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July 15, 2025

- Penny-sized laser could help driverless cars see the world so much clearer

- 4,000-year-old human rib discovered high in the Pyrenees still has an arrowhead from a brutal attack

- Russian volcano grows 'devil horns' and spits out 1,000-mile-long river of smoke — Earth from space

ELECTRIC VEHICLES

NEWS | RORY BATHGATE | JUL 15, 2025, 6:30 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Penny-sized laser could help driverless cars see the world so much clearer

Researchers have created an ultrasensitive laser the size of a penny that could improve lidar technology, boosting autonomous vehicles in the process.

A new chip-scale laser developed by researchers in the lab of engineering professor Qiang Lin can conduct extremely fast and accurate measurements by very precisely changing its color across a broad spectrum of light at very fast rates. (Image credit: University of Rochester photo / J. Adam Fenster)

Scientists have created a penny-sized laser that they say could improve the way that autonomous vehicles can navigate the streets.

The laser is intended to enhance a scientific technique called optical metrology — in which light is used to measure and identify objects.

They envision several applications for their invention, including lidar (light detection and ranging), which is used to provide autonomous vehicles with the live data they need to navigate the roads.

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Vehicles equipped with lidar sensors bounce light off their surroundings using lasers that are invisible to the human eye, to collect information about the size, distance and velocity of surrounding pedestrians, vehicles and obstacles.

The team from the University of Rochester and the University of California, Santa Barbara contends that current lidar systems are too complex and prone to mistakes. They added that their laser solution can collect large, sophisticated data on surroundings at a far higher speed and accuracy than any predecessors.

"A more advanced form [of lidar] known as frequency-modulated continuous-wave LiDAR requires a large tuning range and fast tuning of the laser's frequency, and that's what our laser can do," Shixin Xue, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in electrical and computer engineering and optics at the University of Rochester, said in a statement.

Related: Groundbreaking amplifier could lead to 'super lasers' that make the internet 10 times faster

For example, the researchers used the laser to pick out the letters "U" and "R" built out of Lego bricks on a spinning disk. This shows its ability to track details on fast-moving objects, crucial for autonomous driving as well as in a range of other scenarios.

The team described its approach in a study published May 30 in the journal Light: Science & Applications.

Powering future autonomous vehicles

Xue also described the way that they have shrunk down the equipment required for a process called Pound-Drever-Hall (PDH) laser frequency locking — used to reduce and stabilize a laser’s noise. The equipment typically needed for this — including an intrinsic laser, an isolator, an acoustic optic modulator, and a phase modulator — would typically be the size of a desktop computer.

“It’s a very important process that can be used for optical clocks that can measure time with extreme precision, but you need a lot of equipment to do that,” said Xue in the statement. "Our laser can integrate all of these things into a very small chip that can be tuned electrically.”

In the future, the device could be used to improve the performance of lidar in a much smaller package. Current autonomous systems, such as those found in Waymo cars, need an enormous sensor on top of the car to operate with safety and accuracy, which affects aerodynamics.

The new laser could help in the production of autonomous vehicles that need very low air drag, such as autonomous aircraft, as well as being used for systems that require incredibly accurate lasers, such as quantum information processing or the detection of gravitational waves, according to the researchers.

The team demonstrated that the laser can emit 20 quintillion pulses of light per second – a billion billion – and allowed objects moving at up to 131 feet per second (40 meters per second) to be measured from a distance of 1.3 feet (0.4 m). The laser also proved highly reliable, running for up to 60 minutes.

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) partly supported the research as part of its Lasers for Universal Microscale Optical Systems (LUMOS) program, which aims to improve photonics by supporting the construction of more complex, powerful machines.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/technology/electric-vehicles/penny-sized-laser-could-help-driverless-cars-see-the-world-so-much-clearer at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

ARCHAEOLOGY

NEWS | KRISTINA KILLGROVE | JUL 15, 2025, 6:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

4,000-year-old human rib discovered high in the Pyrenees still has an arrowhead from a brutal attack

A human rib discovered high in the Pyrenees suggests that someone survived a shot in the back several millennia ago.

Archaeologists found a human rib with an arrowhead embedded in it in a cave in Spain. (Image credit: IPHES (Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social))

A 4,000-year-old human rib pierced with a flint arrowhead reveals that a violent attack unfolded high in the Pyrenees of Spain during the Early Bronze Age.

But the brutal trauma wasn't lethal, research finds. The individual survived, with the bone healing around the projectile injury, meaning they lived the rest of their life with the flint arrowhead embedded in their rib.

Archaeologists found the person's bone during recent excavations at a prehistoric burial site known as Roc de les Orenetes, in northeastern Spain, according to a July 8 statement from IPHES — the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution.

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The injured person — whose sex and age at death have not yet been reported — appeared to have been shot from behind, according to the IPHES statement.

Excavations have been ongoing at Roc de les Orenetes in the Catalan Pyrenees since 2019. Led by Carlos Tornero, a prehistoric archaeologist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, excavations at the cave site have produced more than a thousand human bones so far, and carbon dating places the burials at around 4,100 to 4,500 years ago.

In a study published in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology in 2024, bioarchaeologist Miguel Ángel Moreno of the University of Edinburgh, along with Tornero and colleagues, detailed their analysis of the human skeletons recovered from the Roc de les Orenetes cave between 2019 and 2021.

Related: Elite Celtic warrior had healed arrowhead injury in his pelvis, 3D bone analysis reveals

The researchers determined that at least 51 people of various ages and both sexes were buried in the Roc de les Orenetes cave. At least six people were involved in deadly fights, they wrote in the 2024 study.

The wounds identified in this previous analysis were mostly located on the upper body, particularly the upper limbs and ribs, the researchers noted, and different weapons and raw materials appear to have been used to inflict the injuries. In one case, a person's forearm had been amputated.

"This evidence represents recurrent violent behavior and evidence of interpersonal violence located at the highest altitude of the Pyrenees" — 6,023 feet (1,836 meters) above sea level — the researchers wrote. Even in the most rugged geographic conditions, small-scale conflicts clearly arose and resulted in injury and death, they noted.

The newly discovered rib with the embedded arrowhead will now undergo X-ray microtomography analysis, according to the IPHES statement, as well as chemical and DNA analyses, to learn more about the lives and deaths of the people buried in the Roc de les Orenetes cave four millennia ago.

Human evolution quiz: What do you know about Homo sapiens?

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/4-000-year-old-human-rib-discovered-high-in-the-pyrenees-still-has-an-arrowhead-from-a-brutal-attack at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

PLANET EARTH > VOLCANOS

FEATURES | HARRY BAKER | JUL 15, 2025, 3:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Russian volcano grows 'devil horns' and spits out 1,000-mile-long river of smoke — Earth from space

A false-color satellite photo from 2023 shows a devilish pair of lava flows and an enormous plume of smoke spewing from Klyuchevskoy, the tallest volcano in Europe and Asia.

Twin lava flows that appeared during an eruption of the Klyuchevskoy volcano in 2023 gave the mountain a demonic appearance as it spewed out a 1,000-mile-long plume of smoke. (Image credit: NASA Earth Observatory/Wanmei Liang and Lauren Dauphin)

This eerie satellite photo shows a "devilish" Russian volcano spewing out a 1,000-mile-long river of smoke into Earth's atmosphere. It is a striking reminder of the volcanic power trapped within the Pacific "Ring of Fire."

The volcano, known as Klyuchevskoy (or sometimes Klyuchevskaya Sopka), is an active stratovolcano in Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, which is home to more than 300 volcanoes. Klyuchevskoy's peak stands at 15,597 feet (4,754 meters) above sea level, making it taller than any other volcano in Asia or Europe, according to the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program.

The satellite image was snapped by NASA's Aqua satellite during a particularly active point of an eruptive phase, which lasted between June 22 and Dec. 31, 2023. The sudden flurry of activity released twin lava flows, shaped like a pair of horns, and a giant plume of smoke, ash and toxic gases that temporarily halted air traffic in the area.

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The eruption plume reached a maximum height of 7.5 miles (12 km) above Earth's surface and stretched more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) across the Pacific Ocean, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

The satellite snap featured above is a false color image. The lava flows have been enhanced using infrared radiation to help make them visible, while the clouds surrounding the volcano have been given a blueish hue to help distinguish them from the eruption plume.

Related: See all the best images of Earth from space

Klyuchevskoy is one of six tightly grouped volcanoes in the Kamchatka Peninsula. In this 2013 photo, Bezymianny is the one spewing out a stream of smoke. (Image credit: ISS Expedition 38 crew)

Klyuchevskoy is one of the most active volcanoes in the Kamchatka Peninsula. It has experienced at least 18 different eruptive phases since the turn of the 21st century and blown its top more than 60 times in the past 100 years, according to the Global Volcanism Program.

The lofty mountain's most recent eruptive phase began in April 2025 and is still ongoing, although volcanic activity had diminished by May.

Klyuchevskoy is closely flanked by Bezymianny, a smaller volcano standing at around 9,900 feet (3,000 m) tall. The nearby mountain is less active than Klyuchevskoy and was previously assumed to be extinct until an eruption in 1955. It has since erupted multiple times.

Four other volcanoes — Ushkovsky, Tolbachik, Zimina and Udina — are located within a 20-mile (32 km) radius of Klyuchevskoy. All of these mountains, including Klyuchevskoy and Bezymianny, are believed to have formed within the last 10,000 years, which is relatively young for volcanoes.

The Kamchatka Peninsula is a hotspot for volcanoes due to its position along the Ring of Fire — a roughly 25,000-mile-long (40,000 km) arc encircling large parts of the Pacific Ocean basin, where tectonic plates intersect one another. This giant ring, which also runs beneath Indonesia, Japan and Tonga, contains around two-thirds of the world's terrestrial volcanoes and is the site of around 90% of all earthquakes.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/volcanos/russian-volcano-grows-devil-horns-and-spits-out-1-000-mile-long-river-of-smoke-earth-from-space at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

July 14, 2025

- Archaeologists discover that parties 11,000 years ago were BYOB — bring your own boar

- Scientists detect most massive black hole merger ever — and it birthed a monster 225 times as massive as the sun

- 100 undiscovered galaxies may be orbiting the Milky Way, supercomputer simulations hint

- Grand Canyon Dragon wildfire burns down historic lodge and triggers toxic gas leak

- Japan sets new internet speed record — it's 4 million times faster than average US broadband speeds

- Roman dodecahedron: A mysterious 12-sided object that has baffled archaeologists for centuries

- Can your brain run out of memory?

ARCHAEOLOGY

OPINION | PETRA VAIGLOVA | JUL 14, 2025, 4:17 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Archaeologists discover that parties 11,000 years ago were BYOB — bring your own boar

Humans have feasted since the dawn of agriculture — but a new find suggests the practice of bringing exotic food to a communal gathering is even older.

Artistic depiction of people bringing a wild boar to an ancient feast. (Image credit: Kathryn Killackey)

Have you ever stopped by the grocery store on your way to a dinner party to grab a bottle of wine? Did you grab the first one you saw, or did you pause to think about the available choices and deliberate over where you wanted your gift to be from?

The people who lived in western Iran around 11,000 years ago had the same idea — but in practice it looked a little different. In our latest research, my colleagues and I studied the remains of ancient feasts at Asiab in the Zagros Mountains where people gathered in communal celebration.

The feasters left behind the skulls of 19 wild boars, which they packed neatly together and sealed inside a pit within a round building. Butchery marks on the boar skulls show the animals were used for feasting, but until now we did not know where the animals came from.

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By examining the microscopic growth patterns and chemical signatures inside the tooth enamel of five of these boars, we found at least some of them had been brought to the site from a substantial distance away, transported over difficult mountainous terrain. Bringing these boars to the feast — when other boars were available locally — would have taken an enormous amount of effort.

A big feast from before the dawn of agriculture

Feasting activities are widely documented in the archaeological record, primarily from communities that rely on agriculture to generate a food surplus. In fact, it has been suggested feasting may have been a driving force behind the adoption of agriculture, although this theory has been widely debated.

While evidence from after the adoption of agriculture is plentiful from all reaches of the globe, evidence pre-dating agriculture is more sparse.

What is special about the feast at Asiab is not only its early date and that it brought together people from wider reaches of the region. It is the fact that people who participated in this feast invested substantial amounts of effort, so that their contributions involved an element of geographic symbolism.

Related: 'Cone-headed' skull from Iran was bashed in 6,200 years ago, but no one knows why

Food and culture

Food and long-standing culinary traditions form an integral component of cultures all over the globe. It is for this reason that holidays, festivals, and other socially meaningful events commonly involve food.

We cannot imagine Christmas without the Christmas meal, for example, or Eid without the food gifts, or Passover without matzo ball soup.

What's more, food makes for gifts that are highly appreciated. The more a food item is reminiscent of a specific country or location, the better. It is for this reason that cheese from France, crocodile jerky from Australia, and black chicken from Korea make for good currency in the world of gift giving.

Just like today, people who lived in the past noticed the importance of reciprocity and place, and formulated customs to celebrate them publicly.

At ancient feasts at Stonehenge, for example, research has shown people ate pigs brought from wide reaches of Britain. Our new findings provide the first glimpse of similar behaviour in a pre-agricultural context.

How to read a tooth

Did you know that teeth grow like trees? Much like trees and their annual growth rings, teeth deposit visible layers of enamel and dentine during growth.

These growth layers track daily patterns of development and changes in the dietary intake of certain chemical elements. In our study, we sliced the teeth of wild boars from Asiab in a way that allowed us to count these daily growth layers under the microscope.

We then used this information to measure the composition of enamel secreted at approximately weekly intervals. The variability in the isotopic ratios we measured suggests at least some of the wild boars used in the feast at Asiab came from considerable distance: possibly from at least 70 km, or two or more days' travel.

The most likely explanation is that they were hunted in farther reaches of the region and transported to the site as contributions to the feast.

Reciprocity is at the heart of social interactions. Just like a thoughtfully chosen bottle of wine does today, those boars brought from far and wide may have served to commemorate a place, an event and social bonds through gift-giving.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/archaeologists-discover-that-parties-11-000-years-ago-were-byob-bring-your-own-boar at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

SPACE > ASTRONOMY > BLACK HOLES

NEWS | BEN TURNER | JUL 14, 2025, 3:21 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Scientists detect most massive black hole merger ever — and it birthed a monster 225 times as massive as the sun

New gravitational wave findings from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration report the discovery of the largest black hole merger ever. It could lead to evidence of an extremely rare type of black hole.

An artist's rendering of two black holes merging. (Image credit: AiVreaSaStii / pixabay)

Scientists have detected the biggest black hole merger ever known — a gigantic collision from two massive space-time ruptures spiraling into each other — and it could hold evidence of the most elusive type of black hole in the universe.

The merger, which happened on the outskirts of our Milky Way galaxy, produced a black hole roughly 225 times more massive than the sun.

That's nearly double the previous record holder, which spawned a final black hole with a mass of around 142 suns. The new collision was found by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration, a group of four detectors that identify cataclysmic cosmic events from the gravitational waves that spill out in their wakes. Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space-time, first predicted to exist by Albert Einstein and confirmed by LIGO in 2015. For their groundbreaking discovery, physicists involved with the research earned a Nobel Prize in 2017.

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But most intriguing to the scientists are the two black holes' masses: approximately 100 and 140 times that of the sun. As was the case with the previous detection, black holes of these sizes fall into a "mass gap" that challenge conventional wisdom on how the space-time ruptures form. The researchers will present their findings July 14 to 18 at the 24th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation (GR24) and the 16th Edoardo Amaldi Conference on Gravitational Waves in Glasgow, Scotland.

"We expect most black holes to form when stars die — if the star is massive enough, it collapses to a black hole," Mark Hannam, a physics professor at Cardiff University in Wales and a member of the LVK Collaboration, told Live Science. "But for really massive stars, our theories say that the collapse is unstable, and most of the mass is blasted away in supernova explosions, and a black hole cannot form."

"We don't expect black holes to form between about 60 and 130 times the mass of the sun," he added. "In this observation, the black holes appear to lie in that mass range."

Related: Europe approves LISA, a next-generation space mission that will discover the faintest ripples in space-time

Black holes are born from the collapse of giant stars and grow by gorging on gas, dust, stars and other black holes. Currently, known black holes fall into two categories: stellar-mass black holes, which range from a few to a few dozen times the sun's mass; and supermassive black holes, which can be anywhere from about 100,000 to 50 billion times as massive as the sun.

Yet those that fall into the gap of these two mass ranges, known as intermediate-mass black holes, are physically unable to form from direct star collapses and thus remain incredibly rare. Hints of their existence have nonetheless been found, leading astrophysicists to postulate that these black holes grow from merging with others that are similar in size.

Evidence for this merger arrived on Nov. 23, 2023, when two minuscule distortions in space-time passed through the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory's (LIGO) detectors in Louisiana and Washington. The two detectors — each with two L-shaped 2.5-mile-long (4 kilometers) arms containing two identical laser beams — are designed so that if a gravitational wave passes through Earth, the laser light in one arm of the detector will get compressed while the other expands, creating a tiny change in relative path lengths of the beams.

The signal that arrived at the detectors was complex, coming from two high-mass black holes that were spinning rapidly. Astronomers typically analyze black hole mergers by modeling signals from different types of black hole binary systems, before matching them to any new signal they see.

But for this technique to work, the models have to be precise, and Einstein's equations are harder to solve (and therefore less accurate) when the black holes are spinning quickly.

"The black holes in GW231123 appear to be highly spinning, and our different models give different results," Hannam said. "That means that although we're sure that the black holes are very massive, we don't measure the masses especially accurately. For example, the possible masses for the smaller black hole span the entire mass gap."

For scientists to get better calculations of these masses, these models will have to be refined, which will likely require more observations of similar high-spin mergers.

Such detections would be likely; the LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA gravitational wave detectors have spotted 300 mergers since the start of the first run in 2015, with 200 being found in the fourth run alone. Yet LIGO, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, is facing Trump administration budget cuts that could shut down one detector, making current detections "near-impossible," according to the facility's director, David Reitze.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/space/black-holes/scientists-detect-most-massive-black-hole-merger-ever-and-it-birthed-a-monster-225-times-as-massive-as-the-sun at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

SPACE > ASTRONOMY > COSMOLOGY

NEWS | BEN TURNER | JUL 14, 2025, 2:53 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

100 undiscovered galaxies may be orbiting the Milky Way, supercomputer simulations hint

Our Milky Way could have many more satellite galaxies than we've detected so far. They're just too faint to be seen.

The Milky Way surrounded by its satellite galaxies, according to the Acquarius-A-L1 simulation. (Image credit: The Aquarius simulation, the Virgo Consortium/Dr Mark Lovell.)

The Milky Way may be surrounded by dozens of yet-to-be-detected satellite galaxies, scientists claim.

Using the highest-resolution simulation of our galaxy's dark matter — an invisible entity that shapes the large-scale structure of the universe — and new mathematical models, cosmologists predict that more than 100 additional satellite galaxies beyond the ones already cataloged may be swirling around our own.

If those galaxies are spotted by telescopes, they could offer support for the standard model of cosmology — the dominant model of our universe that explains how galaxies form. The researchers presented their findings July 11 at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting in Durham, England.

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"We know the Milky Way has some 60 confirmed companion satellite galaxies, but we think there should be dozens more of these faint galaxies orbiting around the Milky Way at close distances," lead researcher Isabel Santos-Santos, a graduate student at Durham University, said in a statement. "One day soon we may be able to see these 'missing' galaxies, which would be hugely exciting and could tell us more about how the Universe came to be as we see it today."

According to the standard theory of cosmology, known as lambda cold dark matter (LCDM), both dwarf galaxies and large ones such as our own take shape within clumps called galactic halos. These vast spheres of stars float like leaves on a pond of dark matter, the mysterious substance believed to make up 85% of the universe's matter.

Dark matter doesn't reflect light, so it hasn't been observed directly. But scientists see evidence for it in the shapes of galaxies, the warping of starlight as it passes through them, and the acceleration of stars to otherwise inexplicable speeds as they orbit galactic centers.

Related: Scientists discover rare planet at the edge of the Milky Way using space-time phenomenon predicted by Einstein

This dark matter halo gives the Milky Way a hefty gravitational pull. The pull is so strong, in fact, that over the course of billions of years, it has captured a number of dwarf galaxies (those containing less than a few billion stars) as satellites.

Despite being predicted as plentiful by LCDM, satellite galaxies are faint and therefore hard to detect; many more should exist than astronomers have been able to observe or even simulate. Taken at face value, their absence is yet another crack of doubt in the standard model of cosmology.

But the scientists behind the new research propose a reason for this lack of supporting evidence, at least within simulations: They're not precise enough to model galaxy evolution, so the simulated halos get disrupted, leading to the loss of their satellite galaxies.

To better simulate the possible hidden galaxies, the astronomers turned to the Aquarius simulation, the highest-resolution reconstruction of a Milky Way dark-matter halo. They used the Aquarius simulation to run the GALFORM model — a code that tracks gas cooling, stars forming and matter clumping to form galaxies similar to our own.

According to the simulation, dwarf galaxies have been orbiting the Milky Way for much of the universe's life. Yet during their repeated passes, their dark matter and stars were gradually snatched away by the Milky Way's enormous galactic halo, causing them to appear extremely faint in the present day.

This means that anywhere from 80 to over 100 more dwarf galaxies might exist around our galaxy's outskirts, according to the researchers. If these galaxies are really there, it may not be long before they're detected; the new Vera Rubin Observatory, which is equipped with the largest digital camera ever constructed, could resolve some of these hidden galaxies.

"If the population of very faint satellites that we are predicting is discovered with new data, it would be a remarkable success of the LCDM theory of galaxy formation," co-researcher Carlos Frenk, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Durham, said in the statement. "It would also provide a clear illustration of the power of physics and mathematics. Using the laws of physics, solved using a large supercomputer, and mathematical modelling we can make precise predictions that astronomers, equipped with new, powerful telescopes, can test."

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/space/cosmology/100-undiscovered-galaxies-may-be-orbiting-the-milky-way-supercomputer-simulations-hint at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

PLANET EARTH > WEATHER > WILDFIRES

NEWS | PATRICK PESTER | JUL 14, 2025, 9:01 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Grand Canyon Dragon wildfire burns down historic lodge and triggers toxic gas leak

Firefighters are battling a lightning-caused wildfire on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. The Dragon Bravo Fire has burned down the Grand Canyon Lodge and triggered a chlorine gas leak.

A large plume of smoke was visible on the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park. (Image credit: Grand Canyon National Park via Getty Images)

A wildfire has ignited the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, burning down the Grand Canyon Lodge and other historic cabins.

Firefighters were managing the Dragon Bravo Fire, started by a lightning strike, when an uncommonly strong gust of wind pushed the fire beyond multiple containment features on Friday (July 11), according to InciWeb, the U.S. government's incident information management system website.

The fire then exhibited "extreme and volatile" behavior on Saturday (July 12), expanding by 500 acres (0.8 square miles) according to a statement released by the National Park Service (NPS). Conditions in the region are hot, dry and windy, making it more challenging for firefighters.

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A second wildfire, named the White Sage Fire, is burning around 35 miles (56 kilometers) north of the Dragon Bravo Fire in Kaibab National Forest.

"Preliminary assessments indicate that between 50 to 80 structures have been lost, including NPS administrative buildings and visitor facilities," NPS representatives wrote in the statement. "No injuries or loss of life have been reported, and all staff and residents were successfully evacuated prior to the fire’s escalation."

Related: 'We are creating the fire equivalent of an ice age': Humans have plunged Earth into the 'Pyrocene'

Most wildfires are started by humans, either accidentally or on purpose, but lightning is a common natural cause, responsible for around 10% of global forest fires. Lightning can be as hot as 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit (30,000 degrees Celsius) — five times hotter than the surface of the sun — and pack as much as 5 gigajoules of energy. These sparks of electricity are more than capable of igniting dry vegetation and can set multiple trees alight in an instant.

The Dragon Bravo Fire began on July 4 and was initially managed as part of a confine and contain strategy. However, the fire has been growing at night, when visibility is reduced and firefighters can't use aerial resources to drop fire retardant and water on the fire, according to InciWeb.

Hot, dry and windy conditions have been challenging for firefighters battling the Dragon Bravo Fire. (Image credit: Grand Canyon National Park via Getty Images)

The fires also damaged a nearby water treatment facility, which released toxic chlorine gas. The gas leak meant firefighters had to evacuate from critical zones near the fire, according to the NPS statement.

The Dragon Bravo Fire has currently burned around 5,000 acres (7.8 sq/m) of land, while the larger White Sage Fire currently covers around 50,000 acres (78 sq/m), according to the wildfire live tracking non-profit Watch Duty. Both were active at the time of writing, with strong winds, hot temperatures and low humidity driving them, NPS representatives wrote.

"With continued active fire behavior and ongoing risks to personnel and infrastructure, the North Rim will remain closed to all visitor access for the remainder of the 2025 season," NPS representatives wrote.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/wildfires/grand-canyon-dragon-wildfire-burns-down-historic-lodge-and-triggers-toxic-gas-leak at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

COMMUNICATIONS

NEWS | PERRI THALER | JUL 14, 2025, 6:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Japan sets new internet speed record — it's 4 million times faster than average US broadband speeds

A team of scientists in Japan shattered the record for the fastest internet speed by developing new fiber optics.

To achieve this new speed, scientists developed a new form of optical fiber to send information over roughly the distance between New York and Florida. (Image credit: Getty Images/Andriy Onufriyenko)

Researchers in Japan say they have set a new world record for the fastest internet speed, transmitting over 125,000 gigabytes of data per second over 1,120 miles (1,802 kilometers).

That's about 4 million times the average internet speed in the U.S. and would allow you to download the entire Internet Archive in less than four minutes, according to some rough estimates. This is also more than twice the previous world record of 50,250 Gbps, previously set by a different team of scientists in 2024.

To achieve this new speed — which has not been independently verified — the team developed a new form of optical fiber to send information at groundbreaking speeds over roughly the distance between New York and Florida.

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Details about this achievement were presented April 3 at the 48th Optical Fiber Communication Conference in San Francisco, according to a statement from Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology.

1,120 miles of travel

The new type of optical fiber is equivalent to 19 standard optical fibers in its data transmission capacity. The new optical fiber is better suited to long-haul transmission than existing cables because the centers of all 19 fibers interact with light in the same way, so they encounter less light fluctuation, which results in less data loss.

The new cable squeezes 19 separate fibers into a diameter of five-thousandths of an inch (0.127 millimeters), which is the same thickness as most existing single-fiber cables already in use. This effort means the new cable can transmit more data using existing infrastructure.

Related: Internet history timeline: ARPANET to the World Wide Web

In March 2023, the same team reached similar transmission speeds but across less than a third of the distance covered in the new achievement. The biggest hurdles to increasing the range were further reducing data loss, which can happen over long distances, and figuring out how to amplify the data, according to the statement.

Solving these challenges led to increased signal strength, which allowed the data to travel a longer distance.

For this demonstration, the data ran through a transmission system 21 times, finally reaching a data receiver after traveling the equivalent of 1,120 miles.

This record shows technological progress toward developing long-distance, high-capacity, scalable optical communication systems, which could address the increasing global demand for data, the statement suggests.

Data traffic volume worldwide is expected to increase significantly in the near future, so new communications infrastructure may be necessary, the statement suggests. Next, the team hopes to explore practical applications in the telecommunications sphere.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/technology/communications/japan-sets-new-internet-speed-record-its-4-million-times-faster-than-average-us-broadband-speeds at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

ARCHAEOLOGY > ROMANS

FEATURES | KRISTINA KILLGROVE | JUL 14, 2025, 6:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Roman dodecahedron: A mysterious 12-sided object that has baffled archaeologists for centuries

There are more than 50 theories for the function of this 12-sided, pentagonal-faced bronze object — but archaeologists have never quite figured it out.

A dodecahedron was discovered in Lincoln in the U.K. in the summer of 2023. (Image credit: Alamy)

Name: Roman dodecahedron

What it is: A 12-sided bronze object

Where it is from: Northwestern provinces of the Roman Empire

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When it was made: Second to fourth centuries A.D.

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What it tells us about the past:

Roman dodecahedrons have baffled archaeologists since 1739, when the first example of the 12-sided bronze object was discovered in the English Midlands. For nearly three centuries, experts and hobbyists have put forth dozens of theories as to why people treasured these items — but their purpose has never been confirmed.

At least 120 examples of dodecahedrons have been discovered across the northwestern provinces of the Roman Empire. All date to the late second to late fourth centuries, and their general appearance is the same, according to classical archaeologist Michael Guggenberger, who has published several studies on the objects.

In a 2000 study, Guggenberger wrote that the basic shape is a regular or pentagonal dodecahedron: 12 pentagons form the faces of the hollow shape, and they meet at 20 corners. Each corner of a Roman dodecahedron is topped with a small sphere, and each pentagonal face has a hole of varying diameter. The dodecahedrons range from 1.6 to 3.9 inches (4 to 10 centimeters) tall and weigh 1 to 20 ounces (30 to 580 grams), with exceptionally thin walls. No writing has been found on any dodecahedron.

Because these dodecahedrons have been found in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland — but not in Italy — Guggenberger views them as "Gallo-Roman products" with a possible origin in the Celtic tribes of the Roman Empire. But there are no historical records or depictions of them in ancient art, so the origin and purpose of the dodecahedrons have been lost.

Archaeologists have recovered dodecahedrons from the graves of men and women, in coin hoards and even in refuse heaps, so a blanket explanation for their use has not been found. But many researchers have attempted to solve the puzzle, suggesting that dodecahedrons may have been used as weapons, decorations, candlestick holders, range finders, measurement devices, children's toys, dice, craftsman's samples or spools for knitting gloves.

Of the 50 or more theories, Guggenberger wrote, most can now be ruled out or considered highly improbable. The primary explanation he favors is symbolic, with a connection to the philosophy of ancient Greek thinkers Plato and Pythagoras.

In Platonic-Pythagorean symbolism, four solid shapes were associated with four elements — tetrahedrons with fire, octahedrons with air, icosahedrons with water, and hexahedrons with earth. And, as the fifth regular solid, "the dodecahedron served as an all-encompassing symbol representing the universe," Guggenberger wrote in a 2013 study.

In the second century A.D., thinkers like Plutarch resurrected the earlier idea of the dodecahedron as a symbolic connection to the heavens and the universe, Guggenberger wrote, and that may have influenced Celtic peoples in the Roman Empire.

But one particular grave with a dodecahedron may hold a key clue to its use, Guggenberger noted in the 2000 study. Discovered in a woman's grave in Germany in 1966, the Gellep dodecahedron was located directly next to a rod-shaped bone artifact, suggesting it may have been a staff for mounting the mysterious object to create a symbolic scepter. And given the Celtic background for the object, this may link it to Druidic traditions.

"For the time being, the most likely interpretation of the dodecahedron is as a cosmic, all-encompassing symbol," Guggenberger wrote, with "a function comparable to an amulet."

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/romans/roman-dodecahedron-a-mysterious-12-sided-object-that-has-baffled-archaeologists-for-centuries at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

HEALTH > MIND > NEUROSCIENCE

FEATURES | ROBERTA MCLAIN | JUL 14, 2025, 5:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Can your brain run out of memory?

Your memory relies on reusing, overlapping and adapting rather than on a fixed number of storage spots.

Our memory system didn't evolve to archive everything but rather to help us adapt and predict the future. (Image credit: PM Images via Getty Images)

You can use up all the storage on your phone or max out your computer's drive, but can you use up all the memory space in your brain?

Despite how you might feel before an exam or after a sleepless night before a work deadline, neuroscientists say that for a typical, healthy brain, memory capacity isn't fixed or easily used up.

"There isn't a meaningful limit to how much information the brain can store," said Elizabeth Kensinger, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Boston College. "Memories can be thought of as the data the brain uses to understand the current moment, to make predictions about the future, and to scaffold future learning."

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That's because the brain doesn't store memories as isolated files in one specific nerve cell. Instead, a single memory is distributed across many neurons called an engram — a group of brain cells connected and scattered across brain regions. Neuroscientists refer to this pattern, in which a memory is recorded across many neurons, as distributed representation. Each of those individual brain cells plays a role in many different memories.

Consider a memory, such as your 12th birthday party. It is not being stored in a single mental folder. The color of the balloons, the taste of the cake, the sound of your friends singing, and the feeling of excitement all activate different sensory and emotional centers — your visual cortex, taste cortex, auditory system and emotion-processing regions. These areas fire together in a specific pattern, and that pattern of neural activity stores the memory. When you recall that party later, you reactivate the pattern.

This method has significant advantages. Because neurons can participate in numerous combinations, the brain can encode huge numbers of memories. Kensinger suggests related memories share overlapping patterns, helping us to generalize and make predictions — something many neuroscientists believe is the reason for memory. And if a few neurons are damaged, the memory may still be recoverable because it's not stored in just one place.

Paul Reber, a professor of neuroscience at Northwestern University, explained to Live Science that distributed representation is part of what gives the brain its enormous memory capacity. The potential combinations grow exponentially, since each neuron participates in many memories involving overlapping neurons.

Why don't we remember everything?

If the brain isn't limited by memory space, why don't we remember everything? This is because the brain's memory system runs much more slowly than life happens. While information constantly streams in, only a fraction can make it into long-term storage.

Reber suggested thinking of memory like a video camera that only works at 10% of its capacity; we can only remember about a tenth of the specific events, experiences, and encounters we experience.

The information that does get into our memory system is gradually laid down into durable memories that will be there for the long term. That process is called consolidation.

"The storage process is the real bottleneck," Reber told Live Science, "not the total amount of space that you have."

What determines what we keep and what we forget?

At any given moment, tremendous amounts of information come into our brains from all our senses, but we don't need to remember it all.

Human memory did not evolve for perfect recall, Lila Davachi, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Columbia University, noted. Our memory system evolved for survival, so we prioritize what is helpful so we can navigate the world.

"The memory system is built to only encode what is adaptive and necessary," Davachi, told Live Science.

"We just happened to get so good at it that we have this extra reserve that allows us to reminisce about things that happened when we were in college," Davachi said. "That's not adaptive. I'd argue we don't need it. Why is our memory system keeping that around? Well, it's possibly just an accident."

Kensinger explained that there are efficiencies in how the brain processes and remembers information. "When similar information is encountered over and over again," Kensinger said, "the brain tends to shift from storing the specific details to storing the more general content or schemas of the information. This is an efficient way to store information."

Consider your drive to school or to work. You don't remember every trip, because most of them are similar. Rather than storing each drive as its own memory, you recall the general experience. "The brain will tend to store the details of specific drives only if they had something distinctive happen, Kensinger added," perhaps a road was flooded, or you narrowly avoided an accident."

Far from running out of space, our brains constantly reshape what we know to help us adapt, predict and learn. So the next time you forget where you left your coffee cup, don't worry; you're not running out of space. It's likely your brain just had more important things to remember.

Psychology quiz: What do you know about psychology's most infamous experiments?

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/health/neuroscience/can-your-brain-run-out-of-memory at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

July 13, 2025

- Could signs of Mars life be hidden in its thick layers of clay?

- The Perseids are coming — here's how to watch the glorious meteor shower before the moon ruins the show

- 'Paraparticles' would be a third kingdom of quantum particle

- How Trump's budget cuts could affect 2 iconic space telescopes: Hubble and James Webb

- James Webb and Hubble telescopes join forces to explore a cosmic nursery: Space photo of the week

- What's Earth's lowest point on land?

SPACE > ASTRONOMY > PLANETS > MARS

NEWS | VICTORIA CORLESS | JUL 13, 2025, 1:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Could signs of Mars life be hidden in its thick layers of clay?

This content was originally published on Space.

The thick, mineral-rich layers of clay found on Mars suggest that the Red Planet harbored potentially life-hosting environments for long stretches in the ancient past, a new study suggests.

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona)

The thick, mineral-rich layers of clay found on Mars suggest that the Red Planet harbored potentially life-hosting environments for long stretches in the ancient past, a new study suggests.

Clays need liquid water to form. These layers are hundreds of feet thick and are thought to have formed roughly 3.7 billion years ago, under warmer and wetter conditions than currently prevail on Mars.

"These areas have a lot of water but not a lot of topographic uplift, so they're very stable," study co-author Rhianna Moore, who conducted the research as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas' Jackson School of Geosciences, said in a statement.

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"If you have stable terrain, you're not messing up your potentially habitable environments," Moore added. "Favorable conditions might be able to be sustained for longer periods of time."

On our home planet, such deposits form under specific landscape and climatic conditions.

"On Earth, the places where we tend to see the thickest clay mineral sequences are in humid environments, and those with minimal physical erosion that can strip away newly created weathering products," said co-author Tim Goudge, an assistant professor at the Jackson School's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

Related: Why does Mars look purple, yellow and orange in ESA's stunning new satellite image?

Clays can be seen in the Hellas basin of Mars. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona)

However, it remains unclear how Mars' local and global topography, along with its past climate activity, influenced surface weathering and the formation of clay layers.

Using data and images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter — the second-longest-operating spacecraft around Mars, after the agency's 2001 Mars Odyssey — Moore, Goudge, and their colleagues studied 150 clay deposits, looking at their shapes and locations, and how close they are to other features like ancient lakes or rivers.

They found that the clays are mostly located in low areas near ancient lakes, but not close to valleys where water once flowed strongly. This mix of gentle chemical changes and less intense physical erosion helped the clays stay preserved over time.

"[Clay mineral-bearing stratigraphies] tend to occur in areas where chemical weathering was favoured over physical erosion, farther from valley network activity and nearer standing bodies of water," the team wrote in the new study, which was published in the journal Nature Astronomy on June 16.

The findings suggest that intense chemical weathering on Mars may have disrupted the usual balance between weathering and climate.

On Earth, where tectonic activity constantly exposes fresh rock to the atmosphere, carbonate minerals like limestone form when rock reacts with water and carbon dioxide (CO2). This process helps remove CO2 from the air, storing it in solid form and helping regulate the climate over long periods.

On Mars, tectonic activity is non-existent, leading to a lack of carbonate minerals and minimal removal of CO2 from the planet's thin atmosphere. As a result, CO2 released by Martian volcanoes long ago likely stayed in the atmosphere longer, making the planet warmer and wetter in the past — conditions the team believes may have encouraged the clay's formation.

The researchers also speculate that the clay could have absorbed water and trapped chemical byproducts like cations, preventing them from spreading and reacting with the surrounding rock to form carbonates that remain trapped and unable to leech into the surrounding environment.

"[The clay is] probably one of many factors that's contributing to this weird lack of predicted carbonates on Mars," said Moore.

This article was originally published on Space.com.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/space/mars/could-signs-of-mars-life-be-hidden-in-its-thick-layers-of-clay at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

SPACE > ASTRONOMY > METEOROIDS

NEWS | JAMIE CARTER | JUL 13, 2025, 11:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

The Perseids are coming — here's how to watch the glorious meteor shower before the moon ruins the show

As many as 100 "shooting stars" per hour can be visible, but a bright moon on the peak of the Perseids on Aug. 12 and 13 means evasive action is required.

The Perseids are the most famous and one of the most prolific meteor showers of the year. (Image credit: Tito Garcia / 500px via Getty Images)

The annual Perseid meteor display is one of the best-known and commonly observed meteor showers in the Northern Hemisphere. But this year, if you want to enjoy the show, it's best to get in early.

The Perseids will be active from Thursday, July 17, through Saturday, Aug. 23 and will peak this year on Aug. 12 and 13. But the presence of a near-full moon will make this year's event disappointing, with only the very brightest shooting stars visible.

Typical advice for the peak of a major meteor shower is to head to a location with low levels of light pollution, such as a dark sky place or an area that appears dark on a light pollution map. However, with August’s full Sturgeon Moon on Saturday, Aug. 9, its light will bleach the night sky just as the Perseids' peak gets underway. On the night of the peak, a waning gibbous moon will rise a couple of hours before midnight and be 84% lit, shining brightly all night. It will effectively pollute the night sky with its light, making a trip to escape urban light pollution pointless.

Because of the moon's plan to steal the show, the best way to see the Perseids this year will be both before and after the peak nights. Although the rate of shooting stars will be much lower, there's a dark sky window — when moonlight is at a minimum — from July 18 to 28. That's because the half-lit last quarter moon on July 18 rises at midnight, there's a new moon on July 24, and only a weak crescent moon sets early until around July 28. After that, the waxing crescent moon will begin to interfere with shooting stars and there will be two weeks of bright moonlit nights.

After the peak, the waning gibbous moon will begin to move out of the way when it next reaches its last quarter phase on Aug. 16. Although the rates of shooting stars will be on the wane by that time, any clear nights that week should herald at least some views of the celestial light show.

Related: How to photograph a meteor shower

The Perseid meteor shower is known for its fast and bright meteors, which move at a swift 37 miles per second (60 kilometers per second). They're the product of tiny particles left in the solar system by Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle striking Earth's atmosphere. As they do, they heat up and vaporize, releasing energy visible as streaks of light in the night sky.

While conditions in 2025 are far from perfect, if you go stargazing when the moon is down — and even when it's up — you'll probably notice one or two of the year's most famous shooting stars.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/space/meteoroids/the-perseids-are-coming-heres-how-to-watch-the-glorious-meteor-shower-before-the-moon-ruins-the-show at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

PHYSICS & MATHEMATICS > QUANTUM PHYSICS

NEWS | SHALMA WEGSMAN | JUL 13, 2025, 10:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

'Paraparticles' would be a third kingdom of quantum particle

A new proposal makes the case that paraparticles — a new category of quantum particle — could be created in exotic materials.

Paraparticles would have hidden quantum states that change when two particles swap places. (Image credit: Kristina Armitage/Quanta Magazine)

On a quiet pandemic afternoon in 2021, Zhiyuan Wang, then a graduate student at Rice University, was alleviating his boredom by working on a weird mathematical problem. After he found an exotic solution, he started to wonder if the math could be interpreted physically. Eventually, he realized that it seemed to describe a new type of particle: one that's neither a matter particle nor a force-carrying particle. It appeared to be something else altogether.

Wang was eager to develop the accidental discovery into a full theory of this third kind of particle. He brought the idea to Kaden Hazzard, his academic adviser.

"I said, I'm not sure I believe this can be true," Hazzard recalled, "but if you really think it is, you should put all your time on this and drop everything else you're working on."

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This January, Wang, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany, and Hazzard published their refined result in the journal Nature. They say that a third class of particles, called paraparticles, can indeed exist, and that these particles could produce strange new materials.

When the paper appeared, Markus Müller, a physicist at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Vienna, was already contending with the notion of paraparticles for a different reason. According to quantum mechanics, an object or observer can be in multiple locations at once. Müller was thinking about how you can, on paper, switch between the perspectives of observers in these coexisting "branches" of reality. He realized that this came with new constraints on the possibility of paraparticles, and his team described their results in a preprint in February that's now under review for publication in a journal.

The close timing of the two papers was a coincidence. But taken together, the work is reopening the case of a physics mystery that was believed to be solved decades ago. A basic question is being reevaluated: What kinds of particles does our world allow?

Related: In a first, physicists spot elusive 'free-range' atoms — confirming a century-old theory about quantum mechanics

Hidden worlds

All known elementary particles fall into one of two categories, and the two behave almost as opposites. There are the particles that make up matter, called fermions, and the particles that impart the fundamental forces, called bosons.

The defining characteristic of fermions is that if you switch the positions of two fermions, their quantum state gains a minus sign. The presence of that measly minus sign has enormous ramifications. It means that no two fermions can be in the same place at the same time. When packed together, fermions cannot be compressed past a certain point. This feature prevents matter from collapsing in on itself — it's why the electrons in every atom exist in "shells." Without this minus sign, we couldn't exist.

Zhiyuan Wang, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany. (Image credit: Z.Wang/Rice University)

Bosons have no such restriction. Groups of bosons will happily all do exactly the same thing. Any number of particles of light, for instance, can be in the same place. This is what makes it possible to build lasers, which emit many identical light particles. This ability comes down to the fact that when two bosons swap places, their quantum state stays the same.

It's not obvious that fermions and bosons should be the only two options.

That's in part due to a fundamental feature of quantum theory: To calculate the probability of measuring a particle in any particular state, you have to take the mathematical description of that state and multiply it by itself. This procedure can erase distinctions. A minus sign, for example, will disappear. If given the number 4, a Jeopardy! contestant would have no way to know if the question was "What is 2 squared?" or "What is negative 2 squared?" — both possibilities are mathematically valid.

It's because of this feature that fermions, despite gaining a minus sign when swapped around, all look the same when measured — the minus sign disappears when quantum states are squared. This indistinguishability is a crucial property of elementary particles; no experiment can tell two of a kind apart.

The Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli formulated his "exclusion principle" in 1925, when he was 25 years old. It says that two indistinguishable fermions can never have identical quantum states. (Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

But a minus sign may not be the only thing that disappears. In theory, quantum particles can also have hidden internal states, mathematical structures not seen in direct measurements, which also go away when squared. A third, more general category of particle, known as a paraparticle, could arise from this internal state changing in a myriad of ways while the particles swap places.

While quantum theory seems to allow it, physicists have had difficulty finding a mathematical description of a paraparticle that works. In the 1950s, the physicist Herbert Green made a few attempts, but further inspection revealed that these paraparticle models were really just mathematical combinations of typical bosons and fermions.

In the 1970s, the mystery of why no one could find a proper model of paraparticles seemed to be solved. A collection of theorems called DHR theory, after the mathematical physicists Sergio Doplicher, Rudolf Haag and John Roberts, proved that if certain assumptions are true, only bosons and fermions are physically possible. One assumption is "locality," the rule that objects can only be affected by things in their vicinity. ("If I poke my table, I better not affect the moon instantaneously," as Hazzard put it.) The DHR proof also assumed that space is (at least) three-dimensional.

The results discouraged new ventures into paraparticles for decades, with one exception. In the early 1980s, the physicist Frank Wilczek came up with a theory of particles called anyons that can't be described as either bosons or fermions. To get around the DHR theorems, anyons come with a big catch: They can only exist in two dimensions.

Physicists now widely study anyons for their potential in quantum computing. Even confined to two dimensions, they could manifest on a flat surface of a material, or in a 2D array of qubits in a quantum computer.

But paraparticles in three dimensions that could form a solid still seemed impossible. That is, until now.

Shifting sights

While developing their model, Wang and Hazzard noticed that the assumptions behind DHR theory went beyond typical concerns of locality. "I think people overinterpreted what limitations or constraints were actually imposed by these theorems," Hazzard said. Paraparticles, they realized, may be theoretically possible after all.

In their model, in addition to the usual properties of a particle like charge and spin, groups of paraparticles share extra hidden properties. As with the minus sign that gets squared away during a measurement, you can't directly measure these hidden properties, but they change how the particles behave.

Kaden Hazzard, a physicist at Rice University. (Image credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

When you swap two paraparticles, these hidden properties change in tandem. As an analogy, imagine that these properties are colors. Start with two paraparticles, one that's internally red and another that's internally blue. When they swap places, rather than keeping these colors, they both change in corresponding ways, as prescribed by the mathematics of the particular model. Perhaps the swap leaves them green and yellow. This quickly turns into a complex game, where paraparticles affect each other in unseen ways as they move around.

Meanwhile, Müller was also busy rethinking the DHR theorems. "It's not always super transparent what they mean, because it's in a very complicated mathematical framework," he said.

His team took a new approach to the paraparticle question. The researchers considered the fact that quantum systems can exist in multiple possible states at once — what's called a superposition. They imagined switching between the perspectives of observers who exist in these superposed states, each of whom describes their branch of reality slightly differently. If two particles are truly indistinguishable, they figured, then it won't matter if the particles are swapped in one branch of the superposition and not in the other.

"Maybe if the particles are close by, I swap them, but if they are far away I do nothing," Müller said. "And if they're in a superposition of both, then I do the swapping in one branch, and nothing in the other branch." Whether observers across branches label the two particles in the same way should make no difference.

This stricter definition of indistinguishability in the context of superpositions imposes new restrictions on the kinds of particles that can exist. When these assumptions hold, the researchers found that paraparticles are impossible. For a particle to be truly indistinguishable by measurement, as physicists expect elementary particles to be, it must be either a boson or fermion.

Although Wang and Hazzard published their paper first, it's as though they saw Müller's constraints coming. Their paraparticles are possible because their model rejects Müller's starting assumption: The particles are not indistinguishable in the full sense required in the context of quantum superpositions. This comes with a consequence. While swapping two paraparticles has no effect on one person's measurements, two observers, by sharing their data with each other, can determine whether the paraparticles have been swapped. That's because swapping paraparticles can change how two people's measurements relate to each other. In this sense, they could tell the two paraparticles apart.

This means there's a potential for new states of matter. Where bosons can pack an endless number of particles into the same state, and fermions can't share a state at all, paraparticles end up somewhere in the middle. They are able to pack just a few particles into the same state, before getting crowded and forcing others into new states. Exactly how many can be crammed together depends on the details of the paraparticle — the theoretical framework allows for endless options.

"I find their paper really fascinating, and there's absolutely no contradiction with what we do," Müller said.

The road to reality

If paraparticles exist, they'll most likely be emergent particles, called quasiparticles, that show up as energetic vibrations in certain quantum materials.

"We might get new models of exotic phases, which were difficult to understand before, that you can now solve easily using paraparticles," said Meng Cheng, a physicist at Yale University who was not involved in the research.

Bryce Gadway, an experimental physicist at Pennsylvania State University who sometimes collaborates with Hazzard, is optimistic that paraparticles will be realized in the lab in the next few years. These experiments would use Rydberg atoms, which are energized atoms with electrons that roam very far from their nuclei. This separation of the positive and negative charge makes Rydberg atoms especially sensitive to electric fields. You can build quantum computers out of interacting Rydberg atoms. They are also the perfect candidates for creating paraparticles.

"For a certain kind of Rydberg quantum simulator, this is kind of just what they would do naturally," Gadway said about creating paraparticles. "You just prepare them and watch them evolve."

But for now, the third kingdom of particles remains wholly theoretical.

"Paraparticles might become important," said Wilczek, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist and inventor of anyons. "But at present they're basically a theoretical curiosity."

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication supported by the SimonsFoundation.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/physics-mathematics/quantum-physics/paraparticles-would-be-a-third-kingdom-of-quantum-particle at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

SPACE

NEWS | MONISHA RAVISETTI | JUL 13, 2025, 9:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

How Trump's budget cuts could affect 2 iconic space telescopes: Hubble and James Webb

This content was originally published on Space.

The JWST could see a 25-35% reduction in operations, and some Hubble instruments may have to fend for themselves.

These two images of the Pillars of Creation — a star-forming region 6,500 light-years from Earth — were taken by the Hubble Space Telescope (left) and the James Webb Space Telescope (right). (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Hubble Heritage Project (STScI, AURA), Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Anton M. Koekemoer (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI))

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — The Trump administration has been disrupting the infrastructure of U.S. science over the last few months, its latest blow being a 2026 budget proposal that would cut NASA's science funding in about half. If passed by Congress, this budget would be devastating, scientists say. It would cancel a number of in-development and currently operational missions, lead to significant layoffs and force the shutdown of some astronomy facilities.

"It basically slashes science just about everywhere," Neill Reid, the multi-mission project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, said during the 246th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) here last month. "NASA science is cut by a factor of two; astrophysics is cut by two-thirds."

This situation therefore begs the question: How might Trump's proposed reductions in U.S. science funding domino down to two of the most high-profile astronomy instruments we have, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)?

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The short (and glass-half-full) answer is that Trump's fiscal year 2026 budget request doesn't outright cancel the JWST or the HST. The reductions suggested for these instruments are also rather modest relative to those suggested for other projects (not to mention the missions that'd be deleted from the roster altogether, like the Jupiter-orbiting Juno spacecraft).

Still, the JWST's funding would go down from the $187 million it was allocated in 2024 to $140 million for 2026 if the budget gets passed. Hubble's funding would go down from the $93.3 million it had in 2024 to $85 million in 2026. And both of these proposed reductions would certainly affect these cosmic imagers.

Less money, fewer stars

To start with the JWST, Reid says a 25% to 35% reduction in operations could be in store for the $10 billion telescope that lives about a million miles away from Earth.

"The operations costs for JWST were set back in 2011; there was a certain amount of optimism that went into some of those," he said. "There's also been inflation; then you have the [President's budget request] that comes in and cuts more."

A slide in Reid's presentation also stated that "inflation and NASA budget issues are [a] significant risk to JWST support starting Oct 2025." That general support would be needed now more than ever, he explained, seeing as how demand for the JWST has only continued to increase ever since it began observing the cosmos in mid-2022.

With regard to Hubble, Reid pointed out that the telescope's budget has remained "flat" for the past 10 years, which means the team has lost about 30% spending power on the spacecraft already due to inflation: "Essentially, we're now at the point where if you cut the budget further, which is what is proposed here, you end up being able to do less."

The Hubble Space Telescope hovering above Earth. (Image credit: NASA)

To be fair, discussions regarding Hubble funding precede the Trump administration's proposed budget cuts — last year, for instance, an independent panel of experts convened to review what the future of Hubble budgets will look like as the telescope faced a possible 10% cut to its budget under the Biden administration. The Hubble Space Telescope's orbit is also naturally getting lower and lower as the years go by; NASA isn't quite sure yet whether a boosting mission is worth the technology, time and effort (though it's not 100% out of the question).

"The main takeaway for Hubble is that she's in great health. There's a high probability of producing great astrophysics into the early 2030s. The orbit is decaying — we know that — but the median estimate of the entry point [into Earth's atmosphere] is September of 2033."

With Trump's proposed Hubble cut, Reid said some of the telescope's instruments would remain "unsupported" in Earth orbit even if they're able to stay online. He said there's work being done at the moment in a sort of "close-out" to make sure Hubble can have as much support as possible, but that the team will be relying on the community to "self-support" while using those particular instruments.

"The bottom line here is, we're not going to do anything about it until we get formal direction from NASA," he said. "We're preparing … but until NASA tells us 'you need to stop doing something,' we're going to keep doing it."

"I think it is up to us to push back and emphasize the importance of NASA science leadership to our representatives," he added. "You can even tell them that science makes America safer, stronger and more prosperous."

It's a sentiment that was echoed by many at the AAS conference, especially because many scientists are being pressured to not speak out by their institutions for fear of retaliation.

Grants, telescope synergy and the White House

For scientists, some of the most serious consequences of Trump's 2026 budget request have to do with grant funding being significantly reduced. Though it's great to have an operational telescope in space, that telescope isn't of much use if scientists can't create instructions for it.

And those instructions stem from scientific studies, which are funded by grants.

"There's also going to be less money that will go into high-level science products in MAST [which is an astronomy data archive]," Reid said, "and there will be less grant funding."

"That's going to affect, basically, things across the board," he added. "We don't have a specific plan here yet. We'll keep the community informed."

Reid also touched on the importance of publicity for both Hubble and JWST science — something that has indeed been affected by Trump cuts already. "Publicity" in this sense refers to, for instance, the article you're reading right now. Media communications from scientific institutions — including NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and others that have seen reductions in this sector — allow journalists to learn about research timelines, outcomes and hurdles so they can be explained to the public. This is a key aspect of the scientific process.

"Publicity is something that lets the taxpayer know how we are spending money; what we are doing with it," he said.

Additionally, it can't be ignored that a major purpose of science is to further humanity's knowledge and prospects, meaning humanity should know about the discoveries that are fueling this goal. It is only then when scientific observations can lead to breakthroughs in other disciplines, form the next generation of scientists and procure art that cyclically inspires scientists themselves.

An illustration of the JWST in space. (Image credit: NASA)

"I mean, there's the Universe of Learning. That's a consortium of different organizations we're part of. It provides materials for museums, for planetariums. Their grant finishes at the end of this year. It's not being renewed," Reid said. "This is something that we're going to need to look at critically in the future — make sure that we can still tell people what we do so we have some support out there for continuing doing it."

And in fact, both the JWST and Hubble are veterans at strengthening the bond between scientific research and public discourse. Both can create visual expanses that make the unimaginable universe seem a little more coherent and tangible while somehow normalizing concepts once confined to fantasy.

"There's a strong synergy between what Hubble does at UV [ultraviolet] wavelengths, and what Webb does at near-infrared," Reid said. "I'm still blown away by the fact that we're kind of blasé now about redshift 13 galaxies."

(Redshift 13 galaxies are those that existed over 13 billion years ago, when the cosmos was still in its infancy. Thanks to the JWST, we can literally look at them today.)

"The Rocky World project is putting together the best aspects of JWST and HST," Reid said. "This is an exciting program that really has a good chance of telling us whether M-dwarf planets [those circling red dwarfs, the most common stars in the Milky Way] are a good place to look for signs of life."

He also mentioned how excellent the results can be when the JWST and Hubble team up with the Chandra X-ray telescope — yet another NASA facility on the chopping block. Trump's 2026 fiscal year budget proposal takes Chandra from its allocated $70 million in 2024 to $0 for 2026.

"Habitable Worlds Observatory, Hubble 2.0, is the next big thing that NASA's aiming for. It was not written out of the [President's budget request]. It's still in there, much reduced, but it's still in there.

"That's good."

This article was originally published on Space.com.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/space/how-trumps-budget-cuts-could-affect-2-iconic-space-telescopes-hubble-and-james-webb at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

SPACE > ASTRONOMY

FEATURES | JAMIE CARTER | JUL 13, 2025, 6:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

James Webb and Hubble telescopes join forces to explore a cosmic nursery: Space photo of the week

The mighty James Webb and Hubble space telescopes united to reveal stars being born inside the Small Magellanic Cloud, which orbits the Milky Way.

This combined image from NASA's Hubble and James Webb space telescopes shows open clusters NGC 460 and NGC 456 in the Small Magellanic Cloud. (Image credit: Image credit: NASA, ESA, and C. Lindberg (Johns Hopkins University); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America))

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) joined forces to capture a striking new view of two open star clusters within the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf satellite galaxy orbiting the Milky Way.

The spectacular 527-megapixel image is the result of 12 overlapping observations in visible light (by Hubble) and infrared light (by JWST). It shows two open clusters, called NGC 460 and NGC 456, which are home to thousands of stars in various stages of development. An 87-megapixel version of the image can be downloaded from NASA.

Star clusters are groups of stars that share an origin, form at roughly the same time and location, and are held loosely together by gravity. The stars in NGC 460 and NGC 456 are no more than 10 million years old — a stark contrast to the sun's 4.5 billion years of age.

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Featuring bluish clouds of gas full of young stars and red filaments of dust, the image reveals the process by which stars are formed. As new stars grow within clouds of gas, they expel radiation or collapse, triggering further star formation. Hubble captured, in the visible and near-infrared spectra, the glowing, ionized gas shaped by radiation from stars — the bluish "bubbles" in the image.

Meanwhile, JWST observed the same regions in infrared light, revealing the red dust lanes glowing as they absorb starlight. JWST cannot directly see ionized gas bubbles, and Hubble doesn't detect dust — it sees only dark silhouettes — so the collaboration is ideal.

An uncropped version of the image showing NGC 460 and NGC 456 in the Small Magellanic Cloud. (Image credit: Image credit: NASA, ESA, and C. Lindberg (Johns Hopkins University); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America))

Astronomers study the Small Magellanic Cloud because it lacks the heavier elements found in large galaxies such as the Milky Way. It therefore replicates what more primitive galaxies were like in the early universe.

NGC 460 and NGC 456 are part of the N83-84-85 complex, a nursery of massive stars. It's home to rare, extremely massive O-type stars, only perhaps 20,000 of which exist in the Milky Way.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/space/astronomy/james-webb-and-hubble-telescopes-join-forces-to-explore-a-cosmic-nursery-space-photo-of-the-week at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

PLANET EARTH > GEOLOGY

FEATURES | CHARLES Q. CHOI | JUL 13, 2025, 5:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

What's Earth's lowest point on land?

What's Earth's lowest spot on dry land — and how did it get to be that way?

Salt-encrusted rocks at the surface of the Dead Sea, whose banks are Earth's lowest place on dry land. (Image credit: Ido Meirovich via Getty Images)

The highest point on Earth's surface is the top of Mount Everest, which towers more than 29,000 feet (8,800 meters) above sea level. But what's the lowest point on land?

The lowest spot on dry land are the banks of the Dead Sea in the Middle East. These lie about 1,300 feet (430 m) below sea level, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The banks of the Dead Sea are the lowest point on dry land but not the deepest point on Earth's surface. That distinction belongs to the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, a point in the Pacific Ocean that reaches about 35,876 feet [10,935 m] below the planet's surface.

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The precise depth of the Dead Sea's surface can vary daily. According to NASA, on a hot, dry summer day, the water level can drop as much as 1 inch (2 to 3 centimeters) because of evaporation.

The Dead Sea, which is not really a sea but a large saltwater lake, is 47 miles (76 kilometers) long and up to 11 miles (18 km) wide. The "Dead Sea" was named by monks, who noticed that life seemed to be absent from the salty water, NOAA noted.

The Dead Sea lies along the Dead Sea Fault, which spans about 600 miles (1,000 km) from the Red Sea to the Taurus Mountains in Turkey and started forming nearly 20 million years ago, according to a 2006 study in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters. The fault helps form the boundary between the African tectonic plate to the west and the Arabian one to the east. NASA notes that the Dead Sea lies in the Great Rift Valley, which is currently ripping the African continent apart.

"The Dead Sea fault is primarily a transform fault, similar to the San Andreas Fault in California, where two plates are moving next to each other," Rob Pockalny, an associate marine research scientist at the University of Rhode Island, told Live Science.

Related: How many tectonic plates does Earth have?

Both sides of the fault are moving northward, "but the eastern side moves a bit faster, about 5 millimeters [0.19 inches] per year," marine geophysicist Zvi Ben-Avraham, director of the Minerva Dead Sea Research Center at Tel Aviv University in Israel, told Live Science. In comparison, "the San Andreas Fault moves 10 times faster."

Previously, researchers suggested the Dead Sea formed essentially because of a zigzag in the Dead Sea Fault. If the Dead Sea Fault was perfectly straight, one side could slide relatively smoothly next to the other. However, if the fault had a zigzag in it, then as one side slid past the other, a gap would form in the zigzag area where both sides of the fault were pulling apart. Such a "pull-apart basin" could have steep walls, helping to explain why the Dead Sea is so low in elevation, Pockalny said.

However, the standard model of pull-apart basins suggest they become long before they become deep. In contrast, the basin of the Dead Sea is significantly wider than it is deep, Ben-Avraham said. The sediment that makes up the floor of the southern Dead Sea "extends down close to 15 kilometers [9.3 miles], and that part of the basin is only about 10 kilometers [6 miles] wide."

Instead, Ben-Avraham and his colleagues suggest the Dead Sea is a "drop down basin." As both sides of the fault slid past each other, they spread apart a bit, "but then an isolated chunk of basalt detached from them and dropped down starting about 4 million years ago," Ben-Avraham said. "So the Dead Sea basin became deeper while its other dimensions stayed fixed."

Determining which model of the Dead Sea's formation might be correct is challenging "because these motions are very slow," Ben-Avraham said. "Understanding what is going on in this part of the crust in real time is very, very difficult and expensive."

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/geology/whats-earths-lowest-point-on-land at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

July 12, 2025

- How is DNA used to identify victims of mass disasters?

- AI outsmarted 30 of the world's top mathematicians at secret meeting in California

- Kākāpō: The chonky parrot that can live almost 100 years

- Ancient Egyptian rock art discovered near Aswan may be from the dawn of the first dynasty

- Your data is being compromised much quicker than ever before, but you don't have to sit still and take it

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- Science news this week: 'Bringing back' giant ancient birds and a shift in Earth's poles

HEALTH > GENETICS

FEATURES | PUJA CHANGOIWALA | JUL 12, 2025, 1:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

How is DNA used to identify victims of mass disasters?

DNA analysis is considered the gold standard for identifying victims of mass fatalities. But how does it work?

To identify victims of disasters, experts run DNA analyses using antemortem and postmortem samples. This method, when done up to standard, is considered "foolproof." (Image credit: Westend61/Getty Images)

On June 12, 2025, an Air India flight crashed shortly after takeoff, killing 260 people. The plane was carrying over 33,000 gallons (125,000 liters) of fuel, leading to a massive fire, and several bodies were charred beyond recognition, fragmented or otherwise rendered unrecognizable. To identify the bodies, officials sought DNA samples from the victims' family members. More than two weeks after the disaster, the completed DNA analysis successfully identified every person lost in the crash.

Around the world, DNA analysis is the gold standard for identifying human remains following these kinds of mass disasters, whether they're transportation accidents like the Air India crash, major natural disasters or terrorist attacks. But how does DNA analysis actually work? And how does it help identify victims in these disastrous events involving mass fatalities?

DNA analysis involves the collection of two types of samples: postmortem and antemortem. The postmortem DNA is collected at the scene as other specialists take photos of the victims' teeth and police officers collect fingerprints and note specific attributes, such as clothing and personal belongings, said Kerstin Montelius, a molecular biologist with Sweden's National Board of Forensic Medicine.

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"A DNA sample could be from any tissue of the body," Montelius told Live Science in an email. "The DNA sample is sent to the laboratory, where DNA is extracted from the tissue."

Those collecting the DNA have to ensure that the sample remains uncontaminated, considering there's a high risk of human remains commingling after mass disasters. The environment, too, can compromise the quality of the sample. For instance, victims of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center were exposed to intense fire, heat and extinguishing water, and in 2004, victims of the South East Asian tsunami were exposed to seawater and warm, humid air.

To minimize contamination, blood or intact soft tissue samples are usually preferred for analysis. The exception would be cases in which remains have putrefied or commingled, where bone and tooth samples are preferred, according to a 2007 paper about minimizing contamination risk published in the journal Forensic Science, Medicine, and Pathology.

Related: How do DNA tests tell if two people are related?

"When the effect of precise environmental factors is uncertain, it seems sensible to collect different kinds of tissue sample from each victim," the paper notes.

The next step involves preparing a DNA profile of each victim. This requires cleaning and separating DNA from tissue samples, determining the approximate amount of DNA present, and copying that DNA using an enzyme so there's enough to analyze, said Jeremy Watherston, a forensic biologist and executive manager of research and innovation at Queensland Forensic Science. Finally, the DNA fragments are separated based on their size, resulting in a visual representation of an individual's DNA.

"Recovered DNA profiles are then compared to antemortem samples — that is, items known to belong to the victim, such as a toothbrush or razor," Watherson told Live Science in an email. "Alternatively, recovered DNA profiles are compared to samples recovered from known biological relatives — for example, the mother or father of a victim."

If conducted to the high standard expected, this DNA analysis is a foolproof method — and when coupled with other types of chemical analyses, it can even be used to distinguish identical twins, said Peter Ellis, an Australian forensic pathologist who chairs a subgroup of Interpol's Disaster Victim Identification working group. That said, the process does pose a few challenges, he told Live Science in an email.

"Its occasional drawbacks include the technological equipment needed to conduct it, [and] the need for good [postmortem] samples that are not degraded," Ellis said. "Remains that are completely incinerated may not contain enough DNA to allow identification."

Although DNA analysis is a vital scientific tool for identifying victims of mass disasters, the process involves a lot of ethical questions, such as "assumptions about where and how identity is situated, how bodies should be treated after death, and how disasters should be managed," said Caroline Bennett, an assistant professor of social anthropology and international development at the University of Sussex in the U.K.

Bennett authored a paper about how the DNA analysis process may conflict with sociopolitical and cultural norms, citing an example of Iraq in 2005, when the "government argued strongly for bodily integrity" for those who went missing during Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime. Iraq’s government also insisted that bone sections, which were collected for DNA analysis, be returned so they could be buried with the bodies.

"It's important to take such questions into consideration before starting any processes," Bennett told Live Science in an email, "to make sure the treatment of the dead is done with respect and care that is appropriate."

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/health/genetics/how-is-dna-used-to-identify-victims-of-mass-disasters at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

NEWS | LYNDIE CHIOU | JUL 12, 2025, 9:51 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

AI outsmarted 30 of the world's top mathematicians at secret meeting in California

The world's leading mathematicians were stunned by how adept artificial intelligence is at doing their jobs.

(Image credit: Yuichiro Chino via Getty Images)

On a weekend in mid-May, a clandestine mathematical conclave convened. Thirty of the world's most renowned mathematicians traveled to Berkeley, Calif., with some coming from as far away as the U.K. The group's members faced off in a showdown with a "reasoning" chatbot that was tasked with solving problems they had devised to test its mathematical mettle. After throwing professor-level questions at the bot for two days, the researchers were stunned to discover it was capable of answering some of the world's hardest solvable problems. "I have colleagues who literally said these models are approaching mathematical genius," says Ken Ono, a mathematician at the University of Virginia and a leader and judge at the meeting.

The chatbot in question is powered by o4-mini, a so-called reasoning large language model (LLM). It was trained by OpenAI to be capable of making highly intricate deductions. Google's equivalent, Gemini 2.5 Flash, has similar abilities. Like the LLMs that powered earlier versions of ChatGPT, o4-mini learns to predict the next word in a sequence. Compared with those earlier LLMs, however, o4-mini and its equivalents are lighter-weight, more nimble models that train on specialized datasets with stronger reinforcement from humans. The approach leads to a chatbot capable of diving much deeper into complex problems in math than traditional LLMs.

To track the progress of o4-mini, OpenAI previously tasked Epoch AI, a nonprofit that benchmarks LLMs, to come up with 300 math questions whose solutions had not yet been published. Even traditional LLMs can correctly answer many complicated math questions. Yet when Epoch AI asked several such models these questions, which were dissimilar to those they had been trained on, the most successful were able to solve less than 2 percent, showing these LLMs lacked the ability to reason. But o4-mini would prove to be very different.

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Epoch AI hired Elliot Glazer, who had recently finished his math Ph.D., to join the new collaboration for the benchmark, dubbed FrontierMath, in September 2024. The project collected novel questions over varying tiers of difficulty, with the first three tiers covering undergraduate-, graduate- and research-level challenges. By April 2025, Glazer found that o4-mini could solve around 20 percent of the questions. He then moved on to a fourth tier: a set of questions that would be challenging even for an academic mathematician. Only a small group of people in the world would be capable of developing such questions, let alone answering them. The mathematicians who participated had to sign a nondisclosure agreement requiring them to communicate solely via the messaging app Signal. Other forms of contact, such as traditional e-mail, could potentially be scanned by an LLM and inadvertently train it, thereby contaminating the dataset.

Each problem the o4-mini couldn't solve would garner the mathematician who came up with it a $7,500 reward. The group made slow, steady progress in finding questions. But Glazer wanted to speed things up, so Epoch AI hosted the in-person meeting on Saturday, May 17, and Sunday, May 18. There, the participants would finalize the last batch of challenge questions. The 30 attendees were split into groups of six. For two days, the academics competed against themselves to devise problems that they could solve but would trip up the AI reasoning bot.

By the end of that Saturday night, Ono was frustrated with the bot, whose unexpected mathematical prowess was foiling the group's progress. "I came up with a problem which experts in my field would recognize as an open question in number theory — a good Ph.D.-level problem," he says. He asked o4-mini to solve the question. Over the next 10 minutes, Ono watched in stunned silence as the bot unfurled a solution in real time, showing its reasoning process along the way. The bot spent the first two minutes finding and mastering the related literature in the field. Then it wrote on the screen that it wanted to try solving a simpler "toy" version of the question first in order to learn. A few minutes later, it wrote that it was finally prepared to solve the more difficult problem. Five minutes after that, o4-mini presented a correct but sassy solution. "It was starting to get really cheeky," says Ono, who is also a freelance mathematical consultant for Epoch AI. "And at the end, it says, 'No citation necessary because the mystery number was computed by me!'"

Related: AI benchmarking platform is helping top companies rig their model performances, study claims

Defeated, Ono jumped onto Signal early that Sunday morning and alerted the rest of the participants. "I was not prepared to be contending with an LLM like this," he says, "I've never seen that kind of reasoning before in models. That's what a scientist does. That's frightening."

Although the group did eventually succeed in finding 10 questions that stymied the bot, the researchers were astonished by how far AI had progressed in the span of one year. Ono likened it to working with a "strong collaborator." Yang Hui He, a mathematician at the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences and an early pioneer of using AI in math, says, "This is what a very, very good graduate student would be doing — in fact, more."

The bot was also much faster than a professional mathematician, taking mere minutes to do what it would take such a human expert weeks or months to complete.

While sparring with o4-mini was thrilling, its progress was also alarming. Ono and He express concern that the o4-mini's results might be trusted too much. "There's proof by induction, proof by contradiction, and then proof by intimidation," He says. "If you say something with enough authority, people just get scared. I think o4-mini has mastered proof by intimidation; it says everything with so much confidence."

By the end of the meeting, the group started to consider what the future might look like for mathematicians. Discussions turned to the inevitable "tier five" — questions that even the best mathematicians couldn't solve. If AI reaches that level, the role of mathematicians would undergo a sharp change. For instance, mathematicians may shift to simply posing questions and interacting with reasoning-bots to help them discover new mathematical truths, much the same as a professor does with graduate students. As such, Ono predicts that nurturing creativity in higher education will be a key in keeping mathematics going for future generations.

"I've been telling my colleagues that it's a grave mistake to say that generalized artificial intelligence will never come, [that] it's just a computer," Ono says. "I don't want to add to the hysteria, but in some ways these large language models are already outperforming most of our best graduate students in the world."

This article was first published at Scientific American. © ScientificAmerican.com. All rights reserved. Follow on TikTok and Instagram, X and Facebook.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/ai-outsmarted-30-of-the-worlds-top-mathematicians-at-secret-meeting-in-california at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

ANIMALS > BIRDS

FEATURES | MINDY WEISBERGER | JUL 12, 2025, 8:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Kākāpō: The chonky parrot that can live almost 100 years

This flightless nocturnal parrot is only found in New Zealand.

Kākāpōs can't fly, but they can walk long distances and are excellent climbers. (Image credit: Liu Yang/Getty Images)

The first thing that you'll notice about kākāpō — a type of large, flightless parrot found only in New Zealand — is how rotund they are.

They have endearingly round heads and bodies, owl-like faces and sturdy legs, and they are the biggest of all modern parrots; males measure up to 25 inches (64 centimeters) long and can weigh nearly 9 pounds (4 kilograms). Kākāpō are also one of the longest-lived birds in the world, estimated to reach 90 years.

The name "kākāpō" means "night parrot" in the Māori language, a reference to the birds' nocturnal habits. Though kākāpō cannot fly, they can walk for long distances and are agile climbers, clambering and leaping from trees using their shortened wings for balance.

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When they sense danger, kākāpō freeze in place, and their mottled emerald-green plumage renders the birds nearly invisible against the leafy forest backdrop. The feathers of the male kākāpō have a distinctive odor that scientists have described as "sweet and vegetative," and this powerful scent may play a role in males' mating success.

Mating in kākāpō is also unique, as they are the only parrot species to exhibit a behavior called lekking. Males create a stage of sorts, shaping a shallow bowl-shaped depression in the ground. They then crouch in their bowl and call for females using two different sounds: a series of low-frequency "booms" that sound like a tuba, punctuated by a high-pitched "ching." Males may boom and ching for eight hours at a stretch, continuing nightly for two or three months.

Kākāpō numbers were severely impacted by humans arriving on New Zealand and nearly went extinct in the 1900s. (Image credit: Imago / Alamy Stock Photo)

However, in the absence of female attention some males have been known to direct their affections elsewhere. In 1990, author Douglas Adams wrote about an unusual encounter with an amorous kākāpō, describing it in his book "Last Chance to See" (Penguin Random House, 1992). The incident took place while Adams was recording a segment for a BBC radio programme about endangered species.

"When one of the rangers who was working in an area where kākāpōs were booming happened to leave his hat on the ground," Adams wrote, "he came back later to find a kākāpō attempting to ravish it."

Scientists who work with kākāpōs even built a rubber "ejaculation helmet" to accommodate a kākāpō named Sirocco, who was notorious for trying to mate with people's heads. The helmet had a dimpled surface, suitable for collecting sperm for use in artificial insemination.

Shagged by a rare parrot | Last Chance To See - BBC - YouTube

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The birds breed once every two to four years, when local rimu trees produce an abundant crop of berries. These fruits are rich in calcium and vitamin D, essential nutrients for egg laying and for nourishing growing chicks.

Kākāpō thrived for tens of millions of years across New Zealand, where they had no natural predators. But with the arrival of Polynesian people around 700 years ago, the birds' numbers began to drop. Their decline accelerated when Europeans colonized New Zealand in the early 1800s. Deforestation and the introduction of mammalian predators, such as rats, cats and stoats, brought kākāpō to the brink of extinction, and by the 1900s, they had all but vanished.

But in the 1970s, conservationists discovered a breeding population of about 200 birds. For decades they worked to protect kākāpō and secure their future, moving them to the three islands where they live today (and where all invasive carnivores have since been eradicated). Currently there are about 242 kākāpō in the wild, and they are recognized as critically endangered with a high risk of extinction.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/animals/birds/kakapo-the-chonky-parrot-that-can-live-almost-100-years at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

ARCHAEOLOGY > ANCIENT EGYPTIANS

NEWS | LAURA GEGGEL | JUL 12, 2025, 7:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Ancient Egyptian rock art discovered near Aswan may be from the dawn of the first dynasty

Newfound rock art from ancient Egypt may shed light on the time just before the first dynasty.

The rock art panel shows a boat dragged by five figures. It has a standing figure holding an oar and the head and right shoulder of a seated figure inside the boat's inner structure, possibly a cabin.  (Image credit: Dorian Vanhulle (2025); Antiquity Publications Ltd.)

An ancient Egyptian rock engraving may have been carved at the dawn of the first dynasty, up to 5,100 years ago, a new study suggests.

The engraving depicts a boat that may have a royal figure seated in it, although only the person's head and right shoulder are visible. The engraving is stylistically similar to ancient Egyptian rock panels from the protodynastic period and early first dynasty — periods that aren't well known to archaeologists. These similarities hint that the newfound carving may hold clues about the formation of the Egyptian state, according to the study.

"Boats are among the most frequently recurring motifs in Egyptian iconography," study author Dorian Vanhulle, director and curator at the Musée du Malgré-Tout in Belgium, said in a statement. "During the Predynastic and Protodynastic periods (c. 4500-3085 BC), the periods which foreshadowed Pharaonic Egypt, the boat is ubiquitous and invested with complex ideological and symbolic meanings."

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The "intriguing new" rock engraving was found on the west bank of the Nile River near Aswan in November 2022, during a survey that was documenting rock art in the region ahead of the construction of New Aswan City, Vanhulle wrote in the study, which was published Thursday (July 10) in the journal Antiquity.

The engraving shows an "ornate boat dragged by five figures to the right," Vanhulle wrote. At the back of the back, a standing person holds an oar. Next to this person is an enclosed area — possibly a cabin — that appears to hold a seated individual.

This person may be royalty, Vanhulle wrote. However, some details have not been preserved, making it difficult to interpret the individual. The seated person seems to have an elongated chin, which was "typical for depictions of early rulers that might designate the false beard worn by kings since the First Dynasty," Vanhulle wrote in the study.

The seated individual has a "vertical stroke" on their head, which "might be a headdress of some sort," he wrote.

Related: Oldest and most complete ancient Egyptian human genome ever sequenced reveals ties to Mesopotamia

Image 1 of 4

(Image credit: Dorian Vanhulle (2025); Antiquity Publications Ltd.)

An ancient Egyptian rock art panel of people in and around a boat was found here, partly covered by rubble near Aswan.

(Image credit: Dorian Vanhulle (2025); Antiquity Publications Ltd.)

Another ancient Egyptian rock art panel depicting a naval procession. Notice how the king, who is holding a scepter, is given a beard and a crown to indicate royalty.

(Image credit: Dorian Vanhulle (2025); Antiquity Publications Ltd.)

The newly discovered rock art panel with the boat scene in a photo taken during the cleaning process.

(Image credit: Dorian Vanhulle (2025); Antiquity Publications Ltd.)

A protodynastic boat engraving from Wadi Abu Subeira, near Aswan. The boat in this panel has similarities with the newfound boat engraving, a new study finds.

To date the rock art, Vanhulle examined its style. The boat's sickle-like shape and figures pulling it resemble boat depictions from the protodynastic and early dynastic periods, he noted, adding that the cabin is similar to depictions of late predynastic boats. The boat also appears to have "horns" on the top of its second cabin — a feature that was common in the beginning of the first dynasty, he wrote.

However, Vanhulle does not think this individual is Narmer, who founded the first Egyptian dynasty around 3085 B.C. That's because the engraving lacks a serekh, a hieroglyphic symbol that portrays a palace facade carrying the king's name and has Horus, the falcon-headed god.

"This absence would suggest that the seated figure is not a First Dynasty king," Vanhulle wrote in the study. Rather, it's likely that the engraving was "produced at the dawn of the First Dynasty, perhaps shortly before the reign of Narmer," he wrote.

The lack of the serekh is "a relevant detail," Alejandro Jiménez Serrano, an Egyptologist at the University of Jaén in Spain who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. "This could indicate that the seated figure predates the widespread use of this royal symbol in official rock art."

This engraving and others are well done and have many similarities, so it's possible that regional authorities commissioned rock-art specialists long before the first pyramids were built, Vanhulle noted.

There is a "limited corpus of Protodynastic rock art," making this engraving "particularly significant because it depicts a seated figure in a processional boat, interpreted as a possible representative of authority," Jiménez Serrano said.

But interpreting the rock art is difficult, and Vanhulle and Jiménez Serrano noted a number of limitations in the study. For instance, it's hard to know if the vertical stroke above the seated person's head is actually a headdress or if the elongated chin is a false beard. It's not even clear if the seated individual is male or female.

"The study acknowledges that 'it is not possible to determine the gender and status' of the figure, although its social importance as a potential member of the ruling class is recognized," Jiménez Serrano said.

Ancient Egypt quiz: Test your smarts about pyramids, hieroglyphs and King Tut

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/ancient-egyptians/ancient-egyptian-rock-art-discovered-near-aswan-may-be-from-the-dawn-of-the-first-dynasty at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

COMMUNICATIONS

OPINION | MIKE CHAPPLE | JUL 12, 2025, 6:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Your data is being compromised much quicker than ever before, but you don't have to sit still and take it

Your personal privacy depends on your awareness, tech controls that allow you to decide what to share, and public policies that take personal privacy into account.

(Image credit: d3sign via Getty Images)

Cybersecurity and data privacy are constantly in the news. Governments are passing new cybersecurity laws. Companies are investing in cybersecurity controls such as firewalls, encryption and awareness training at record levels.

And yet, people are losing ground on data privacy.

In 2024, the Identity Theft Resource Center reported that companies sent out 1.3 billion notifications to the victims of data breaches. That's more than triple the notices sent out the year before. It's clear that despite growing efforts, personal data breaches are not only continuing, but accelerating.

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What can you do about this situation? Many people think of the cybersecurity issue as a technical problem. They're right: Technical controls are an important part of protecting personal information, but they are not enough.

As a professor of information technology, analytics and operations at the University of Notre Dame, I study ways to protect personal privacy.

Solid personal privacy protection is made up of three pillars: accessible technical controls, public awareness of the need for privacy, and public policies that prioritize personal privacy. Each plays a crucial role in protecting personal privacy. A weakness in any one puts the entire system at risk.

The first line of defense

Technology is the first line of defense, guarding access to computers that store data and encrypting information as it travels between computers to keep intruders from gaining access. But even the best security tools can fail when misused, misconfigured or ignored.

Two technical controls are especially important: encryption and multifactor authentication. These are the backbone of digital privacy — and they work best when widely adopted and properly implemented.

Encryption uses complex math to put sensitive data in an unreadable format that can only be unlocked with the right key. For example, your web browser uses HTTPS encryption to protect your information when you visit a secure webpage. This prevents anyone on your network — or any network between you and the website — from eavesdropping on your communications. Today, nearly all web traffic is encrypted in this way.

Related: Quantum computers will be a dream come true for hackers, risking everything from military secrets to bank information. Can we stop them?

But if we're so good at encrypting data on networks, why are we still suffering all of these data breaches? The reality is that encrypting data in transit is only part of the challenge.

Securing stored data

We also need to protect data wherever it's stored — on phones, laptops and the servers that make up cloud storage. Unfortunately, this is where security often falls short. Encrypting stored data, or data at rest, isn't as widespread as encrypting data that is moving from one place to another.

While modern smartphones typically encrypt files by default, the same can't be said for cloud storage or company databases. Only 10% of organizations report that at least 80% of the information they have stored in the cloud is encrypted, according to a 2024 industry survey. This leaves a huge amount of unencrypted personal information potentially exposed if attackers manage to break in. Without encryption, breaking into a database is like opening an unlocked filing cabinet — everything inside is accessible to the attacker.

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Multifactor authentication is a security measure that requires you to provide more than one form of verification before accessing sensitive information. This type of authentication is more difficult to crack than a password alone because it requires a combination of different types of information. It often combines something you know, such as a password, with something you have, such as a smartphone app that can generate a verification code or with something that's part of what you are, like a fingerprint. Proper use of multifactor authentication reduces the risk of compromise by 99.22%.

While 83% of organizations require that their employees use multifactor authentication, according to another industry survey, this still leaves millions of accounts protected by nothing more than a password. As attackers grow more sophisticated and credential theft remains rampant, closing that 17% gap isn't just a best practice — it's a necessity.

Multifactor authentication is one of the simplest, most effective steps organizations can take to prevent data breaches, but it remains underused. Expanding its adoption could dramatically reduce the number of successful attacks each year.

Awareness gives people the knowledge they need

Even the best technology falls short when people make mistakes. Human error played a role in 68% of 2024 data breaches, according to a Verizon report. Organizations can mitigate this risk through employee training, data minimization — meaning collecting only the information necessary for a task, then deleting it when it's no longer needed — and strict access controls.

Policies, audits and incident response plans can help organizations prepare for a possible data breach so they can stem the damage, see who is responsible and learn from the experience. It's also important to guard against insider threats and physical intrusion using physical safeguards such as locking down server rooms.

Public policy holds organizations accountable

Legal protections help hold organizations accountable in keeping data protected and giving people control over their data. The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation is one of the most comprehensive privacy laws in the world. It mandates strong data protection practices and gives people the right to access, correct and delete their personal data. And the General Data Protection Regulation has teeth: In 2023, Meta was fined €1.2 billion (US$1.4 billion) when Facebook was found in violation.

Despite years of discussion, the U.S. still has no comprehensive federal privacy law. Several proposals have been introduced in Congress, but none have made it across the finish line. In its place, a mix of state regulations and industry-specific rules — such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act for health data and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act for financial institutions — fill the gaps.

Some states have passed their own privacy laws, but this patchwork leaves Americans with uneven protections and creates compliance headaches for businesses operating across jurisdictions.

The tools, policies and knowledge to protect personal data exist — but people's and institutions' use of them still falls short. Stronger encryption, more widespread use of multifactor authentication, better training and clearer legal standards could prevent many breaches. It's clear that these tools work. What's needed now is the collective will — and a unified federal mandate — to put those protections in place.

This article is part of a series on data privacy that explores who collects your data, what and how they collect, who sells and buys your data, what they all do with it, and what you can do about it.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/technology/communications/your-data-is-being-compromised-much-quicker-than-ever-before-but-you-dont-have-to-sit-still-and-take-it at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

ANIMALS > MOLLUSKS > OCTOPUSES

FEATURES | ELANA SPIVACK | JUL 12, 2025, 5:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Why is the blue-ringed octopus so deadly?

The blue-ringed octopus is by far the most venomous octopus.

The small but mighty blue-ringed octopus produces the most potent venom among cephalopods. (Image credit: Belive... via Getty Images)

Octopuses have gotten a reputation for being cunning camouflagers and intelligent creatures. But some are known for a more ominous reason: They're deadly.

One group — the blue-ringed octopus (genus Hapalochlaena) — is especially dangerous. But what makes this creature so lethal?

Blue-ringed octopuses carry a killer concoction called tetrodotoxin (TTX), a potent neurotoxin that can paralyze living things, including humans. Tetrodotoxin is most famously known from pufferfish — improperly prepared "fugu" can kill those who eat it. Tetrodotoxin is 1,200 times more toxic to humans than cyanide and it has no known antidote.

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All four of the octopus species in the genus Hapalochlaena have tetrodotoxin, making them the four most venomous species of octopus: the greater blue-ringed octopus (H. lunulata), the southern or lesser blue-ringed octopus (H. maculosa), the blue-lined octopus (H. fasciata) and the common blue-ringed octopus (H. nierstraszi). These cephalopods, with their iridescent blue circles, are indeed beautiful, but also dangerous.

All octopods — a group of marine animals that includes octopuses — have venom, but some of these animals' venom is more potent than others', said Michael Vecchione, an adjunct zoologist at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. "The blue-ringed is perhaps the most venomous," he told Live Science in an email, in part because it lives in shallow water teeming with predators that may hope to feast on this octopus. Its venom is a natural defense.

"The venomous secretions are among a broad spectrum of naturally occurring toxins produced by octopods," Vecchione added. However, blue-ringed octopuses don't actually make tetrodotoxin on their own. Rather, symbiotic bacteria in their salivary glands produce it, the Australian Institute of Marine Science reports.

Related: How many hearts does an octopus have?

These octopuses reside in coral reefs and on rocky seafloors in the Pacific and Indian oceans. They hang out at depths of around 66 to 164 feet (20 to 50 meters) deep, depending on the species. They're also tiny, measuring between 5 and 9 inches (12 to 22 centimeters) long, including their arms.

"It does make sense that such a small octopus would have to have such impressive abilities to defend itself," Bret Grasse, manager of cephalopod operations at the University of Chicago Marine Biological Laboratory, told Live Science.

This potent venom comprises a number of compounds — like histamine, acetylcholine and dopamine — but its primary component is tetrodotoxin. It acts on nerve tissue as a neural inhibitor by blocking sodium channels — proteins in nerve cells that are essential to communication between these cells and muscles. When tetrodotoxin acts on these channels, it can stop a creature's lung muscles from breathing and even their heart from beating.

This venom comes in handy for fighting predators and capturing prey. Blue-ringed octopuses commonly deploy their venom through direct bites. Although researchers have found a blue-ringed octopus's venom throughout its body, like in its gills and the sac that contains its internal organs, it's most concentrated in the posterior salivary gland, Grasse said.

They can also disperse the venom into the surrounding water. When nearby creatures — predators or prey — breathe, they take in the toxic water, which "can start to slow their motor activity and paralyze them," Grasse said.

But the venom isn't just weaponry; blue-ringed octopuses also employ it in mating, Grasse said. As with other animals, the female blue-ringed octopus is "substantially" larger than the male — sometimes even three to five times larger — so the male faces risks when mating, including the danger of being cannibalized.

Although the blue-ringed octopus has some resistance to its own toxins, it's not completely immune. So the male can temporarily paralyze larger females with venom long enough to transfer a sperm packet.

The females also incorporate venom into their egg laying, Grasse said. They layer their eggs with the toxin to deter predators.

It's uncommon for a human to get bitten by a blue-ringed octopus, Grasse said. There are at least three reported deaths caused by the blue-ringed octopus — two in Australia and one in Singapore, according to the Australian Institute of Marine Science.

While this potent toxin may lead to an agonizing death in as little as 20 minutes or as long as 24 hours, some people have lived to tell the tale. The outcomes are "actually wildly variable," Grasse said. "Some instances where humans have had confirmed bites from blue ring octopuses result in absolutely nothing."

In one case from 2006, a 4-year-old boy was bitten by a blue-ringed octopus in Australia. Within 10 minutes of exposure, the boy had vomited three times, reported having blurry vision and couldn't stand on his own. An ambulance rushed him to the emergency department, where he was put on a ventilator to help him breathe for a total of 17 hours. But 28 hours after the initial bite, he was discharged with no long-term complications. Grasse confirmed that seeking medical help and use of a ventilator is the best route to go in this case.

This small but mighty creature can certainly take care of itself. "It's a widely utilized advantage that they have, and they deploy in various ways," Grasse said.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/animals/octopuses/why-is-the-blue-ringed-octopus-so-deadly at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

PLANET EARTH

FEATURES | PANDORA DEWAN | JUL 12, 2025, 12:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Science news this week: 'Bringing back' giant ancient birds and a shift in Earth's poles

June 12, 2025: Our weekly roundup of the latest science in the news, as well as a few fascinating articles to keep you entertained over the weekend.

'Bringing back' giant ancient birds and a shift in Earth's poles (Image credit: Florilegius/Universal Images Group/Dragon Claws/Getty Images)

Did you notice the days feeling shorter this week? Probably not. But our planet has actually been spinning ever so slightly faster, due to changes in the position of the moon relative to Earth's poles. And the shortest days are yet to come.

On average, a day on Earth is about 86,400 seconds long, or 24 hours. But this can vary due to a number of things, including the positions of the sun and moon and changes to Earth's magnetic field.

On July 9, July 22 and Aug. 5, the moon will be at its farthest distance from Earth's equator, which changes the impact of its gravitational pull on the planet's axis. With the moon closer to the poles, Earth's spin speeds up, making our day shorter than usual — but only by about 1.5 milliseconds.

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- Earth's 'leaking' core and strange signals from space

- 'City-killer' asteroid swarms and a buried toddler 'Ice Prince'

Much more noticeable this week were the devastating flash floods in Texas, New Mexico, North Carolina and Illinois, which have left at least 130 dead.

Moa 'de-extinction'

'We're bringing back avian dinosaurs': De-extinction company claims it will resurrect the giant moa in next 10 years

Moas were hunted to extinction around 600 years ago, but now, scientists want to bring them back. (Image credit: Florilegius/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

After years of analysis and observation, scientists have identified a new blood group, called Gwada negative, that has so far only been identified in only one person on the planet.

After making headlines for claiming to have brought dire wolves back from extinction earlier this year, biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences has sparked a new wave of controversy with its latest "de-extinction" project: bringing back the giant moa (Dinornis robustus.)

The giant moa was a large flightless bird native to New Zealand that is thought to have gone extinct due to hunting by humans roughly 600 years ago. The company claims that "resurrecting" these giant birds could bring benefits to endangered animals alive today, but the announcement has drawn criticism from many others in the scientific community.

Discover more animal news

—Chimps develop fashion trend by shoving grass in their ears — and in their butts

—'Ash-winged dawn goddess' is oldest pterosaur ever discovered in North America — and it was small enough to sit 'on your shoulder'

—'Alpha male' primates are rare, with females about as likely to dominate the opposite sex, study finds

Life's little mysteries

Why are men taller than women, on average?

Why are men often taller than women? (Image credit: RunPhoto via Getty Images)

On average, human males tend to be about 5 inches (13 centimeters) taller than females. However, this size difference isn't consistent across the animal kingdom, with females often outsizing males. So, why are human men typically bigger than women?

—If you enjoyed this, sign up for our Life's Little Mysteries newsletter

Earth's poles shifting

Dams around the world hold so much water they've shifted Earth's poles, new research shows

Baihetan Dam is a huge hydroelectric operation in China. (Image credit: VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

Since 1835, thousands of dams have been built around the world to control water supplies and, in some cases, generate electricity. Some of these larger dams hold so much water that they have actually redistributed mass around the world.

Now, scientists have found that this mass redistribution has shifted the position of Earth's crust relative to its mantle and, in turn, affected the position of our planet's poles.

Discover more planet Earth news

—Melting glaciers could trigger volcanic eruptions around the globe, study finds

—Scientists discover that mysterious giant structures beneath the North Sea seemingly defy what we know about geology

—Mercury's 'missing' meteorites may have finally been found on Earth

Also in science news this week

—Massive blocks from the Lighthouse of Alexandria, an ancient wonder, hauled up from the Mediterranean

—Scientists burned, poked and sliced their way through new robotic skin that can 'feel everything'

—Scientists discover Burmese pythons have never-before-seen cells that help them digest entire skeletons

—Stunning facial reconstructions of 'hobbit,' Neanderthal and Homo erectus bring human relatives to life

Beyond the headlines

A dangerous condition that can cause seizures, coma and death could rise dramatically as the climate warms

A sugarcane cutter toils in scorching heat in Western Maharashtra. (Image credit: Sanket Jain)

Between March and May, as temperatures climbed above 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius) in parts of India, community health care workers reported an increase in the number of patients coming in with persistent confusion, weakness and seizures. Outdoor workers were collapsing, with new cases reported every day.

But the uptick was not the result of a new virus or bacterial infection — rather, these incidents were caused by a dangerous electrolyte imbalance.

Hyponatremia is a condition in which the sodium level in the blood falls too low and, if left untreated, can lead to brain swelling, seizures, coma, muscle breakdown and even death. Cases of hyponatremia often increase in the summer months. Now, experts are warning that warming global temperatures could cause incidences of hyponatremia to skyrocket.

Something for the weekend

If you're looking for something a little longer to read over the weekend, here are some of the best long reads, book excerpts and interviews published this week.

—8-year-old with rare, fatal disease shows dramatic improvement on experimental treatment (Analysis)

—'The first author was a woman. She should be in the kitchen, not writing papers': Bias in STEM publishing still punishes women (Book Extract)

—What are dwarf planets — and how many are there? (Query)

Science in pictures

Whooo's there? James Webb telescope spots 'Cosmic Owl,' super-rare structure formed from colliding ring galaxies

The "Cosmic Owl," as photographed by the James Webb Space Telescope. Each "eye" is an active galactic nucleus, and the "beak" is a nursery of stars.  (Image credit: Li et al.)

This week, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) revealed its latest cosmic curiosity after it spotted a strange owl-shaped object lurking 11 billion light-years from Earth.

The avian formation is thought to have taken shape due to the extremely unusual collision of two rare ring galaxies, which are formed when smaller galaxies smash straight through the middle of larger ones, kicking out the larger galaxy's stars and gas around a central core to create a ring-like shape.

Follow Live Science on social media

Want more science news? Follow our Live Science WhatsApp Channel for the latest discoveries as they happen. It's the best way to get our expert reporting on the go, but if you don't use WhatsApp, we're also on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Flipboard, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky and LinkedIn.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/science-news-this-week-bringing-back-giant-ancient-birds-and-a-shift-in-earths-poles at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

July 11, 2025

- 'Epigenetic memory' may help explain why PCOS tends to run in families

- Scientists grow mini amniotic sacs in the lab using stem cells

- Experimental treatment for high cholesterol edits DNA in the body to reduce LDL

- In disasters like the Texas floods, warning people of danger isn't so simple

- Man in Australia dies of rare, rabies-like disease

- Earliest evidence of humans catching disease from animals dates to 6,500 years ago

- Astronomers are racing to study our solar system's newest 'interstellar visitor.' Here's why.

- Antarctic sea ice collapse linked to a mysterious spike in ocean salt

- In a first, congenital deafness in teens and adults treated with new gene therapy

- Collapse of key Atlantic currents may be held off by newly-discovered back-up system, study finds

- Parker Solar Probe captures closest-ever photos of the sun during record-breaking flight

- 140,000-year-old child's skull may have been part modern human, part Neanderthal — but not everyone is convinced

- A dangerous condition that can cause seizures, coma and death could rise dramatically as the climate warms

- Texas flood devastation revealed in before-and-after satellite images

- 'Time machine' reveals hidden structures in the universe's first galaxies

- Cosmic images from the world's largest digital camera are so big they require a 'data butler'

HEALTH > FERTILITY, PREGNANCY & BIRTH

NEWS | ALEXANDRA FROST | JUL 11, 2025, 6:30 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

'Epigenetic memory' may help explain why PCOS tends to run in families

New research suggests how PCOS may be partly inherited through "epigenetic memory," offering insight into why the condition tends to run in families.

A new study looked at potential "epigenetic" influences that shape the inheritence of PCOS, a common hormonal condition. (Image credit: KTSDESIGN/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY via Getty Images)

Scientists may be one step closer to understanding why polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) tends to run in families.

The new research, presented July 1 at the 41st Annual Meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Paris, suggests that "disruptions" in the way genes are turned on and off may increase the likelihood of developing PCOS. These "epigenetic" changes alter gene activity without changing DNA's underlying code, but they may also be passed down through families.

In theory, this research hints at a potential avenue for preventing PCOS.

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If a person was undergoing in vitro fertilization (IVF), for example, "these damaging [epigenetic] markers may be identified in embryos and changed before being implanted in a pregnant person, preventing PCOS from being passed onto future offspring," Dr. Sherry Ross, a board certified OB/GYN at Providence Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, California, told Live Science in an email.

However, "further research needs to be done in human embryos to understand if this is a safe and viable intervention," she added.

Understanding PCOS inheritance

PCOS is a hormonal condition that affects 6% to 13% of reproductive-age women, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Many cases — up to 70% — go undiagnosed worldwide. Common symptoms include ovarian cysts, weight gain, balding or thinning hair on the head, excess hair on the face or body, acne, infertility, and irregular or heavy periods.

Related: Malaria drug may treat root cause of PCOS, early study hints

Alongside these often debilitating symptoms, people with PCOS are also more likely to develop a variety of other conditions, including high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes and endometrial cancer, the WHO notes.

It's known that PCOS has a strong genetic component, said Dr. Sydney Chang, founding partner and medical director of CCRM Fertility of Austin.

In the Dutch Twin-Family Study, for example, researchers compared identical twins (who share nearly 100% of their DNA) with fraternal twins (who share 50% of their DNA), to see how likely it was for both twins in a pair to have PCOS. They found this concordance was twice as high among identical twins than fraternal twins, "suggesting that a large portion of the risk of developing PCOS is due to inherited genes," Chang told Live Science in an email.

It's estimated that 20% to 40% of people with PCOS have a mother or sister with the condition. But the exact pattern of inheritance is unclear, Chang noted. On that front, the new research may shed some light.

The study, led by Dr. Qianshu Zhu, an assistant professor of reproductive biology at the Institute of Reproductive Medicine at Chongqing Medical University in China, included about 230 women undergoing IVF, 133 of whom had PCOS and 95 of whom didn't. The researchers looked at unfertilized egg cells and pre-implantation embryos from these participations, looking for chemical tags, known as epigenetic markers, on the cells' DNA. These markers affect the activity of the genes they're attached to.

Compared to the eggs and embryos of people without PCOS, those from participants with the condition showed "widespread disruptions" in many key genes, according to a statement. Affected genes were involved in metabolic processes and activation of the early embryo's DNA. Sections of the genome called retrotransposons, which must be tightly regulated to keep DNA stable, were also affected.

The team also noted irregular patterns in well-known epigenetic markers that help control genes, including one called H3K27me3. In the statement, Zhu noted that "about half of the abnormal H3K27me3 signatures we saw in Day 3 embryos were already present in the oocyte [egg cells]. This tells us that an epigenetic signal is being passed from mother to embryo before implantation even begins."

Understanding these mechanisms could enable new preventative interventions for PCOS. The authors suggested that embryos created through IVF could potentially be treated to tweak their epigenetics and thus lower the risk of PCOS being inherited. The findings could also be useful in aiding embryo selection processes in IVF, they added.

Zhu emphasized, however, that the research is based on only lab-made embryos and cannot demonstrate how these epigenetic markers affect children. His team is now pursuing mouse studies to better understand the potential effects in offspring.

"What is exciting about this new research is it supports an actual genetic association between PCOS in families," Ross said, "and shines light for early diagnosis and interventions to prevent PCOS from being transmitted through families."

Disclaimer

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

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/health/fertility-pregnancy-birth/epigenetic-memory-may-help-explain-why-pcos-tends-to-run-in-families at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

HEALTH > FERTILITY, PREGNANCY & BIRTH

NEWS | RJ MACKENZIE | JUL 11, 2025, 6:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Scientists grow mini amniotic sacs in the lab using stem cells

A newly created cell model of the amniotic sac could reveal new insights into early pregnancy, as well as generate helpful products for medical use.

This image shows one of the new lab models, called PGAs, at day 18 of growth. PGAs are composed of two different cell populations (magenta, the extra-embryonic mesoderm and yellow, the amniotic endoderm). (Image credit: Gharibi, B. (2025). Cell.)

Researchers have developed a new laboratory model grown from stem cells that replicates the human amniotic sac in the first two to four weeks after fertilization.

The structure, which the researchers say is the most advanced and mature amniotic model ever created, could offer new insight into human development and lead to cell products for medical procedures, from burn treatments to cornea reconstruction, the team reported in a study published July 10 in the journal Cell.

The growing human embryo isn't alone on its developmental journey. "Supporting tissues like the placenta, like the amniotic sac, grow with the embryo and are really important for the embryo's growth and survival," said study co-author Silvia Santos, a group leader at the Francis Crick Institute in London.

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The amniotic sac is a fluid-filled, biological balloon that cushions and protects the growing embryo. The liquid it contains is thought to be essential for healthy embryo development. But it hasn't been easy to investigate this interplay between the embryo and its entourage, largely because this stage of development is logistically difficult and ethically fraught to study inside human beings.

Previous attempts at modeling the amniotic sac in the lab were unable to replicate its complex 3D structure, which has two distinct cell layers. In addition, previous models tended to last only a few days, making it harder to get insight into the extended process of development.

By contrast, Santos' new cell models, called post-gastrulation amnioids (PGAs), can survive in their lab dishes for at least three months and develop to the same degree as a month-old amniotic sac. Remarkably, they grow to a similar size, too — up to about an inch (2.5 centimeters).

Related: Scientists invent 1st 'vagina-on-a-chip'

This image shows a PGA at day 8 of growth, showing the early tissues supporting the embryo, including the amniotic sac and the yolk sac-like structures, surrounded by extraembryonic mesoderm tissue. (Image credit: Gharibi, B. (2025). Cell.)

"They are little golf balls," Santos told Live Science. The PGAs also form the amniotic sac's distinct two-layer structure.

To achieve this, Santos' team used a new cell-culture method. They began with embryonic stem cells, which can grow to become any other cell type in the body if nudged with specific signaling molecules. The team exposed these cells to two of these signals, called BMP4 and CHIR. They made sure to space out the signals, adding BMP4 over the first 24 hours of growth, followed by CHIR for another 24 hours.

Then, the researchers left the cells alone in round-bottomed culture dishes. "The rest was complete self-organization," meaning the maturing stem cells orchestrated their own assembly into a structure, Santos said.

Single cells aggregated in the dishes and formed the distinct two-layered, fluid-filled structure the team had searched for. "This just shows you that these embryonic stem cells have this amazing propensity to specialize and to become everything given the right instructions, which I'm still in awe about," Santos said.

This microscopy image of a PGA shows that it's a two-membrane sac. The inner membrane represents amniotic endoderm cells and the outer extraembryonic mesoderm cells. The dark space in the middle represents the fluid within PGAs. (Image credit: Gharibi, B. (2025). Cell.)

Armed with their new models, the team set out to answer key questions about how amniotic sacs influence their environment. They wanted to know what genes might be directing cells to turn into PGAs. By interfering with a long list of genes that they suspected might influence cell development, they found that a single gene, GATA3, could convert cells into amniotic sacs without any other signals.

GATA3 codes for a transcription factor — a protein that turns other genes on or off. Santos and her team showed that two of the genes GATA3 regulates are BMP4 and CHIR, the same genes their culture protocol had involved.

To explore how the amniotic sac may influence nearby cells, they mixed their PGAs with additional stem cells that hadn't been nudged to become any particular cell type. Left on their own, these cells would have continued to exist in their unspecialized state. But next to the PGAs, they changed into a host of other "extraembryonic" cell types, showing that the amniotic sac was capable of driving the transformation of cells around it.

This diagram shows how the PGAs develop through time, largely through self-assembly. (Image credit: Gharibi, B. (2025). Cell.)

Santos and her team are now exploring possible applications for their new system. Amniotic sacs have antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory properties, and people who have had elective C-sections can opt to donate their amniotic sacs for use as transplant tissue in burn treatments or cornea repairs. These donated materials can be difficult to standardize, Santos said, but PGAs could theoretically provide a reliable source of these desired cells.

Yi Zheng, an assistant professor in biomedical and chemical engineering at Syracuse University who was not involved in the study, said further tests would be required to see whether PGAs could provide clinically useful materials for such procedures.

He added that mature, non-stem cells can be transformed back into stem cells called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). Perhaps, Zheng said, iPSCs converted into PGAs could be particularly useful for medical applications, in part because you could use a patient's own cells to generate them.

Better models of the amniotic sac could also help researchers understand why this critical structure sometimes malfunctions. Some congenital disorders — meaning those babies are born with — are tied to differences in the size or content of the sac prior to birth, and Santos said the PGAs could help explain that link.

"I'm extremely excited about the potential of these little structures," she concluded.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/health/fertility-pregnancy-birth/scientists-grow-mini-amniotic-sacs-in-the-lab-using-stem-cells at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

HEALTH > MEDICINE & DRUGS

NEWS | NICOLETTA LANESE | JUL 11, 2025, 5:30 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Experimental treatment for high cholesterol edits DNA in the body to reduce LDL

An experimental treatment called VERVE-102 lowers the amount of "bad" cholesterol in the blood of people with specific cholesterol-raising conditions.

A treatment being tested in clinical trials lowers bad cholestorol by editing a specific gene inside the body. (Image credit: Rasi Bhadramani via Alamy)

An experimental gene therapy for high cholesterol is showing promise in clinical trials and inching closer to approval.

The treatment, called VERVE-102, is being tested in people with familial hypercholesterolemia (FH), an inherited condition that raises the levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol — the "bad" kind — in the blood. It's also being tested in people with premature coronary artery disease (CAD), in which the arteries narrow and can't deliver enough oxygenated blood to heart muscle. The age at which CAD is considered "premature" varies, but it generally occurs before age 65 in women and age 55 in men.

Both groups "require deep and durable reductions" of LDL in the blood, Verve Therapeutics, the treatment's maker, noted in an April statement. In an ongoing clinical trial, the company tested the treatment in 14 people with FH and/or premature CAD, and found that a single dose of the therapy led to a 53% reduction in LDL, on average.

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These early data are drawn from three groups of people who received different doses of the treatment. The four participants given the highest dose saw the largest benefit: a 69% reduction in LDL, at maximum.

Across the groups, "VERVE-102 was well-tolerated, with no treatment-related serious adverse events (SAEs) and no clinically significant laboratory abnormalities observed," Verve's statement noted.

VERVE-102 uses a modified version of CRISPR, the famous gene-editing system. The CRISPR systems developed originally introduce a "break" in both strands of a DNA molecule, and then, the cell's built-in repair system swoops in to repair the break. However, this comes with the risk of adding unwanted mutations to the DNA.

Related: New CRISPR alternative can 'install' whole genes, paving the way to treatment for many genetic disorders

The new cholesterol-lowering therapy instead uses "base editing," which swaps out just one letter in DNA's code, thus sidestepping the danger of a double-stranded break. Like classic CRISPR, the base editor still includes a "guide" molecule to fix its aim at the correct gene, and from there, an enzyme tweaks just one letter in DNA's code.

VERVE-102 targets a gene called PCSK9, which controls the number of LDL receptors on the surfaces of cells. The quantity of these receptors dictates how quickly LDL gets cleared from the blood. When PCSK9 is too active — as it is in the genetic disease FH — it breaks down LDL receptors before they can make it to the cell surface, thus causing LDL to accumulate in the bloodstream instead.

The new therapy, given in a single intravenous infusion over two to four hours, is designed to turn off PCSK9, especially in the liver, where LDL receptors are abundant. Across the three dosing groups, there was a decrease in both PCSK9 activity and LDL levels in the 28 days following the treatment, with higher doses tied to greater reductions.

Now, the company is enrolling a fourth group of patients who will receive an even higher dose, and who are being recruited in the United Kingdom, Canada, Israel, Australia and New Zealand. As of April, two people in the group had been treated.

Verve expects to release data from this portion of the trial later this year, as well as start its next clinical trial, which will include more participants. The next trial will likely enroll U.S. participants, as the Food and Drug Administration granted the therapy "Fast Track Designation" to help expedite its development and approval.

Notably, in June, Verve was acquired by the drug company Lilly, which aims to continue the development of the treatment.

"VERVE-102 has the potential to be the first in vivo [in the body] gene editing therapy for broad patient populations and could shift the treatment paradigm for cardiovascular disease from chronic care to one-and-done treatment," Ruth Gimeno, Lilly group vice president of diabetes and metabolic research and development, said in a statement.

Larger and longer clinical trials will be needed before VERVE-102 can earn approval and reach more patients.

Disclaimer

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

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/health/medicine-drugs/experimental-treatment-for-high-cholesterol-edits-dna-in-the-body-to-reduce-ldl at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

PLANET EARTH > WEATHER > FLOODING

OPINION | HAMILTON BEAN, KERI K. STEPHENS | JUL 11, 2025, 4:43 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

In disasters like the Texas floods, warning people of danger isn't so simple

As flash floods ravage areas like the Texas Hill Country, research shows that technology alone cannot save lives during flooding emergencies.

How emergency alerts convey risks matters.  (Image credit: Jim Vondruska via Getty Images)

Flash floods like the one that swept down the Guadalupe River in Texas on July 4, 2025, can be highly unpredictable. While there are sophisticated flood prediction models and different types of warning systems in some places, effective flood protection requires extensive preparedness and awareness.

It also requires an understanding of how people receive, interpret and act on risk information and warnings. Technology can be part of the solution, but ultimately people are the critical element in any response.

As researchers who study emergency communications, we have found that simply providing people with technical information and data is often not enough to effectively communicate the danger and prompt them to act.

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The human element

One of us, Keri Stephens, has led teams studying flood risk communication. They found that people who have experienced a flood are more aware of the risks. Conversely, groups that have not lived through floods typically don't understanding various flood risks such as storm surges and flash floods. And while first responders often engage in table-top exercises and drills — very important for their readiness to respond — there are only a few examples of entire communities actively participating in warning drills.

Messages used to communicate flood risk also matter, but people need to receive them. To that end, Keri's teams have worked with the Texas Water Development Board to develop resources that help local flood officials sort through and prioritize information about a flood hazard so they can share what is most valuable with their local communities.

The commonly used "Turn Around Don't Drown" message, while valuable, may not resonate equally with all groups. Newly developed and tested messages such as "Keep Your Car High and Dry" appeal specifically to young adults who typically feel invincible but don't want their prized vehicles damaged. While more research is needed, this is an example of progress in understanding an important aspect of flood communication: how recipients of the information make decisions.

Related: Texas flood devastation revealed in before-and-after satellite images

Interviews conducted by researchers often include responses along these lines: "Another flash flood warning. We get these all the time. It's never about flooding where I am." This common refrain reveals a fundamental challenge in flood communication. When people hear "flood warning," they often think of different things, and interpretations can vary depending on a person's proximity to the flooding event.

Some people equate flood warnings with streamflow gauges and sensors that monitor water levels — the technical infrastructure that triggers alerts when rivers exceed certain thresholds. Others think of mobile phone alerts, county- or geographic-specific notification systems, or even sirens.

Beyond technologies and digital communication, warnings still come through informal networks in many communities. Emergency managers directly coordinate with and share information with major businesses and organizations, saying, "Hey, John, be sure you have somebody up tonight watching the National Weather Service alerts and rivers."

This human-centered approach, similar to neighborhood-level systems we have studied in Japan, can provide direct confirmation that warnings have been received. This is something mass media and mobile systems cannot guarantee, especially during infrastructure failures such as power and cell tower outages.

Effective messages

Research shows that effective warning messages need to include five critical components: a clear hazard description, location-specific information, actionable guidance, timing cues and a credible source. The Federal Emergency Management Agency's integrated public alert and warning system message design dashboard assists authorities in rapidly drafting effective messages.

This warning system, known as IPAWS, provides nationwide infrastructure for wireless emergency alerts and Emergency Alert System messages. While powerful, IPAWS has limitations − not all emergency managers are trained to use it, and messages may extend beyond intended geographic areas. Also, many older mobile devices lack the latest capabilities, so they may not receive the most complete messages when they are sent.

Hyperlocal community opt-in systems can complement IPAWS by allowing residents to register for targeted notifications. These systems, which can be run by communities or local agencies, face their own challenges. People must know they exist, be willing to share phone numbers, and remember to update their information. Social media platforms add another communication channel, with emergency managers increasingly using social media to share updates, though these primarily reach only certain demographics, and not everyone checks social media regularly.

The key is redundancy through multiple communication channels. Research has found that multiple warnings are needed for people to develop a sense of urgency, and the most effective strategy is simple: Tell another person what's going on. Interpersonal networks help ensure the message is delivered and can prompt actions. As former Natural Hazards Center Director Dennis Mileti observed: The wireless emergency alerts system "is fast. Mama is faster."

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Warning fatigue

Professionals from the National Weather Service, FEMA and the Federal Communications Commission, along with researchers, are increasingly concerned about warning fatigue — when people tune out warnings because they receive too many of them.

However, there is limited empirical data about how and when people experience warning fatigue — or about its impact.

This creates a double bind: Officials have an obligation to warn people at risk, yet frequent warnings can desensitize recipients. More research is needed to determine the behavioral implications of and differences between warnings that people perceive as irrelevant to their immediate geographic area versus those that genuinely don't apply to them. This distinction becomes especially critical when people might drive into flooded areas outside their immediate vicinity.

The key to effective emergency communication is to develop messages that resonate with specific audiences and build community networks that complement technological systems. We are now studying how to do this effectively in the United States and internationally. It's also important to apply behavioral insights to the design of every level of communication warning systems. And it's important to remember to test not just the technology but the entire end-to-end system, from threat identification to community response.

Finally, maintaining true redundancy across multiple communication channels is an important strategy when trying to reach as many people as possible. Technology supports human decision-making, but it doesn't replace it.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/flooding/in-disasters-like-the-texas-floods-warning-people-of-danger-isnt-so-simple at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

HEALTH > VIRUSES, INFECTIONS & DISEASE

NEWS | NICOLETTA LANESE | JUL 11, 2025, 3:40 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Man in Australia dies of rare, rabies-like disease

A man in New South Wales was exposed to a rare relative of the rabies virus and died of the resulting infection. His was only the fourth case of the disease ever documented.

An Australian flying fox. These bats are known to be carriers of Australian bat lyssavirus (ABLV). (Image credit: 11Audrey11 via Getty Images)

A man in New South Wales (NSW) caught the state's first known case of Australian bat lyssavirus (ABLV), a rabies-like infection that can't be treated once symptoms appear. It was the fourth human case of the infection ever documented.

The man, who was in his 50s and from northern NSW, was in critical condition and being treated at a hospital on July 2, when NSW Health issued a statement about his case. The next day, the health department announced that the man had died.

"We express our sincere condolences to the man's family and friends for their tragic loss," an NSW Health spokesperson said July 3, according to The Australian.

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Like the rabies virus, ABLV belongs to a genus of viruses called Lyssavirus. "All Lyssavirus species have the potential to cause rabies disease in people, but rabies virus is by far the most common cause," the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes. After exposure but prior to symptoms setting in, ABLV can be treated in the same way as rabies — namely, with rapid wound care and the administration of antibodies and vaccines.

Compared with rabies, ABLV infections are considered very rare. Since the virus was first identified in 1996, only four cases of human infection — including the recent one in NSW — have been documented in Australia, and none have occurred elsewhere.

ABLV is transmitted from living bats to humans, typically through bites or scratches from the animal. In the man's case, he had "been bitten by a bat several months ago and received treatment following the injury," Keira Glasgow, a director in health protection at NSW Health, said in the statement. The statement did not specify the exact nature of the treatments provided.

Related: In 'extremely rare' case, Michigan resident dies from rabies after receiving transplanted kidney carrying the virus

"Further investigation is underway to understand whether other exposures or factors played a role in his illness," Glasgow added.

In Australia, direct evidence of ABLV has been found in flying foxes and insect-eating microbats. But NSW Health warned that any bat could potentially carry the germ.

The public is advised to avoid touching or handling bats at all. "Only people who have been vaccinated against rabies and who are trained in handling bats should ever handle bats or flying foxes," the department cautioned.

In general, if a bat bites or scratches a person, they should take these steps: Wash the wound with soap within 15 minutes, apply an antiseptic that kills viruses, and seek immediate medical attention, the department advises. Antibodies against rabies and a rabies vaccine would then be given, which can prevent rabies and other Lyssavirus-related illnesses if symptoms have not yet emerged.

Once symptoms of ABLV set in, though, "sadly there is no effective treatment," Glasgow said.

Early symptoms of ABLV infection resemble those of rabies and include flu-like symptoms of headache, fever and fatigue. The infection then rapidly progresses to affect the central nervous system, triggering paralysis, delirium, convulsions and death, typically within a few weeks of symptom onset.

Rabies and ABLV infections have "shown a wide variability in the time it takes for symptoms to appear following exposure to an infected animal (from several days to several years)," NSW Health noted.

Disclaimer

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

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/health/viruses-infections-disease/man-in-australia-dies-of-rare-rabies-like-disease at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

HEALTH

NEWS | CHRISTOPH SCHWAIGER | JUL 11, 2025, 3:30 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Earliest evidence of humans catching disease from animals dates to 6,500 years ago

By analyzing ancient DNA, scientists determined when, where and how our ancestors got sick from infectious diseases.

A new analysis of ancient human DNA uncovered evidence of humans being infected with germs from animals 6,500 years ago. (Image credit: Jacques Julien via Getty Images)

Diseases started jumping from animals to humans at least 6,500 years ago, researchers found in a new study of ancient DNA.

After analyzing ancient DNA from 1,313 prehistoric humans from Europe and Asia, researchers charted a map and timeline of human infectious disease that spans 37,000 years. Within that long history, they uncovered the earliest-known evidence of zoonotic disease — in which pathogens in animals transfer to humans — dated to 6,500 years ago.

The researchers described their findings in a study published Wednesday (July 9) in the journal Nature, noting that cases of zoonotic disease probably occurred before that point. But they said the risk and extent of the transmission of such diseases probably increased as humans interacted with animals more frequently, namely through farming and animal husbandry.

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Migration likely also played a role, as individuals may have carried zoonotic diseases to new populations that had not yet been exposed to them.

"Today, zoonoses account for more than 60% of newly emerging infectious diseases," the researchers wrote.

The researchers found a peak in evidence of zoonosis in samples that are around 5,000 years old. They argue this coincides with the period when livestock domestication became more widespread. (Evidence suggests animal domestication began around 8,000 to 10,000 years ago and then likely took time to spread to various geographies.)

Related: 32 diseases you can catch from animals

Until now, questions remained about where and when known human pathogens first emerged and how they were distributed around the world. Thanks to new technology that can capture genomic evidence of such diseases in ancient DNA, some of these questions are beginning to be answered.

In total, 214 known human pathogens were detected in the study's DNA samples, which were gathered from the bones and teeth of ancient human remains. The oldest case with a known pathogen uncovered in the study involved Corynebacterium diphtheriae, the bacterium behind diphtheria. The microbe's DNA was discovered in a sample from the Mesolithic period and dated back as far as 11,400 years.

Twelve cases involved the Yersinia enterocolitica bacterium behind the zoonotic disease yersiniosis, which causes various symptoms including fever and diarrhea. The oldest remains showing evidence of this pathogen were found in Denmark and are about 6,500 years old.

The researchers also found evidence of some more well-known pathogens — including 42 suspected cases of the plague-causing bacterium Yersinia pestis — in about 3% of their samples. However, they did not detect the pathogen responsible for tuberculosis: Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

The team suspects that they didn't detect M. tuberculosis because it is typically a low-load bloodstream infection. Due to the dataset they used, they were most likely to detect bugs that accumulate in high concentrations in the blood during an infection.

The samples from the human remains consisted of a mixture of human, germ and other DNA. After excluding any human DNA, the team then identified which DNA belonged to human pathogens and which came from other sources, such as bacteria involved in the decomposition process, the soil or from the human microbiome.

One limitation of the study is that the technology used does not detect RNA, a cousin of DNA that forms the basis of many germs. Flu viruses contain RNA, for instance, so analyzing RNA could have provided evidence of different influenza pandemics throughout history.

"There are many epidemic-type pathogens that are RNA viruses that we would like to study from the past. But the problem with those is that RNA is not as stable a molecule as DNA," study lead author Martin Sikora, an associate professor who studies human and pathogen evolution at the University of Copenhagen, told Live Science. "So far, we haven't really been successful at extracting this type of information from archaeological remains."

This is "the largest study to date on the history of infectious diseases," the researchers said in a statement, adding that it could potentially have implications for the future of medicine, including the development of vaccines.

Sikora said that while reconstructing the genomes of these ancient pathogens, sometimes they got enough data to recover the whole genome sequence of a particular germ. In theory, new vaccines could be developed based on this information and would be available to protect humans against viruses that are not around now but could emerge again in the future, he suggested.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/health/earliest-evidence-of-humans-catching-disease-from-animals-dates-to-6-500-years-ago at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

SPACE > ASTRONOMY > COMETS

NEWS | HARRY BAKER | JUL 11, 2025, 2:29 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Astronomers are racing to study our solar system's newest 'interstellar visitor.' Here's why.

Astronomers have been given the rare opportunity to study an extrasolar object after the recent discovery of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. Experts tell Live Science how they are planning to observe the cosmic visitor.

Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS will blaze through our solar system for the rest of the year before zooming away forever. (Image credit: ESA/Las Cumbres Observatory)

The astronomical community is abuzz over a newly discovered "interstellar object," only the third of its kind ever seen, which is currently shooting toward us on a one-way trip through the solar system.

The race is now on to study the alien interloper, named 3I/ATLAS, before it leaves forever.

"We only have one shot at this object and then it's gone forever," Darryl Seligman, an astronomer at Michigan State University and the lead author of a new paper about the object, told Live Science. "So we want as much information from all of our observatories as we can possibly get."

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Related: Watch newly discovered 'interstellar visitor' 3I/ATLAS shoot toward us in first livestream

Experts say studying 3I/ATLAS could potentially tell us about alien star systems and how exoplanets form — and we may even be able to trace it back to its origins.

Initial discovery

3I/ATLAS (previously dubbed A11pl3Z) has a high speed and extremely flat trajectory, which is it what first hinted it was interstellar object. (Image credit: David Rankin/Catalina Sky Survey)

3I/ATLAS was discovered on July 1 from data collected by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) and immediately piqued researchers' interests due to its trajectory and extreme speed, which exceeds 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h). Within 24 hours of its discovery, NASA had confirmed that it was an interstellar object.

A day later (July 3), a group of more than 40 astronomers, led by Seligman, had uploaded the first paper describing the extrasolar entity to the preprint database arXiv. All data so far indicates that 3I/ATLAS is a large comet surrounded by a cloud of ice, dust and gas up to 15 miles (24 kilometers) across.

Prior to this discovery, only two other interstellar objects (ISOs) had been spotted: 1I/'Oumuamua, a space rock that was discovered in 2017; and 2I/Borisov, a comet spotted in 2019. This makes the newly discovered comet particularly appealing to astronomers.

However, there is a limited window to study 3I/ATLAS. The comet, which is currently around 4.5 times farther from the sun than Earth, will reach its closest point to the sun, or perihelion, on Oct. 30, before beginning its journey out of the solar system, when it will get much harder to spot. It will also be out of view between late September and early December, when it is positioned on the opposite side of the sun to Earth.

Observing an interstellar visitor

Astronomers discovered the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS on July 1. This was one of the first photos of the object. (Image credit: ATLAS/University of Hawaii/NASA)

Over the next few weeks and months, researchers will attempt to use "any and all telescopes" they can to make observations of 3I/ATLAS, Sean Raymond, a planetary scientist at the University of Bordeaux in France, told Live Science in an email.

This will be especially true for observatories in the Southern Hemisphere, which will have a better view of the increasingly bright comet, Aster Taylor, a graduate student at the University of Michigan and co-author of the arXiv study, told Live Science in an email.

Experts are particularly excited about the possibility of imaging 3I/ATLAS with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory — the world's most powerful optical telescope, which recently released its first images. The observatory, located in Chile, has already proved to be adept at imaging never-before-seen asteroids and will undoubtedly target the interstellar comet when it comes fully online in a few months time.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and Hubble Space Telescope, meanwhile, could help reveal the interloper's chemical composition because of their ability to study the object in multiple wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum Pedro Bernardinelli, a planetary scientist at the University of Washington's DiRAC Institute, told Live Science in an email.

Some researchers have also proposed using NASA's Mars rovers to snap pictures of the comet as it makes a close pass by the Red Planet a few weeks before it reaches perihelion. The robots have previously been used to spy on dangerous sunspots lurking on the sun's far side from Earth.

Another intriguing option is to send a spacecraft to collect samples from 3I/ATLAS. However, the general consensus among experts is that such a mission is unlikely to happen

Alien star systems

3I/ATLAS is currently racing towards the sun at more than 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h). (Image credit: Olivier Hainaut et al./European Southern Observatory)

Studying 3I/ATLAS provides a rare opportunity for us to glean insights into alien star systems and potential exoplanets.

"Interstellar objects are probably the leftovers of the formation of exoplanets," Raymond said. "Studying them can open a window into understanding other planetary systems' formation and evolution."

In this way, ISOs like 3I/ATLAS also "connects the solar system with its galactic environment," Amir Siraj, a doctoral candidate at Princeton University who has previously studied ISOs, told Live Science.

While it is still unclear where 3I/ATLAS came from, it's possible we can pinpoint its origins, especially if researchers can work out how old it is, Wes Fraser, an astronomer with National Research Council Canada, told Live Science in an email. And as the comet reaches perihelion, the amount of ice and other "volatile" substances that get burned off the interloper will help us narrow this down, Fraser added.

However, even then "we probably won't ever be able to pin it down to a single star system," Taylor argued.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/space/comets/astronomers-are-racing-to-study-our-solar-systems-newest-interstellar-visitor-heres-why at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

PLANET EARTH > ANTARCTICA

NEWS | BEN TURNER | JUL 11, 2025, 2:28 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Antarctic sea ice collapse linked to a mysterious spike in ocean salt

Satellite imagery has revealed a yet-to-be-explained rise in the Southern Ocean's salinity. It could be a key factor in the decline of the region's sea ice.

Antarctica's sea ice has been shrinking since 2015. (Image credit: Patrick J. Endres via Getty Images)

Antarctica's waters are getting saltier and driving a collapse in its sea ice — and scientists aren't sure why.

Antarctic sea ice has been declining since 2015, defying model predictions to hit a record 0.6 million square miles (1.55 million square kilometres) below its expected average extent in 2023. At winter's peak in July of that year, the region was missing a chunk of ice bigger than Western Europe, and it's showing no signs of recovery.

This decline — the largest environmental shift seen anywhere on Earth in recent decades — will have ripple effects on the world's climate.

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Now, scientists have linked the decline to an unexpected and yet-to-be-explained rise in the saltiness of the waters surrounding the continent. The researchers published their findings June 30 in the journal PNAS.

"We were surprised. It's a counterintuitive result because we usually associate melting ice with freshening of the ocean," study lead-author Alessandro Silvano, a senior scientist at the University of Southampton, told Live Science. "This points to a more profound structural shift in the Southern Ocean — not just sea ice, but also the ocean beneath."

Troubled waters

The sea ice surrounding Earth's poles melts in the summer and freezes in the winter, fluctuating between minimums and maximums. In Antarctica, this ice acts as a moat that protects the continent's increasingly precarious land ice from warming ocean waters, while also reflecting some of the sun's energy back into space and trapping carbon dioxide underneath the ocean's surface.

Related: 'We were in disbelief': Antarctica is behaving in a way we've never seen before. Can it recover?

Since satellites began monitoring sea ice extent in 1979, Arctic ice coverage has plunged by more than 12% each decade. Yet the Antarctic's ice continued to steadily grow, hitting an all-time high in 2014. But this trend reversed into a precipitous, worsening fall in 2016, marking a fundamental shift.

Scientists agree that the underlying driver of this switch is climate change. Yet sea ice forms at the boundary between the ocean and the air, which are both surprisingly complex systems. This, alongside the Southern Ocean’s remoteness, makes predicting how intricate warming mechanisms will play out upon the ice difficult.

To investigate, the researchers behind the new study turned to the European Space Agency's Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity satellite, which measures the subtle changes extra salinity makes to the brightness of microwaves bouncing off the ocean's surface. This signal is messy, requiring cutting-edge algorithms to untangle, meaning that analyzing it only recently became possible.

After examining daily readings from 2011 to 2023, the researchers found that the sea ice's decline and reopening of giant holes in its cover (such as the Weddell Sea's Maud Rise polynya) coincided with a sharp increase in salinity. They were shocked by their result, doubting it until it was confirmed by data from floating buoys.

Conventional wisdom suggests that as temperatures increase, melting ice spilling from Antarctic ice shelves should increase the ocean surface's freshwater content. Instead, some unknown process is making the water more salty.

"The precise drivers remain unclear," Silvano said. "One possibility is that salt stored in deeper layers of the ocean were brought up to the surface — a process potentially triggered by changes in ocean circulation or atmospheric forcing. We're actively investigating how and why this structural change began."

A group of Adélie penguins (Pygoscelis adeliae) hop from one sea ice chunk to another. The penguins depend upon the ice for breeding and hunting. (Image credit: nicholas_dale via Getty Images)

The increasing salt content will likely bring greater warming to the surface waters and ever faster melting of the ice. Salt water is denser than fresh water, so a freshwater layer at the top of the water column acts as a lid, preventing the warmer water that usually circulates in deeper layers from reaching the surface.

Sea ice is also responsible for bringing fresh water from the coast, where the ice forms, out into the ocean. With the freshwater lid broken, more warm water can rise, shrink the sea ice's extent, and in turn ensure that there will be less fresh water in future, Silvano said.

Other experts agree with the paper's findings, describing it as a missing puzzle piece that could explain discrepancies between climate models and real-world data.

"The fact that this change in salinity is counter to what we expect under climate change suggests there are processes at play that we don't fully understand, and that might not be included or well represented in our climate models," Ariaan Purich, an Antarctic climate researcher at Monash University in Australia, told Live Science. Purich suggests that investigating the gaps between the predictions of models and readings like these could provide new insights.

Another missing element is "the kind of observations that provide the information to build the right processes into models," Caroline Holmes, a polar researcher at the British Antarctic Survey, told Live Science. "The Southern Ocean below the surface is chronically underobserved, and there is momentum at the moment building towards two major initiatives, Antarctica InSync and the International Polar Year, that would do just that."

Meanwhile, Silvano and his colleagues will look into what triggered the salinity spike in 2015 and whether this could be considered a tipping point, alongside how the process may influence the world's climate through impacts on the sea ice, ocean circulation and carbon cycling.

"The timeline for these changes to have widespread global consequences is uncertain, but if the current trends continue, we could begin seeing more pronounced effects within a few decades," Silvano said. "Reduced sea ice may enable the release of carbon stored in the Southern Ocean, increasing atmospheric CO_2 — as has occurred in past warm climate periods. This process is not yet fully understood and warrants urgent further investigation."

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/antarctica/antarctic-sea-ice-collapse-linked-to-a-mysterious-spike-in-ocean-salt at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

HEALTH > GENETICS

NEWS | MAOLI DUAN | JUL 11, 2025, 2:20 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

In a first, congenital deafness in teens and adults treated with new gene therapy

This is the first time such results have been achieved in both children and adult patients born with a specific type of congenital deafness.

A gene therapy for a form of genetic deafness has now been tested in people ages 1 to 24. It shows the best results in children ages 5 to 8. (Image credit: Capuski/Getty Images)

Up to 3 in every 1,000 newborns has hearing loss in one or both ears. While cochlear implants offer remarkable hope for these children, it requires invasive surgery. These implants also cannot fully replicate the nuance of natural hearing.

But recent research my colleagues and I conducted has shown that a form of gene therapy can successfully restore hearing in toddlers and young adults born with congenital deafness.

Our research focused specifically on toddlers and young adults born with OTOF-related deafness. This condition is caused by mutations in the OTOF gene that produces the otoferlin protein — a protein critical for hearing.

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The protein transmits auditory signals from the inner ear to the brain. When this gene is mutated, that transmission breaks down leading to profound hearing loss from birth.

Unlike other types of genetic deafness, people with OTOF mutations have healthy hearing structures in their inner ear — the problem is simply that one crucial gene isn't working properly. This makes it an ideal candidate for gene therapy: if you can fix the faulty gene, the existing healthy structures should be able to restore hearing.

In our study, we used a modified virus as a delivery system to carry a working copy of the OTOF gene directly into the inner ear's hearing cells. The virus acts like a molecular courier, delivering the genetic fix exactly where it's needed.

Related: Gene therapy: What is it and how does it work?

The modified viruses do this by first attaching themselves to the hair cell's surface, then convincing the cell to swallow them whole. Once inside, they hitch a ride on the cell's natural transport system all the way to its control centre (the nucleus). There, they finally release the genetic instructions for otoferlin to the auditory neurons.

Our team had previously conducted studies in primates and young children (5- and 8-year-olds) which confirmed the virus therapy was safe. We were also able to illustrate the therapy's potential to restore hearing — sometimes to near-normal levels.

But key questions had remained about whether the therapy could work in older patients — and what age is optimal for patients to receive the treatment.

To answer these questions, we expanded our clinical trial across five hospitals, enrolling ten participants aged 1 to 24 years. All were diagnosed with OTOF-related deafness. The virus therapy was injected into the inner ears of each participant.

We closely monitored safety during the 12 months of the study through ear examinations and blood tests. Hearing improvements were measured using both objective brainstem response tests and behavioral hearing assessments.

From the brainstem response tests, patients heard rapid clicking sounds or short beeps of different pitches while sensors measured the brain's automatic electrical response. In another test, patients heard constant, steady tones at different pitches while a computer analysed brainwaves to see if they automatically followed the rhythm of these sounds.

For the behavioral hearing assessment, patients wore headphones and listened to faint beeps at different pitches. They pressed a button or raised their hand each time they heard a beep — no matter how faint.

Hearing improvements were both rapid and significant — especially in younger participants. Within the first month of treatment, the average total hearing improvement reached 62% on the objective brainstem response tests and 78% on the behavioral hearing assessments. Two participants achieved near-normal speech perception. The parent of one 7-year-old participant said her child could hear sounds just three days after treatment.

Over the 12-month study period, ten patients experienced very mild to moderate side-effects. The most common adverse effect was a decrease in white blood cells. Crucially, no serious adverse events were observed. This confirmed the favourable safety profile of this virus-based gene therapy.

Treating genetic deafness

This is the first time such results have been achieved in both adolescent and adult patients with OTOF-related deafness.

The findings also reveal important insights into the ideal window for treatment, with children between the ages of 5 and 8 showing the most pronounced benefit.

While younger children and older participants also showed improvement, their recovery was less dramatic. These counter-intuitive results in younger children are surprising. Although preserved inner-ear integrity and function at early ages should theoretically predict a better response to the gene therapy, these findings suggest the brain's ability to process newly restored sounds may vary at different ages. The reasons for this are not yet understood.

This trial is a milestone. By bridging the gap between animal and human studies and diverse patients of different ages, we're entering a new era in the treatment of genetic deafness. Although questions still remain about how long the effects of this therapy last, as gene therapy continues to advance, the possibility of curing — not just managing — genetic hearing loss is becoming a reality.

OTOF-related deafness is just the beginning. We, along with other research teams, are working on developing therapies that target other, more common genes that are linked to hearing loss. These are more complex to treat, but animal studies have yielded promising results. We're optimistic that in the future, gene therapy will be available for many different types of genetic deafness.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/health/genetics/in-a-first-congenital-deafness-in-teens-and-adults-treated-with-new-gene-therapy at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

PLANET EARTH > RIVERS & OCEANS

NEWS | SASCHA PARE | JUL 11, 2025, 2:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Collapse of key Atlantic currents may be held off by newly-discovered back-up system, study finds

Rising temperatures in the North Atlantic are slowing vital currents, but a new process in the Arctic could save the day, scientists say.

Researchers have discovered a process in the Barents Sea that could keep Atlantic currents going strong. (Image credit: Anton Petrus via Getty Images)

Key Atlantic Ocean currents that appear to be slowing down due to climate change may be more resilient to global warming than scientists previously thought — thanks to a secret back-up system, a new study shows.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is a web of currents that loops around the Atlantic like a giant conveyor belt. Cold, salty waters sink near Greenland then travel south along the ocean floor. Eventually these waters rise to the surface again near Antarctica and return north, bringing balmier waters to the Northern Hemisphere. This system is crucial to warming Europe, in particular.

In recent years, experts have repeatedly sounded the alarm bell, suggesting the step in which waters sink could cease completely, which could lead to a massive drop in temperatures in Northern Europe and exacerbate sea level rise along the U.S. East Coast, among other impacts.

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Researchers think this crucial stage of the AMOC is in trouble due to changes to dense water formation — the process by which the top layer of the ocean cascades to the bottom. Cold, salty water is more dense than warmer, less salty water. Under normal conditions, surface waters lose a lot of heat as they travel through the North Atlantic, which causes them to sink when they reach the end of their northward journey.

This typically takes place in the Nordic Seas — the Greenland, Norwegian and Iceland seas — Marius Årthun, a physical oceanographer at the University of Bergen in Norway and the lead author of the new study, told Live Science in an email.

But with climate change cooking the planet, surface waters in this region aren't transferring as much heat to the air anymore, while rivers of meltwater are also gushing from the Arctic and Greenland Ice Sheet into the ocean, diluting the salt content of surface waters and preventing them from sinking.

Related: Key Atlantic current is weakening much faster than scientists had predicted

Dense water formation in the Nordic Seas has decreased since 1993, which spells trouble for the entire Atlantic circulation system — were it not for a newly found back-up system, Årthun said. The researchers published their findings Friday (July 11) in the journal Science Advances.

Arctic "Atlantification"

For the study, Årthun and his colleagues fed density measurements from the subpolar North Atlantic, Nordic Seas and Arctic Ocean into a computer model. They compared the results with available observations to check that the simulation accurately mirrored processes in this region.

The simulation confirmed that the Arctic Ocean is undergoing a process called "Atlantification."

"Atlantification refers to the transition of the Arctic Ocean from a cold, ice-covered state to a warm, more ice-free state," Årthun said.

Recent decades have seen sea ice in the Barents Sea — a region of the Arctic Ocean that is situated between Scandinavia and Svalbard — retreat farther and farther north, Årthun said. "We expect the Barents Sea to be the first Arctic region to become ice-free," he said, adding that Atlantic waters are now also spreading into the Eurasian Basin, north of the Barents Sea.

Atlantification of the Arctic means that relatively warm Atlantic waters are spreading farther into the Arctic Ocean every year. (Image credit: Adapted from PeterHermesFurian, via Getty Images)

Atlantification of the Arctic Ocean means the region is creating more dense water than it was previously, Årthun said.

"We find that this decrease [in dense water formation] in the Nordic Seas has been compensated for by more dense water formation in the Barents Sea and north of Svalbard," he said. "These two regions have experienced a retreating sea ice edge [...], hence increasing the area over which dense waters can be produced."

The authors think this back-up system could help to sustain the AMOC. "There are processes that add resilience to the AMOC, perhaps making a serious weakening or collapse less likely," Årthun said.

More research is needed to figure out whether this back-up system will last in a warming world. There is also a question mark over how well the Arctic Ocean can really replace the Nordic Seas by forming extremely dense water, said Nicholas Foukal, a physical oceanographer and assistant professor at the University of Georgia who was not involved in the study.

It would be interesting to explore whether the densest waters are still being formed, Foukal told Live Science in an email, because "the water masses that were formed historically in the Greenland Sea were incredibly dense."

The Greenland Sea is a very deep ocean basin that is exposed to frigid gusts from the Greenland Ice Sheet. "The Arctic does not have this type of setting," Foukal said. "I doubt that these really dense waters are being formed in the Arctic."

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/rivers-oceans/collapse-of-key-atlantic-currents-may-be-held-off-by-newly-discovered-back-up-system-study-finds at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

SPACE > ASTRONOMY > THE SUN

NEWS | VICTORIA ATKINSON | JUL 11, 2025, 1:57 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Parker Solar Probe captures closest-ever photos of the sun during record-breaking flight

During a record-smashing flight through the sun’s corona in Dec. 2024, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe captured the closest-ever images of our home star. Now, NASA has finally revealed what the daredevil probe saw.

Three stills from the Parker Solar Probe’s groundbreaking footage of the corona reveal the formation of coronal mass ejections (yellow) — enormous balls of plasma flung off of the sun and into the solar system. (Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Naval Research Lab)

NASA has released the closest-ever photos of the sun, taken by the Parker Solar Probe at just 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) from the star's surface. The new images reveal important features in the solar wind that will help scientists understand the origins of this mysterious space weather phenomenon and its effects on life on Earth.

The solar wind is the constant stream of charged particles — mainly protons and electrons — released by the sun's outer atmosphere, known as the corona. This torrent of matter speeds through the solar system at more than a million miles an hour, combining with magnetic fields and material jettisoned from the sun to create auroras, strip planetary atmospheres, and generate electric currents that can interfere with power networks on Earth. Understanding and predicting this space weather is vital to protecting astronauts and spacecrafts, and minimizing the disruptions to infrastructure sometimes caused by strong solar activity.

Launched in 2018, the Parker Solar Probe is the first spacecraft to have entered the sun's corona. Equipped with an array of scientific instrumentation including the Wide Field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR) and Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons (SWEAP), the unmanned ship braves blistering heat and fierce radiation to provide researchers on Earth with detailed data about the sun and its close surroundings.

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In its record-breaking flyby of the sun on December 24th last year, the Parker Solar Probe captured images showing how this wind behaves shortly after leaving the corona and, crucially, recorded collisions between unpredictable bubbles of plasma and magnetic fields called coronal mass ejections (CMEs).

"In these images, we're seeing the CMEs basically piling up on top of one another," said Angelos Vourlidas, the WISPR instrument scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in a press release. "We're using this to figure out how the CMEs merge together, which can be important for space weather."

There are two types of solar wind: fast solar wind travels at up to 800 kilometres per second, creating a relatively uniform torrent of matter. Meanwhile slow solar wind is denser and more unpredictable, blowing in gusts rather than a constant stream.

Related: Bottom of the sun becomes visible to humans for the first time in history (photos)

Around Earth we tend to experience solar winds as more of a consistent breeze. But earlier data from the Parker Solar Probe revealed that these gusts ramp up in intensity closer to the sun, with additional turbulence in the form of zigzagging magnetic fields called switchbacks at distances of 14.7 million miles (23.6 million km) from the surface. These switchbacks are thought to originate from magnetic funnels created by visible patches on the sun's exterior and, in 2024, scientists declared the fast solar wind is partially powered by this phenomenon.

However, the slow solar wind — its denser and more variable sibling — has remained more of a mystery.

Parker Solar Probe's view of solar wind gushing out of the corona (Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Naval Research Lab)

"The big unknown has been: how is the solar wind generated, and how does it manage to escape the Sun's immense gravitational pull?" Nour Rawafi, the project scientist for Parker Solar Probe at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, said in a statement. "Understanding this continuous flow of particles, particularly the slow solar wind, is a major challenge, especially given the diversity in the properties of these streams — but with Parker Solar Probe, we're closer than ever to uncovering their origins and how they evolve."

Previous observations had suggested there were potentially two types of slow solar wind — Alfvénic, which has small magnetic switchbacks, and non-Alfvénic, which doesn't. In its latest pass, the Parker Solar Probe was finally able to confirm this long-held hypothesis. Furthermore, the new detailed pictures are helping scientists to understand the origin of each of these distinct phenomena — the Alfvénic wind possibly comes from coronal holes on cooler regions of the corona while non-Alfvénic winds could be released from hot magnetic loops called helmet streamers. "We don't have a final consensus yet, but we have a whole lot of new intriguing data," said Adam Szabo, Parker Solar Probe mission scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland in the statement.

The probe will continue to collect data as it orbits the sun and is expected to next pass its perihelion — the closest point to the sun's surface — on the 15th of September.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/space/the-sun/parker-solar-probe-captures-closest-ever-photos-of-the-sun-during-record-breaking-flight at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

ARCHAEOLOGY > HUMAN EVOLUTION

NEWS | PATRICK PESTER | JUL 11, 2025, 12:53 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

140,000-year-old child's skull may have been part modern human, part Neanderthal — but not everyone is convinced

A child buried in the world's oldest human cemetery had both modern human (Homo sapiens) and Neanderthal characteristics, suggesting she was a hybrid, according to a new study. However, not everyone is convinced the study's findings are definitive.

The child's skull has a mix of features that appear to align with both modern Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. (Image credit: Israel Hershkovitz/Tel Aviv University)

One of the earliest known human burials — that of a young child — could have been a cross between modern humans and Neanderthals, a new study suggests.

Researchers analyzed a skull that was found at a 140,000-year-old burial site and concluded that the child it belonged to had both modern human (Homo sapiens) and Neanderthal characteristics. However, the child's precise ancestry is still uncertain.

The skull was part of a cache of mysterious human remains unearthed almost 100 years ago in Skhul Cave, located on Mount Carmel in Israel. These fossils have been the subject of much scientific debate since their discovery, but were largely considered to be anatomically modern humans.

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Skhul Cave is the earliest of all known organized human burial sites, so the identity of the remains buried there is significant. The authors of the study, published in the July-August issue of the journal L'Anthropologie, argued that based on their analysis, the remains can no longer be attributed exclusively to Homo sapiens.

The researchers used CT scanning techniques to get a new and detailed look at the child's skull (Skhul I), which consists of a broken braincase (neurocranium) and jaw (mandible). On further study, the braincase mostly exhibited modern features typical of Homo sapiens, but the jaw was more like a Neanderthal's, according to the study.

Study co-author Anne Dambricourt Malassé, a paleoanthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and National Museum of Natural History in France, told Live Science in an email that there was "no way" this morphology represents variability of Homo sapiens and the child was "objectively" a hybrid.

However, not everyone thinks the findings are so definitive. Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London who was not involved in the study, told Live Science that while the mandible looked primitive, when considering all of the fossils together, he thought they primarily aligned with Homo sapiens. But Stringer did note that the study's conclusions were consistent with a 2024 study suggesting that there was cross-population (or cross-species) gene flow between Neanderthals and humans about 100,000 years ago.

"Even if not 1st-generation hybrids, it's certainly possible that the Skhul fossils reflect some gene flow between the 2 populations," Stringer said in an email. "Overall though, looking at all the material including the skeletons, the material still primarily aligns with Homo sapiens, in my view."

Related: Stunning facial reconstructions of 'hobbit,' Neanderthal and Homo erectus bring human relatives to life

John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who wasn't involved in the study, told New Scientist that the study advances our understanding of the skull, but scientists can't definitively identify the child as a hybrid without extracting its DNA.

"Human populations are variable and there can be a lot of variability in their appearance and physical form even without mixing with ancient groups like Neanderthals," Hawks said.

Modern humans bred with Neanderthals, which is why most people alive today carry between 1% and 3% of Neanderthal DNA. However, researchers still have a lot to learn about this interbreeding, as well as how the ancient human family tree fits together.

Researchers digitally removed plaster (shown in green) from the jaw. (Image credit: Israel Hershkovitz/Tel Aviv University)

Who was this ancient child?

Archaeologists first discovered human remains at Skhul Cave in 1928. Excavations uncovered the skeletons of seven adults and three children, which had been deliberately buried, along with bones linked to 16 other individuals. The bones were initially considered to be a transitional species between Neanderthals and modern humans. Researchers later suggested they were a hybrid between the two, but that assessment was also then rejected, and they ended up classed as anatomically modern humans, according to the study.

Skhul I belonged to a child, likely a female, between the ages of 3 and 5 years old. The middle section of the skull's face and a large part of the base were missing, while the rest was in pieces. In the past, archaeologists attempted to put the skull back together and consolidated the pieces with plaster, which made it more difficult for modern researchers to study. The new CT scans allowed researchers to virtually remove this plaster and compare the skull with other specimens.

The skull's modern human features include the vertical orientation of a bone on the side of the skull's base, while the jaw's Neanderthal-like features include a lack of chin.

Human evolution quiz: What do you know about Homo sapiens?

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/human-evolution/140-000-year-old-childs-skull-may-have-been-part-modern-human-part-neanderthal-but-not-everyone-is-convinced at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

HEALTH

NEWS | SANKET JAIN | JUL 11, 2025, 12:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

A dangerous condition that can cause seizures, coma and death could rise dramatically as the climate warms

Researchers are uncovering a link between rising temperatures and hyponatremia, a condition caused by a dangerous decline in sodium in the body.

A sugarcane cutter toils in scorching heat in Western Maharashtra. (Image credit: Sanket Jain)

MAHARASHTRA, INDIA — After working in a sugarcane field for an hour, Shakuntala Admane began to feel lightheaded, but she persisted for another four hours. Then, as the temperature soared above 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius), she collapsed.

Medical tests later confirmed that the 60-year-old agricultural worker had hyponatremia, a condition in which the sodium level in the blood falls too low. If left untreated, hyponatremia can lead to brain swelling, seizures, coma, muscle breakdown and even death.

Admane — from Yadrav, a village in western India's Maharashtra state — was not alone. Between March and May, as temperatures climbed above 95 F (35 C) in several parts of India, community health care workers said they began noticing many patients coming in with persistent confusion, weakness and seizures.

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"Every day, someone collapses in the field," Admane said.

Although India doesn't track hyponatremia rates on a national scale, some small studies suggest the incidence of the condition rises during the country's warmer months.

This observation isn't limited to India. Studies from around the world have found that hyponatremia cases spike as the temperature climbs. The link between hot weather and hyponatremia is particularly pronounced among older adults.

Related: Climate change is spoiling food faster, making hundreds of millions of people sick around the world

That means that as climate change worsens and extreme heat becomes more common, hyponatremia cases will likely skyrocket, too.

To avoid a tsunami of serious cases in the coming decades, it's crucial for people who are at risk of hyponatremia to be better informed about the condition and given tips on how to avoid it, experts told Live Science.

Shakuntala Admane sits at the entrance of her house, talking about how rising temperatures are affecting her health and making it difficult to work in the fields. (Image credit: Sanket Jain)

High heat, low sodium

The link between temperature and hyponatremia has been found around the world. A 2024 analysis in the journal Clinical Endocrinology looked at research conducted in nearly two dozen countries across six continents and found that high temperatures were consistently associated with low sodium levels.

That study concluded that such cases "are likely to rise with increasing global temperatures and the frequency of extreme heat events secondary to climate change."

Another 2024 study analyzed records from 2 million patients in Germany between 2000 and 2023. It found that cases of hyponatremia surged as the heat index — a measure of what temperatures "feel like" when humidity is taken into account — climbed above their typical levels.

As a result of climate change, in the past 12 months alone, Germany has experienced nearly double the days of extreme heat that it would have in a world without climate change, according to a report by World Weather Attribution, the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, and Climate Central.

Meanwhile, a Swedish study published in March in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology pulled blood test results from all patients who had their sodium levels checked in Stockholm County between 2005 and 2018. They found a sharp rise in cases when outdoor temperatures exceeded 68 F (20 C), which is warm for the Scandinavian country.

Sweden, too, has seen a rise in hot days. And this trend will only worsen: The country's annual average temperature is projected to rise by 3.6 to 12.6 F (2 to 7 C) by the end of the century. Even the lower end of that projection — an increase of 3.6 F — would fuel a nearly 14% rise in hyponatremia cases in the country, a 2022 study found.

"Given the predictions of further global warming and demographic changes with an aging population, the estimated prevalence of severe hyponatremia may in Stockholm increase by 66%," Dr. Buster Mannheimer, a senior lecturer at Sweden's Karolinska Institute and a co-author of both Swedish studies, told Live Science in an email.

Farmworker Shakuntala Admana lifts her hands to show how overexposure to extreme heat over the years has weathered her skin. She says she is 60, but the wrinkles make her look much older. (Image credit: Sanket Jain)

Globally, there's an 86% chance that at least one year between 2025 and 2029 will cross the critical threshold of 2.6 F (1.5 C) above the preindustrial temperature average, according to a World Meteorological Organization report published in May. That threshold, established in the Paris Agreement, defines a point beyond which the likelihood of devastating and irreversible climate breakdown increases dramatically — and that comes with more extreme heat waves around the world.

There are several reasons that high temperatures may set the stage for hyponatremia. At its root, hyponatremia — when blood sodium concentrations fall below 135 milliequivalents per liter (mEq/L) — is an imbalance between the body's sodium and water levels.

During hot weather, people sweat to cool off. In doing so, they shed both water and electrolytes, such as sodium. If sodium levels in the blood drop too low, the body normally counteracts this imbalance by flushing out water in urine. However, if blood volumes are also low, the body is at risk of dehydration, so the body releases hormones to retain water. This water retention can worsen the sodium imbalance.

Risk factors

Common medications can worsen this heat-hyponatremia feedback loop, often by triggering the release of hormones that fuel water retention. In a 2018 paper published in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, researchers noted that individuals taking diuretics — medications that help the body eliminate excess water, but also flush out electrolytes — are more likely to develop hyponatremia during hot weather than during milder weather.

At higher outdoor temperatures, the combination of diuretic use, sweating, and low fluid and electrolyte intake may increase the risk of hyponatremia, the researchers wrote in their paper.

Dr. Kai Kappert, a professor at Charité University Medicine in Berlin and one of the authors of the German study, agreed. In an email, he told Live Science that electrolyte imbalances triggered by heat may be worsened by people rehydrating with low-sodium liquids such as water.

Sugarcane cutters load the harvested sugarcane onto a trolley amid sweltering temperatures in western Maharashtra. (Image credit: Sanket Jain)

Mannheimer told Live Science that older adults and those with frailty are prone to developing hyponatremia because they are more likely to have other medical conditions and be taking prescribed medications. Beyond diuretics, other common medications, such as antidepressants, antipsychotics and anticonvulsants, can also raise the risk of the condition.

"Periods of high temperature can be seen as another factor that is added to the increased overall risk that may affect the elderly disproportionately more," Mannheimer said.

At baseline, aging might also reduce the body's ability to handle heat and eliminate excess water.

Moreover, health problems that grow more common in old age — like kidney disease, infections or cancer — can put older adults at risk of hyponatremia. That's because they impair the body's ability to regulate water and sodium, either through direct kidney effects or by triggering hormonal and metabolic changes that disrupt fluid balance.

What can be done?

Worldwide, 1 in 6 people, or approximately 1.4 billion, will be over 60 by 2030, making many individuals vulnerable to hyponatremia as the planet continues to warm.

Mannheimer suggested that systems should be developed to alert people during heat waves and provide adequate lifestyle advice to help them cope.

"Given that the underlying cause [of hyponatremia] is water retention, uncritically advocating high fluid intake would, in most cases, be directly counterproductive," he said. Instead, he advocated for a balanced approach to fluid intake, meaning drinking enough water to stay hydrated while also replacing lost electrolytes, especially sodium.

With rising temperatures, Jayashree Pandav says episodes of hyponatremia have become more frequent, affecting her health and routine. (Image credit: Sanket Jain)

Kappert emphasized that the public should be informed about the increased risk of hyponatremia during heat waves and suggested that people take precautions to reduce heat exposure. That's challenging for agricultural workers like Admane, who must spend hours toiling in the fields to make ends meet.

And as the climate warms, that will become a bigger problem.

Five years ago, Admane could work at least eight hours a day without problems.

Now, "if I work in the fields today in extreme heat, I can't work the next day. First, I have to either take medicines or an electrolyte solution given through a drip, and only then can I work," Admane told Live Science. "Now, even working for four hours has become difficult."

Admane's daughter, Jayashree Pandav, 40, lives and works with her and has also been experiencing episodes of hyponatremia over the past year, which she believes are triggered by prolonged exposure to extreme heat. She works at least 10 hours a day in the fields, but lately, it's been getting more difficult for her to manage.

"Frequent doctor visits have now become a common part of any farmworker's life," she told Live Science.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/health/a-dangerous-condition-that-can-cause-seizures-coma-and-death-could-rise-dramatically-as-the-climate-warms at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

PLANET EARTH > WEATHER > FLOODING

NEWS | PATRICK PESTER | JUL 11, 2025, 11:21 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Texas flood devastation revealed in before-and-after satellite images

Satellites have captured before-and-after images of the devastating floods in Texas, highlighting a trail of devastation on the Guadalupe River.

Maxar Technologies has released satellite images of flood damage along the Guadalupe River. (Image credit: Satellite image ©2025 Maxar Technologies.)

New satellite images have captured the trail of devastation left in the wake of Texas' deadly flash floods earlier this week.

The flooding, which began in the early hours of Friday (July 4), has been catastrophic, with 121 people reported to have died and at least 150 people still missing, at the time of writing.

Most of the deaths have occurred in Kerr County, where extreme rainfall caused the Guadalupe River to swell and burst its banks.

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Space technology company Maxar Technologies has released satellite images that show the Guadalupe River before and after the flooding. Click on the right of the images below to see how the landscape changed as a result of the floods.

Related: Why were the Texas flash floods so catastrophic?

Image 1 of 2

The Ingram Dam in Ingram on July 25, 2022.(Image credit: Satellite image ©2025 Maxar Technologies.)

The Ingram Dam on July 8, after the flooding.(Image credit: Satellite image ©2025 Maxar Technologies.)

These images show the Ingram Dam, located in Kerr County, before and after the devastating floods. The first image was taken in July 2022, while the second was taken on Tuesday (July 8). Last Friday, water levels in the river rose by more than 26 feet (8 meters) in just 45 minutes.

Image 1 of 2

Green vegetation beside the Guadalupe River on June 23, 2023.(Image credit: Satellite image ©2025 Maxar Technologies.)

Washed-out vegetation beside the Guadalupe River on July 8, after the flooding.(Image credit: Satellite image ©2025 Maxar Technologies.)

These two satellite images show vegetation along the Guadalupe River before and after the flooding. The first image was taken in June 2023, while the second was taken on July 8. Much of the vegetation visible in the first image has been washed out in the second.

Image 1 of 2

Homes beside the Guadalupe River on June 23, 2023.(Image credit: Satellite image ©2025 Maxar Technologies.)

Devastation along the Guadalupe River on July 8, after the flooding.(Image credit: Satellite image ©2025 Maxar Technologies.)

These before-and-after photos from along Texas State Highway 39 illustrate some of the catastrophic damage the waters caused. In the second image, taken after the flooding on July 8, homes just above the highway have been swept away.

These floods are the deadliest inland flooding in the U.S. since 1976, when the Big Thompson Canyon flood killed 144 people in Colorado, The Associated Press reported.

Image 1 of 2

Trees beside the Guadalupe River on June 23, 2023. (Image credit: Satellite image ©2025 Maxar Technologies.)

Fallen trees beside the Guadalupe River on July 8, after the flooding.(Image credit: Satellite image ©2025 Maxar Technologies.)

These before-and-after shots show how the river expanded and swept through trees, causing many to tumble down. The first satellite image was taken in June 2023, while the second was taken on July 8. Many trees have either fallen or are completely missing in the second image.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/flooding/texas-flood-devastation-revealed-in-before-and-after-satellite-images at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

SPACE > ASTRONOMY > COSMOLOGY

NEWS | ROBERT LEA | JUL 11, 2025, 9:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

'Time machine' reveals hidden structures in the universe's first galaxies

This content was originally published on Space.

Using the ALMA telescope, astronomers have revealed the internal structure of the first galaxies in the universe, hinting at how our cosmos took shape.

A family portrait of galaxies from the CRISTAL survey. Red shows cold gas traced by ALMA’s [CII] observations. Blue and green represent starlight captured by the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes (Image credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO) / HST / JWST / R. Herrera-Camus)

Astronomers have turned the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) into a time machine to peer back in cosmic time to 1 billion years after the Big Bang.

This has revealed previously hidden structures within the universe's first galaxies, which could help us understand how the modern cosmos, including our galaxy, the Milky Way, took shape.

The data was collected as part of the CRISTAL survey ([CII] Resolved ISM in STar-forming galaxies with ALMA), which zoomed in on 39 typical star-forming galaxies in the infancy of the 13.8 billion-year-old universe. ALMA had infrared assistance from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and Hubble. The target galaxies were selected to represent the main population of galaxies shortly after the Big Bang.

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"Thanks to ALMA’s unique sensitivity and resolution, we can resolve the internal structure of these early galaxies in ways never possible before," CRISTAL principal investigator Rodrigo Herrera-Camus said in a statement. "CRISTAL is showing us how the first galactic disks formed, how stars emerged in giant clumps, and how gas shaped the galaxies we see today."

How ancient structures were revealed by CRISTAL

The CRISTAL findings were possible thanks to the sensitivity of ALMA, consisting of 66 radio antennas in the Atacama desert region of northern Chile, to a specific emission of ionized carbon atoms in cold interstellar gas. This is called the [CII] line emission, and it acts as a tracer of cold gas and dust.

Thus, the CRISTAL team was able to create a complex and detailed map of interstellar gas, the nebulous matter between stars, in galaxies.

One of the key things this cosmic map revealed was stars being born in vast clumps, each stretching for several thousand light-years. Additionally, in many of the CRISTAL galaxies, the [CII] emission was seen to extend far beyond the population of stars of those galaxies.

That indicates the presence of more cold gas that could go on to form more stars or could be driven out of these galaxies by the powerful stellar winds of infant stars. This hints at how star-forming regions gather and evolve.

Related: Giant radio telescope in the Utah desert could reveal hidden corners of the cosmos — and brand-new physics

A family portrait of galaxies from the CRISTAL survey. The image shows the gas traced by ALMA’s [CII] observations. Blue and green represent starlight captured by the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes. (Image credit:  ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO) / HST / JWST / R. Herrera-Camus)

Several of the galaxies seen by CRISTAL seemed to be spinning, which indicates how they could eventually flatten out into disk-like structures. These disk-shaped galaxies are thought to be the progenitors of spiral galaxies like the Milky Way.

"What's exciting about CRISTAL is that we are seeing early galaxies not just as points of light, but as complex ecosystems," team member and National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) scientist Loreto Barcos-Muñoz said. "This project shows how ALMA can resolve the internal structure of galaxies even in the distant universe — revealing how they evolve, interact, and form stars."

Two CRISTAL galaxies are real gems

As stunning and scientifically important as these 37 galaxies are, two seem to be something really special.

One galaxy that really stood out from these ALMA observations was CRISTAL-13 which is shrouded in vast and massive clouds of dust that block the visible light from its newborn stellar population.

These clouds absorb this light and reemit it in wavelengths that ALMA can detect, allowing it to see structures that would be hidden from telescopes observing CRISTAL-13 in visible light or even in infrared light as used by the JWST and Hubble.

Artist’s illustration of CRISTAL-13. Dust-rich regions obscure newborn stars, whose energy is re-emitted at ALMA’s millimeter wavelengths (Image credit: NSF/AUI/NRAO/B. Saxton)

Also exceptional, but arguably more mysterious, is CRISTAL-10. This ancient galaxy has ionized carbon that seems to be unusually faint compared to how bright the galaxy is in infrared.

This is a characteristic usually only seen in galaxies that are heavily obscured, like the local galaxy Arp 220. The fact that it is seen for CRISTAL-10 implies there are extreme physical conditions at work within its interstellar medium. Another possibility is that there is something within the interstellar medium of CRISTAL-10 that is pumping out energy.

"These observations highlight ALMA’s potential as a time machine, allowing us to peer into the early ages of the Universe," ALMA head of science operations Sergio Martín said. "Programs like CRISTAL demonstrate the power of ALMA's Large Programs to drive high-impact science. They allow us to tackle the big questions of cosmic evolution with the unprecedented depth and resolution that only a world-class observatory like ALMA can provide."

The CRISTAL survey hasn't just opened a new view of cosmic history by conducting the interstellar medium that can be compared with galaxies' stars and dust content, but it has set the stage for future surveys.

These could eventually reveal how the turbulent, violent, and chaotic early galaxies transformed into well-ordered and structurally well-defined modern galaxies like our own.

"CRISTAL provides the kind of multi-wavelength data that allows us to test and refine our theories of galaxy evolution," Herrera-Camus concluded. "This is a major step toward understanding how galaxies like our Milky Way came to be."

The team's research was published on June 30 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

This article was originally published on Space.com.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/space/cosmology/time-machine-reveals-hidden-structures-in-the-universes-first-galaxies at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

COMPUTING

NEWS | KEITH COOPER | JUL 11, 2025, 6:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Cosmic images from the world's largest digital camera are so big they require a 'data butler'

This content was originally published on Space.

The Rubin Observatory's enormous datasets call for cloud computing, seven different "brokers" and, indeed, a butler of sorts.

(Image credit: OBSERVATORIO VERA C. RUBIN/ HANDOUT/Anadolu via Getty Images)

The amount of data that will be collected by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which released its fabulous first-light images this week, will far outweigh what any telescope before it managed to deliver. This has led astronomers to take a step into cloud computing — as well as enlist the help of seven brokers and a data butler.

Once it is fully up and running, the Rubin Observatory (funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation–Department of Energy) will be collecting 20 terabytes of data each night. Analyzing this data, it will issue 10 million alerts to astronomers, all of which will be managed by what are known as "brokers" that filter the huge number of alerts into something more manageable.

"In terms of data, we're at least an order of magnitude bigger than previous telescopes," University of Edinburgh computer scientist George Beckett, who is the U.K. Data Facility Coordinator for Rubin, told Space.com.

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Over the next 10 years, Rubin's Legacy Survey of Space and Time will collect about 500 petabytes of data, equivalent to half a million 4K-UHD Blu-ray disks. Once collected by the telescope, the data will get transmitted along a dedicated network link between Rubin, which is located in Chile, and a data center at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California. From SLAC, a copy of all the raw data will be sent to the IN2P3 computing facility in Lyon, France, and some of the data will also be sent to a U.K.-based distributed computing network.

The processing of the data will be shared between these three data centers, with SLAC contributing 35%, IN2P3 taking on 40% and the UK 25%. (There's also a modest data center in Chile, which hosts the Rubin Observatory, to support Chilean astronomers.) Not only do the multiple data centers provide redundancy so data can't be lost in an accident, but they also can support each other if one data center is falling behind on the processing. That's because what really counts for astronomers is getting the important data out quickly, so they can follow up on interesting alerts as soon as possible.

"My biggest challenge is having astronomers constantly demanding their data!" joked Beckett.

Related: Vera C. Rubin Observatory: The groundbreaking mission to make a 10-year, time-lapse movie of the universe

This vast amount of data will be a precious resource for astronomers not only in the here and now, but also decades into the future.

So, how does one go about searching through it all?

Beckett draws an analogy with searching for a photograph taken on your smartphone. "Your phone is probably full of pictures you've taken over the past five or 10 years, and finding that one picture from two years ago usually involves flicking through and it is a bit of a piecemeal approach," he said. "Now imagine that your phone has 1.5 million photos and they're all 10,000 pixels wide, you haven't got a chance of just flicking through them."

Bringing this analogy back to the Rubin dataset, the solution, Beckett says, is to provide accessible descriptions of all those images in a way that astronomers can find what they are searching for with relative ease. That's one of the reasons why Rubin's data handling is different compared to that of previous telescopes, with which astronomers could download pockets of data that they need without too much complexity. The dataset for Rubin is simply too big to download — so it's all kept in the "cloud."

The Rubin dataset is managed by a service called the Data Butler. It records all the metadata, which is the data about the data — time, date, sky coordinates, what's in the image and so on.

"An astronomer can come up with pretty much any query they want written in astronomy terms talking about astronomical objects, timescales or coordinate systems, and the Data Butler fetches what they need," said Beckett.

That's for longer-term research, but there's also the transients, the moving objects, the things that go bump in the night that set off alerts to prompt astronomers to chase them up before the transients fade away. These include supernovas, kilonovas that produce gravitational waves, novas, flare stars, eclipsing binaries, magnetar outbursts, asteroids and comets moving across the sky, quasars, and much more besides, possibly even new types of object never seen before. Rubin will produce an estimated 10 million alerts each night, releasing each alert within two minutes of it being detected by the telescope: Even with the help of Data Butler, how can astronomers possibly sift through all those to find the most important ones to follow-up on?

The control room at the Vera Rubin Observatory helps to receive incoming images from the telescope. (Image credit: JAVIER TORRES / Getty Images)

There are seven brokers, operated by scientists in different countries, which will process the full 10 million alerts (and two more brokers with specific science goals that will only work on a subset of the 10 million daily alerts). For example, there's a Chilean broker called ALeRCE, standing for Automatic Learning for the Rapid Classification of Events, and ANTARES, the Arizona–NOIRLab Temporal Analysis and Response to Events Systems. The U.K. broker is called Lasair (pronounced LAH-suhr, meaning 'flame' or 'flash' in Scottish and Irish Gaelic) and focuses on transients.

Think of the brokers as a set of filters that astronomers can choose to help sift through the alerts and pick out the ones that they're most interested in. Some of the brokers use machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms, but more traditional modeling methods are also used for quickly processing the data.

"Astronomers can sign up to a broker, describe the kind of things they're interested in, and hope that with appropriate descriptions the 10 million alerts each night will be filtered down to maybe two or three," said Beckett.

It's not that the other 9,999,998 alerts are not of value — maybe they're just not the thing the astronomer is interested in, or perhaps they're not unique enough to demand dedicated follow-ups, but they do add to the statistics for each type of object.

Rubin will survey a quarter of the Southern Hemisphere sky every night, seeing everything and missing nothing. One might think that it is the survey to end all surveys, that there will never be a bigger survey that will produce more data. However, Beckett also works on the data management team for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), which is a huge array of radio telescopes in South Africa and Australia, and the techniques developed for Rubin and the lessons learned are going into making the data handing for the SKA run a lot smoother.

"The size of Rubin's dataset will be swamped by the SKA, which will be an order of magnitude again larger than Rubin," said Beckett.

There's always a bigger fish!

This article was originally published on Space.com

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/technology/computing/cosmic-images-from-the-worlds-largest-digital-camera-are-so-big-they-require-a-data-butler at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

July 10, 2025

- 1,600-year-old tomb of Maya city's first ruler unearthed in Belize

- Scientists discover that mysterious giant structures beneath the North Sea seemingly defy what we know about geology

ARCHAEOLOGY

NEWS | TOM METCALFE | JUL 10, 2025, 4:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

1,600-year-old tomb of Maya city's first ruler unearthed in Belize

Archaeologists have discovered the tomb of the Maya king who founded the city of Caracol in what is now Belize.

The ruined Maya city of Caracol in Belize is dominated by the Caana pyramid, which was once a temple. The newfound tomb was in a raised area immediately to the right, underneath the modern canopy of trees (Image credit: Caracol Archaeological Project, University of Houston)

Archaeologists in Belize have unearthed the tomb of the first ruler of the ancient Maya city of Caracol, which was a major center in the Maya Lowlands during the sixth and seventh centuries.

The tomb of Caracol's king, named Te K'ab Chaak (Mayan for "Tree Branch Rain God") dates to about A.D. 350; he had ascended the throne at Caracol in 331.

This is the first time any identifiable royal tomb has been found at Caracol since University of Houston archaeologists Diane Chase and Arlen Chase began excavations there more than 40 years ago, according to a statement released Thursday (July 10).

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Te K'ab Chaak's tomb was one of three major tombs found in the "Northeast Acropolis" at the site — a raised complex just outside the city center that was used for royal homes and public ceremonies.

The royal tomb contained pottery vessels, carved bones, seashells, tubular jade beads, and a mosaic death mask made of jade. One pottery vessel portrayed a Maya ruler holding a spear while receiving offerings, while another showed Ek Chuah, the Maya god of traders, surrounded by offerings, the statement said.

An earlier discovery in 2010 had found artifacts from central Mexico, including obsidian blades, which indicated the influence of the central Mexican city of Teotihuacán, which also influenced the later Aztecs.

Related: 'Stunning' discovery reveals how the Maya rose up 4,000 years ago

But the newfound tombs at Caracol date to at least a generation before that, which implies they held native Maya rulers rather than a ruling elite from Teotihuacán, the statement said.

Image 1 of 2

(Image credit: Caracol Archaeological Project, University of Houston)

The grave goods in the tomb included these tubular beads made from carved jade.

(Image credit: Caracol Archaeological Project, University of Houston)

Several distinctive pottery vessels were also found in the tomb, including this one that portrays Ek Chuah, the Maya god of traders.

Maya city

The remains of Te K'ab Chaak indicate that he was about 5 feet, 7 inches (1.7 meters) tall and had no teeth when he died at an advanced age, the statement said. The royal dynasty he founded lasted more than 460 years.

Caracol was one of the largest and most important cities in the Maya world, with a population estimated at more than 100,000 people at its peak. But it declined for unknown reasons, along with many other Maya settlements, by A.D. 900.

Its ruins are now found in highland jungle in the Cayo District of central Belize, about 53 miles (85 kilometers) from the Caribbean coast and 45 miles (72 km) southeast of the Maya city of Tikal in Guatemala.

Archaeological investigations have revealed that Caracol once covered more than 68 square miles (177 square km) with extensive causeways, agricultural terraces, buildings and monumental structures, like the 140-foot-high (43 meters) Caana pyramid, which was also discovered by the Chases and remains one of the tallest buildings in Belize to this day.

Image 1 of 2

(Image credit: Caracol Archaeological Project, University of Houston)

University of Houston archaeologist Diane Chase inside the newfound tomb, which dates to the fourth century A.D.

(Image credit: Caracol Archaeological Project, University of Houston)

Diane Chase and her husband, University of Houston archaeologist Arlen Chase, have investigated the Maya ruins at Caracol for more than 40 years.

Arlen Chase, a professor of anthropology at the University of Houston, said the Teotihuacán influences at the site indicated that Caracol's early rulers had deep contacts with that region and other parts of Mesoamerica at that time.

"Both central Mexico and the Maya area were clearly aware of each other's ritual practices," even though Teotihuacán is around 745 miles (1,200 km) from Caracol, he said in the statement.

The connections between the two regions seem to have been maintained by the rulers themselves, so Te K'ab Chaak and other Maya kings may have "engaged in formal diplomatic relationships with Teotihuacán," Chase said.

Ancient Maya quiz: What do you know about the civilization that built pyramids across Mesoamerica?

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/1-600-year-old-tomb-of-maya-citys-first-ruler-unearthed-in-belize at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

PLANET EARTH

NEWS | SKYLER WARE | JUL 10, 2025, 3:41 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Scientists discover that mysterious giant structures beneath the North Sea seemingly defy what we know about geology

Giant mounds of sand discovered beneath the North Sea off Norway may scramble what we know about a key geological process.

Giant sand mounds in the North Sea seabed sank below ancient "ooze," a new study finds. (Image credit: photo © by Tomasz Sienicki [user: tsca, mail: tomasz.sienicki at gmail.com], CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons)

Giant sand mounds beneath the North Sea have puzzled scientists for years. Now, researchers have discovered that these mysterious structures were created by a geological process that has never been seen on such a huge scale.

Seismic data and rock samples from the northern North Sea, off the coast of Norway, suggest that these miles-wide mounds sank millions of years ago, lifting up older, less-dense "ooze" beneath. The findings could help scientists learn more about future carbon storage options, the researchers wrote in the new study, which was published June 21 in the journal Communications Earth and Environment.

Researchers have known about these mounds buried beneath the seabed for years but haven't reached a consensus regarding the structures' origins. Proposed explanations have included landslide deposits, sandstone pushed up from below, or mud forced through brittle rock.

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Now, using a three-dimensional seismic dataset covering the northern North Sea, along with rock samples, researchers examined the mounds and the surrounding regions. They found that the structures were surrounded by older, low-density "ooze," composed in large part of the fossil remains of ancient microorganisms.

The mounds were chemically similar to nearby sands that appear later in the geological record. In some places, the mounds were connected to these sands via fractures in the rock. This suggests that the mounds were made of younger sands that sank beneath the older, lighter ooze below.

The sunken sands have jumbled the expected pattern in the geological record. Usually, older layers of rock are buried deeper than younger sediment, leaving a record of the processes that shaped the landscape over time.

"This discovery reveals a geological process we haven't seen before on this scale," study co-author Mads Huuse, a geophysicist at the University of Manchester in the U.K., said in a statement. "What we've found are structures where dense sand has sunk into lighter sediments that floated to the top of the sand, effectively flipping the conventional layers we'd expect to see and creating huge mounds beneath the sea."

Earthquakes or changes in pressure may have caused the sands to behave like a fluid, thus enabling it to flow through fractures in the seabed and slip beneath rigid sections of the ooze. The researchers dubbed these large, sinking mounds "sinkites." The ooze rafts, buoyed upward, were named "floatites."

"This research shows how fluids and sediments can move around in the Earth's crust in unexpected ways," Huuse said.

The team originally studied these mounds as a possible location for carbon dioxide storage. Before beginning any carbon storage efforts in the region, scientists will need to understand how well and how safely the area can hold on to that carbon.

"Understanding how these sinkites formed could significantly change how we assess underground reservoirs, sealing, and fluid migration — all of which are vital for carbon capture and storage," Huuse said.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/scientists-discover-that-mysterious-giant-structures-beneath-the-north-sea-seemingly-defy-what-we-know-about-geology at Jul 15, 2025 at 8:52 AM EDT.

Table of Contents

Live Science: 2025 Jul 15

July 15, 2025

Penny-sized laser could help driverless cars see the world so much clearer

4,000-year-old human rib discovered high in the Pyrenees still has an arrowhead from a brutal attack

Russian volcano grows 'devil horns' and spits out 1,000-mile-long river of smoke — Earth from space

July 14, 2025

Archaeologists discover that parties 11,000 years ago were BYOB — bring your own boar

Scientists detect most massive black hole merger ever — and it birthed a monster 225 times as massive as the sun

100 undiscovered galaxies may be orbiting the Milky Way, supercomputer simulations hint

Grand Canyon Dragon wildfire burns down historic lodge and triggers toxic gas leak

Japan sets new internet speed record — it's 4 million times faster than average US broadband speeds

Roman dodecahedron: A mysterious 12-sided object that has baffled archaeologists for centuries

Can your brain run out of memory?

July 13, 2025

Could signs of Mars life be hidden in its thick layers of clay?

The Perseids are coming — here's how to watch the glorious meteor shower before the moon ruins the show

'Paraparticles' would be a third kingdom of quantum particle

How Trump's budget cuts could affect 2 iconic space telescopes: Hubble and James Webb

James Webb and Hubble telescopes join forces to explore a cosmic nursery: Space photo of the week

What's Earth's lowest point on land?

July 12, 2025

How is DNA used to identify victims of mass disasters?

AI outsmarted 30 of the world's top mathematicians at secret meeting in California

Kākāpō: The chonky parrot that can live almost 100 years

Ancient Egyptian rock art discovered near Aswan may be from the dawn of the first dynasty

Your data is being compromised much quicker than ever before, but you don't have to sit still and take it

Why is the blue-ringed octopus so deadly?

Science news this week: 'Bringing back' giant ancient birds and a shift in Earth's poles

July 11, 2025

'Epigenetic memory' may help explain why PCOS tends to run in families

Scientists grow mini amniotic sacs in the lab using stem cells

Experimental treatment for high cholesterol edits DNA in the body to reduce LDL

In disasters like the Texas floods, warning people of danger isn't so simple

Man in Australia dies of rare, rabies-like disease

Earliest evidence of humans catching disease from animals dates to 6,500 years ago

Astronomers are racing to study our solar system's newest 'interstellar visitor.' Here's why.

Antarctic sea ice collapse linked to a mysterious spike in ocean salt

In a first, congenital deafness in teens and adults treated with new gene therapy

Collapse of key Atlantic currents may be held off by newly-discovered back-up system, study finds

Parker Solar Probe captures closest-ever photos of the sun during record-breaking flight

140,000-year-old child's skull may have been part modern human, part Neanderthal — but not everyone is convinced

A dangerous condition that can cause seizures, coma and death could rise dramatically as the climate warms

Texas flood devastation revealed in before-and-after satellite images

'Time machine' reveals hidden structures in the universe's first galaxies

Cosmic images from the world's largest digital camera are so big they require a 'data butler'

July 10, 2025

1,600-year-old tomb of Maya city's first ruler unearthed in Belize

Scientists discover that mysterious giant structures beneath the North Sea seemingly defy what we know about geology