovery could happen only thanks to the exquisite imaging and spectroscopic capabilities of the JWST, and in particular its instrument NIRSpec," study co-author Roberto Decarli, an astronomer at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics in Bologna, told Live Science in an email. "Similar observations from the ground would be extremely challenging due to the poor transparency of the atmosphere at these wavelengths."

"Meaningful evidence"

Both objects showed spectral signatures of gas swirling at high speeds indicative of actively feeding black holes, also known as active galactic nuclei, powering the merging system. Trindade Falcão said the researchers tested several methods for subtracting the main galaxy's light, and the signal at the second object's position stayed there every time, which is "meaningful evidence" that the signal is real

Even so, she says it would be worth double-checking, with a more detailed follow-up analysis, that the data truly shows two separate black holes — rather than one black hole plus some leftover glow being mistaken for a second one.

Using ALMA data, the team also detected a large pool of cold gas associated with each AGN, which Decarli said "points to the two AGN residing in the center of two galaxies on the verge of merging."

The presence of the galactic environment around each black hole helped the team rule out other exotic scenarios of how this system formed. For example, if one of the black holes were kicked out of its home galaxy in the process of merging, or flung out through a chaotic three-way gravitational interaction, the black hole would be moving fast, without any gas around it. It would show up as a "naked" black hole stripped of its surroundings. But that's not what the observations showed.

Monstrous growth

This discovery could also help astronomers understand one of the biggest puzzles in astronomy: how some supermassive black holes grew so quickly in the early universe. Models that explain this rapid growth rely on the same idea that gas rushes in from around the galaxy and gets funneled down to the center, feeding the black hole, Decarli explained.

"Cannibalizing other galaxies is part of this process," he said. "But what if these galaxies also host a massive black hole at their center?" Studying systems like LID-1166 "will help us shed light on how the growth of these galaxies and black holes will take place," he added.

The basic idea that early galaxies merge and drag their black holes together isn't surprising on its own, as it's something theory has predicted for years, Trindade Falcão noted. "What is striking here is resolving this process in an obscured pair that is only 1.5 kiloparsecs apart," she said, and this is the first step toward uncovering a hidden population of black holes that, in theory, we know should exist.

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

Between outbreaks of explosive diarrhea leading to nationwide lettuce recalls and cases of Salmonella tied to eggs and jalapeños, foodborne diseases in the United States have been hitting the headlines hard this summer.

But is the U.S. really contending with more foodborne infections than usual this year, or does the extensive news coverage just make it feel that way?

Live Science spoke with researchers to find out. Here's what the experts wish people knew about the recent outbreaks.

What is Cyclospora, and how many people have been infected?

Cyclospora cayetanensis is a single-celled parasite that, when ingested, can cause an intestinal illness known as cyclosporiasis. Symptoms of the infection include watery diarrhea, nausea and cramping. It's rarely fatal, but its symptoms can be severe; specific antibiotics can clear the infection.

There are currently several unrelated outbreaks of cyclosporiasis in the United States, most of which have not been linked to specific sources of contamination. Across all of the outbreaks combined, 10,468 lab-confirmed and a further suspected 12,255 cases were reported in the U.S. between May 1 and Aug. 4.

Health officials have linked the largest of the outbreaks to iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico and supplied by Taylor Farms. A recall of the affected produce was issued July 17. As of Aug. 5, over 6,300 cases of cyclosporiasis across 15 states have been linked to this outbreak, resulting in 278 hospitalizations and two deaths.

However, despite the large number of cases involved, the outbreak linked to lettuce does not necessarily represent a cause for alarm.

"This particular outbreak traces back to a single independent farm in central Mexico that Taylor Farms estimates supplies under 1% of the U.S. iceberg [lettuce] supply," Jessica Steier, a public health scientist, told Live Science by email. "One contamination event, on one farm, growing product that gets shredded and distributed nationally through food service is enough to produce thousands of illnesses and isn't necessarily a trend."

Considering the total number of Americans and the volume of lettuce consumed annually each summer, "you're looking at a very small fraction," she said. "For the large majority of Americans, the risk right now is very low."

Furthermore, the exposures to the contaminated lettuce are likely behind us, she noted. Cyclosporasis symptoms can take two weeks to show up, and the nation's capacity to test for the parasite is limited. Those factors mean the case counts are catching up.

How does the Cyclospora situation compare with previous years?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has confirmed more than 10,000 domestically acquired cases of cyclosporiasis since May 1, with another 12,000-plus awaiting confirmation, compared with roughly 2,000 to 3,000 in a typical full year, Steier said. "This is the largest documented cyclosporiasis outbreak in US history," she told Live Science.

Although the primary Cyclospora outbreak has been tied to lettuce, how that lettuce became contaminated is not yet known. Exposure typically occurs as a result of irrigation water that is contaminated with tiny amounts of human waste bearing the parasite or improper sanitation for workers during growing, harvesting or handling, according to the State of Rhode Island Department of Health.

Cyclosporiasis was first detected in the United States in 1985 — the illness was seen in four travellers who had returned to New York from Haiti and Mexico. The first U.S. outbreak occurred in Illinois in 1990; there were just 21 clinically defined cases associated with contaminated tap water. The next recorded outbreak occurred in Florida in 1995, with just 45 cases; the following year, there was a single outbreak of more than 1,400 cases across 20 states linked to raspberries imported from Guatemala.

As a result of these outbreaks, in 1999 the disease became nationally notifiable, meaning new cases are reported to the CDC. On average, there have been around 3,600 cases of cyclosporiasis in each of the past few years.

Steier attributes the growing trend in Cyclospora cases to Americans eating more fresh produce year-round, with much of it grown in ‪—‬ and imported from ‪—‬ tropical and subtropical regions where the parasite is commonly found. In 1990, when the U.S. had its first cyclospora outbreak, imports accounted, respectively for only around 35% and 10% of the nation’s fresh fruit and vegetable availability; today, those figures have risen to around 60% and 35%. Additionally, tests that detect the pathogen have been improved, so there's a greater rate of diagnosis.

Is there one Cyclospora outbreak, or many?

Part of the problem is that some news coverage "keeps reporting a singular number that keeps increasing, which is not useful," Steier said. "Almost every story leads with a number, and almost none explain what it's counting."

There are many metrics being reported, including the CDC's confirmed national case count, the confirmed cases in the 15-state outbreak, the cases still awaiting confirmation, travel-associated cases, and various states' totals, which sometimes combine probable and confirmed cases.

If you conflate all those counts, Steier cautioned, "we create the appearance of one massive outbreak, which is not necessarily the case." In other words, "Cyclosporiasis reported in 47 different states is not the same thing as an outbreak in 47 states, and media coverage doesn't reflect that distinction."

Ellen Shumaker, a food safety scientist at North Carolina State University, said by email that "Clear and frequent communication with the public is really important in outbreaks like these, to make sure consumers are getting accurate information and have clear steps of what to do."

Shumaker also noted that these outbreaks highlight the need for better traceability for foodborne illnesses. Such improvements are expected to come in July 2028, from which point the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will require companies to maintain more detailed records tracking food products across the supply chain, linked to critical events such as harvesting, processing or packing. This change — which was pushed back from its original implementation date of January this year to give the industry more time to adapt — is expected to not only enable much faster tracing but also allow product recalls to be more targeted around contaminated lots, thereby helping to minimize food waste.

What is Salmonella, and what outbreaks are ongoing?

Recent weeks have also seen two prominent outbreaks of Salmonella infection, or salmonellosis. Salmonella is a group of bacteria that can infect the intestinal tract, causing diarrhea, stomach pains and, sometimes, vomiting.

The first of the two outbreaks led to a recall of white shell eggs and brown, cage-free shell eggs sold by Midwest Poultry Services with best-by dates between July 20 and Aug. 17. The recalled eggs — sold under the brand names Country Morning, Cal-Maine Sunups, Brookshire's, Simple Truth and Kroger — were shipped to Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.

According to the FDA, although Midwest Poultry Services was identified as a common egg source by the traceback investigation, this producer does not account for all of the illness in the outbreak. In fact, as of July 24, there have been 98 confirmed cases across 17 states, including 26 hospitalizations and no deaths. Investigations to determine if there are other illness sources ongoing.

A second Salmonella outbreak has been tied to fresh jalapeños from the Mexican state of Sinaloa. These were sent by Coast Citrus Distributors to food service companies, restaurants, distributors and wholesalers across the United States.

Taylor Fresh Foods has issued a recall for multiple products made with jalapeños with “Best If Used By” dates up to and including Aug. 16. These include products sold at Hannaford, Kroger, Stop and Shop and Hannaford, Target, Trader Joe’s, Walmart and Whole Foods stores.

The Food Safety and Inspection Service has also issued a public health alert for meat and poultry products containing jalapeños that may be contaminated with Salmonella. These include products sold at Albertsons, Dillons, Hannaford, H-E-B, Kroger, RaceTrac, Randalls, Tom Thumb, Walmart and Wawa stores.

This second outbreak has been linked to 345 confirmed cases of Salmonella across 27 states as of Aug. 10, with 36 hospitalizations and no deaths.

Are there more Salmonella cases than usual?

The number of Salmonella infections this year is not abnormal, according to Steier.

Last year, for example, an outbreak of Salmonella infections tied to eggs distributed by County Eggs LLC led to 105 cases across 14 states in August; June saw 134 cases across 10 states as the result of an outbreak linked to the August Egg Co.; and 21 people were infected by contaminated home deliveries from Metabolic Meals across 13 states.

Looking at the big picture, "ninety-eight cases tied to recalled shell eggs and 345 tied to jalapeños are unremarkable for a pathogen that causes something like 1.35 million infections in this country every year," Steier said.

Salmonella may be getting more attention than usual, she added, "because Cyclospora has everyone on high alert."

Dr. Zoe Weiss, a clinical microbiologist at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, added that COVID-19 pandemic may have also had a lasting effect on people's reactions to infectious disease.

"The average person is just more aware of infectious diseases and has a more sophisticated understanding of disease spread," she said.

How can consumers stay safe?

The key thing for consumers to do is to keep checking the relevant product recall lists, such as those for lettuce, eggs and jalapeños, and not eat any of the recalled products.

Cyclospora is only really eliminated by cooking, and cannot be rinsed off lettuce. When it comes to Salmonella, Steier stresses that recalled eggs should be thrown out or returned, not “cooked more carefully.”

"Please don't panic — and please don't come away thinking you need to avoid lettuce or other produce beyond what has been recalled," she added, noting that the recalls related to specific products and not, for example, lettuce in general.

"What worries me is the collateral damage," she added. "Product sales have taken a hit, lettuce especially, and most Americans were not eating enough vegetables to begin with. Swearing off produce is a real cost to your health in exchange for protection you’re not actually getting."

An unassuming, brownish stone may be one of the most precious objects on Earth. The rare rock, called Teghaza 001, is a piece of ancient Mars and gives geoscientists an invaluable opportunity to study the planet's oldest material.

Now, a slew of recent studies based on evidence from the space rock are helping scientists understand more about the Red Planet's history of habitability.

Scientists believe that Earth and Mars coalesced around 4.5 billion years ago from the protoplanetary disk of gas and dust that surrounded our young sun. These two celestial siblings have since shared more than a few rocks in the intervening millions of millennia. Meteoroid impacts frequently gouge the Martian crust and have sent several hundred pieces of Mars hurtling to Earth — a free Mars return mission, paid for by the universe.

Two especially famous specimens include the Allan Hills 84001 meteorite, which contains tantalizing 4 billion-year-old organic molecules; and NWA 7034, a meteorite with 4.4 billion-year components and specks of ancient water.

But these Martian meteorites are lacking in a couple of respects. The former lacks mineral variety, and the latter appears to be a meteoritic mosaic that solidified from much older individual components, so neither faithfully represents some of Mars' oldest crust.

Teghaza 001, however, may help fill that knowledge gap.

Martian history right in our hands

The Teghaza 001 meteorite comprises 28 ounces (800 grams) of Martian material, split into eight pieces recovered in 2022 near the Taghaza archaeological area in Mali. It's owned by the Maine Mineral and Gem Museum.

In a preprint uploaded April 14, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, researchers measured the rate of multiple types of radioactive decay in different minerals, including tiny crystals called zircons, which are embedded within Teghaza 001, and found that the multiple measures agreed on an age at least 4.1 billion years ago. This may make the space rock the single oldest-known piece of Mars.

The space rock is rich in silica, suggesting that Mars may have been producing its own version of granite, which on Earth requires forces associated with plate tectonics. Granite must melt in extremely hot, pressurized subterranean conditions and then cool slowly, becoming lighter and eventually bubbling up through the ground to form the core of continents and the hearts of mountains.

But Mars has no tectonic plates, and its surface seems to be made of basalt, the dark, heavy volcanic rock that forms from quick-cooling lava — and also the stuff that makes the Hawaiian islands.

Are plate tectonics really necessary?

In a paper published June 26 in the journal Nature Astronomy, researchers revealed evidence that Mars may have been able to drive the geological processes that are mediated by plate tectonics on Earth.

The researchers used seismic data from NASA's InSight lander to model Mars' interior, and found evidence that it once housed huge, interconnected magma networks that may have stretched thousands of miles beneath its northern hemisphere.

"One of the big questions in planetary science is whether Earth is unique," study co-author Jon Wade, an associate professor of planetary materials at Oxford University, said in a statement.

"If Mars could develop this kind of complex crust without plate tectonics, then maybe the conditions needed for habitability can emerge on more planets than we realised, including those previously dismissed based on size or their apparent lack of tectonic activity," Wade added.

As a result, such processes may have helped early Mars develop an atmosphere, large bodies of water and potentially habitable conditions — a scenario that may be playing out elsewhere across the universe.

The solar system gives, and the solar system takes

While this may sound encouraging for the emergence of Martian life, Teghaza 001 also offered evidence that Mars began losing its water early in its history.

In a separate paper published June 10 in the journal Science Advances, researchers recreated Mars' hydrological evolution by tracing its hydrogen, a major constituent of water, by chemically analyzing a piece of Teghaza 001 and comparing it with two younger Martian meteorites.

To explore when Mars' water began seeping into space, the researchers examined the meteorites’ ratios of hydrogen to deuterium, a heavier version of hydrogen that contains a neutron in addition to the one proton and one electron that make up basic hydrogen atoms.

Because hydrogen is lighter, it more readily escapes into space, leaving behind a greater abundance of deuterium. The results "indicate that Mars lost a substantial proportion of its juvenile atmosphere to space within a few hundred million years after the magma ocean solidified," the researchers wrote in the study.

Importantly, this suggested that Mars was already rapidly losing its hydrogen into space by 4.1 billion years ago.

While Teghaza opens a rare window onto Mars’ earliest epochs, scientists urge that more samples are needed to truly understand Martian history. James Day, a professor of geosciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, who was not involved in this research, noted that this finding is drawn from a small, rare piece of evidence. "I would caution that all of these arguments would have been based on a single small stone," he told Live Science in an email.

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

A dog-sized carnivore and mammal ancestor that lived around 236 million years ago seems to have given birth to live young, a new study suggests. This means the tactic of keeping young developing inside the mother ‪—‬ known as viviparity ‪—‬ may have emerged in the mammalian lineage 90 million to 95 million years earlier than scientists previously thought, researchers noted in the study.

"This is the first time that we have evidence on how these mammalian ancestors reproduced," said first author Leandro Gaetano, a paleontologist at Argentina's National Scientific and Technical Research Council. His team reported the findings Aug. 13 in the journal Frontiers in Mammal Science.

Mammals, along with their extinct ancestors and close relatives, belong to the Cynodontia clade, which first appeared about 260 million years ago, in the Late Permian period. But after the Great Dying extinction event 252 million years ago, which heralded the start of the Triassic, the cynodonts flourished.

Gaetano and his colleagues spotted a curious growth mark in a fossilized bone of Chiniquodon theotonicusis, a carnivorous, dog-sized cynodont that lived some 236 million years ago in what is now northwestern Argentina.

Data from living species suggested the mark was a growth ring of disorganized bone material known as neonatal line, which forms when growth rapidly accelerates just after birth or hatching. These marks are common in the bones of living terrestrial animals, Gaetano said.

"When you are in an egg or in your mom's belly, you have a small space and you grow very slowly," he told Live Science. "When you hatch or are born, you have a lot of space and you start growing very, very quickly."

To try to discern how the youngster emerged, the team measured the neonatal line and overall size of adult C. theotonicusis leg and arm bones to estimate that the individual weighed about 26 pounds (12 kilograms) when it died and about 3.7 pounds (1.7 kg) when it was born ‪—‬ about 14% of its adult mass.

Then, the team compared these values to those of 1,869 mammal species, 2,619 nonavian reptiles and 782 birds alive today. Zooming in on those of comparable weight, the team found that the reptiles ‪—‬ including snakes, turtles and crocodilians ‪—‬ that weigh between 17.6 and 32 pounds (8 to 14.5 kg) a produce hatchlings that are just 0.1% to 0.6% of their adult mass.

Birds that weigh between 17.6 and 47 pounds (8 to 21.5 kg) as adults, like some cranes or vultures, produce hatchlings of about 1.3% to 4.5% of their adult mass.

But in mammals that weigh 17.6 to 33 pounds (8 to 15 kg) as adults, some babies can hit around 20% of their adult mass, much closer to the figure for C. theotonicusis. The bay duiker antelope (Cephalophus dorsalis), for example, ‪gives birth to young that weigh about as much as the newborn C. theotonicus. This similarity in the relationship between newborn and adult mass suggests that like these antelope, C. theotonicus gave birth to living young, said Gaetano.

"It's not the smoking gun, but it does suggest they are giving birth to live young," said Emily Rayfield, a paleobiologist at the University of Bristol in the U.K. who wasn't involved in the study.

How is giving birth to live young helpful?

Giving birth to live young may have been advantageous at the time. "The Triassic was a very difficult time to be alive," Gaetano said. It was after a huge extinction event, and as ecosystems restructured and animals filled empty niches, there was huge competition for resources and strong predation pressure amid very arid conditions, so embryos of viviparous species may have been better protected than those of egg-laying species, he noted.

An egg can't move away from a predator, but a young animal can, which is a "huge advantage," said Anne Weil, a vertebrate paleontologist at Oklahoma State University who wasn't involved in the study.

She told Live Science that she wasn't surprised to see viviparity in C. theotonicus, given the range of reproductive behavior in living vertebrates. For example, there are both egg-laying and live-bearing fish and reptiles living today. There are also nonplacental mammals that lay eggs, like the duck-billed platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) and the echidna (Tachyglossidae); others, like kangaroos, produce extremely small newborns and then harbor them in belly pouches.

Until a few years ago, birthing live young was often considered a relatively modern evolutionary acquisition within the mammalian lineage, developing from egg-laying, perhaps via the intermediate step of the reproductive tactics still used by mammals with pouches. However, evidence has mounted against this in recent years and C. theotonicus lived and seemed to have given birth to live young before the ancestors of marsupials even split from the ancestors of placental mammals.

"This could be evidence of a general switch from laying eggs to giving birth to live young early in the mammalian lineage, but we need more evidence," Gaetano said.

Rayfield agreed that more research is needed to make firm conclusions. "My take on it is that live birth appeared earlier than we thought, but we still need a lot more evidence to really nail it," she told Live Science.

According to Gaetano, the bigger picture is that many characteristics that are thought to be particular features of mammals are, in fact, older. "We usually think of mammalian ancestors as small, reptile-looking creatures," he said. "But we are finding a lot of different pieces of evidence that are pointing to these guys being more similar to present-day mammals than we thought."

Aside from the newfound hint of live bearing, these include suggestions of whiskers in Probainognathus, a carnivorous cynodont that lived about 230 million years ago; and indications of hair and lactation in Prozostrodontia, another cynodont that lived about 240 million years ago.

Deep-sea divers take careful measures to avoid "the bends," a painful condition where gas bubbles form in divers' blood and tissues when they ascend from the depths too quickly. Now, a new study using unlikely test subjects — pigs in diving suits — has shown that switching up the gas they breathe underwater may help divers avoid this dreaded decompression sickness.

One day, the lessons from the research may help humans dive deeper for longer and get back to the surface more quickly, the study authors say. The work was published Aug. 10 in the journal PNAS.

Study co-author Dr. Richard Moon, an anesthesiologist and professor of medicine at Duke University, has treated many cases of decompression sickness over his career. He's even suffered from mild cases of the bends himself. While Moon only experienced slight joint pain in these instances, serious cases of decompression sickness can be fatal, blocking blood flow around the body and damaging the heart and other organs.

The trouble begins with the gases divers breathe to stay alive underwater.

Diving pioneers like Jacques Cousteau, who went underwater while breathing compressed air, noted the confusion and elation they felt during extended dives, calling it the "rapture of the deep." What they were truly feeling was the effects of nitrogen narcosis; this side effect of breathing nitrogen at high pressures makes divers feel drunk.

Divers who ascended rapidly would be beset with severe cramps that doubled them over in agony. These cramps came from bubbles of nitrogen that had dissolved in their blood and tissues in the deep ocean. When the divers ascended too quickly, the dissolved gas started bubbling out, and their bodies essentially became shaken-up cans of soda.

Many divers now minimize the risk of both nitrogen narcosis and the bends by using nitrox, a gaseous mixture of nitrogen and oxygen that has a higher oxygen content than regular air. And commercial deep divers often breathe heliox, a mix of helium and oxygen that reduces the risk of nitrogen narcosis.

However, high levels of oxygen can be toxic in the abyss, and heliox is pricey and can still produce bends-like effects. Safe diving practices, such as tight limits on how long someone spends deep underwater, further cut the risk, but they can't erase it.

"The risk for diving injury almost exponentially increases with depth," said Dr. Kay Tetzlaff, a clinician researcher at the University of Tübingen who was not involved in the research.

For decades, Moon and his colleagues have studied ways to make deep-sea dives safer. The scientists knew that one way to stop gas from entering the body's tissues so quickly was to use a gas with larger molecules. But this replacement gas also had to be less soluble than helium or nitrogen.

"Our first idea was neon," Moon said. But this plan was undermined by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which sent neon prices spiraling. Instead, they settled on carbon tetrafluoride (CF₄), which, like helium, is inert, meaning it wouldn't chemically react with the body's tissues.

The team tested the gas inside a big, blue tank in Duke's hyperbaric facility. The pressure inside the vast tank can be altered to simulate the crushing conditions 200 feet (61 meters) below sea level.

The team ran their experiments with 40 pigs, whose biology makes them an appropriate model for studying the effects of diving. These pigs were fitted with custom-built suits featuring a hood, a built-in heater and a diaper, for emergencies.

All of the animals were sedated for hour-long simulated dives. Half breathed heliox for the entire dive, while the other half were switched to a mix of oxygen and CF₄ for the last 10 minutes of their submersion. During this period, the helium in the pigs' bodies left their tissues and was replaced by the CF₄. Because the latter gas is less soluble, it entered tissues more slowly than the helium left them. By the time these pigs resurfaced, there was less inert gas in their tissues, which reduced the risk of the bends.

Both groups of pigs were removed from their simulated dives at the same rate, and afterward, they were carefully monitored for three hours. The pigs that had breathed only heliox had much more pronounced signs of decompression sickness, such as impairment in their ability to walk and more bubbles of gas, or embolisms, in their hearts.

In many instances, these cases of depression sickness proved fatal; the dive and subsequent decompression killed over 80% of the heliox-breathing pigs in the three hours after the dive. By contrast, none of those that switched to CF₄ died.

Both Tetzlaff and Moon acknowledged that the findings won't immediately translate to a new standard of practice for human divers. For starters, the risk of decompression sickness for recreational divers is low enough ‪—‬ and the cost of CF₄ is high enough ‪—‬ that few would likely switch their gases.

"I think the expense would limit it to commercial or military diving," Moon said.

Even if the population of people who would use CF4 is small, the new data could still have an important impact, Tetzlaff noted.

"Every dive that you can make safer is worth the effort, right?" he said. "Even if it only applies to a few people."

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

A push to raise the minimum age for social media and other online services is gaining momentum, beginning with Australia, which recently banned those under 16 from creating social media accounts.

Proponents present compelling studies on the harms of youth social media use and point to evidence that the threat of age restrictions is already pushing some companies to make their products safer. Critics counter that requiring adults to submit to intrusive age checks creates privacy harms and security risks, that blocking young people from these services infringes on their right to participate in public life, and that it pushes them toward riskier alternatives, such as Telegram.

This debate speaks to our professional experiences at New York University's Center for Business and Human Rights, and a 15-year career as a Google executive. We are also both parents, so the outcome will affect our families directly. We recognize that minimum-age requirements will continue to advance if platforms fail to comply with targeted design requirements. We propose two positive, solution-oriented initiatives that we urge policymakers to adopt before they consider implementing minimum-age restrictions.

Enforce targeted, proportionate restrictions

Creating safe online spaces without being overly intrusive is difficult. Human rights law provides a methodology for assessing government actions that restrict individual rights for any legitimate reason: Does the restriction achieve its purpose, or could a lesser restriction work?

Applied here, a government would have to show that switching off or altering harmful platform features or expanding parental controls would not suffice and that nothing short of removing children from the service would work. Answering that question requires specifying which harm is at issue, since each calls for a different fix. There were 21.3 million suspected online child sexual exploitation incidents reported to the U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 2025. Such exploitation may be enabled by children having publicly discoverable profiles, recommendation systems that surface those profiles, and frictionless messaging between children and adults.

Cyberbullying ‪—‬ which, according to one 2025 study, had affected almost one-third of American teens in the past 30 days ‪—‬ may be facilitated by pseudonymous accounts and group chats that allow adding someone without permission. Keeping children from accessing some of these features and keeping adult strangers out of child-focused spaces, like Roblox, would address both harms without placing unnecessary restrictions on children.

Age-inappropriate content is harder to define. Adult-content filters in school have been critiqued for treating health-related content as if it were pornographic. In addition, potentially sensitive material does not affect all children equally. Parents and caregivers, rather than regulators, may be better at making the calls about specific categories to restrict.

The compulsive use of social media emerges from systems designed for growth and engagement optimization — features like infinite scroll, autoplay, variable reward notifications, and algorithmic feeds. These exploitative design patterns affect every user, not just children, and they exist in other online services, like gaming platforms. The best response may be to restrict these features across the board or, as the New York SAFE for Kids Act does, to turn them off by default unless adults opt in.

Examining each harm separately suggests the risk lies not in the platforms but in particular design choices. Most of these elements can be altered by the companies or, where necessary, age restricted, without removing young people from these services altogether.

A wholesale ban could then be explored if those targeted measures fail or platforms don't comply. Indonesia and Canada are now taking that approach by requiring that these platforms meet defined safety criteria before children can create accounts.

Learn from other industries

For features that do require age verification, we need to develop safety systems similar to those in areas like architecture, drug testing and food service. Such infrastructure can be considered "high-stakes," because it is implemented when laypeople cannot directly evaluate a product’s safety themselves and the consequences of failure are severe, such as the collapse of an apartment building.

We argue that online identity verification matches this pattern; no user can verify whether a vendor or platform properly handles and disposes of the photographs and identity documents required to verify their age, and the consequences of failure — misuse by the platforms or identity theft — are severe and often irreversible. For example, in 2025 the Federal Trade Commission received over 1.3 million reports of identity theft, with estimated losses of more than $15.8 billion.

We do not endorse specific technical standards, as our experience in counter-abuse technology shows that adversaries continually work to subvert online protections. Just as a bridge decays over time due to weather and usage, and needs to be maintained, regularly inspected and eventually replaced, we need to continue recognizing and adapting to new online threats over time.

Three attributes common to existing high-stakes safety systems would help address online age verification.

First, expert-led committees typically set and update safety standards, which agencies such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration adopt and enforce. The technical standards behind age verification are very new, and they don't have the same level of government support to help develop or enforce them. For example, Google and Apple take different technical approaches to secure age verification in their mobile operating systems, which could make different systems less compatible over time. We strongly encourage governments to invest in supporting information security, internet and web standards bodies to move their work forward more quickly and to help the entire tech industry converge on common practices. Those standards should also be revised on a fixed schedule, in the same way that the building code is updated every three years.

Second, products in most high-stakes industries require review before they can be rolled out. Drug trials are extensive and scientifically rigorous, buildings require certified plans and inspections, and restaurants require a health certificate before they can serve a single meal. Age-verification vendors should face similar preapproval inspection, with computer architecture assessments, code reviews and adversarial security testing. Critically, social media companies should pass an equivalent review before deploying age verification.

Third, our food, drugs and buildings are safer than they otherwise would be because we fund full-time government experts in proportion to commercial activity in those sectors. This often takes the form of significant up-front fees for the companies involved ‪—‬ pharmaceutical companies must fund drug trials, and contractors must obtain building permits. This money covers the salaries and operating costs of trained inspectors. Vendors and social media companies should pay similar high fees, both up front for pre-review and annually for ongoing supervision, scaled to each company's audience size and scope of services.

In conclusion, we call on governments to approach child safety online as an ongoing challenge rather than a one-time regulatory fix. Making children safer online will take years of continued research into both child behavior and new technologies. One useful model is the progressive regulation of automobiles. Since the mid-1960s, new technologies and government targets have driven tailpipe emissions for most passenger vehicles down 99% and fatalities per mile down 78% per million vehicle miles traveled. If we take a similar approach to reducing online harms to our children, we are confident that we can achieve similar remarkable improvements in the years to come.

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

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.

Just over two weeks after the total solar eclipse on Aug. 12 comes an encore. On the night of Aug. 27–28, a very deep partial lunar eclipse will see Earth's shadow cover more than 96% of the full moon. Although it falls just short of becoming a total lunar eclipse — and therefore isn't technically a "blood moon" — much of the lunar surface will turn a coppery red to cameras. It will also be the deepest lunar eclipse anywhere in the world until the next total lunar eclipse on Dec. 31, 2028.

Unlike a solar eclipse, a lunar eclipse is completely safe to observe with the naked eye and unfolds slowly over several hours, giving observers and photographers plenty of time to enjoy it. Whether you're using binoculars, a telescope, a mirrorless camera or a smart telescope, it will be one of the best lunar photography opportunities for years.

Solar and lunar eclipses often come in pairs because they occur during the same eclipse season — a period of about 34 days when the sun, Earth and moon line up closely enough for eclipses to occur. A solar eclipse happens at new moon, when the moon passes between Earth and the sun. Then, about two weeks later, at full moon, the alignment can produce a lunar eclipse as the moon passes through Earth's shadow.

This eclipse will favor observers in North and South America, where every stage will be visible high in the night sky. Europe gets a different, but equally photogenic experience, with the eclipse occurring before dawn as the moon sinks toward the western horizon.

Whatever equipment you use, the biggest challenge for most people won't be finding the eclipse, but deciding how to see and photograph it. Here's some gear worth considering.

Best binoculars for the Aug. 27-28 lunar eclipse

Best telescopes for the Aug. 27-28 lunar eclipse

Best smart telescopes for the Aug. 27-28 lunar eclipse

Best cameras for the Aug. 27-28 lunar eclipse

Best lenses for the Aug. 27-28 lunar eclipse

Essential accessories for the Aug. 27-28 lunar eclipse

FAQs

Every time you use your smartphone to send a text, take a photo or post to social media, countless electrons are doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes by handling inputs and storing that information. But researchers in China have created a new chip that uses just a single electron to store data.

In a study published July 16 in the journal Science, scientists demonstrated a two-dimensional (2D) flash memory chip that can trap a solitary electron at room temperature, reducing the energy needed for processing data.

The device has been nicknamed "Guiyi," which means "return to one" in Chinese Buddhism. This is a nod to a single electron being the theoretical minimum it takes to transfer a single bit, with the South China Morning Post likening it to the "holy grail for the semiconductor industry."

A stronger signal from a single electron

The reason this technology could be a big breakthrough, the scientists believe, is that it promises to solve challenges associated with energy efficiency, speed and stability all in one device.

"Our demands for storage speed, capacity, energy efficiency and stability have reached a new level in the AI era," study co-author Chunsen Liu, an engineer at Fudan University, told state-owned China Daily. "Being able to store one bit of information by changing the state of a single electron will significantly reduce power consumption and pave the way for much larger storage capacity."

According to the study, scientists tried to store data using a single electron in the late 1990s, but the signal, or electrical pulse, generated from trapping the electron was too faint to read clearly. They likened it to trying to detect the ripple from a single drop of rain falling into a reservoir.

To get around this problem, the team structured the Guiyi 2D flash memory chip to feature a layer of graphene before the floating gate ‪—‬ a trap that can hold electrons and a place where data can be stored even after power is switched off.

Electrons can move through graphene's single-atom hexagonal lattice with very low resistance and at high speed with minimal energy loss. This layer of graphene enables electrons to accelerate before jumping into the floating gate, where they are then trapped.

The result was a stronger electrical pulse from a single trapped electron, which produced a 0.5-volt signal ‪—‬ 10 times stronger than previous single-electron attempts, the researchers said.

Liu told China Daily that Guiyi could help data move more quickly between computing and storage units. "That would significantly reduce data transfer delays, improve computing efficiency and help expand AI applications across industries," he said.

The challenge in scaling up

Guiyi is another example of "researchers exploring new device architectures to overcome today's memory bottlenecks" caused by artificial intelligence (AI), Andrew Humphris, a professor of nanoimaging at the University of Bristol and founder of semiconductor metrology company Infinitesima, told Live Science in an email.

Demand for AI workloads and large language models has created a performance gap between processor and memory speeds, thereby slowing data transfer. At the same time, the three chipmakers that dominate the NAND flash memory market — Samsung, SK hynix and Micron — are deprioritizing this form of non-volatile memory that keeps data stored when power is turned off.

Instead, they are increasing capacity for high-bandwidth memory. This has caused a NAND shortage and pushed up prices. Technologies like Guiyi, which promise to speed up data transfer, could fill the gap.

Although Guiyi is a strong proof of concept, commercial use will be a different story. Humphris warned that the real challenge will be in scaling up, saying, "a scientific breakthrough can only transform an industry when it can be produced reliably, repeatedly and economically."

He cited the example of component maker ASML, whose extreme ultraviolet (EUV) technology has become ubiquitous in the semiconductor industry; it's used by the likes of Intel and Samsung for the production of 3- and 5-nanometer process nodes. ASML took more than two decades to take EUV technology from the research lab to commercial production — which is much longer than the company had anticipated.

"The companies that shape the next generation of AI chips won't just be those with the best technologies," Humphris added, "but those that can manufacture at scale and at the right cost."

Nonetheless, the team led by study first author Zhou Peng, a microelectronics professor at Fudan University, has bold plans. As reported by the South China Morning Post, he told Jiefang Daily (the official daily newspaper of the Shanghai Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party) in June that they plan to set up a company later this year to commercialize the technology within three to five years. If they're successful, he said, it could "shake up" the flash storage market.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's how you guys watched the eclipse around the world:

The sky show will keep going tonight as the Perseid meteor shower continues to grace our skies after peaking yesterday. The skies will still be especially dark after last night's new moon, so you'll be able to see these shooting stars in all their splendor. More eclipses are also on the way, with the first coming in just two weeks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Different fish, different response

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

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

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

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

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

A slap is just one part of the story

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

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

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

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

The octopuses were also curious about their observers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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