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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inside the dodo's brain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing is surprising anymore, nothing is deniable on oath;

No longer will anything seem impossible or marvellous, since

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

veiling the radiance of the sun, and turning mankind slack

with fear.

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

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

The wild beasts changing places with dolphins,

making the oceans their pasture, and taking joy

in the sonorous murmur of the sounding sea,

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

mountain.

(Translated by Michael Armstrong)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For more intriguing medical cases, check out our Diagnostic Dilemma archives.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where is the Aug. 12 total solar eclipse visible?

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

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

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

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

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

Where is the Aug. 12 partial eclipse visible?

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

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

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

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

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

Where to stream the Aug. 12 eclipse online

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

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

When is the next eclipse?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Growing cells

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

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

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

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

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

Growing Neanderthals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new approach to neuromorphic computing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Merging memory and compute

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

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

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

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

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

The "output layer" of spiking neural networks

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

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

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

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

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

More efficient AI at the edge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Similar pressures, different systems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hesitations from U.S. doctors

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other doctors were less open to the idea.

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

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

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

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

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

How incentives work in the U.S.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You have to have some sort of guardrail"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alternative approaches?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Targeting caregivers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beyond pediatrics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See more Earth from space

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

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

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

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

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

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

A "tortured" approval process

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next step for the new mRNA flu vaccine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

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

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

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

Baader AstroSolar Filter Film OD 5.0: Design

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

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

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

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

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

Baader AstroSolar Filter Film OD 5.0: Performance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baader AstroSolar Filter Film OD 5.0: Functionality

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

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

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

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

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

Should you buy Baader AstroSolar Filter Film?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you put together last week's Astonishing Artifact?

This article was originally published by Yale Environment 360.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"They do not want to be disturbed"

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

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

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

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

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

"They erase their footprints"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Misconceptions about isolated peoples

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Energy-hungry bots

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t give up on search

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

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

Smaller models use less energy

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

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

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

Less chatty chatbots

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

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

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

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

Go low-res and batch video

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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