- October 30, 2025

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- October 27, 2025

October 30, 2025

- Physicists detect rare 'second-generation' black holes that prove Einstein right... again

- 2,200-year-old Celtic 'rainbow cup' in 'almost mint condition' found in Germany

- Ancient 'frosty' rhino from Canada's High Arctic rewrites what scientists thought they knew about the North Atlantic Land Bridge

- 'I was wrong': Dinosaur scientists agree that small tyrannosaur Nanotyrannus was real, pivotal new study finds

- NASA spacecraft reveal interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS brightened rapidly as it swooped behind the sun

- Astronomers discover surprisingly lopsided disk around a nearby star using groundbreaking telescope upgrade

- The next Carrington-level solar superstorm could wipe out 'all our satellites,' new simulations reveal

- 'Chemo brain' may stem from damage to the brain's drainage system

- Greenland is twisting, tensing and shrinking due to the 'ghosts' of melted ice sheets

SPACE > ASTRONOMY > BLACK HOLES

NEWS | ELIZABETH HOWELL | OCT 30, 2025, 5:27 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Physicists detect rare 'second-generation' black holes that prove Einstein right... again

Physicists have analyzed two enormous black hole mergers that happened one month apart and have come up with tantalizing evidence that rare "second-generation" black holes were involved.

An artist's impression of two colliding black holes. (Image credit: Aurore Simonnet SSU/EdEon/LVK/URI)

Scientists have found two pairs of merging black holes, and they think the larger one in each merger is a rare "second-generation" veteran of a previous collision.

The two larger black holes' unusual behavior, observed through ripples in space-time called gravitational waves, was described Oct. 28 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The telltale clue was twofold: In each merger, the larger black hole was spinning rapidly and was significantly more massive than the partner black hole it swallowed. The events were observed with the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration, a set of gravitational-wave detectors around the world aiming to observe space-shaking events like black hole mergers and neutron star collisions.

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The results "provide tantalizing evidence that these black holes were formed from previous black hole mergers," study co-author Stephen Fairhurst, a professor at Cardiff University in the U.K. and a spokesperson for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, said in a statement.

Back-to-back mergers

The research was based on two recently detected mergers that occurred just a month apart. Analyzing the gravitational wave signatures from these events allowed the researchers to infer the mass, rotation and distances of the black holes involved.

In the first event, on Oct. 11, 2024, scientists spotted two black holes — measuring six and 20 times the mass of the sun, respectively — colliding in a merger known as GW241011, roughly 700 million light-years from Earth. The larger black hole was one of the fastest-rotating black holes ever found.

The second merger, GW241110, was found on Nov. 10, 2024, with black holes that were eight and 17 times the mass of the sun. This merger was farther away, at 2.4 billion light-years. The larger black hole was also spinning opposite to its orbit, which has never been seen before.

Scientists say each of these mergers had novel properties, including that the bigger black hole in each merger was nearly double the size of the smaller one, and that the larger black holes were spinning oddly compared with the hundreds of other mergers observed through gravitational waves since the historic first detection by LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) in 2015.

The scientists suggested that the larger black hole in each merger previously coalesced in a process called a "hierarchical merger," which would happen in dense environments like star clusters, where black holes would frequently come near each other.

"This is one of our most exciting discoveries so far," study co-author Jess McIver, an astrophysicist at the University of British Columbia, said in the statement. "These events provide strong evidence that there are very dense, busy pockets of the universe driving some dead stars together."

Aside from the possible second-generation black hole finds, scientists said that the two mergers validated physics laws predicted by Albert Einstein more than a century ago and that the events are helping scientists learn more about elementary particles.

For example, GW241011 generated a clear signal that allowed scientists to see the larger black hole deforming as it spun, due to the black hole's rapid rotation. The resulting signature in the gravitational waves matched up with theories from Einstein, as well as from mathematician Roy Kerr, concerning rotating black holes.

That same event also generated a "hum" in the gravitational-wave signal, created because the larger black hole was much larger than the smaller one. (The hum is similar to musical instrument overtones, the collaborators stated.) This observation also helped confirm predictions from Einstein.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/space/black-holes/physicists-detect-rare-second-generation-black-holes-that-prove-einstein-right-again at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

ARCHAEOLOGY

NEWS | KRISTINA KILLGROVE | OCT 30, 2025, 5:06 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

2,200-year-old Celtic 'rainbow cup' in 'almost mint condition' found in Germany

A rare and unique Celtic coin was discovered in Saxony, Germany, even though the Celts didn't live there.

Obverse (left) and reverse (right) of the Celtic rainbow cup. (Image credit: Landesamt für Archäologie Sachsen)

A certified metal detectorist who was scanning in a field near Leipzig, Germany, discovered the oldest coin ever found in the state of Saxony. The 2,200-year-old gold coin, known as a "rainbow cup," is a rare example of imported Celtic currency.

"The gold coin is a tangible piece of our history and provides new insights into trade with the Celts," Saxony's state minister, Barbara Klepsch, said in a translated statement Oct. 27.

While numerous Celtic coins have been found in Bohemia in the northwest Czech Republic, Saxony is considered outside the Celtic settlement area. Only two Celtic coins had previously been discovered in Saxony. The newly discovered coin has been dubbed the Gundorf Rainbow Cup for its findspot in a neighborhood outside Leipzig.

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Celtic rainbow cups — named after the German term "regenbogenschüsselchen," which translates to "tiny rainbow finger bowl" — were named for their curved shape and for the superstition that treasure could be found where a rainbow touched the ground, according to the statement. They were created by the ancient Celts, fierce warrior tribes who lived in mainland Europe and later sacked Rome.

The front of the Gundorf Rainbow Cup depicts the stylized head of a stag or similar animal, while the back shows an open neck ring with thickened ends (possibly a Celtic torc or torque), a star with rounded corners, and a sphere.

Saxony state archaeologist Regina Smolnik said in the statement that the 2-gram (0.7 ounce) coin — about the weight of a U.S. dime — was in "almost mint condition" and unlikely to have been in circulation as currency. "Rather, it was likely a status symbol or a store of value belonging to an upper class person with trade relations with the Celts," Smolnik said.

Several rainbow cups have been recovered recently in Germany, painting a picture of trade relations between the Celts and Germanic-speaking people prior to the Roman invasion.

In 2021, archaeologists discovered a stash of 41 plain rainbow cups in the northeastern German state of Brandenburg. These coins, which were minted in the first century B.C., were also assumed to have been procured through trade, as the Celts didn't live in Brandenburg. And in 2023, archaeologists in the German state of Bavaria announced the discovery of a single rainbow cup with a rare four-pointed star decoration on the inside, possibly lost by someone traveling along an ancient road nearby.

Although the Gundorf Rainbow Cup is only a single coin, its discovery in Saxony, along with other examples of the coin elsewhere in Germany, has provided "further evidence of regular contact and connections" between the Celts and the people living in Saxony more than two millennia ago, according to Smolnik.

Celtic quiz: Test your knowledge about these fierce tribes once described by Julius Caesar

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/2-200-year-old-celtic-rainbow-cup-in-almost-mint-condition-found-in-germany at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

ANIMALS > EXTINCT SPECIES

NEWS | SASCHA PARE | OCT 30, 2025, 1:15 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Ancient 'frosty' rhino from Canada's High Arctic rewrites what scientists thought they knew about the North Atlantic Land Bridge

Researchers have gained new insights into rhinoceros evolution and the longevity of the North Atlantic Land Bridge from analyzing the perfectly preserved fossils of a "frosty" Arctic rhino.

An artist's impression of Epiatheracerium itjilik and a transitional seal (Puijila darwini) in their forested lake habitat. (Image credit: Canadian Museum of Nature)

Almost four decades ago, researchers discovered a collection of perfectly preserved fossils inside an impact crater in the Canadian High Arctic. Now, those remains have finally yielded their secrets, revealing they belong to an extinct species of hornless rhinoceros that lived 23 million years ago.

Scientists have called the animal Epiatheracerium itjilik, with the species name meaning "frost" or "frosty" in Inuktitut. These creatures were similar in size to modern Indian rhinos (Rhinoceros unicornis), according to a statement from the Canadian Museum of Nature (CMN). The newly identified fossils are the only specimen found to date and show that the animal died of unknown causes as a young adult.

"What's remarkable about the Arctic rhino is that the fossil bones are in excellent condition," Marisa Gilbert, a CMN paleobiologist and co-author of a new analysis of the remains, said in the statement. "They are three-dimensionally preserved and have only been partially replaced by minerals. About 75% of the skeleton was discovered, which is incredibly complete for a fossil."

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The bones were preserved inside the 14-mile-wide (23 kilometers) impact crater thanks to it rapidly filling with water. The crater formed from an asteroid or comet around the same time that the Arctic rhino lived, which suggests the rhino died inside the crater before it became a lake.

The climate in this region was far warmer then than it is today, and plant remains show that the Canadian High Arctic — specifically, Devon Island in Nunavut, where the crater is located — hosted a temperate forest, according to the statement.

As the Miocene epoch (23 million to 5.3 million years ago) transitioned into the Pliocene epoch (5.3 million to 2.6 million years ago) and finally gave way to the last ice age, the fossils were broken up by freeze and thaw cycles and gradually pushed to the surface of the crater. Researchers then found the fossils in 1986.

Subsequent field trips to the crater uncovered more bones belonging to the Arctic rhino specimen. These expeditions also unearthed another species that lived 23 million years ago, the walking seal (Puijila darwini), which likely lived alongside Arctic rhinos.

Gilbert and her colleagues described E. itjilik based on the characteristics of its teeth, lower jawbone and cranium compared with other rhino species. The researchers then determined the Arctic rhino's place in the rhinoceros evolutionary tree by analyzing the newfound species' ties to 57 extinct and living rhino groups. They published their results Tuesday (Oct. 28) in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.

About 75% of the Arctic rhino's skeleton was preserved. (Image credit: Canadian Museum of Nature)

The findings suggest E. itjilik was most closely related to rhinos that lived in what is now Europe earlier than 23 million years ago. True modern rhinos (Rhinocerotidae) evolved about 40 million years ago in North America and Southeast Asia, and their descendants subsequently spread to every continent except South America and Antarctica.

"Today there are only five species of rhinos in Africa and Asia, but in the past they were found in Europe and North America, with more than 50 species known from the fossil record," study lead author Danielle Fraser, a research scientist and head of paleobiology at CMN, said in the statement.

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The newfound Arctic rhino is the most northerly rhinoceros ever discovered. The researchers think the species migrated from Europe via the North Atlantic Land Bridge, an ancient passage over Greenland consisting of exposed continental crust.

The North Atlantic Land Bridge emerged in the latter stages of the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago), but when it disappeared is debated. Some studies indicate that the land bridge collapsed 56 million years ago; others suggest the bridge was more or less continuous until about 2.7 million years ago.

The new findings lend support to the latter hypothesis, because Rhinocerotidae arrived in Europe 33.9 million years ago, during an extinction and dispersal event known as the Grande Coupure, or "great cut." The new study suggests that by 23 million years ago, these rhinos had arrived in North America, so the land bridge likely persisted at least until the beginning of the Miocene epoch.

"It's always exciting and informative to describe a new species," Fraser said. "Our reconstructions of rhino evolution show that the North Atlantic played a much more important role in their evolution than previously thought."

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/animals/extinct-species/ancient-frosty-rhino-from-canadas-high-arctic-rewrites-what-scientists-thought-they-knew-about-the-north-atlantic-land-bridge at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

ANIMALS > EXTINCT SPECIES > DINOSAURS

NEWS | CHRIS SIMMS | OCT 30, 2025, 12:44 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

'I was wrong': Dinosaur scientists agree that small tyrannosaur Nanotyrannus was real, pivotal new study finds

An argument over whether fossils from several small dinosaurs represent a juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex or smaller adults of a separate species may finally be settled.

An illustration of a pack of Nanotyrannus dinosaurs attacking a young Tyrannosaurus rex. A new study finds that the controversial Nanotyrannus is a real species and not simply a juvenile T. rex. (Image credit: Anthony Hutchings)

A pivotal new dinosaur study is finally settling a fierce, four-decade-long debate: Was the small tyrannosaur Nanotyrannus a distinct species or merely a teenage Tyrannosaurus rex? Now, a remarkably complete fossil reveals that Nanotyrannus was real.

For years, key fossils were thought by many paleontologists to be juvenile examples of Tyrannosaurus rex, which lived between 67 million and 66 million years ago in western North America. Rather than settling all arguments, however, this "nano" discovery opens a new chapter in understanding T. rex biology and further debate.

A key source of the argument has been a small 67 million-year-old tyrannosaur skull found in the Hell Creek Formation of Montana in 1942. It was given its own species name Nanotyrannus lancensis, in 1988, meaning that the species was based on a single skull, and no one knew what the rest of its body looked like.

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"This has been one of the most controversial topics in all of dinosaur paleontology," study co-author Lindsay Zanno, a paleontologist at North Carolina State University and North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, told Live Science.

Apart from the isolated skull, the best skeleton of one of these small-body tyrannosaurs came from the Hell Creek Formation, which also spans parts of North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming. This specimen, known as Jane, was still rapidly growing and aged about 11 when it died, and differed in several ways from the lone skull.

Now, Zanno and study co-author James Napoli, an anatomist at Stony Brook University in New York, have described a complete tyrannosaur skeleton that is part of the "Dueling Dinosaurs" fossils, the 67 million-year-old remains of what seemed to be the most complete, yet small, T. rex on record and a Triceratops, possibly locked in combat when they died.

Study co-author Lindsay Zanno, a paleontologist at North Carolina State University and and head of paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, sits next to the famous "Dueling Dinosaurs" specimen from the Hell Creek Formation of eastern Montana. (Image credit: N.C. State University)

The case for Nanotyrannus

Zanno and Napoli say this "Dueling Dinosaurs" skeleton of a tyrannosaur, also from the Hell Creek Formation, isn't a T.  rex and instead shares features with the N. lancensis skull. Crucially, their analysis of growth rings in the bones, spinal fusion data and developmental anatomy indicates that the fearsome dinosaur was about 20 years old and almost fully grown when it died, rather than being a juvenile.

"We were able to take a thin section of the limb bones of this animal and determine that it was in fact, nearly a full-grown individual even though it was only half the length and about 1/10th of the mass of a full, grown T. rex," Zanno said.

The differences between the dinosaur species Nanotyrannus and Tyrannosaurus rex, which likely lived in the same ecosystem during the late Cretaceous period. (Image credit: North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences)

It would have weighed just 1,500 pounds (700 kilograms), whereas an adult T. rex would have weighed in at more like 14,700 to 18,000 pounds (6,700 to 8,200  kg). It also has larger forelimbs, more teeth, fewer tail vertebrae and distinct skull nerve patterns. The researchers reported the research on Thursday (Oct. 30) in the journal Nature.

The two dinosaurs would have had very different ecologies, Zanno said. T. rex was a bulky predator with a massive skull, powerful bite force and serrated teeth the shape of bananas. Nanotyrannus was small and slender, swifter and more agile, with enlarged hands and claws, which it would have used for prey capture, she said.

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Paleontologists respond

The wider research community seems convinced by this new evidence that this small dinosaur and T. rex are different species.

"Fundamentally and on balance, it looks pretty solid," Dave Hone, a paleontologist at Queen Mary University of London, told Live Science. "I and many other people who have said we don't think Nanotyrannus is valid have always said that the main reason for this is we just don't have any apparent adult small skeletons and that's obviously a pretty big deal. And this really, really looks like an adult small skeleton."

Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, thinks similarly. "For many years in my research on tyrannosaurs, I've considered a set of smaller skeletons found in the same rocks as the famous skeletons of huge T. rexes to be juveniles of T. rex rather than a distinctive smaller species," he told Live Science in an email. "Evidence from this exquisite new specimen shows that I was wrong — at least in part. The case for Nanotyrannus, a species of long-armed tyrannosaur smaller than T. rex, looks strong, and I think proven beyond a reasonable doubt now."

The right arm bones of a Tyrannosaurus rex (left) and a Nanotyrannus (right). Notice how the hand of Nanotyrannus is as long as both the its upper and lower arm combined. Nanotyrannus' finger bones and claws are also larger than those of even the largest-bodied Tyrannosaurus. (Image credit: NC Museum of Natural Sciences)

Thomas Carr, a paleontologist at Carthage College in Wisconsin who has previously argued that all the fossils are juvenile T. rex, has also changed his mind on that front. "I think they've shown decisively that the dueler is a small adult tyrannosaur, so I don't have a problem with that at all," he told Live Science.

However, Carr disagrees with the family tree that Zanno and Napoli suggest, which has Nanotyrannus as a more primitive group outside the Tyrannosauridae family. He said the specimen should be considered a sister species of T. rex, and should be renamed as Tyrannosaurus lancensis.

Is Jane a new species?

Other parts of Zanno and Napoli's paper are more controversial. They examined more than 200 other tyrannosaur fossils, and say that the Jane skeleton differs both from T. rex and the dueling N. lancensis. Jane would have been slightly larger than the dueler, and has a unique sinus pattern in the palate and a differently shaped bone behind the eye.

This leads them to suggest that Jane represents a new species, Nanotyrannus lethaeus — named for the River Lethe from Greek mythology — although they haven't yet described it fully.

"They may have been separated in time or they may have been overlapping and that's something we are not sure of yet," Zanno said.

Barring further finds that shed more light on Jane's anatomical features, the distinctions here are sufficient to justify two species, Thomas Holtz, a palaeontologist at the University of Maryland, told Live Science in an email.

But many researchers remain unconvinced regarding Jane being a new species. "This second described species of Nanotyrannus is based on a small skeleton that clearly had not stopped growing, so I think it's frankly very hard to tell if this was a Nanotyrannus or a juvenile T. rex," Brusatte said.

Image 1 of 3

(Image credit: N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences)

The fossilized snout of Nanotyrannus, which has different nerve patterns, sinus structures and more teeth than T. rex does.

(Image credit: Right hand of Nanotyrannus lancensis)

The right hand bones of Nanotyrannus lancensis

(Image credit: N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences)

The first complete tail on record of Nanotyrannus lancensis from the Dueling Dinosaurs specimen.

"I have a different way of looking at the evidence and that is that Jane is a juvenile T. rex," said Carr, who has studied Jane extensively.

The new study suggests that more than one tyrannosaur species shared the same western North American ecosystem in the final million years before the asteroid impact some 66 million years ago, Zanno said.

"I certainly don't have any a priori problem that there's more than one species of carnivore out there at the same time," Hone said. "It was very weird that there were no others."

But if most of the smaller tyrannosaurs at Hell Creek are species other than T. rex, as Zanno and Napoli suggest, that means there is a lack of analyzed juvenile skeletons that are definitely of T. rex.

"Tyrannosauruses were running around for several million years," Hone said. "They're massive, we found loads of adults and they don't just pop into existence at 10 meters [33 feet] long and 5 tonnes [5.5 tons]. So, where, where are the juveniles?"

This lack of juvenile specimens also means we have to re-evaluate ideas of how T.  rex grew — the previous idea was that the species changed quite dramatically as it reached maturity. "We have to rethink a lot of what we know about T. rex life history, growth, paleobiology, because Nanotyrannus has been used as data to understand T. rex and its biology for decades," Zanno said.

She, Hone and Carr suggest that models of T. rex growth should be based on the development of one of its closest relatives, a dinosaur called Tarbosaurus bataar from Mongolia, for which many skeletons ranging from baby to adult exist. Tarbosaurus young look like scaled-down adults rather than having bigger skeletal differences.

"The overarching mic drop of this paper is that Nanotyrannus is real, its own distinct tyrannosaur species, and that necessitates a fundamental reassessment of tyrannosaur classification and evolution," Brusatte said.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/animals/dinosaurs/i-was-wrong-dinosaur-scientists-agree-that-small-tyrannosaur-nanotyrannus-was-real-pivotal-new-study-finds at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

SPACE > ASTRONOMY > COMETS

NEWS | PATRICK PESTER | OCT 30, 2025, 12:39 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

NASA spacecraft reveal interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS brightened rapidly as it swooped behind the sun

Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is briefly out of view as it travels around the sun this week, but researchers and amateur astronomers used spacecraft data to track its progress right up until perihelion.

Researchers and amateur astronomer Worachate Boonplod kept track of 3I/ATLAS using GOES-19 weather satellite data. (Image credit: Image: CCOR-1/GOES-19/NOAA. Processed and annotated by Worachate Boonplod.)

Comet 3I/ATLAS is rapidly brightening as it swings behind the sun, spacecraft observations have revealed.

The comet has been flying around the sun, obscuring it from Earth’s view, to reach perihelion (its closest point to our star) on Thursday (Oct. 29).

Yet, while most of the world has been waiting for it to re-emerge, some researchers and amateur astronomers have been using spacecraft to follow its path.

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On Oct. 18, amateur astronomer and seasoned comet hunter Worachate Boonplod spotted the comet in images from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's GOES-19 weather satellite, which uses an instrument called CCOR-1 to observe the sun as part of its regular space weather monitoring. Boonplod noted that comet 3I/ATLAS was easily detectable and was set to remain visible to the spacecraft until Oct. 24.

"Its brightness is comparable to nearby stars with magnitude ~11," Boonplod wrote on the Comets Mailing List group, part of the group email service Groups.io. (In astronomy, a higher magnitude corresponds to a brighter object; typically, objects with a magnitude greater than 6 are too faint for the naked eye to see.) "The comet is moving from left to right (relative to both the field and background stars) and should go out of the CCOR-1 field on October 24."

The GOES-19 satellite wasn't the only satellite with comet 3I/ATLAS in its sights. Also tracking it are NASA's Polarimeter to Unify the Corona Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission, which includes four small satellites aimed at the sun, as well as NASA and the European Space Agency's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), Universe Today reported. SOHO orbits the sun at almost 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth, with its Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO C3) instrument keeping track of comet 3I/ATLAS until Oct. 26. Coronagraphs, like those used by SOHO and GOES-19, are instruments that intentionally block the sun in images in order to study the surrounding atmosphere, or corona.

On Wednesday (Oct. 28), two researchers posted a study to the preprint server arXiv that reported comet 3I/ATLAS underwent rapid brightening ahead of perihelion. The team estimates that, at perihelion, the comet will have brightened to roughly magnitude 9 — still too faint to be seen with the unaided eye, but bright enough to be seen by good backyard telescopes, if it were visible from Earth.

The study relied on space-based solar instruments like GOES-19 and SOHO, and found that the comet was distinctly bluer than the sun, which was consistent with gas emissions contributing substantially to the comet’s increased brightness near perihelion, according to the study's authors. This is expected of comets, which heat up as they approach the sun, causing surface ices to sublimate into gases that wrap around the comet’s body and contribute to its tail. Solar radiation ionizes the gas, causing further brightening.

Scientists have been using various telescopes to learn all they can about comet 3I/ATLAS since its discovery in July. The comet is only the third interstellar comet ever recorded, and findings thus far indicate that it's zooming through our solar system at speeds in excess of 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h) in an unusually flat and straight trajectory.

Despite some rather frenzied speculation that comet 3I/ATLAS could be an alien spacecraft, most astronomers are confident that this interstellar visitor is a space rock from an unknown star system far away.

The speed of the comet, which has the highest velocity ever recorded for a solar system object, suggests that it has been traveling for billions of years, gaining momentum from a gravitational slingshot effect as it whips by stars and nebulas, according to a NASA statement .

In fact, 3I/ATLAS could be the oldest comet ever seen, with one study suggesting it's around 3 billion years older than our 4.6 billion-year-old solar system. The comet is also likely the largest interstellar object ever seen, though researchers are still pinning down its exact size. Hubble Space Telescope data suggest that 3I/ATLAS has a maximum width of about 3.5 miles (5.6 km).

The comet will become visible again to Earth-based telescopes by early December, according to NASA, and may even be visible to spacecraft orbiting Jupiter as it makes a close approach to the gas giant in March, 2026.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/space/comets/nasa-spacecraft-reveal-interstellar-comet-3i-atlas-brightened-rapidly-as-it-swooped-behind-the-sun at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

SPACE > ASTRONOMY

NEWS | HARRY BAKER | OCT 30, 2025, 12:13 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Astronomers discover surprisingly lopsided disk around a nearby star using groundbreaking telescope upgrade

Researchers armed with a new "photonic lantern" device have discovered an unexpectedly asymmetrical disk of gas swirling around a mysterious star 162 light-years from Earth. The new technology could revolutionize ground-based astronomy, the researchers claim.

It may not look like it, but this is the "sharpest-ever measurement of a star’s surrounding disk" from a single ground-based telescope. (Image credit: Yoo Jung Kim/UCLA)

Astronomers have discovered a surprisingly lopsided disk surrounding the mysterious nearby star Beta Canis Minoris, thanks to a brand new "photonic lantern" device that could vastly improve the observing power of ground-based telescopes.

Beta Canis Minoris, also known as Gomeisa, is around 3.5 times more massive than the sun and is located approximately 162 light-years from Earth in the Canis Minor constellation, where it is visible to the naked eye at night. Despite its relative proximity to Earth, researchers still don't know much about it. For example, past research suggested it is a close binary system made up of two smaller stars orbiting one another in extreme proximity, but this has not yet been confirmed.

In a new study, published Oct. 22 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers used their new photonic lantern device, attached to the Subaru Telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, to photograph the puzzling star. This revealed that the swirling disk of hydrogen gas circling the star is not as symmetrical as expected, which could be further evidence that it's a binary system.

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"We were not expecting to detect an asymmetry like this, and it will be a task for the astrophysicists modeling these systems to explain its presence," study lead-author Yoo Jung Kim, a doctoral student at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a statement.

But what really excites the study team is that their new device achieved such a high level of detail on its very first use. They believe that the small device captured the "sharpest-ever measurement of a star’s surrounding disk" acquired by a single ground-based telescope.

The photonic lantern was attached to the Subaru telescope (left) on the summit of Hawaii's Mauna Kea. (Image credit: Julie Thurston Photography via Getty Images)

The photonic lantern can be attached to almost any optical observatory-grade telescope. It works by taking light from an object and splitting it up into individual strands — "like separating a chord into its individual musical notes," researchers wrote in the statement. Each strand is then separated further by wavelength, like the colours in a rainbow, before all the individual bits of information are recombined using specialized computer software.

This process enables astronomers to partially bypass a major limitation of visual astronomy, known as the "diffraction limit," which is caused by subtle fluctuations that occur across multiple wavelengths of light as it passes through Earth’s atmosphere. With the new device, the researchers can see "subtle details that are otherwise lost," Kim said.

In this case, the lantern enabled the team to more accurately measure subtle color variations in the star's gas disk, which are caused by the Doppler effect — the change in the frequency of a wave due to the relative motion of its source and the observer. Half of the disk is tinted blue because it is spinning towards us, while the other half has a redder hue because it is spinning away from us. However, the color variation on each side of the star does not perfectly match, meaning the gas was not spinning in a perfect disk.

The photonic lantern is a small device that can be added to instruments on larger telescopes. The yellow line on the right-hand image represents light entering the device. (Image credit: Sébastien Vievard/University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa)

Normally, this type of insight is only available to space-based assets — like the James Webb Space Telescope — which don't have to contend with atmospheric disturbance, or by stacking together multiple images from different ground-based telescopes. However, the photonic lantern can boost the power of single ground-based telescopes so they can achieve comparable results, the researchers said.

"In astronomy, the sharpest image details are usually obtained by linking telescopes together," Kim said. "But we did it with a single telescope."

The team will now study other objects with their new device and attach it to other telescopes to see if the same level of observing power can be replicated.

"We are just getting started," study co-author Nemanja Jovanovic, an astronomer and photonics expert at Caltech, said in the statement. "The possibilities are truly exciting."

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/space/astronomy/astronomers-discover-surprisingly-lopsided-disk-around-a-nearby-star-using-groundbreaking-telescope-upgrade at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

SPACE > ASTRONOMY > THE SUN

NEWS | HARRY BAKER | OCT 30, 2025, 10:56 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

The next Carrington-level solar superstorm could wipe out 'all our satellites,' new simulations reveal

New ESA simulations suggest that a solar storm on par with the 1859 Carrington Event could wreak havoc on Earth-orbiting satellites — and it is a question of "when," not "if" this will happen, experts say.

New simulations reveal that no spacecraft's safety will be fully guaranteed when the next Carrington-level solar storm strikes our planet. (Image credit: ESA/NASA–T. Pesquet)

Worrying new simulations show that a solar storm on par with the infamous Carrington Event could potentially wipe out every single satellite orbiting our planet, leaving us in a precarious and expensive predicament. And experts say such a powerful solar storm is inevitable and will hit our planet sooner or later.

On Sept. 1, 1859, British astronomer Richard Carrington observed a brilliant flash of light coming from a gigantic sunspot that was about the same size as Jupiter. He had witnessed the most powerful solar flare in recorded history, and it was followed by a major disturbance to Earth's magnetic field, known as a geomagnetic storm, which raged for almost a week and painted the skies with widespread auroras.

Now, a new set of simulations conducted by the European Space Agency (ESA) has revealed that if a similar event occurred today, the effects would be much more catastrophic due to our reliance on technologies — both on Earth and in space.

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The simulations were part of a tabletop exercise carried out by researchers from multiple ESA departments at the European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany. The simulations were in preparation for the upcoming launch of ESA's Sentinel-1D radio imaging satellite, which is currently scheduled for Nov. 4.

In the hypothetical scenario, an X45 magnitude solar flare — around five times more powerful than the most intense solar flare of the current solar cycle — suddenly erupts from the sun, showering Earth with a wave of intense radiation without warning. Around 15 hours later, after another wave of radiation, a gigantic cloud of fast-moving plasma known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), hits our planet at more than 4.4 million mph (7.1 million km/h), triggering a Carrington-like geomagnetic storm.

Richard Carrington's sketch of the "monster" sunspot from 1859 revealed the dark patch was the size of Jupiter. In this image, his drawing has been superimposed onto a modern photo of the sun's surface. (Image credit: Richard Carrington/ NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory/ SpaceWeather.com)

While the researchers' response to this scenario was focused on how they would protect Sentinel-1D, the simulations also demonstrated how the global constellation of orbiting spacecraft would fare in such an event.

"The immense flow of energy ejected by the sun may cause damage to all our satellites in orbit," Jorge Amaya, ESA's space weather modeling coordinator , said in a statement. "Satellites in low-Earth orbit are typically better protected by our atmosphere and our magnetic field from space hazards, but an explosion of the magnitude of the Carrington Event would leave no spacecraft safe."

In the exercise, there were three main threats that satellites faced. First, the initial wave of radiation from the solar flare, which could permanently or temporarily disable any satellites too far from Earth's inner magnetic field. Second, a follow-up wave of radiation that scrambled navigation systems, increasing the likelihood of collisions. And third, the CME, which caused the upper atmosphere to swell outward as it soaked up the solar storm's energy.

The atmospheric swelling is perhaps the most dangerous aspect of this triple threat, as it could increase satellites' drag by up to 400%, pulling the spacecraft down to Earth, where they will either burn up in the atmosphere or crash to the planet's surface.

Solar flares release near-light-speed waves of intense radiation that hit satellites without warning. This ultraviolet wavelength footage shows this radiation hitting the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft shortly after a solar flare in 2003. (Image credit: ESA/NASA)

We got a small taste of what the effects of such an event would be like during the record-breaking geomagnetic storm of May 2024, which was the most powerful of its kind for 21 years and triggered widespread aurora displays.

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In addition to knocking a handful of satellites out of low Earth orbit, the 2024 storm significantly disrupted GPS systems, resulting in malfunctioning agricultural machinery that cost U.S. farmers around $500 million.

But that was only a drop in the ocean compared with the costs of a Carrington-like storm. A 2013 study analyzing the possible impact of such an event on North American power grids revealed that the U.S. could incur damages of up to $2.6 trillion, while the Planetary Society noted the true global cost is "beyond the scale of our comprehension."

"When" not "if"

The reason that tabletop exercises like this are important is that another Carrington-like storm may not be far away.

"The key takeaway is that it's not a question of if this will happen but when," Gustavo Baldo Carvalho, a spacecraft operations expert who led the Sentinel-1D simulations, said in the statement.

Tabletop exercises play an important role in teaching experts how they should respond in worst-case scenarios. (Image credit: ESA)

Experts think that a Carrington-level storm occurs every 500 years on average, putting the odds of such an event occurring this century at around 12%.

While the latest exercise is further proof that we are not currently equipped to deal with this type of extreme scenario, researchers hope that by continually training for this eventuality we will become better able to deal with it.

"Simulating the impact of such [an] event is similar to predicting the effects of a pandemic," Amaya said. "We will feel its real effect on our society only after the event, but we must be ready and have plans in place to react in a moment's notice."

But the longer we have to wait for the next megastorm, the more costly it will become, as the number of satellites orbiting our planet is predicted to rise by at least tenfold by 2050.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/space/the-sun/the-next-carrington-level-solar-superstorm-could-wipe-out-all-our-satellites-new-simulations-reveal at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

HEALTH > VIRUSES, INFECTIONS & DISEASE > CANCER

NEWS | SOPHIE BERDUGO | OCT 30, 2025, 10:24 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

'Chemo brain' may stem from damage to the brain's drainage system

An early-stage study has found that a common chemotherapy drug disrupts lymphatic cells in the tissue surrounding the brain. This is linked to memory issues in mice.

These meningeal lymphatic vessels, depicted in pink, are found within a meningeal layer (blue) in the brain and provide one of the organ's drainage pathways for fluid and waste. (Image credit: Jennifer Munson)

"Chemo brain" — chemotherapy-induced difficulties with focusing, thinking and remembering — may be caused by the cancer treatment's disruption to the brain's lymphatic system, an early-stage study suggests.

The study zoomed in on the meningeal lymphatics, the drainage network found in the protective tissue layer surrounding the brain. Dysfunction in this network has been linked to Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and traumatic brain injuries.

Now, the new research, published Oct. 13 in the journal Communications Biology, has linked damage to the meningeal lymphatics with the brain fog that patients commonly experience after receiving chemotherapy.

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Using human and mouse cells, as well as living lab mice, researchers found evidence that a common type of chemotherapy drug that blocks cancer cells from dividing, called taxanes, damages the brain's lymphatic vessels and limits their drainage. Normally, the vessels would work together with the brain's glymphatic system to flush away metabolic waste.

"Lymphatic health really declined across all three models measured in different ways," study co-author Jennifer Munson, director of Virginia Tech's Cancer Research Center in Roanoke, Virginia, said in a statement. The vessels shrank and had fewer branches, which "are signs of reduced growth that indicate the lymphatics are changing, or not regenerating in beneficial ways," she said.

"Chemo brain" is a broad category of cognitive changes that follow chemotherapy and can last for years after treatment. "There's really a lot we don't know," Munson told Live Science, but these cognitive impairments have previously been linked to oxidative stress and inflammation, as well as impaired myelin production. (Myelin is fatty insulation that covers nerve fibers.)

"Others had looked on the neural side, so we wanted to focus on the meningeal side," Munson said.

To do this, Munson and her team used three models — human cells, mouse tissues and live mice — to assess whether chemotherapy drugs led to changes to the meningeal lymphatics at different scales.

First, they used cell lines to build a human-cell model of healthy meningeal lymphatics. This model paired cells from the lining of lymphatic vessels with meningeal cells. This enabled the team to tease apart the isolated effects of chemo on each cell's function. They also grew healthy mouse meningeal tissue in lab dishes to assess any structural changes triggered by the drug exposure.

They found that the drug docetaxel disrupted the cells in the human meningeal lymphatic model by reducing their coverage and length. The treatment also shrank the vessels within the mouse tissues and reduced the number of loops in the network structure.

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Next, the researchers ran experiments with live mice, comparing mice treated with docetaxel to mice unexposed to the drug. Mice with cancerous tumors that were given the drug tended to have narrower meningeal lymphatic vessels, as well as fewer loops, compared to untreated mice.

The researchers wanted to see whether these docetaxel-induced structural changes led to impaired memory or changes in behavior. They found that healthy mice treated with docetaxel forgot objects they had previously seen, while the untreated mice showed clear signs of remembering them. MRI scans of the treated mice indicated that these cognitive issues correlated with the decreased flow of fluids through the lymphatic vessels, the authors wrote in the study.

Munson cautioned that this is an early-stage study and that there are many gaps left in our understanding of the link between "chemo brain" and meningeal lymphatics. She explained that one limitation of the research was that the chemotherapy drugs were administered over relatively short time periods, whereas chemotherapy courses for human cancer patients often last months.

Similarly, the memory issues the mice experienced were tested over a couple of days, whereas humans can sometimes experience chemo brain for years following treatment. "So it's possible that these lasting effects that we see in [human] patients may have different mechanisms that may not be captured fully here," Munson said.

It is important to replicate this research using samples from many individuals of different ages and to compare outcomes between tumor-bearing and tumor-free mice, to see if there's a difference in how the chemotherapy affects them, Munson said. She hopes that, eventually, this research will provide a new target for treating this side effect of chemotherapy.

"Ultimately, this work underscores the need to consider not only survival, but also the long-term, often overlooked neurological side effects of cancer treatment on cognitive well-being and quality of life," study co-author Monet Roberts, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering and mechanics at Virginia Tech, said in the statement.

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/cancer/chemo-brain-may-stem-from-damage-to-the-brains-drainage-system at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

PLANET EARTH > GEOLOGY

NEWS | SASCHA PARE | OCT 30, 2025, 9:51 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Greenland is twisting, tensing and shrinking due to the 'ghosts' of melted ice sheets

Earth's mantle is so gooey, it takes eons for material that has been displaced by the weight of ice sheets to flow back. And Greenland is very much still processing its glacial past, a new study shows.

Researchers tracked Greenland's movements using data from the island's many satellite stations. (Image credit: Christian Solgaard)

Tectonic processes and the "ghosts" of past ice sheets are contorting, lifting and pulling Greenland in different directions, new research reveals.

Greenland sits on the North American tectonic plate, which has dragged the island northwest by 0.9 inches (23 millimeters) per year over the past two decades. Researchers have been monitoring this drift for some time, but a new study analyzing satellite data has found that there is far more to the movement and to other deformations than just plate tectonics.

"We get this complicated pattern with twisting, pressure, and tension," said study lead author Danjal Longfors Berg, a postdoctoral researcher specializing in geodesy and Earth observation at the Technical University of Denmark. "The Greenlandic map will slowly lose its accuracy if not updated," he told Live Science in an email.

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Berg and his colleagues analyzed data from 58 Global Network Satellite System (GNSS) stations in Greenland that record the island's horizontal and vertical movements, and nearly 2,900 GNSS stations around the North American plate. The researchers entered these data into a model, and when they removed the effect on Greenland of the North American plate, the researchers were left with bedrock deformations — areas where Earth's crust has been stretched or crumpled — that didn't match previous modeling.

In most regions, the movement of landmasses is overwhelmingly controlled by tectonic processes. But Greenland is different, because the island is covered by a giant ice sheet and has a tumultuous glacial past, according to the study, published Aug. 28 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth.

Ice sheets pile enormous weight onto Earth's crust, pressing it down into the mantle — the layer of the planet that sits beneath the crust. The material displaced in the mantle by the sinking crust is pushed out to the sides, creating what is known as a peripheral forebulge, Berg said.

When an ice sheet retreats, the mantle does not return to its original shape immediately. Due to the mantle's gooey consistency, it takes thousands of years for material to flow back into the dent created by the loaded crust. In other words, the mantle "has a very long memory," Berg said.

A map showing the northwest horizontal pull of the North American tectonic plate. The red circles mark the locations of satellite stations. (Image credit: Longfors Berg et al. (2025). Redistributed under CC BY-NC 4.0.)

The mantle beneath and around Greenland is still adjusting to changes in ice cover since the peak of the last ice age about 20,000 years ago, which explains why data show the island deforming. Specifically, it appears that Greenland is reacting to the retreat of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which covered large swathes of North America until about 8,000 years ago.

The Laurentide Ice Sheet created a peripheral forebulge beneath parts of Greenland. This forebulge is gradually flattening, pulling areas of southern Greenland downward and towards Canada, Berg said. Researchers already knew this, he said, but the new results reveal that the rate of deformation is higher than most modeling suggests.

The Greenland Ice Sheet also plays a role in the island's twisting motions. Meltwater from the ice sheet has contributed 13.5 feet (4.1 meters) of the 430 feet (130 m) of sea level rise recorded over the past 20,000 years, Berg said. That means Greenland has lost an incredible amount of ice, which in turn has triggered a response in the mantle that is separate from the effect of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, he said.

Melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet has accelerated in recent years due to climate change. Past and present-day declines in ice mass over Greenland have had the same general effect on the island, pushing the bedrock outward and up, Berg said.

The results offer the most detailed picture of Greenland's movements to date, particularly of how the island is scrunching up in some places, according to a statement. The findings are important because they provide new insights into how polar regions may react to climate change and thereby skew the maps we use for navigation and surveys, Berg said.

"Together with other type[s] of satellite observations it can give new information about the past ice sheets and the structure of the Earth," he added.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/geology/greenland-is-twisting-tensing-and-shrinking-due-to-the-ghosts-of-melted-ice-sheets at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

October 29, 2025

- Mystery of the sun's mind-bogglingly hot atmosphere may finally be solved

- 2,000-year-old Celtic teenager may have been sacrificed and considered 'disposable'

- Why don't teeth count as bones?

- Lab monkeys on the loose in Mississippi don't have herpes, university says. But are they dangerous?

- Gene on the X chromosome may help explain high multiple sclerosis rates in women

- Humanoid robots could lift 4,000 times their own weight thanks to breakthrough 'artificial muscle'

- Exceptionally rare iron saber, arrowheads and jewelry discovered in seventh-century warrior's tomb in Hungary

- 22 of Earth's 34 'vital signs' are flashing red, new climate report reveals — but there's still time to act

- First-ever 'mummified' and hoofed dinosaur discovered in Wyoming badlands

- Capture the Leonids meteor shower with our favorite astro camera — now under $2,000

- Diagnostic dilemma: A baby suddenly started to smell of rotting fish

- Science history: First computer-to-computer message lays the foundation for the internet, but it crashes halfway through — Oct. 29, 1969

SPACE > ASTRONOMY > THE SUN

NEWS | ELIZABETH HOWELL | OCT 29, 2025, 6:14 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Mystery of the sun's mind-bogglingly hot atmosphere may finally be solved

Scientists have spotted elusive "magnetic waves" in the sun's atmosphere that may explain why the sun's corona is much hotter than its surface.

A solar flare erupts from the sun in 2014. (Image credit: NASA Goddard)

A hot mystery on the sun may be close to being solved.

For decades, scientists have been trying to understand why the sun's outer atmosphere is so much hotter than its surface, despite being farther from the core. Whereas the surface, or photosphere, is millions of degrees Fahrenheit, the outer atmosphere is only about 10,000 F (5,500 C).

Now, thanks to observations from a new high-resolution telescope, scientists have finally spotted elusive "magnetic waves" in the sun's atmosphere that may be responsible for much of the corona's incredible heating. The findings were published Oct. 24 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

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New data from the National Science Foundation's Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) in Hawaii — the largest ground-based solar telescope ever built — is helping scientists learn how the sun's energy is transported through its atmosphere.

A solar mystery

Researchers previously noted the extreme temperature of the sun's corona, as well as the supercharged flow of heated gas, called the solar wind, which streams from the sun at more than 1 million mph (1.6 million km/h), said Richard Morton, a solar physicist and professor at Northumbria University in the U.K. who led the research, told Live Science in an email.

Both processes need energy, and scientists assumed rolling convection at the sun's surface generated the requisite fuel. But complications arose during the first studies of this decades ago.

"It is unclear how this [energy] gets transferred into the atmosphere and solar wind, and how the energy is converted to heat and momentum," Morton said.

In 1942, Swedish plasma physicist (and eventual Nobel Prize winner) Hannes Alfvén suggested magnetic waves may be responsible. But these waves, now known as Alfvén waves, had never been spotted in the corona until now.

An illustration of twisting magnetic waves (inset) revealed by the Inouye Solar Telescope. These upward-traveling waves may be an essential ingredient in solving the mystery of why the sun’s corona is so hot. (Image credit: NSF/NSO/AURA/J. Williams)

"This was because the sensitivity of previous instrumentation has not been good enough to resolve the motions of the Alfvén waves," Morton said. "Despite this, many numerical experiments and space weather forecasting tools assume that Alfvén waves exist in the corona. However, the properties of the waves they use within the models have been educated guesses."

'Unprecedented' observations

DKIST has a 4-meter (13 feet) mirror and an "unprecedented" resolution of the sun, Morton said, with much "cleaner measurements" (less noise) than any prior solar observatory. In the new research, scientists used the telescope's Cryogenic Near Infrared Spectropolarimeter (Cryo-NIRSP) to search for the coronal Alfvén waves.

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Cryo-NIRSP can chart movements of the corona through images, Morton said, as well as examine changes in the sun's plasma (superheated gas) through a phenomenon known as Doppler shift — the perceived difference in the frequency of a wave as the observer and the source of the wave move toward or away from each other. (A common, real-life example is the change in the sound of an ambulance siren as it passes by a pedestrian on the street.)

"Cryo-NIRSP provided the data to enable us to observe the tell-tale signature of the Alfvén waves, which in a plasma like the corona, is a back-and-forth twisting of the magnetic field," Morton said. "This appears as an alternating pattern of red and blue Doppler shifts on opposite sides of the magnetic fields. We found these waves were continually present during the time of observation, and given there was nothing particularly special about the region we observed, this implies they are always likely common across the rest of the atmosphere.”

"Perhaps most importantly," he continued, "our analysis indicates that waves likely carry a significant amount of energy."

That is a significant finding, he noted, because astronomers have been debating between solar waves and magnetic reconnection — when magnetic fields on the sun twist together and snap, releasing energy — as the mechanism behind the intense heating in the corona.

While various spacecraft have found evidence that magnetic reconnection is a driver of coronal heating, the new findings from DKIST show that the full picture is more complicated. Solar observatories such as NASA's Parker Solar Probe and the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter, alongside the fresh data from DKIST, show "both waves and reconnection are occurring frequently throughout the Sun's atmosphere," Morton said.

"Our research confirms that the Alfvén waves are present and carry a significant amount of energy, potentially making up at least half the required energy for heating the corona," he added. "However, the exact energy associated with the waves is still challenging to estimate."

The ratio of magnetic reconnection to Alfvén waves affects not only solar heating but also the light (or more properly, the radiative output) from the sun, as well as the light from stars beyond our solar system. Scientists hope to use the research to understand how planetary systems evolved over the longer term and to make better short-term predictions about solar wind production. "It is hoped that further studies like the one we have published will shed some light on the properties of Alfvén waves to better inform the models and improve predictions," he said.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/space/the-sun/mystery-of-the-suns-mind-bogglingly-hot-atmosphere-may-finally-be-solved at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

ARCHAEOLOGY

NEWS | KRISTINA KILLGROVE | OCT 29, 2025, 4:18 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

2,000-year-old Celtic teenager may have been sacrificed and considered 'disposable'

Archaeologists have recovered three unusual burials of Celtic women and girls who may have been sacrificed in England.

A Celtic teenager was buried face down in Dorset, England. (Image credit: © Bournemouth University)

Archaeologists in England have discovered the 2,000-year-old skeleton of a teenager lying face down in a pit — an unusual burial position that may be a clue in a murder mystery.

Researchers from Bournemouth University were excavating a Celtic site in Dorset, a county in southwest England, earlier this year when they stumbled upon the bizarre burial. The discovery happened during the filming of "Sandi Toksvig's Hidden Wonders," a new TV series hosted by broadcaster and comedian Sandi Toksvig, according to a statement from Bournemouth University.

"This has the sense of a body thrown into a pit, with hands potentially tied at the wrist" in front of her body, Miles Russell, the lead archaeologist for the project, told Live Science in an email. "We think she's a 'she', although we haven't had a chance to assess the DNA yet in order to clinch it."

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The teenager had no grave goods and was found face down at the bottom of an abandoned pit. Combined with the evidence that her hands had been bound, those clues hint that she had been sacrificed by the Durotriges tribe, a Celtic group that lived in Britain during the Iron Age before the Romans invaded, Russell said.

And she's not the only likely murder victim at the site.

"The two other face-down bodies in pits we've recovered in the project were a teenage girl found in 2024," Russell said, "and one from 2010 of a young adult female" whose neck had been slashed.

In 2024, archaeologists found another face-down female burial at the site. (Image credit: © Bournemouth University)

These unusual burials have been recovered as part of Bournemouth University's Durotriges Project, which focuses on pre-Roman settlements in southern Britain. The cemetery appears to date to roughly the early to mid-first century B.C., about a century before the Romans successfully invaded southern England.

In a study published earlier this year, researchers with the project used DNA analysis to show that Celtic groups such as the Durotriges were likely organized along maternal lines, which matched what Roman authors said about the Celts. It appears that men traveled to their wives' villages to marry, instead of the other way around.

Given the Celts' emphasis on maternal relationships, it's surprising that all three unusual burials may represent sacrificed women and girls.

Russell said these individuals may have been at the lower end of the social scale and considered more "disposable," especially if they were not from the area or were not related to the ruling families.

Although the sacrificed woman discovered in 2010 has already been analyzed, the sacrificed teenager found in 2024 and the teenager found this year have not been fully studied yet. Russell and his team plan to investigate both skeletons for possible signs of trauma and disease, as well as determine what the teenagers ate and where they came from.

The discovery of multiple female sacrifices suggests the practice was much more common than previously thought, Russell said, but "we are at a loss to know what socio-politico-environmental factors triggered the practice."

Celtic quiz: Test your knowledge about these fierce tribes once described by Julius Caesar

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/2-000-year-old-celtic-teenager-may-have-been-sacrificed-and-considered-disposable at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

HEALTH > ANATOMY

FEATURES | MARILYN PERKINS | OCT 29, 2025, 4:10 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Why don't teeth count as bones?

Teeth and bones may appear alike, but they actually have more differences than similarities.

At first glance, teeth and bones seem similar. So why aren't teeth considered a type of bone? (Image credit: Carbonero Stock via Getty Images)

At first glance, teeth look a lot like bones: Both are hard, white and rich in calcium. So why aren't teeth considered part of the skeletal system? Even though teeth and bones share a few basic similarities, they're actually quite different.

The major resemblance between teeth and bones is what they're made of: hard tissue composed of minerals, such as calcium, phosphorus, fluoride and magnesium. On a molecular level, these minerals form a solid crystal structure, which is what makes both teeth and bones so much harder than everything else in the body.

"They're mineralized tissue," said Dr. Edmond Hewlett, a professor emeritus at the UCLA School of Dentistry. "But there, frankly, the similarity ends."

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Functions of teeth and bones

One reason teeth aren't considered part of the skeletal system is that teeth serve an entirely different function than bones do, Hewlett said. The primary job of teeth is to break down food as it enters the digestive tract, though they're also important for producing speech. Due to their main job, your pearly whites are considered part of the digestive system.

Bones have different jobs. They provide structure and support to the body, creating attachment points for our muscular system. They also protect vital organs, housing key body parts such as the heart and lungs. And bones serve as production factories for both red and white blood cells, which carry oxygen around the body and play a key role in the immune system, respectively.

There is some small overlap in the functions of teeth and bones, though. The bones in the jaw do help to support the teeth and are important for chewing, for example.

"They work together but are separate," Hewlett said.

Structure of teeth and bones

Because bones and teeth do different jobs, they're also built differently. The outer structure of teeth is called enamel, a thin layer of mineralized tissue. Enamel is the hardest substance in the body — a property it gets from jam-packed crystals made from a compound of calcium and phosphate.

Underneath the enamel lies dentin, a type of mineralized tissue that's slightly softer than enamel but still hard. Dentin makes up the majority of a tooth's structure, and it contains tiny tubes that hold blood vessels and nerve endings. The core of the tooth is made of a jelly-like substance called pulp, which houses more blood vessels that provide nutrients to the tooth and to the nerves that control feeling in the tooth.

The structure of bones, on the other hand, looks completely different to that of teeth.

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Bones are covered in a very thin, tough outer layer called the periosteum, which houses both blood vessels and nerves essential for growth and healing in the tissue. The next layer is composed of durable compact bone tissue. The inside of a bone contains cancellous tissue, a sponge-like substance with tiny holes that house bone marrow, where new blood cells are made.

Living vs. dead tissue

You might have noticed that, unlike teeth, bones are infused with nerves and blood vessels on both the inside and the outside. That's because bones are living tissue, whereas teeth are not — and that's one of the most important differences between the two.

Teeth form during fetal development and early childhood from specialized cells called ameloblasts and odontoblasts, which create layers of enamel and dentin that harden over time. Once that process is complete, the enamel-forming cells die off — meaning if a tooth is chipped or broken, that lost tissue won't grow back. While the pulp on the interior of the tooth is composed of living tissue, it can't help regenerate these outer layers of dentin or enamel.

Bones, by contrast, are dynamic structures that constantly remodel themselves. They contain a network of blood vessels, nerves and living cells called osteoblasts and osteoclasts that build new bone and break down old tissue, respectively. This constant turnover enables bones to heal after a fracture and to adapt to bodily changes, such as shifts in an individual's stress or activity levels. In fact, most of the adult skeleton is completely renewed about every 10 years.

"Bone is more of a living part of the body," Hewlett said. "But take care of your teeth — they won't grow back."

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/health/anatomy/why-dont-teeth-count-as-bones at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

ANIMALS > LAND MAMMALS > MONKEYS

NEWS | PATRICK PESTER | OCT 29, 2025, 4:03 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Lab monkeys on the loose in Mississippi don't have herpes, university says. But are they dangerous?

Authorities have killed several lab monkeys that escaped from an overturned truck in Mississippi. The rhesus macaques were initially thought to be diseased and dangerous, but that's not necessarily the case.

A stock image of a rhesus macaque. (Image credit: eROMAZe via Getty Images)

Lab monkeys initially thought to be carrying a range of diseases have escaped from a truck in Mississippi following a crash — prompting law enforcement officers to kill a number of the animals. However, it's still unclear just how dangerous they are.

The truck, which was carrying rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) from Tulane University, overturned in Jasper County on Tuesday (Oct. 28), with several monkeys breaking loose — although the exact numbers have yet to be reported.

At the time of writing, three monkeys are still on the loose, according to an update from the Jasper County Sheriff's Department. The authorities believed that the monkeys were aggressive to humans and carried herpes, COVID-19 and hepatitis C. But Tulane University has subsequently said that the monkeys weren't infectious.

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"The primates in question belong to another entity & aren't infectious," Tulane University wrote in a post on X on Tuesday. "We're actively collaborating with local authorities & will send a team of animal care experts to assist as needed."

Following Tulane University's statement, the sheriff's department clarified that the driver of the truck had told law enforcement that the monkeys were dangerous.

"The driver of the truck told local law enforcement that the monkeys were dangerous and posed a threat to humans," Jasper County Sheriff's Department wrote in a post on Facebook. "We took the the appropriate actions after being given that information from the person transporting the monkeys. He [the driver] also stated that you had [to] wear PPE equipment to handle the monkeys."

Sheriff Randy Johnson has since said that the monkeys still needed to be "neutralized" because of their aggressive nature, the Associated Press reported on Wednesday (Oct. 29).

Are rhesus macaques dangerous?

Rhesus macaques are medium-sized monkeys, and they could pose a threat to humans if they decided to attack. However, it's unclear whether the escapees were likely to do that.

The sheriff's department wrote on Facebook that the escaped monkeys each weighed approximately 40 pounds (18 kilograms). This would be exceptionally large for a rhesus macaque and is likely an overestimate, unless the individuals were overweight. Male rhesus macaques, which are larger than females, typically weigh about 17 pounds (7.7 kg), according to the University of Wisconsin–Madison's Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, while the New England Primate Conservancy states that this species can weigh up to 22 pounds (10 kg).

Aggression is a natural part of macaque behavior, and while they don't normally direct it at humans, they regularly scrap among themselves. The New England Primate Conservancy states that fights between monkeys can be frenzied and violent, with rhesus macaques aiming for the eyes, face, limbs and genitals in order to maim or kill their opponents.

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In other words, rhesus macaques can be dangerous if they want to be. Although they also have a range of peaceful behaviors, such as grooming.

A stock image of a rhesus macaque in India, one of many countries in Asia where this species naturally roams. (Image credit: McDonald Wildlife Photography Inc. via Getty Images)

Rhesus macaques have the widest geographic distribution of any non-human primate and can frequently be found living in close proximity to humans across their native range of Asia. They are often considered pests because of their penchant for stealing our food. Macaque species do occasionally bite or attack people, but this is a consequence of them becoming too habituated to humans in our expanding urban environments and losing their natural fear of people.

Macaques in labs, like the ones that escaped in Mississippi, have historically had a reputation for being aggressive, but experts have also argued that this aggression can be brought on by poor husbandry and handling practices. Lab monkeys are sometimes hand-reared by humans, which can lead to a range of abnormal behaviors not typically seen in the wild or in captive monkeys raised by other monkeys, such as self-biting and more aggression toward humans. Each individual monkey also has its own personality. And captive monkeys can have relatively calm and gentle demeanors.

There aren't any reports of the escaped monkeys attacking humans before they were killed. Tulane University has also said that the monkeys had "not been exposed to any infectious agent," the Guardian reported.

There are still a lot of unknowns surrounding the monkeys, including who owned them, who was transporting them, where they were heading, and for what purpose they were being used, according to the Associated Press.

Lab monkeys

Rhesus macaques are the most common monkeys used for testing in labs. Experimenting on these monkeys can be extremely valuable to scientific research and has led to a plethora of breakthroughs, including the development of various vaccines, including mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.

The use of monkeys in labs is also controversial. For example, in 2023, hundreds of scientists called for an end to "cruel" monkey experiments at Harvard Medical School and elsewhere. These included visual recognition studies in which juvenile monkeys had their eyes sewn shut for their first year.

Macaques on the run

This isn't the first time lab monkeys have escaped. For example, in 2020, a group of macaques reportedly escaped from a lab in India and took several COVID-19 blood test samples after attacking a lab assistant, Sky News reported. More recently, 43 monkeys escaped from a lab in South Carolina and went on the run, the Associated Press reported.

The descendants of escaped rhesus macaques are also living in the Silver Springs State Park in Florida. In the 1930s, a commercial river boat captain put six macaques on an island as a tourism ploy, not realizing that rhesus macaques can swim. The monkeys soon left the island and spread along the river.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/animals/monkeys/lab-monkeys-on-the-loose-in-mississippi-dont-have-herpes-university-says-but-are-they-dangerous at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

HEALTH > GENETICS

NEWS | ZUNNASH KHAN | OCT 29, 2025, 11:30 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Gene on the X chromosome may help explain high multiple sclerosis rates in women

A gene on the X chromosome revs up inflammation in the female brain, which may explain why rates of multiple sclerosis are higher in women than in men, scientists suggest.

An X-linked gene called KDM6A shows more activity in women than in men and is linked to brain inflammation, which may explain the higher rates of multiple sclerosis observed in women. (Image credit: quantic69/Getty Images)

Brain inflammation may be fueled by a gene on the X chromosome, a new study in mice suggests.

And in female mice, who carry two X chromosomes, a diabetes drug called metformin may work to counteract that inflammation.

If these findings bear out in later studies, they could help to unravel the long-standing mystery of why women, who have two copies of this inflammation-driving gene, are more prone to certain autoimmune diseases, particularly after menopause.

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A disparity between the sexes

Our bodies are patrolled by immune cells that provide protection against bacteria and viruses, but sometimes, these defenses turn on us. In the autoimmune disorder multiple sclerosis (MS), for instance, the immune system attacks myelin, the fatty insulation surrounding the nerve fibers in the brain and spinal cord. This leads to symptoms such as muscle weakness and difficulty walking, as well issues with memory and thinking.

The disease is two to three times more common in women than in men, and symptoms often become more debilitating after menopause. But until recently, scientists didn't know why.

Dr. Rhonda Voskuhl, a neurologist and neuroscientist at UCLA, has been investigating that mystery for decades. Clinical patterns showing higher disease rates in women are "a really valuable clue" that the difference may be driven by an X-linked gene, Voskuhl told Live Science.

That's because women typically inherit an X chromosome from each parent, while men inherit only one from their mothers. Normally, one set of X-linked genes in women is silenced, leaving only one active gene from either the mother or the father. But a handful of genes escape this "X inactivation," Voskuhl told Live Science, giving women an enhanced dose of X-linked gene activity.

To see if X-linked genes might explain women's higher rates of MS, Voskuhl and her colleagues looked at existing data for human microglia, the primary immune cells in the brain. They looked at cells from both men and women with MS.

Compared with those from men, women’s microglia had higher levels of a protein called KDM6A, which is encoded by the KDM6A gene on the X chromosome. Women's cells also showed higher levels of immune-related gene activity.

To investigate the role of KDM6A gene in the brain, Voskuhl and colleagues used techniques to "knock out" the activity of the gene in lab mice — specifically in the rodents' microglia. Then, they induced an MS-like condition in the mice using established methods.

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Female knockout mice walked better, and their brain tissue had less nerve damage and more intact, myelin-covered nerve fibers compared with female mice with a functional KDM6A gene. Knockout female mice also showed less infiltration by immune cells, called T cells, compared with female mice with working KDM6A genes.

But deleting the KDM6A gene had no effect in male mice, the researchers reported in the new study, published Oct. 15 in the journal Science Translational Medicine. The finding hints that the KDM6A gene may fuel brain inflammation in females because they have two copies of it and one copy "escapes" silencing. Thus, females may get an increased dose of the KDM6A protein.

The researchers then looked for a drug that could mimic the effects of deleting KDM6A. Earlier studies had shown that metformin can block the KDM6A enzyme in other cell types, so Voskuhl wondered whether it would have the same effect in microglia. Her team found that metformin calmed brain inflammation and improved symptoms in female mice while having little effect in male mice.

This points to the potential for sex-specific treatments, given that both KDM6A activity and metformin's effects differ between men and women. If such a treatment were only tested in men or in a mixed pool of study participants, its effectiveness in women may not be noticeable, Voskuhl explained; so data from women would need to be gathered and analyzed in isolation.

"It's a brilliant study," said Dr. Lawrence Steinman, a neurologist at Stanford University who was not involved in the new work, because it identifies one of the key genes that make women more susceptible to MS. It's "another step forward" in understanding how KDM6A shapes immune activity in the brain and keeps microglia "on the quiet side," Steinman told Live Science.

Follow-up studies and clinical trials are still needed to pinpoint the most clinically effective ways to block KDM6A in women's microglia, and to confirm that such a drug would be therapeutically beneficial.

These findings also hint at an interplay between hormones and chromosome-linked inflammation. Past work has shown that estrogen generally counteracts the inflammation in the body, helping balance immune activity that defends the female brain against pathogens and excess inflammation during the reproductive years, Voskuhl said.

"So when estrogen levels go down in menopause," she said, "you lose that protection."

Disclaimer

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

Brain quiz: Test your knowledge of the most complex organ in the body

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/health/genetics/gene-on-the-x-chromosome-may-help-explain-high-multiple-sclerosis-rates-in-women at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

TECHNOLOGY > ROBOTICS

NEWS | BOBBY HELLARD | OCT 29, 2025, 11:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Humanoid robots could lift 4,000 times their own weight thanks to breakthrough 'artificial muscle'

Researchers have developed a chemical structure for an artificial muscle that can lift up to 4,000 times its weight, and they say it could be used in future humanoid robots.

(Image credit: Ociacia/Getty Images)

Researchers in South Korea have built an artificial muscle that can lift approximately 4,000 times its own weight. They say it can be used in future humanoid robots.

A key breakthrough with the muscle's design is its ability to be flexible or taut when needed, which is a first for this field of research. The scientists outlined their findings in a study published Sept. 7 in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

"This research overcomes the fundamental limitation where traditional artificial muscles are either highly stretchable but weak or strong but stiff," lead study author Hoon Eui Jeong, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), said in a statement. "Our composite material can do both, opening the door to more versatile soft robots, wearable devices, and intuitive human-machine interfaces."

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Artificial muscles are often limited by an inability to be flexible or taut; they need to be stretchable while still offering enough energy output, or else their work densities are limited. But soft artificial muscles are believed to be transformative because they're lightweight, mechanically compliant, and capable of multidirectional actuation (movement).

When the researchers say "work density," they refer to how much energy per unit volume the muscle can deliver. Achieving high values alongside high stretchability is where the challenge lies for artificial muscles.

Do you even lift, robo?

The scientists described their artificial muscle as a "high-performance magnetic composite actuator," which means it's a complex chemical combination of polymers that link together to mimic the pull and release of muscles.

One of these polymers can have its level of stiffness altered and sits in a matrix that has magnetic microparticles on the surface that can also be controlled. This enables the muscle to be animated and controlled through the tunable stiffness, thus allowing it to be moved.

The researchers' new design integrates two distinct cross-linking mechanisms. The first is a covalently bonded chemical network (two or more atoms that share electrons to achieve a more stable configuration) and a reversible, physically interacting network. The two mechanisms, developed in this way, provide the durability for the muscle to work long-term, the researchers said in the study.

The trade-off between stiffness and stretchability is effectively solved by a dual cross-linking architecture, and the physical network is further reinforced by incorporating a type of microparticle (NdFeB) on the surface of the muscle that can be given a function via a colorless liquid (octadecyltrichlorosilane). The particles are dispersed throughout the polymer matrix.

The composite muscle becomes stiff when bearing heavy loads and softens when it needs to contract. In its stiffened state, the artificial muscle, which weighs just 0.04 ounce (1.13 grams), can support up to 11 pounds (5 kilograms) — roughly 4,400 times its own weight.

A human muscle contracts at approximately 40% strain, but the synthetic muscle achieves a strain of 86.4% — over double that of the human muscle, the researchers said in the study. This enables a work density of 1,150 kilojoules per meter cubed — 30 times higher than human tissue is capable of.

The researchers used a uniaxial tensile test to measure the strength of their artificial muscle. A type of mechanical test that applies a pulling force to a subject until it fractures – the elongation is measured against the applied force to find its ultimate tensile strength.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/technology/robotics/humanoid-robots-could-lift-4-000-times-their-own-weight-thanks-to-breakthrough-artificial-muscle at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

ARCHAEOLOGY

NEWS | TOM METCALFE | OCT 29, 2025, 10:28 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Exceptionally rare iron saber, arrowheads and jewelry discovered in seventh-century warrior's tomb in Hungary

Archaeologists in Hungary have found the 1,300-year-old burial of a warrior who was buried with a rare iron saber.

The iron saber is badly rusted and very fragile but intact. It was lifted from the tomb in a specially-made wooden cradle. (Image credit: Szent István Király Múzeum)

Archaeologists in Hungary have unearthed the remnants of a rare iron saber, jewelry and other artifacts in the 1,300-year-old tomb of an elite warrior.

The elegantly curved sword — a type used mainly by warriors on horseback — is badly rusted, but it still has traces of fine decorations on its blade that reveal the craftsmanship used to make the ancient weapon.

The tomb — located near the city of Székesfehérvár (also known as Fehérvár), about 30 miles (50 kilometers) southwest of Budapest — was spotted by satellites in orbit, according to a translated statement from the Szent István Király (King Saint Stephen) museum there.

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The excavations are part of the Hungarian National Museum and the King Saint Stephen Museum's Cemeteries from Space program, which analyses crop marks in satellite imagery to detect buried archaeological sites.

Pannonian Avars

The newfound tomb dates to between A.D. 670 and 690, when the region was part of a vast "Avar Khaganate" — a type of kingdom — in Central Europe, centered in the Carpathian Basin of what's now Hungary.

The Avars from Central Europe are now called "Pannonian Avars" (the Byzantine Empire called that region "Pannonia") to distinguish them from the semi-nomadic Avars of Central Asia, with whom a 2022 genetic study suggested they were related. (An entirely unrelated people, called the "Dagestani" or "Caucasian" Avars, live now in the Caucasus Mountains — ethnographers think their shared name is a coincidence.)

The ancient tomb was discovered near the central Hungarian city of Székesfehérvár after crop marks were seen there in satellite images. (Image credit: Szent István Király Múzeum)

According to the Byzantine-era historian Menander Protector (a name he earned as a guardsman for the emperor) the Byzantines in the sixth century thought the Pannonian Avars were the same Central Asian Avars they'd heard about in the fifth century and greatly feared — but never met.

Scientists and historians now think, however, that the Pannonian Avars were a different confederation of semi-nomadic Eurasian steppe peoples, possibly led by a Turkic or Mongolian elite. They left no written language, making their culture enigmatic today. But a 2024 genetic study of a Pannonian Avar cemetery suggests that the women traveled to their husband's village upon getting married.

Archaeologists said there were signs that the tomb near Székesfehérvár had been looted but that it still contained a rich selection of grave goods, including the saber.

Archaeologists say the remains of the Avar warrior in the grave were "ravaged" by looters, but many of the grave goods remain. (Image credit: Szent István Király Múzeum)

The blade and hilt of the weapon are intact, making it an exceptionally rare find from this era. It is badly rusted, however, and extremely brittle after 1,300 years underground, so it had to be lifted from the excavations on a specially designed wooden cradle, the statement said.

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Ravaged remains

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(Image credit: Szent István Király Múzeum)

As well as the remains and sword, archaeologists also found this silver ornament, which seems to be a brooch.

(Image credit: Szent István Király Múzeum)

The grave goods in the tomb also included this gilded piece of metal, which seems to have been braided into long hair.

The archaeologists also discovered silver belt fittings, gilded metal ornaments for braiding into hair, earrings made from glass beads, a long knife, and arrowheads that were likely stored in a quiver — although the quiver itself, and the shafts and feather fletches of the arrows, have rotted away.

The warrior's remains were also found in the tomb. While his arms and lower body were arranged in anatomical order, his head, chest and abdomen had been "ravaged" by the looters, according to the statement.

The Pannonian Avars established a kingdom in the Carpathian Basin in the sixth century, historian Walter Pohl wrote in "The Avars: A Steppe Empire in Central Europe, 567-822" (Cornell University Press, 2018).

But their battles against the Byzantine Empire, the Franks and the Bulgars contributed to the collapse of their kingdom in the ninth century and the territory falling to the Magyar people, a different ethnic group from the Volga-Ural region who were the ancestors of most modern Hungarians.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/exceptionally-rare-iron-saber-arrowheads-and-jewelry-discovered-in-seventh-century-warriors-tomb-in-hungary at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

PLANET EARTH > CLIMATE CHANGE

NEWS | SASCHA PARE | OCT 29, 2025, 10:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

22 of Earth's 34 'vital signs' are flashing red, new climate report reveals — but there's still time to act

Earth's systems are nearing tipping points that could plunge the planet into a "hothouse" regime — but there's still time to prevent that from happening, scientists say.

One of the "vital signs" researchers measured was global tree cover loss due to fires, which reached a record high in 2024. (Image credit: Artur Debat/Getty Images)

Without deep cuts to emissions, there's a chance Earth could embark on a dangerous "hothouse trajectory" to complete climate chaos. That's one takeaway from a new report that found 22 of Earth's 34 "vital signs" are flashing red, signaling that the planet is in distress.

Earth's vital signs are markers of planetary health, such as atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane concentrations, ocean heat content, sea level fluctuations, and the yearly percentage of extremely hot days relative to the 1961-to-1990 average. Most of these markers hit record levels in 2024, and 2025 looks like it's on the same trajectory, according to the report, published today (Oct. 29) in the journal BioScience.

"This report is both a warning and a call to action," co-lead author William Ripple, a distinguished professor of ecology at Oregon State University, told Live Science in an email. "2024 was the hottest year ever recorded in modern times, and likely the warmest in at least 125,000 years. Ocean heat and ice loss hit record highs. Global surface temperatures exceeded 1.5 C [2.7 degrees Fahrenheit] above pre-industrial levels for the first time over a 12-month period. We also saw record wildfire activity and the most widespread coral bleaching event in recent history."

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Ripple and his colleagues first laid out the framework to measure Earth's vital signs in 2020. Five years on, the researchers warn that we could cross a series of tipping points and push the planet into a self-sustaining hothouse regime — a state where Earth continues to heat up massively even after carbon emissions drop significantly.

Earth is now 2.2 F (1.2 C) warmer than it was on average between 1850 and 1900, and if countries don't enact any further climate policies (which is a scenario often described as the "cost of inaction"), the planet could reach up to 5.6 F (3.1 C) of warming above preindustrial levels by 2100. Such rapid change would mark a turning point in the Holocene, the stable period that Earth entered about 11,000 years ago after the last ice age, the scientists wrote in the report.

"Scholars argue that this period of relative climatic calm enabled the development of agriculture, permanent settlements, and the rise of human civilizations," they wrote. "That stability is now giving way to a period of rapid and dangerous change."

Soaring global temperatures considerably increase the risk of crossing climate tipping points, such as the collapse of polar ice sheets and the melting of carbon-rich permafrost. If these systems disintegrate, both the amount of solar energy that Earth bounces back to space and the quantity of carbon it can store plummet, thus locking in further warming and causing additional systems to collapse.

"Crossing one tipping point could set off a cascade of other tipping point crossings with the majority of interactions being destabilizing," Ripple and his colleagues wrote. "In the worst case, this could push the climate system onto a hothouse Earth trajectory. This trajectory would lead to a fundamentally different planet with devastating impacts on natural systems and humanity."

The hothouse pathway is one of the four most urgent climate risks that the researchers identified in the report. The other three are biodiversity loss; freshwater declines; and a downturn in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a system of ocean currents that brings heat to the Northern Hemisphere.

But, of course, these aren't the only effects of climate change. "There are [all] sorts of consequences of warming, including ice sheet collapse, coastal inundation, the increases in extreme weather," report co-author Michael Mann, a presidential distinguished professor and the director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, told Live Science in an email.

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Global warming is proportional to the amount of carbon we pump into the atmosphere. Therefore, to stave off the worst consequences of climate change, "the focus should be on rapid decarbonization so we stabilize warming below dangerous levels," Mann said.

"Every year of delay locks in higher risks and costs," Ripple added. "We can limit the damage if we act like this is the emergency it truly is."

There is still time to act, because we haven't yet reached levels of warming where the consequences are unmanageable. And there are reasons to be hopeful. "Some nations have successfully ended coal use and cut methane leaks," Ripple said. (The U.K., Ireland, Switzerland, Norway and several other European countries no longer have coal in their electricity mix. The European Union and Nigeria have also made tangible progress in cutting methane emissions.)

"Deforestation rates in the Amazon have dropped sharply under new leadership, renewable energy capacity keeps setting records, and electric-vehicle sales are climbing," Ripple added.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/22-of-earths-34-vital-signs-are-flashing-red-new-climate-report-reveals-but-theres-still-time-to-act at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

ANIMALS > EXTINCT SPECIES > DINOSAURS

NEWS | PATRICK PESTER | OCT 29, 2025, 9:49 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

First-ever 'mummified' and hoofed dinosaur discovered in Wyoming badlands

Researchers have unearthed two dinosaur "mummies" in the badlands of Wyoming, confirming duck-billed dinosaurs had hooves, alongside a string of other discoveries.

This mummified duck-billed dinosaur fossil is a juvenile Edmontosaurus annectens, nicknamed "Ed Jr." (Image credit: Photograph courtesy of Tyler Keillor/Fossil Lab))

Two extremely rare dinosaur "mummies" found in the badlands of Wyoming are the first examples of hoofed reptiles, according to a new study.

Researchers discovered the pair of 66 million-year-old duck-billed dinosaur (Edmontosaurus annectens) skeletons complete with skin, spikes and hooves, as if the creatures had been naturally mummified.

The fossils aren't true mummies, as their original tissues have been replaced with rock, but they give scientists an unprecedented look at duck-billed dinosaur biology, confirming they had hooves. The researchers reported their findings Oct. 23 in the journal Science.

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"It's the first time we’ve had a complete, fleshed-out view of a large dinosaur that we can really feel confident about," study senior author Paul Sereno, a professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago, said in a statement.

Duck-billed dinosaurs used their hooves to stomp through mud at the end of the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago). They lived alongside other large dinosaurs, such as Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops, just before the age of dinosaurs came to a crashing end when a massive asteroid hit Earth and wiped them all out (except for birds).

Dinosaur mummies are exceptionally preserved fossils that contain a clay copy of dinosaur skin and other organic tissues. Several of these fossils were discovered in Wyoming in the early 1900s, which inspired the new research. Sereno and his colleagues found the two new specimens by tracking down the locations of the historical discoveries, using old photographs and letters, and mapping out what they described as a "mummy zone."

One of the newly discovered Edmontosaurus specimens, nicknamed "Ed Jr.," was a late juvenile and estimated to be about 2 years old at the time of its death. The other specimen, nicknamed "Ed Sr.," was an early adult about 5 to 8 years old when it perished.

Edmontosaurus annectens as it appeared in life. (Image credit: Artwork by Dani Navarro)

The researchers reconstructed the dinosaurs' biology, movement and preservation using a variety of imaging techniques, including X-rays and micro-CT scans, as well as by analyzing clay, examining the site where they were discovered, and studying fossilized duck-billed dinosaur footprints.

The dinosaurs had a fleshy crest running along their neck and trunk that transitioned into a row of spikes at the tail. Small, pebble-like scales also peppered the animal's lower body and tail, the largest of which were only 0.2 inches (4 millimeters) across — tiny considering the dinosaur could grow to more than 40 feet (12 meters) long, according to the statement.

The team determined that the mummification-like preservation occurred because the dinosaurs' bodies were dried out in the sun — they may well have perished in a drought — before being quickly covered in a flash flood. Static electricity, reacting with microorganisms on the surface of the carcasses, then sucked clay from the wet sediment to form a thin template later around the remains. The organic material then slowly decayed and was replaced with rock.

"There are so many amazing 'firsts' preserved in these duck-billed mummies — the earliest hooves documented in a land vertebrate, the first confirmed hooved reptile, and the first hooved four-legged animal with different forelimb and hindlimb posture," Sereno said.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/animals/dinosaurs/first-ever-mummified-and-hoofed-dinosaur-discovered-in-wyoming-badlands at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

TECHNOLOGY

DEALS | KIMBERLEY LANE | OCT 29, 2025, 8:13 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Capture the Leonids meteor shower with our favorite astro camera — now under $2,000

The Sony A7 IV is the cheapest it's been since last Black Friday, and there's no guarantee it'll drop lower this year — this could be your best chance to save.

(Image credit: Sony)

Black Friday is only a month away and we've been keeping an eye out for early discounts. This Sony A7 IV camera deal is the lowest price we've seen since last year's event — and it's one of our favorite astrophotography cameras. It has excellent ISO performance and a hidden Bright Monitoring feature (which we praised in our full Sony A7 IV review), and it's now on sale for $1,998 at Amazon.

Save 26% and get the Sony A7 IV for $1,998 right now at Amazon.

Now's a great time to take advantage of this deal — not just for the lower price, but because some incredible celestial sights are coming up. Over the next few months, you can try out the camera with your favorite astro lens as two meteor showers peak near a new moon — the Leonids on November 17 and Geminids on December 13. You'll also have two stunning supermoons to capture: the full Beaver Moon on November 5 and the full Cold Moon on December 4.

Excellent for astrophotography

Save $701.99

Sony A7 IV: was $2,699.99 now $1,998 at Amazon

The Sony A7 IV seriously impressed us for astrophotography, and it's the cheapest it's been since last Black Friday. We think it's one of the best cameras on the market.

View Deal

- Our experts have also reviewed and rated the best telescopes, binoculars, star projectors, cameras, fitness trackers, running shoes, rowing machines and more.

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The Bright Monitoring feature is fantastic for composing images without trial and error.(Image credit: Kimberley Lane)

(Image credit: Kimberley Lane)

(Image credit: Kimberley Lane)

We've tested the A7 IV in both astro conditions and challenging indoor lighting to push its 33-megapixel sensor to the limit. Its high ISO performance is among the best we've seen, with noise only becoming noticeable at ISO 6,400 and above.

The hidden Bright Monitoring feature is especially useful for composing astro shots. When activated, it brightens the display, making it easier to see subjects like the Milky Way on the LCD screen, cutting out the guesswork.

While it doesn't have the burst speed to rank among the best cameras for wildlife photography, Sony's autofocus is the best in the business, so the A7 IV will happily lend itself to many other styles of photography if astrophotography isn't your main interest.

Key features: Key features: 33MP resolution, 10FPS burst rate, ISO range 100 — 51,200 (expands to 50 - 204,800), 5.5 stops image stabilization, dual card slots (one CFexpress Type A/UHS-II SD, one UHS-II SD).

Product launched: October 2021.

Price history: We saw the Sony A7 IV for the same price back in April; otherwise, it has only been cheaper last Black Friday.

Price comparison: Amazon: $1,998 | Walmart: $1,998 | BHPhoto: $1,998

Reviews consensus: One of the best cameras we've used for astrophotography that produces stunning 33MP images with excellent noise handling for clean, crisp shots. The autofocus is impressive, and it's a joy to use out in the field.

Live Science: ★★★★½ | TechRadar: ★★★★½ | Toms Guide: ★★★★ | Digital Camera World: ★★★★½

Featured in guides: Best astrophotography cameras, Best cameras

✅ Buy it if: You've surpassed beginner level and are ready to take astrophotography seriously with a more powerful camera, while also wanting the freedom to experiment with other photographic styles.

❌ Don't buy it if: You primarily want to shoot fast action like sports or wildlife and need a fast burst rate.

Check out our other guides to the best telescopes, binoculars, cameras, star projectors and much more.

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This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/technology/capture-the-leonids-meteor-shower-with-our-favorite-astro-camera-now-under-usd2-000 at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

HEALTH

FEATURES | MINDY WEISBERGER | OCT 29, 2025, 6:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Diagnostic dilemma: A baby suddenly started to smell of rotting fish

A boy would stink of fish after eating certain dishes, and doctors found that the noxious odor likely stemmed from a rare genetic quirk.

Doctors determined that a young boy had an uncommon genetic conditions that's only been described a few hundred times in the medical literature. (Image credit: Peter Cade via Getty Images)

The patient: A 12-month-old boy in Portugal

The symptoms: Shortly after eating different types of fish, the child would develop an odor of rotting fish emanating from his body. The smell was noxious and powerful, especially around his head and hands. He was 10 months old the first time this happened. (The child had been exclusively breastfed as an infant and began eating solid foods at 7 months of age.) His mother temporarily put him on a fish-free diet, but after she reintroduced fish to his meals two months later, the odor returned.

What happened next: When doctors examined the child, they did not detect a fishy smell, though they noted that he had not eaten fish before his medical visit, according to a report of the case. They detected no abnormalities in the boy's neurodevelopment or growth, and laboratory tests showed that his kidneys, liver and thyroid were functioning normally.

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The diagnosis: Doctors suspected that the child had developed a rare metabolic disorder called trimethylaminuria, also known as "fish odor syndrome," in which breath, saliva, sweat and urine smell like decaying fish. Rotten fish gets its distinctive smell from a molecule called trimethylamine, and the human body produces trimethylamine from nitrogen-rich foods, such as fish. An enzyme called flavin-containing monooxygenase 3 (FMO3) breaks down trimethylamine in the body, changing it to the odorless compound trimethylamine N-oxide. But if the enzyme isn't working as it should, trimethylamine accumulates in the body and can make a person produce a foul, rotting-fish aroma.

A metabolic pediatrician conducted a molecular analysis of the child's FMO3 gene, which makes the FMO3 enzyme, and found a combination of genetic variants that could disrupt the production of the enzyme, leading to a mild or temporary type of trimethylaminuria.

The treatment: The doctors recommended that the child's parents reintroduce fish to the child's diet in small increments and that they manage any lingering smell with a low-pH soap, which reduces body odors. Over time, the rotten smell after fish meals weakened. By the time the child was 19 months old, he was eating fish five or six times per week without experiencing any malodorous symptoms afterward, and the symptoms had not returned by the time he was 3 years old.

What makes the case unique: There is no treatment or cure for trimethylaminuria; its primary cause is genetic, and in adults the condition is frequently chronic. In this case, the child's temporary bout of trimethylaminuria was likely shaped by a combination of factors, including inherited variants of the FMO3 gene and the immaturity of his metabolism, his physicians wrote in the report.

As the boy's metabolic system matured, the FMO3 enzyme improved its ability to break down trimethylamine. This child's case and others suggest that the causes of trimethylaminuria are more nuanced than once thought and that the disorder varies in severity, according to the report.

Trimethylaminuria is an uncommon disorder, with just a few hundred cases described in medical literature. However, the condition may be underdiagnosed, as people with trimethylaminuria often link their symptoms to personal hygiene habits and do not seek medical treatment for the unusual smell.

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/diagnostic-dilemma-a-baby-suddenly-started-to-smell-of-rotting-fish at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

TECHNOLOGY > COMMUNICATIONS

FEATURES | TIA GHOSE | OCT 29, 2025, 2:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Science history: First computer-to-computer message lays the foundation for the internet, but it crashes halfway through — Oct. 29, 1969

Messages transmitted between two computers located about 380 miles apart would form the basis of what would become the internet.

Computer science professor Leonard Kleinrock poses beside the first Interface Message Processor, which would evolve into the internet routers of today. (Image credit: ROBYN BECK via Getty Images)

Late one evening, UCLA graduate student Charley Kline sat in front of a refrigerator-sized computer and sent the message "lo" to a rack of computers operated by systems engineer Bill Duvall at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), hundreds of miles away.

This message itself was nothing special; it was meant to be the word "login," but the system crashed before it could be completed. However, the transmission was revolutionary, because it formed the foundation for the internet.

The two computers were part of a four-computer network that made up the first Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET).

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The notion of computers communicating was part of a grand vision to "augment human intellect," but ARPANET was ultimately funded for a more practical purpose: to enable the U.S. government to communicate in the wake of a nuclear attack. Although telephone lines would likely be intact in that case, the major switching centers could be destroyed, the military worried.

In 1964, RAND Corp. scientists Paul Baran and Sharla Boehm sent a memo proposing a solution: a "distributed network" that involved "hot potato" switching so that no single node would be crucial to the system's functioning.

From there, the military agency funded a project to create such a network. For the system to work, it needed a way to break up messages from a sender into smaller portions that were then reassembled at the destination. Boehm and Baran simulated this process, which would eventually become known as packet switching, using a program written in the computer language Fortran.

Even before ARPANET was realized, however, the scientists involved in the project clearly saw the potential of the concept. Baran, for instance, envisioned that by the year 2000, people would be able to do their shopping from home using a TV.

In 1968, ARPANET was approved, and by the summer, scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara; SRI; UCLA; and the University of Utah began building the infrastructure to allow their computers to communicate using these packets.

For the first transmission, each computer at these locations had a separate, "mini-computer" called an interface message processor (IMP), which would evolve into the routers of today. The IMPs were meant to break up the messages into smaller chunks and send them to the IMP at the receiving end, which would then reassemble them and echo them to the receiving terminal.

On the storied evening the message was sent, Kline and Duvall were on the phone with each other, confirming when each letter arrived. But the system crashed because the Stanford computer was expecting the data to be transmitted at 10 characters per second, while ARPANET had an unprecedented speed of 5,000 characters per second. This overloaded the "buffer" in the Stanford computer, according to BBC Future.

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"It was like filling a glass with a fire hose," Duvall told BBC Future.

Duvall identified the problem and got the system up and running an hour later.

Almost immediately, researchers realized the potential of the system.

"As of now, computer networks are still in their infancy, but as they grow up and become more sophisticated, we will probably see the spread of 'computer utilities,' which, like present electric and telephone utilities, will service individual homes and offices across the country," Leonard Kleinrock, a computer science professor who was in charge of that UCLA node, said in a statement at the time.

ARPANET would be tied to its military roots until 1981, when the military spun off its own MILNET. And while the term "internetwork" was coined in a 1970s paper to describe a standardized protocol for transmitting and receiving data, the internet itself technically wasn't born until 1983, when ARPANET switched over to that protocol.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/technology/communications/science-history-first-computer-to-computer-message-lays-the-foundation-for-the-internet-but-it-crashes-halfway-through-oct-29-1969 at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

October 28, 2025

- Building blocks of life detected in ice outside the Milky Way for first time ever

- 'Miracle' photo captures Comet Lemmon and meteor seemingly entwined over Earth

- Would you get rid of daylight saving time?

- Watch Air Force fly inside the eye of Hurricane Melissa as experts warn 'storm of the century' will be catastrophic for Jamaica

- 'Puzzling' object discovered by James Webb telescope may be the earliest known galaxy in the universe

- Our favorite everyday running shoes are now at their lowest-ever price

- Future pandemics are a 'certainty' — and we must be better prepared to distribute vaccines equitably, says Dr. Seth Berkley

- 'This is a completely different level of anti-vaccine engagement than we've ever seen before,' says epidemiologist Dr. Seth Berkley

- Glowering 'skull' stares upward from a giant volcanic pit in the Sahara — Earth from space

SPACE > ASTRONOMY

NEWS | SKYLER WARE | OCT 28, 2025, 6:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Building blocks of life detected in ice outside the Milky Way for first time ever

New observations from the James Webb Space Telescope have uncovered five complex organic molecules trapped in the ice around a star outside our galaxy. This cosmic first hints that the stuff of life may be widespread throughout space.

Using JWST, researchers detected several complex carbon-based molecules in the ice around ST6, a developing star in the Large Magellanic Cloud. (Image credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/JPL-Caltech/M. Sewiło et al. (2025))

For the first time, scientists have spotted multiple complex building blocks of life in the ice around a star outside the Milky Way.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), researchers detected five large, carbon-based compounds around a protostar in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy that orbits closely to the Milky Way. The findings could help scientists learn how complex molecules formed in the early universe, according to a study published Oct. 20 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The Large Magellanic Cloud is a dwarf galaxy 160,000 light-years from Earth in the Local Group, a collection of gravitationally bound galaxies that includes the Milky Way. The Large Magellanic Cloud is filled with hot, luminous stars that flood it with ultraviolet radiation. It also has fewer elements heavier than helium than the Milky Way does. These conditions make it similar to those expected in galaxies in the early universe.

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"What we learn in the Large Magellanic Cloud, we can apply to understanding these more distant galaxies from when the universe was much younger," study co-author Marta Sewilo, an astronomer at the University of Maryland and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement. "The harsh conditions tell us more about how complex organic chemistry can occur in these primitive environments where much fewer heavy elements like carbon, nitrogen and oxygen are available for chemical reactions."

In March 2024, the researchers pointed the JWST at a developing star, dubbed ST6, in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Using instruments that measure infrared light, they discovered five complex carbon-based molecules in the ice around the star: methanol, acetaldehyde, ethanol, methyl formate and acetic acid.

Of the five molecules, only methanol has been previously detected in protostars outside the Milky Way. Acetic acid, the main component in vinegar, had never even been conclusively found in space ice before.

"Before Webb, methanol had been the only complex organic molecule conclusively detected in ice around protostars, even in our own galaxy," Sewilo said. "The exceptional quality of our new observations helped us gather an immense amount of information from a single spectrum, more than we've ever had before."

The researchers also found signals that might be caused by a chemical called glycolaldehyde, although further study will be needed to confirm its presence. Glycolaldehyde can react with other molecules to form a type of sugar called ribose, an important component of ribonucleic acid (RNA), which is essential for life.

Finding such complex molecules in the Large Magellanic Cloud suggests that chemical reactions on the surfaces of dust grains can produce complex molecules even under harsh conditions, the researchers said. In future studies, the team plans to look for these and similar molecules around other protostars, both in the Milky Way and in nearby galaxies.

"With this discovery, we've made significant advancements in understanding how complex chemistry emerges in the universe and opening new possibilities for research into how life came to be," Sewilo said in the statement.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/space/astronomy/building-blocks-of-life-detected-in-ice-outside-the-milky-way-for-first-time-ever at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

SPACE > ASTRONOMY > COMETS

NEWS | BRANDON SPECKTOR | OCT 28, 2025, 4:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

'Miracle' photo captures Comet Lemmon and meteor seemingly entwined over Earth

An astronomer in Italy caught a fortuitous image of the bright comet Lemmon seemingly entwined with the glowing trail of a "shooting star."

(Image credit: Gianluca Masi / Virtual Telescope Project)

An astronomer recently aimed his telescope above Manciano, Italy, and caught something incredible: a bright comet seemingly wrapped up in the corkscrewing trail of a meteor, glittering in the same patch of sky like a cosmic barber shop pole.

With millions of miles separating the foreground meteor and the background comet, the odds of capturing such a fortuitous shot were (excuse the pun) astronomically low.

"In this photograph, the meteor's afterglow appears to coil around the comet's ion tail — a pure perspective miracle," astronomer Gianluca Masi, founder of The Virtual Telescope Project and the photographer who captured the stunning shot, wrote in a statement. "The former is an atmospheric effect induced by the meteor, while the comet itself was about 100 million kilometers [62 million miles] away."

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The comet seen here is C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) — one of three comets taking the solar system by storm right now, along with Comet R2 (SWAN) and the interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS. Comet Lemmon, which reached its closest point to Earth on Oct. 21, is the brightest of the bunch and has remained visible enough to be seen through simple telescopes and stargazing binoculars for the following several days.

Masi spotted the comet on the night of Oct. 24. Its long, blue tail — the product of ionized gas that's been vaporized off of the comet's surface and blown away by the solar wind — was clearly visible. But for several minutes during Masi's observations, another streamer-like structure became visible near the comet: the wispy remnants of an ion trail left by a meteor plummeting through Earth's atmosphere.

Seen here as a golden line spiraling around the comet; the meteor trail evolved constantly over the course of Masi's observations, briefly appearing like a part of the comet itself. In reality, the trail is a result of chemical reactions in the atmosphere triggered by the meteor's ultrafast passage.

"The phenomenon is associated with the ionization of molecular oxygen in the atmosphere caused by the meteor event, followed by its recombination, which produces the emission of light at that wavelength," Masi said.

While meteors typically move at more than 100,000 mph (160,000 km/h), their trails can linger in the sky for several minutes, according to NASA. During this time, winds blowing at different altitudes can sculpt those trails into meandering streamer shapes like the one seen here. Masi also posted a time-lapse video of the meteor event on YouTube showing how the glowing trail whipped through the sky in front of the comet for several minutes.

Comet C/2025 A6 Lemmon and red meteor afterglow - YouTube

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The phenomenon of spiral meteor trails has not been extensively studied, but they are considered relatively rare. A series of papers published in the 1980s and 1990s estimated that only 0.5% of observed meteors leave a nonlinear trail. However, this number is far from certain and may have been skewed by suboptimal camera settings used to record meteor trails at the time.

The annual Orionid meteor shower — an event triggered by the debris of Halley's comet — peaked on Oct. 20-21, the same night Comet Lemmon was at its brightest. Although the shower is waning, it will last until Nov. 7, meaning more "shooting stars" like the one Masi caught are possible at night. Keep your eyes on the skies, and maybe you'll spot a "miracle" of your own.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/space/comets/miracle-photo-captures-comet-lemmon-and-meteor-seemingly-entwined-over-earth at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

HEALTH > SLEEP

OPINION | SOPHIE BERDUGO | OCT 28, 2025, 1:07 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Would you get rid of daylight saving time?

The clocks in the U.S. will be "falling back" on Sunday, Nov. 2, marking the end of daylight saving time for 2025. If you could decide, would you abandon it forever?

There are many reasons for and against abandoning daylight saving time. (Image credit: Carol Yepes via Getty Images)

Many countries observe daylight saving time (DST), in which clocks get pushed ahead one hour in March to gain more hours of daylight in the spring and summer. In the U.S., all but two states, Hawaii and Arizona (except for Navajo Nation) observe DST and thus are preparing to make the switch back to standard time on Sunday Nov. 2.

Not everyone is happy with this routine change, however, with recent surveys showing that 54% of Americans and 42% of Britons want to scrap DST altogether.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) favors permanent standard time because it is better aligned with our circadian rhythm, the body's internal clock. Because light exposure regulates the circadian rhythm, a mismatch between our body clock and the environment can lead to problems such as reduced sleep, higher heart rate and blood pressure, and impaired immune function, AASM representatives wrote in a position statement.

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Last month, we reported on a study predicting that abandoning DST and permanently staying on standard time could prevent over 2 million obesity cases and around 300,000 strokes a year in the U.S. by better aligning our circadian rhythm with the environment.

Yet others suggest there are benefits to keeping DST. Recent research, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, reviewed 157 studies from 36 countries on the links between DST and health outcomes and found evidence for fewer deaths and traffic accidents in the summer.

So, if it were up to you, would you abandon daylight saving time? Take our poll, and let us know what you think of each time policy in the comments below. If you choose "I'm undecided," what would persuade you either way?

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This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/health/sleep/would-you-get-rid-of-daylight-saving-time at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

PLANET EARTH > WEATHER > HURRICANES

NEWS | PATRICK PESTER | OCT 28, 2025, 11:46 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Watch Air Force fly inside the eye of Hurricane Melissa as experts warn 'storm of the century' will be catastrophic for Jamaica

The U.S. Air Force's "Hurricane Hunters" have flown inside the eye of Hurricane Melissa, capturing eerie footage of the historic storm that has caused widespread devastation in Jamaica.

(Image credit: Handout via Getty Images)

The Air Force has captured jaw-dropping footage from inside the eye of Hurricane Melissa, which has caused widespread devastation as it made landfall in Jamaica.

The 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, known as the "Hurricane Hunters," entered the hurricane on Monday morning (Oct. 27) to collect data for the National Hurricane Center, News18 reported.

The Hurricane Hunters were met with a gigantic wall of swirling clouds, videos on the social platform X show. The eye appears eerily calm in the videos and has an almost-enchanting quality to it, yet the storm will be anything but for people in its path. The Category 5 hurricane is expected to make landfall on the southern coastline of Jamaica on Tuesday (Oct. 28), where it will unleash catastrophic damage.

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Fifth and final pass through Hurricane Melissa for our crew today. Just after noon entering from the NW corner exiting SE. pic.twitter.com/BVtyIlZpsxOctober 27, 2025

Caribbean weather forecasts have been extremely ominous for days. AccuWeather meteorologists have warned that the hurricane could trigger a humanitarian crisis, while the U.S. National Hurricane Center noted that the life-threatening storm is expected to bring "catastrophic flash flooding, landslides and destructive winds."

The World Meteorological Organization's tropical cyclone specialist, Anne-Claire Fontan, told a press briefing that Hurricane Melissa will be "the storm of the century" for Jamaica, according to Reuters. Jamaica hasn’t been hit by a hurricane since Category 1 Hurricane Sandy made landfall there in 2012, and the island has never taken a direct blow from a Category 5 storm before. The storm has already caused three fatalities on the island.

Near-record-warm Caribbean waters have fueled Melissa's strength as it has slowly closed in on Jamaica. The country's authorities have urged citizens to seek immediate shelter and said that many communities will not survive the storm, the Guardian reported.

A thread of videos from today’s flight into Hurricane MelissaIn this first one we are entering from the southeast just after sunrise and the bright arc on the far northwest eye wall is the light just beginning to make it over the top from behind us. pic.twitter.com/qGdpp7lbCNOctober 27, 2025

The risk to life may be similar to 2019's Hurricane Dorian, which hit the Bahamas, and 1992's Hurricane Andrew, which hit the southeastern U.S and the Bahamas, AccuWeather reported. The official death toll for Hurricane Dorian was 74 people, with 282 more still missing, while Hurricane Andrew directly caused 65 deaths and was the most devastating hurricane in Florida's history.

Hurricane Melissa also threatens countries such as Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Cuba, with at least four storm-related deaths already reported across Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Meteorologists categorize hurricanes from 1 to 5 based on their maximum sustained wind speeds — anything above Category 2 is considered a major hurricane. Hurricanes reach Category 5 status when they have sustained winds of at least 157 mph (252 km/h).

On Monday, Hurricane Melissa blew past this threshold when its wind speeds strengthened to 175 mph (282 km/h), establishing it as the strongest hurricane of 2025 and potentially the most intense hurricane ever recorded so late in the Atlantic hurricane season (which runs from the beginning of June to the end of November), AccuWeather reported.

More hurricanes are rapidly intensifying in the Atlantic as climate change causes atmospheric and sea temperature to soar. Since March 2023, average sea surface temperatures around the world have broken records, with warming waters adding extra energy to hurricanes as they grow.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/hurricanes/watch-air-force-fly-inside-the-eye-of-hurricane-melissa-as-experts-warn-storm-of-the-century-will-be-catastrophic-for-jamaica at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

SPACE > ASTRONOMY > COSMOLOGY

NEWS | SOPHIE BERDUGO | OCT 28, 2025, 10:52 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

'Puzzling' object discovered by James Webb telescope may be the earliest known galaxy in the universe

While scouring images from the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers spotted Capotauro, "one of the most puzzling discoveries" to date.

Capotauro is located near the tail of the Big Dipper constellation. (Image credit: Image processing: Giuseppe Capriotti & Giovanni Gandolfi. Data: NASA / ESA / CSA / JWST / CEERS collaboration.)

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have spotted a very bright and mysterious object that could be a galaxy that emerged just 100 million years after the Big Bang, which would make it the universe's earliest known galaxy, a new study suggests.

Alternatively, Capotauro may be an extraordinary brown dwarf (a "failed star" that is more massive than the largest gas giant planets but not large enough to sustain nuclear fusion in its core) that lives on the outer edges of the Milky Way while smoldering at a mere 80 degrees Fahrenheit (27 degrees Celsius).

Capotauro's exact identity is not certain yet, the researchers wrote in the paper, which was posted Sept. 1 to the preprint server arXiv but has not been peer-reviewed yet.

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"Capotauro, whatever it is, seems really interesting and promising," co-author Giovanni Gandolfi, an astrophysicist at the National Institute of Astrophysics in Italy, told Live Science.

Capotauro was originally spotted by Gandolfi and his team during a previous study, in which they tried to identify very old galaxies in JWST observations. But the lack of fine-grained data made it impossible to narrow down the object's identity, which Gandolfi said was like having a slither of DNA at a crime scene but too many matches in the FBI database to be helpful.

Then, in March, JWST released more data on Capotauro that was like getting a partial fingerprint, thus allowing them to whittle down the list to just a handful of suspects, Gandolfi said.

To determine what Capotauro could be, the team used images taken by JWST's Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) at seven wavelengths as part of the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) survey to measure Capotauro's brightness. The object was detected only at the two longest NIRCam wavelengths.

Then, they used limited, but more fine-grained data from JWST's Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) to get a more accurate picture of Capotauro's age and temperature.

Combining the NIRCam and NIRSpec data, the researchers used models to test three possible galaxy configurations, as well as a scenario in which Capotauro might instead be a brown dwarf on the outer rim of the Milky Way. They also tested a range of other possible scenarios, such as the object being a very odd young galaxy or a peculiar exoplanet.

The results were inconclusive, meaning the team could not decisively determine Capotauro's identity. However, they identified the two most likely options.

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Under the early-galaxy interpretation, Capotauro was consistently found to have formed around 100 million years after the Big Bang — pushing the age of the oldest known galaxy back by around 200 million years. It was estimated to be gigantic, at over a billion solar masses.

The other possibility is that Capotauro is a very unusual brown dwarf. If this is the case, Capotauro would be the coldest and farthest known brown dwarf in our galaxy, at over seven light-years away and only 300 kelvins (80 F, or 27 C), the researchers wrote in the study. If Capotauro is a pristine brown dwarf, Gandolfi said, scientists now have the chance to investigate the formation of our galaxy.

Both possibilities are "very exciting" because they would challenge what we thought we knew about our own galaxy and how galaxies form and evolve in general, Gandolfi added.

Muhammad Latif, an astrophysicist at United Arab Emirates University who was not involved in the research, said Capotauro is "one of the most puzzling discoveries" from JWST to date.

"It's a very intriguing object in the sense that whatever the way you interpret it, it basically is kind of pushing the boundaries of our knowledge to the edge," he told Live Science.

More precise data on the light emitted by Capotauro is needed to pinpoint its exact properties, Latif said. The team has submitted a request for JWST to gather more data on this mysterious object, Gandolfi added, and is scanning other areas of the universe for similar-looking objects.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/space/cosmology/puzzling-object-discovered-by-james-webb-telescope-may-be-the-earliest-known-galaxy-in-the-universe at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

HEALTH > EXERCISE

DEALS | ANNA GORA | OCT 28, 2025, 7:30 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Our favorite everyday running shoes are now at their lowest-ever price

Save up to 50% on the ultra-comfortable New Balance Fresh Foam X 1080 V14 running shoes at Amazon.

(Image credit: New Balance/ Future)

The New Balance Fresh Foam X 1080 V14 running shoe is the king of easy runs and recovery walks, and one of the best daily trainers for conquering your mid-week treadmill workouts. It's durable, stable and highly breathable, but most importantly, it's well-cushioned and very comfortable to wear. The best part? The New Balance Fresh Foam X 1080 V14 has just been discounted for the first time since its release in October last year.

Save up to 50% on the New Balance Men's Fresh Foam X 1080 V14 running shoe at Amazon. Women's collection has also been heavily discounted, with up to 37% off on most sizes and colors.

This running shoe is also a personal favorite of our running expert. Kate Carter gave them a near-perfect 4.5-star rating in her full New Balance 1080 V14 running shoes review, and named it the best option for everyday runs in our guide to the best running shoes for supination. The 1080 v14 is an excellent buy even at full price, but with this Amazon deal, it is simply a steal.

Best for everyday runs

Save 47% ($77.59)

New Balance Fresh Foam X 1080 V14: was $164.99 now $87.40 at Amazon

Save up to 50% on the New Balance Men's Fresh Foam X 1080 V14 running shoes. With an ultra-cushioned Fresh Foam X midsole, breathable design and durable build, they are the perfect trainer for everyday runs and recovery walks.

Women's Fresh Foam X 1080 V14 running shoes are also on sale with discounts going up to 37%.

View Deal

Kate Carter

Freelance journalist and product tester

Kate Carter is a marathon runner, England Athletics coach and experienced freelance journalist. She regularly appears in The Guardian, Runner's World, World Athletics, and many other publications. At Live Science, Kate writes about running gear, exercise equipment and fitness tracking, and is one of the biggest contributors to our guide on the best running shoes for supination.

- Our experts have also reviewed and rated the best telescopes, binoculars, star projectors, cameras, fitness trackers, running shoes, rowing machines and more.

Image 1 of 4

Kate Carter reviewed the New Balance 1080 V14 running shoes in June this year.(Image credit: Kate Carter)

(Image credit: Future/ Kate Carter)

(Image credit: Future/Kate Carter)

(Image credit: Future/ Kate Carter)

The New Balance Fresh Foam X 1080 V14 running shoe won our reviewer over with its comfort, cushioning and durability, and it has been her go-to daily trainer for the past year. In the words of Kate Carter herself, "If you want an all-round shoe that can be worn almost anywhere, and in almost any conditions, look no further. It's a shoe that can do a casual parkrun, a tempo session, a long run and almost everything else." And who are we to argue with an expert?

There is a caveat, though. While the New Balance Fresh Foam X 1080 V14 may be so soft that it gives the feeling of walking on the clouds, this also means that it can be just a bit too cushioned for some people. As our reviewer pointed out, it may not be the best option for speedwork and racing. When it comes to anything else, however, the New Balance Fresh Foam X 1080 V14 is unlikely to disappoint — and now, you can get this excellent all-rounder at its lowest-ever price.

Key features: Fresh Foam X platform, drop 6 mm, heel stack height 38 mm, forefoot stack height 32 mm

Product launched: October 2024

Price history: The price of the New Balance Fresh Foam X 1080 V14 has remained at $164.99 since its release in October 2024. Today marks the first time Amazon has put these running shoes on sale, offering up to 50% off on men's and up to 37% off on women's collection.

Price comparison: Amazon: up to 50% off | New Balance: up to 21% off | REI: up to 20% off

Reviews consensus: One of the best daily trainers on the market, the New Balance Fresh Foam X 1080 V14 gets a lot of praise for its plush cushioning, breathable upper and durable construction. Many reviewers also applaud its versatile design and bouncy platform, and generally consider it good value for money. Negative remarks vary depending on the tester, but they primarily concern the level of cushioning. Some reviewers also complained about the lack of significant upgrades to the 1080 V13 model.

Live Science: ★★★★½ | Tom's Guide: ★★★★ | T3: ★★★★

Featured in guides: Best running shoes for supination

✅ Buy it if: You want a comfortable, well-cushioned running shoe for everyday runs and strolls.

❌ Don't buy it if: You are looking for a responsive, racing-focused running shoe, or something under $50 (such as the Adidas Racer TR23 Sneaker, now up to 46% at Amazon).

Check out our other guides to the best treadmills, exercise bikes, fitness trackers, running watches and much more.

$100.03 at Amazon

$104.94 at Walmart

$109.99 at Zappos

$115.50 at Amazon

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/health/exercise/our-favorite-everyday-running-shoes-are-now-at-their-lowest-ever-price at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

HEALTH > MEDICINE & DRUGS

FEATURES | DR. SETH BERKLEY, NICOLETTA LANESE, NICOLETTA LANESE | OCT 28, 2025, 7:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Future pandemics are a 'certainty' — and we must be better prepared to distribute vaccines equitably, says Dr. Seth Berkley

Months before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, efforts were already underway to ensure low-income countries would get access to future vaccines against the infection. The book "Fair Doses" tells that story and discusses the ongoing fight for vaccine equity around the world.

"Fair Doses," a new book from Dr. Seth Berkley, looks back to the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines to see how we can better prepare for the next pandemic. (Image credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Months before COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic, public health leaders were poring over the early data coming out of China and preparing for the worst.

Dr. Seth Berkley — a renowned infectious-disease epidemiologist and former CEO of Gavi, an international organization aimed at improving children's vaccine access — was among those leaders. In January 2020, Berkley and colleagues were working to establish an infrastructure so that, if and when scientists created vaccines for this novel virus, the shots wouldn't be hoarded by high-income countries and denied to poor nations.

Now, Berkley has released a new book — "Fair Doses: An Insider's Story of the Pandemic and the Global Fight for Vaccine Equity" (University of California Press, 2025) — that recounts how that initiative unfolded and what lessons were learned through the process, while underscoring why the broader fight for vaccine equity is far from finished.

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On January 23, 2020, I was high up in the Swiss Alps in Davos, attending the World Economic Forum (WEF). I was at Davos as the CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, the largest purchaser of vaccines in the world and which worked to provide new and underutilized vaccines to children in developing countries — countries in which about half the world's children live. As usual, I was preoccupied with how we could do a better job protecting the world with vaccines for new and old diseases. And there were murmurs of a new epidemic of respiratory disease caused by a novel coronavirus in China on the horizon.

At the bar of the Hard Rock Hotel my wife, Cynthia [an academic physician and consultant], and I met with Richard Hatchett, CEO of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). Over nachos and drinks, we started to talk through what was likely to happen with the new coronavirus, which would later be named COVID-19. Discussion about the disease hadn't really reached a high political level and was not formally on the Davos agenda, but concern was growing, and many people during that week asked us our opinions.

The first question we discussed was whether this was just going to be a worrisome outbreak or the Big One that epidemiologists had long warned might come. So far, we only had official confirmation of a point outbreak, spreading from animals at the Wuhan live animal market to humans. But on the nerdy LISTSERVs about infectious disease and epidemics, there was already a lot of chatter about how the virus might be spreading from person to person, which is a huge red flag in our field. We agreed that there was potential for the new virus to spread dramatically. Regardless of whether this was or was not the Big One, we needed to prepare.

Such a scenario creates a problem for all countries, even those with access to the vaccines. But to me a far bigger concern was the unfairness of high-income countries' self-interest. People in developing nations without access to vaccines were historically already the most vulnerable to disease and the most likely to suffer complications if they got sick. They already had limited access to the most basic medical treatment.

Improving the delivery of existing vaccines and building up better delivery systems is the best way to detect outbreaks early, prepare communities for outbreaks of disease, and ensure health systems aren't overwhelmed in an emergency — as well as strengthen our epidemic stockpiles.

If vaccines against the disease could be made — and at the time, we were far from certain they could be — we knew that stocks would be quickly bought up by the richest countries. The logical conclusion was that the bulk of the world's population, and most especially those in lower income, developing countries, would be locked out of these deals, and so denied timely access to whatever vaccine supplies became available.

That was where we thought we could help. So, Richard, Cynthia, and I talked through a rough outline of what would be needed to ensure equitable access to any COVID-19 vaccines that emerged and the roles that various organizations — such as CEPI, Gavi, UNICEF, and WHO — as well as the pharmaceutical companies might play to make that happen.

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Imagining ourselves in the place of government decision-makers, we envisioned that they would have an incentive to participate in a mechanism that pooled risk by making advance purchase commitments for a wide variety of candidate vaccines. Their buy-in could help us pool demand, generating enough scale to incentivize increasing production and to negotiate the best prices on everyone's behalf. We wanted to promote solidarity, to publicize and meet lower-income country needs, and to create an early, strong global movement for equitable access.

Richard went from Davos back to London and talked with the CEPI team, I went back to Geneva to talk to the Gavi team and our Alliance partners WHO and UNICEF, and we started our collaboration. That joint effort became COVAX [COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access, an initiative to ensure equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines].

Our small team working on COVAX undertook what I believe was the most ambitious public health effort of the 21st century so far. The first COVAX dose was delivered to a COVAX-supported country 39 days after the first jab in the United Kingdom. Due to the time required for WHO to prequalify the vaccine, 43 days later the first doses were administered in Africa, in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire. Forty-two days later, COVAX vaccines had been distributed to 100 countries. There were many delays due to export bans, vaccine nationalism, and manufacturing delays. But by the end of 2021, close to 1 billion doses had been distributed; by the end of 2022, COVAX had delivered more than 1.6 billion doses to people in the world's poorest countries and was estimated to have averted 2.7 million deaths in those countries. That's the fastest rollout of vaccines to developing countries ever.

WHO estimates that some 16 million people died during the first two years of the pandemic; we are still counting, and that number will doubtlessly grow. And COVID-19 is by no means the only infectious risk: Currently, about one in seven deaths, accounting for more than 7 million people a year, is due to an infectious disease. Millions of people die from diseases for which we already have vaccines.

It's hard to put numbers on the deaths that have been prevented by vaccines, but some estimates say that vaccines have saved more than half a billion lives over the past 70 years, the time period they have been routinely available. And this only covers the 30 or so vaccines we have against the more than 300 infectious diseases known to plague humanity.

More and better vaccines need to be developed, particularly for major killers such as tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV, and, hopefully, more cancers. And in the meantime, the risks for infectious diseases are shifting.

Even those of us who had been working in the field for years were surprised at how poorly prepared the world was for an emergency of this magnitude. What's more, we faced the perils of vaccine nationalism, vaccine diplomacy, and the sometimes-selfish behaviors of manufacturers and world leaders. It was clear from the start that we wouldn't be able to do this work perfectly. But we did our best, and I've sought to set down both what we did and what I wish we could have done differently so that we can learn from our history.

As the world continues to recover from the worst of the pandemic years, we may not relish thinking about another pandemic ahead. We face complacency, fatigue, and a growing distrust of both science and institutions, fed by intentional disinformation that spreads rapidly online. But we also have an opportunity to harness what we've learned to do better next time — and there is epidemiologic certainty that a next time will come. When it does, we need to have robust public health systems in place, and ideally, vaccines.

Reprinted from Fair Doses: An Insider's Story of the Pandemic and the Global Fight for Vaccine Equity by Seth Berkley, MD, courtesy of University of California Press. Copyright 2025.

$29.95 at Amazon

Fair Doses: An Insider's Story of the Pandemic and the Global Fight for Vaccine Equity

"Fair Doses" is a story of vaccines: how they came about, why they are important, and how they have been made globally available — although our quest for vaccine equity is still ongoing. In this fascinating deep dive into vaccines, Dr. Seth Berkley, an internationally recognized infectious-disease epidemiologist and public health leader, offers an inside view of the challenges of developing and disseminating vaccines for a broad swath of illnesses, from Ebola to AIDS to malaria and beyond.

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This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/health/medicine-drugs/future-pandemics-are-a-certainty-and-we-must-be-better-prepared-to-distribute-vaccines-equitably-says-dr-seth-berkley at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

HEALTH > MEDICINE & DRUGS

INTERVIEW | NICOLETTA LANESE | OCT 28, 2025, 7:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

'This is a completely different level of anti-vaccine engagement than we've ever seen before,' says epidemiologist Dr. Seth Berkley

Epidemiologist Dr. Seth Berkley spoke to Live Science about the importance of vaccine equity and the obstacles undermining it, as well as the political challenges to vaccines being raised in the U.S.

Public health leaders worked to deliver vaccines equitably across the world during the COVID-19 pandemic. They made great strides, but in the future, they could do even better, Dr. Seth Berkley argues. (Image credit: Peter Dazeley via Getty Images)

Within weeks of the first cases of a "mysterious pneumonia-like illness" being reported in Wuhan, China, public health leaders were convening to assess the threat and shore up systems to mitigate the potential harm to come. This work started unfolding months before COVID-19 would be officially declared a pandemic.

Dr. Seth Berkley — a renowned infectious-disease epidemiologist and former CEO of Gavi, an international organization aimed at improving children's vaccine access — was one figure at the forefront of the effort to ensure future COVID-19 vaccines would be distributed to the world's poorest nations. In his new book "Fair Doses: An Insider's Story of the Pandemic and the Global Fight for Vaccine Equity" (University of California Press, 2025), Berkley recounts those pandemic-era efforts and reflects on what went right and what went wrong.

Live Science spoke with Berkley about the book and the lessons we should take forward into the world's next big outbreak — the emergence of which, Berkley argues, is a matter of "when," not "if."

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Nicoletta Lanese: What was the impetus to write this book?

Dr. Seth Berkley: When the book was written, the real purpose of it was to capture the experience [of the pandemic], post-COVID and post-COVAX. COVAX [COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access] was an initiative we put together when we realized that this looked like it was going to become a more severe infection. In doing that, we had all kinds of problems, but in the end, we did do the fastest and largest rollout of vaccines in history. We ended up with 57% of people in the developing world, the poorest 92 countries, getting coverage with primary doses, versus 67% globally — so not perfect equity, but better than it had ever been done before.

Dr. Seth Berkley. (Image credit: Courtesy of University of California Press)

What I was worried about is [that] people wouldn't capture the lessons learned, both good and bad. The book tries to explain what it took to get there, and also who were the good players, who were the bad players.

Now, since the book was written, the world has changed dramatically. I couldn't — I mean, I suppose I could have ripped the book up and started writing again. I didn't do that, but I did have a chance to say in the preface, and then later on at the end of the book, how much had changed, given the intense anti-vaccine attitudes that we're seeing right now in the U.S. government, particularly in the secretary of health and human services [HHS], Robert Kennedy Jr., who is a long-term vaccine skeptic and a conspiracy theorist on these things.

It's obviously quite concerning in regard to how that may affect Americans. But also it's important for Americans to understand that the vaccine work that's done in other countries also affects America, because the diseases we get come from both inside and outside.

NL: On that point, we've seen the U.S. withdraw support from initiatives that support vaccine equity globally. What are the potential impacts of that?

SB: So if we go back — I'll use a period of 50 years, for convenience — less than 5% of people in the world received even a single dose of vaccine. Not all the doses that were recommended — a single dose. And we've gone from that level up until vaccines, now, are the most widely distributed health intervention in the world. Along with that, we've seen a 70% reduction in vaccine-preventable disease deaths, and we've seen a more than 50% reduction in under-5 child mortality, directly as a result of this type of work.

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So this is a really big deal. We've also seen control of many infectious diseases: the eradication of smallpox, the almost complete elimination of wild polio, the control of measles in many countries, etc. etc. Those are the successes. But the idea now is that we back away from this, when we have these infectious diseases that are still a risk — and as we've recently seen in the U.S., we've had some big measles outbreaks.

The U.S. actually had received the status of having eliminated endogenous measles infections, meaning that when new infections would occur, they had to come from outside. Now, the U.S. is at risk of losing that designation. This is why it's so important to think about it globally, because if we see many more measles infections occurring in other countries and given the movement of people, you're eventually going to see those cases in the United States if vaccine rates go down. And they are going down.

We've got a situation where people are discrediting experts and putting people in place who do not have expertise and have preconceived notions on vaccines. They say they're trying to increase trust, but I don't see how that increases trust. And we're now fractured in the U.S.; you've seen most recently this idea that states are coming together to put out their own recommendations. Professional societies are putting out recommendations, instead of having one definitive set. In the end, I don't think that helps with confidence.

NL: Do you feel these shifts in the U.S. stem from an amplification of an old problem we've had, or more from a brand-new issue?

SB: It's a little of both. Vaccine hesitancy has existed from the first vaccine, which was in the 1700s smallpox right after the original vaccine was shown to work. There were cartoons showing — because the vaccine was derived from cows — there were pictures of people with cow horns growing out of their heads and all kinds of things like that. So this is not a new problem.

What is new is having the intense politicization of this — the idea that one political party more than another political party has these beliefs and therefore acts on them, so there are different coverage slates for vaccines for different parties. And then finally, [there's] the fact that you've got government leaders that are pushing these conspiracy theories and discrediting institutions that have scientific professionals and mechanisms that have been set up to try to have the best science possible.

During COVID, we saw Russian bots and Chinese bots that were providing disinformation, and of course, this spread like wildfire. But also for the first time that I know of, we had the U.S. government, the Defense Department, putting out misinformation to try to discredit the Chinese vaccine. So this is a kind of warfare that's going on that has some terrible effects. … This is a completely different level of anti-vaccine engagement than we've ever seen before.

By definition, everybody should invest their marginal dollars in preventing disease before they get to investing in treating diseases — but that's not human nature.

Dr. Seth Berkley, Brown University

NL: You often hear the argument that, because vaccines have worked so well, people lack a fear of vaccine-preventable diseases. Do you see any validity to that?

SB: When you look at this new era of misinformation — as I said, there's always been vaccine misinformation. But the difference is, if you are in a country that has very high vaccination rates and therefore the diseases have virtually disappeared, it's very easy for a parent to say, "I don't want my kid to be injected with something. … I don't know anything about these diseases. I've never seen them. How bad can they be?" So that's one side of it.

When you're living in a developing country and these diseases are still there, you see kids that have morbidity from these diseases. You see people paralyzed from polio. You see people who are blind or deaf from German measles [also called rubella]. And so your benefit-harm ratio is seen as different in these different populations. And it's the job of science to ask the question, what is the benefit-to-cost ratio of these products?

The other thing that's really hard is, because we don't see these diseases, you don't know the kind of really severe side effects that occur. In measles, there's a disease called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis. It's a fairly rare disease — but when it happens, the child's brain dissolves, and there is nothing you can do.

The challenge is that you don't want people to live in fear all the time, but no parent wants that to happen to their child. It's about how you can both educate and have people aware of the side effects of these diseases, and even ones that are rare. That's really the challenge right now. I think the only way to solve that is education.

NL: Another focus of the book is a roadmap to global vaccine equity. What do you see as the biggest obstacles to that goal?

SB: First of all, the stuff we've just discussed, which is having awareness of the value of vaccination, and that's critical for populations everywhere in the world. And obviously keeping that knowledge up even when the diseases get rarer and rarer is really important.

The second critical point is having access to vaccines. What Gavi was able to do was, by consolidating the buying power of many different countries, we were able to drive the price [of routine vaccines] down 98% from that of what it cost in the United States, which makes it really affordable. Vaccines are cost-effective even at higher prices, but obviously the more affordable they are, the better it is. So a priority is making sure that those products are available and that they are being produced in the quantities they need.

The third part of it is having delivery systems in place, and this is really a challenge. As I mentioned at the beginning, vaccines are the most widely distributed health intervention, and about 90% of families in the world have access to routine vaccines. … Reaching [the last 10%] with that system not only provides vaccines but also provides health access, and it also means there is an early warning system to make sure that there are health workers for everybody — so that if there are outbreaks or weird diseases that appear, you have a system that can report back.

Lastly, I'd say that there's importance in having global surveillance for new infections. It's evolutionarily certain we're going to have new outbreaks and new pandemics, and that warning system is critical for everybody in the world. Building this prevention system, which is very cost-effective, is the right thing to do everywhere, and it's a matter of making that a priority.

NL: I want to come back to the point that epidemics and pandemics are essentially inevitable. With that in mind, how do we prepare?

SB: Epidemics are evolutionarily certain — certainly, that's true. So the first part of that is, how do we prepare for things that we know, like flu, like COVID, like hemorrhagic fevers? These are things that we now have interventions for. And how do we make sure that the world is ready, that there are systems of laboratories, that there are stockpiles of vaccines ready to go, and [that there's] the ability to scale them up?

Unfortunately, a lot of that is now being broken apart. At this moment in time, we [the United States] are firing people in major health agencies. We're pulling out of the World Health Organization. We're changing our development assistance and stopping training of scientists, etc. etc. So we are breaking down the systems that exist to deal with that [preparation for known threats], which is a real problem.

Then, when you get to the "unknown unknowns," you also want to have the science ready to go. There's a good example right now, of pulling out of mRNA vaccines. [The HHS recently pulled funding from research-and-development projects focused on mRNA vaccines.] mRNA vaccines may not be perfect; they may not even be the best vaccines for some diseases. But they are the fastest, because you can make them very quickly from the genome. Then you can, in essence, "print" the vaccine and scale it up very quickly.

In the case of a very severe pandemic that has a very high mortality rate, that is the best way: to make an mRNA vaccine to deal with it. The idea that we would not want to continue to work on mRNA — improving it, making it better — and instead we're just pulling research out seems to me to be very, very shortsighted indeed.

NL: To continue on mRNA, would you say that in a pandemic scenario, it's speed that's the most crucial element of the vaccine? Or are there other advantages to the mRNA platform?

SB: The absolute advantage there is speed. And remember, COVID had a mortality rate of about 1.5%, 2%. Some of the other diseases that we know of, that potentially could spread, have mortality rates of 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%. If you had something like that — that's a respiratory pathogen spreading quickly with very high mortality rates — every hour counts in terms of speed.

So mRNA is the fastest. … It may be that, once you have mRNA vaccines, you may want to shift to other vaccines that may give longer duration of protection, give better immune responses, etc. [for a given pathogen]. But you can't make those in the same time frame, so it may be a handoff from one to another.

One of the challenges in COVID was that there were over 200 different vaccines that were made, but mRNA was so fast out of the block that others really didn't get a chance to become successful. If I use an example, the Novavax vaccine, which is a protein[-based vaccine], never really got global traction, even though it was a very effective, very safe vaccine that maybe had a longer duration of protection.

The challenge is, how do we, in that setting, have comparative science to say which are the best products? That will not be done by the pharmaceutical sector because they don't have any incentive to do head-to-head comparisons. That needs to be done by international agencies or by governments.

NL: What else can readers expect from "Fair Doses"?

SB: The book is also filled with lots of interesting nuggets of stories of who behaved well and who didn't behave well during the pandemic, and that includes political leaders, that includes pharmaceutical companies, that includes agencies. So it gives a nuanced understanding of what that time really looked like.

We came together, along with our partners, to try to see if we could change the normal dynamic that occurs in a pandemic, which is wealthy countries buy all the doses and there's no doses available for anybody else. That was our goal going into it, and the book tells the story of how we put together this initiative, how we raised the $12.5 billion necessary to buy vaccines, how we ultimately delivered more than 2 billion doses to 146 countries.

One of the questions is, how do we do better? What do we learn from that? And that's something we try to explore in the book.

Editor's note: This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Disclaimer

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

$29.95 at Amazon

Fair Doses: An Insider's Story of the Pandemic and the Global Fight for Vaccine Equity

"Fair Doses" is a story of vaccines: how they came about, why they are important, and how they have been made globally available — although our quest for vaccine equity is still ongoing. In this fascinating deep dive into vaccines, Dr. Seth Berkley, an internationally recognized infectious-disease epidemiologist and public health leader, offers an inside view of the challenges of developing and disseminating vaccines for a broad swath of illnesses, from Ebola to AIDS to malaria and beyond.

View Deal

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/health/medicine-drugs/this-is-a-completely-different-level-of-anti-vaccine-engagement-than-weve-ever-seen-before-says-epidemiologist-dr-seth-berkley at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

PLANET EARTH > VOLCANOS

FEATURES | HARRY BAKER | OCT 28, 2025, 4:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Glowering 'skull' stares upward from a giant volcanic pit in the Sahara — Earth from space

A 2023 astronaut photo shows off an unusual cranium-like structure appearing to stare up into space from the floor of a large volcanic caldera in Chad.

A 2023 astronaut photo captured the menacing glare of the Trau au Natron caldera in the Tibesti Massif of Chad. (Image credit: NASA/ISS program)

This eerie astronaut photo shows a ghostly structure with a skull-like appearance glowering up into space from the floor of a giant volcanic pit in the Sahara.

The cranium lookalike is located on the floor of Trou au Natron, also known as Doon Orei — a 3,300-foot-wide (1,000 meters) volcanic caldera, or crater, in northern Chad. (Trou au Natron translates to "natron hole" in French, while Doon Orei means "big hole" in Teda.)

The volcanic pit was carved out by a massive eruption hundreds of thousands of years ago and sits at the heart of the Tibesti Massif, a 300-mile-long (480 kilometers) mountain range that stretches across the center of the Sahara desert through Chad and Libya, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

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When viewed from space, the caldera's floor has an unmistakable skull-like appearance. But when viewed from ground level (see below), it looks almost unrecognizable.

Related: See all the best images of Earth from space

The skull takes on a more deformed appearance when viewed from the cladera's rim. (Image credit: Gerhard Holub/Wikimedia)

The white color of the skull's mouth, nose and cheeks is the result of natron, a naturally occurring mixture of sodium carbonate decahydrate, sodium bicarbonate, sodium chloride and sodium sulfate. This salty mix is extremely flaky and looks like cracked paint when viewed up close.

The eyes and nose hole areas are actually cinder cones — steep conical hills built around volcanic vents that tower above the rest of the caldera floor. The darker area to the left of the face is the shadow cast by the tall rim of the crater, which helps give the skull its distinctive shape.

From ground level, the skull shape completely disappears. Instead, all you can see is tall cinder cones tower above a sea of flaky natron. (Image credit: Alexios Niarchos/Wikimedia)

Trou au Natron is barren and lifeless today, but experts believe it was once a thriving glacial lake. In the 1960s, researchers discovered fossils of sea snails and plankton beneath the pit's natron-covered floor, which date back to 14,000 years ago. In 2015, a follow-up expedition found algal fossils that date back as far as 120,000 years ago.

The caldera has been volcanically dormant since shortly after it formed. However, it is situated close to Tarso Toussidé, a broad volcanic feature covered with a sea of frozen lava (located just beyond the top of the satellite image). Tarso Toussidé is home to a stratovolcano that is still believed to be volcanically active despite not erupting for more than 12,000 years, according to the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program.

Trou au Natron is not the only volcanic structure that looks like a skull when viewed from space: The Chiltepe Peninsula in Nicaragua's Lake Managua has a pair of volcanic lakes, each sitting within its own caldera, which give the landmass a very similar appearance to the caldera in Chad.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/volcanos/glowering-skull-stares-upward-from-a-giant-volcanic-pit-in-the-sahara-earth-from-space at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

October 27, 2025

- Differences in red blood cells may have 'hastened the extinction' of our Neanderthal cousins, new study suggests

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ARCHAEOLOGY > HUMAN EVOLUTION

NEWS | KRISTINA KILLGROVE | OCT 27, 2025, 5:52 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Differences in red blood cells may have 'hastened the extinction' of our Neanderthal cousins, new study suggests

Gene variants in red blood cell function may have doomed the hybrid babies of Neanderthals and modern humans.

Hybrid Neanderthal-human mothers may have had red blood cell incompatibilities with their fetuses. (Image credit: Getty Images)

A fatal genetic incompatibility between Neanderthals and modern humans may have hastened the extinction of our ancient cousins, new research suggests.

Researchers found that different versions of a gene tied to red blood cell function may have caused Neanderthal-human hybrid women to miscarry their fetuses.

When Neanderthals and early modern humans met in Eurasia around 45,000 years ago, "they exchanged genes — and may also have passed on hidden reproductive risks that shaped the fate of both lineages," Patrick Eppenberger, co-head of the Evolutionary Pathophysiology and Mummy Studies Group at the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine in Zurich, and colleagues wrote in a study posted to the preprint database bioRxiv Sept. 29. (It has not been peer-reviewed yet.)

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The researchers focused on the PIEZO1 gene, which affects red blood cells and is found in both modern humans (Homo sapiens) and Neanderthals. They discovered that the PIEZO1 gene differed between Neanderthals and modern humans.

The Neanderthal variant, which is similar to the variant found in other great apes, allowed the hemoglobin in red blood cells to cling more tightly to oxygen molecules, while the novel H. sapiens variant allowed oxygen to be passed more efficiently into surrounding tissue. Neanderthals may have maintained the original variant because it was beneficial for surviving extreme cold and periods of starvation, the researchers suggested.

But when maternal blood has abnormally high amounts of oxygen bound to hemoglobin, that means low levels of oxygen are passed on to a fetus through the placenta. This can cause hypoxia (oxygen deficiency) or restricted growth of the fetus or miscarriage.

But because of the way the PIEZO1 gene variants are inherited, the incompatibility would arise only when a hybrid Neanderthal-human mother mated with a modern-human father or with a hybrid Neanderthal-human father.

"Many of their offspring would fail to survive," the researchers wrote. This, in turn, would mean Neanderthal women would pass on less of their mitochondrial DNA, which is carried in the egg and passes from mother to child, the authors wrote in the study. Over the course of several generations of mating between Neanderthals and humans, this may have significantly compromised hybrid Neanderthals' ability to have kids, the researchers noted.

"The PIEZO1 incompatibility may have accelerated the demise of the Neanderthals by gradually eroding their reproductive capacity whenever the two groups interacted," they wrote.

April Nowell, a Paleolithic archaeologist at the University of Victoria who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email that the study adds a much-needed piece of the puzzle to the question of Neanderthal extinction — namely, maternal-fetal incompatibility in oxygen transfer during pregnancy.

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"It's super interesting that an allele [gene variant] that may have saved Neanderthals in the past was their ultimate undoing when they began to interbreed with modern humans," Nowell said.

John Hawks, a biological anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email that the maternal-fetal incompatibility of PIEZO1 was intriguing and analogous to other genetic blood conditions, such as Rh factor incompatibility in modern humans.

"This is one of many potential cases where the gene variant coming from an archaic population had some bad effects, causing it to decline in frequency over time in modern people," Hawks said.

But PIEZO1 is not the final answer to the question of Neanderthal extinction.

"There are no single-gene explanations for what was a long and complicated interaction across many archaic human groups, as modern humans entered the places where they lived and interacted with them," Hawks said.

Eppenberger and colleagues emphasized in their study that the effect of interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans was likely drawn out and subtle — "more akin to rust weakening a structure than a single catastrophic blow" — and that more research along these lines is needed.

"It is worth pondering how many other loci in the genome might have similarly given rise to hybrid incompatibilities," they wrote.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/human-evolution/differences-in-red-blood-cells-may-have-hastened-the-extinction-of-our-neanderthal-cousins-new-study-suggests at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

TECHNOLOGY > ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

NEWS | ALAN BRADLEY | OCT 27, 2025, 12:45 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Being mean to ChatGPT increases its accuracy — but you may end up regretting it, scientists warn

Being curt or outright mean may make a newer AI model more accurate, a new study shows, defying previous findings on politeness to AI.

(Image credit: Malte Mueller/Getty Images)

Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots might give you more accurate answers when you are rude to them, scientists have found, although they warned against the potential harms of using demeaning language.

In a new study published Oct. 6 in the arXiv preprint database, scientists wanted to test whether politeness or rudeness made a difference in how well an AI system performed. This research has not been peer-reviewed yet.

To test how the user's tone affected the accuracy of the answers, the researchers developed 50 base multiple-choice questions and then modified them with prefixes to make them adhere to five categories of tone: very polite, polite, neutral, rude and very rude. The questions spanned categories including mathematics, history and science.

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Each question was posed with four options, one of which was correct. They fed the 250 resulting questions 10 times into ChatGPT-4o, one of the most advanced large language models (LLMs) developed by OpenAI.

"Our experiments are preliminary and show that the tone can affect the performance measured in terms of the score on the answers to the 50 questions significantly," the researchers wrote in their paper. "Somewhat surprisingly, our results show that rude tones lead to better results than polite ones.

"While this finding is of scientific interest, we do not advocate for the deployment of hostile or toxic interfaces in realworld applications," they added. "Using insulting or demeaning language in human-AI interaction could have negative effects on user experience, accessibility, and inclusivity, and may contribute to harmful communication norms. Instead, we frame our results as evidence that LLMs remain sensitive to superficial prompt cues, which can create unintended trade-offs between performance and user well-being."

A rude awakening

Before giving each prompt, the researchers asked the chatbot to completely disregard prior exchanges, to prevent it from being influenced by previous tones. The chatbots were also asked, without an explanation, to pick one of the four options.

The accuracy of the responses ranged from 80.8% accuracy for very polite prompts to 84.8% for very rude prompts. Tellingly, accuracy grew with each step away from the most polite tone. The polite answers had an accuracy rate of 81.4%, followed by 82.2% for neutral and 82.8% for rude.

The team used a variety of language in the prefix to modify the tone, except for neutral, where no prefix was used and the question was presented on its own.

For very polite prompts, for instance, they would lead with, "Can I request your assistance with this question?" or "Would you be so kind as to solve the following question?" On the very rude end of the spectrum, the team included language like "Hey, gofer; figure this out," or "I know you are not smart, but try this."

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The research is part of an emerging field called prompt engineering, which seeks to investigate how the structure, style and language of prompts affect an LLM's output. The study also cited previous research into politeness versus rudeness and found that their results generally ran contrary to those findings.

In previous studies, researchers found that "impolite prompts often result in poor performance, but overly polite language does not guarantee better outcomes." However, the previous study was conducted using different AI models — ChatGPT 3.5 and Llama 2-70B — and used a range of eight tones. That said, there was some overlap. The rudest prompt setting was also found to produce more accurate results (76.47%) than the most polite setting (75.82%).

The researchers acknowledged the limitations of their study. For example, a set of 250 questions is a fairly limited data set, and conducting the experiment with a single LLM means the results can't be generalized to other AI models.

With those limitations in mind, the team plans to expand their research to other models, including Anthropic's Claude LLM and OpenAI's ChatGPT o3. They also recognize that presenting only multiple-choice questions limits measurements to one dimension of model performance and fails to capture other attributes, such as fluency, reasoning and coherence.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/being-mean-to-chatgpt-increases-its-accuracy-but-you-may-end-up-regretting-it-scientists-warn at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

MEMBER EXCLUSIVE

HUMAN BEHAVIOR > POLITICS

OPINION | KIT YATES | OCT 27, 2025, 10:13 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

There is such a thing as 'settled science' — anyone who says otherwise is trying to manipulate you

How bad-faith arguments sow doubt by weaponizing scientific humility.

Vaccine skeptics sometimes say that "science is never settled." But that's often a bad-faith argument meant to prop up widely debunked links between vaccines and autism. (Image credit: David McNew via Getty Images)

"Science is never settled" has become a go-to slogan for populists seeking to legitimise politically convenient but fringe scientific positions. In 2020, MAGA Republican Representative Nancy Mace was asked whether she agreed that climate change is the result of humanmade greenhouse emissions. She responded: "My opponent has said that the science is settled on this. Well, the science is never settled. Scientists will tell you that."

In February, Senator Roger Marshall argued more money should be spent on investigating widely debunked links between autism and vaccines, saying "I'm a physician. Science is never settled. That's what makes us scientists."

The phrase has also crossed the Atlantic. When asked if President Donald Trump was right to share widely debunked claims about a link between Tylenol use in pregnancy and autism, U.K. Reform party leader Nigel Farage replied, "I have no idea." When pressed on whether he would "side with medical experts who say it's dangerous nonsense," he responded, "When it comes to science, I don't side with anybody… because science is never settled."

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The issue is, of course, that in many areas, from the theory of evolution to the theory of gravity, science is very much settled. To pretend otherwise is to misrepresent the position of the scientific community.

That doesn't mean that scientific positions are eternally fixed and can't be updated in light of new evidence. It means that our current best explanations have been tested enough for us to be confident that they are good descriptions of the way things work.

Kit Yates

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Kit Yates is a professor of mathematical biology and public engagement at the University of Bath in the U.K.

Myth of overturned consensus

A favorite trope of climate denialists is that scientists in the 1970s predicted "global cooling" — an imminent ice age. It's a smart argument, because if you can suggest that the exact opposite of global warming was once the prevailing view, surely you throw the current consensus on climate science into doubt?

Despite media attention and much discussion of the idea, global cooling was never a consensus scientific position. Reviews of the literature at the time show that even 50 years ago, global warming dominated scientific thinking about the Earth's short-term climate future. That climate change is the result of greenhouse gas emissions is now very much the consensus scientific position.

There are, however, examples in science where consensus positions have been modified or updated. Gravity is a classic case. Galileo established that acceleration due to gravity is the same for all objects near Earth's surface. But it wasn't until Newton that we had a universal theory of gravitation.

Newton's theory unified the behavior of objects falling on earth with the motions of planets. For years, every measurement seemed to confirm it, and the theory became known as a "law" that nature was thought to obey without exception.

But as experiments expanded and instruments improved, the edges of Newton's "law" began to fray. When dealing with strong gravitational fields like those near a black hole, or when calculating to high precision or over short astronomical distances, Newton's law wasn't sufficient. In the 20th century, Einstein's general relativity filled many gaps — resolving a range of seeming astronomical anomalies and describing how light bends near a black hole.

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Yet even the relativistic interpretation of gravity is not perfect. We know, for example, that it must break down inside a black hole.

First Galileo's and then Newton's theories were superseded, and we know Einstein's isn't correct in every situation. Does that mean these earlier theories are useless and not examples of settled science? Definitely not.

In contexts where these theories have been rigorously tested and shown to give the correct answers (to a given degree of precision), they remain valid. They aren't wrong — just special cases of the more general theories, valid within a given domain of legitimacy in which they were originally postulated and tested.

In the same way, whatever supersedes Einstein's theory will have to include it as a special case. The example of gravity shows that scientific knowledge can evolve yet still be considered settled within its domain of legitimacy. We can point to other consensuses, like evolution or germ theory, as settled science that has been expanded and generalized over time.

Scientific 'facts'

There are also questions that most would call definitively settled. That Earth is round, not flat, is perhaps the most obvious. But whether we choose to call this a "fact" or not depends on how we define the word. If we demand 100% certainty, science can't provide it. If you want certainty, you need to look to mathematics, where knowledge is built through deduction from axioms (a fundamental set of premises), independent of the world.

Science, in contrast, built on evidence and induction, can only ever offer increasing confidence. A key premise of the scientific method is openness to new evidence. If you consider yourself 100% certain, then no new evidence, however convincing, can change your mind. That is not good science.

However, if you accept that science provides evidence for hypotheses, it can offer what we might call indisputable evidence — so robust that disputing it isn't a tenable position. Overturning the not-flat worldview would require such a massive reconsideration of what we understand about reality as to make it practically impossible.

So, "settled science" does not mean we know something with absolute certainty, but that the weight of evidence is heavily in favor of this interpretation. Perhaps more importantly, if someone wants to change the currently held conception, the burden of proof is on them.

All scientific knowledge comes with uncertainty. That is the hallmark of good science. But uncertainty doesn't mean we cannot confidently assert that entropy always increases (the second law of thermodynamics) or that Earth orbits the sun.

Science embraces uncertainty and is open to revision when new information appears, but that does not mean we shouldn't take a position when the evidence stacks up on one side of the balance. Issues that have been rigorously tested can still be considered settled.

Not being 100% certain isn't the same as being 50-50. Admitting doubt isn't the same as both-siding a one-sided issue. The fact that scientists acknowledge uncertainty isn't a reason for championing false balance. But these are the fallacious positions populists are taking when they say "I have no idea" or "I don't side with anybody" on scientific questions.

So when you hear a politician dismissing scientific consensus with phrases like "science is never settled," don't confuse what they are saying with an argument for intellectual humility. They are bluntly attempting to undermine inconvenient truths. Truths which can evolve and grow more nuanced over time, for sure — but whose foundations are strong enough to remain robust in their domain of legitimacy, even as the structure grows around them.

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

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/human-behavior/politics/there-is-such-a-thing-as-settled-science-anyone-who-says-otherwise-is-trying-to-manipulate-you-opinion at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

ARCHAEOLOGY

FEATURES | KRISTINA KILLGROVE | OCT 27, 2025, 6:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Decapitator nose ornament: 1,500-year-old gold jewelry depicting a bloodthirsty South American god

The Moche made human sacrifices to their gods, including Ai Apaec, the Decapitator.

The figure known as the Decapitator in Moche culture. (Image credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art (Public Domain))

This gilt-copper nose ornament, discovered at the archaeological site of Loma Negra in northern Peru, depicts the important Moche deity Ai Apaec, also known as the Decapitator. The ornament is inlaid with accents of turquoise and black stones for his pupils.

In Moche mythology, Ai Apaec was the supreme creator, a deity who had the power to subdue and restore order. In art from the time, he is commonly depicted with a human face, jaguar fangs, and a spider-like body, along with a ceremonial knife called a tumi in one hand and a decapitated human head in the other to represent his power to subdue.

The Moche, also known as the Mochicas, lived on the coast of northern Peru from A.D. 200 to 900, prior to the rise of the Inca Empire. This piece of jewelry was found at Loma Negra, a rich Moche site near the Ecuadorian border. Hundreds of gold, silver and copper artifacts were looted from tombs at Loma Negra in the late 1960s, but many of them, including this ornament, were eventually donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

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The Decapitator ornament measures 2.8 by 3.9 inches (7 by 10 centimeters) and was made out of a sheet of gilded copper. Semiprecious stones accentuate the Decapitator's eyes, earrings and belt. Ai Apaec also wears a large, silver nose ornament. The tiny figurine was likely attached to a piece of silver so that someone could wear it as a nose ornament. But because most of the Loma Negra artifacts were looted from graves, it is unclear whether this ornament was associated with a specific person.

Archaeologists have found that the Moche practiced human sacrifice to honor their gods. This ritual was performed for political reasons, such as the killing of captured enemies, but recent research has shown that family members were also sometimes sacrificed to their high-status relatives.

The Decapitator is closely associated with spiders in Moche iconography, but experts are unsure exactly why. According to The Met, "perhaps the manner in which spiders trap their prey in a web and liquefy their internal organs was considered analogous to the Moche practice of prisoner capture and sacrifice by bloodletting."

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

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/decapitator-nose-ornament-1-500-year-old-gold-jewelry-depicting-a-bloodthirsty-south-american-god at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

PLANET EARTH > PLANTS

FEATURES | ASHLEY HAMER | OCT 27, 2025, 5:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Why can pumpkins grow so large, but blueberries can't?

Most fruit is pretty small, so why do pumpkins grow to such enormous sizes?

An award-winning pumpkin weighing 2,507 pounds (1,137 kilograms) at the All New England Giant Pumpkin Weigh-Off at the Topsfield Fair on Oct. 4, 2025. (Image credit: Photo by Erin Clark/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Every fall, pumpkin growers haul their record-breaking giants onto scales, with some pumpkins weighing more than 2,700 pounds (1,225 kilograms). Yet the world's largest apple barely reaches 4 pounds (1.8 kg), and the heaviest blueberry ever grown weighs less than an ounce (28 grams). So what allows pumpkins to grow to such staggering sizes while other fruits (yes, pumpkins are fruits and even a type of berry) remain comparatively tiny?

Giant pumpkins are a specific variety of Cucurbita maxima that's been bred to grow huge — most often Mammoth and Atlantic Giant varieties. A basic reason they can grow so large is that they're indeterminate plants, Vikram Baliga, an assistant professor of practice of horticulture at Texas Tech University, told Live Science. Whereas determinate plants reach a set size and then stop, indeterminate plants grow indefinitely.

"So you'll see these big, sprawling pumpkin plants that take over your entire yard, and sometimes it's just one plant," Baliga said.

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Determinate plants tend to produce all their fruit at once, which has benefits for harvesting but limits how large they can grow.

"Some plants, when they grow an organ — whether it's a leaf, whether it's a fruit, whether it's a flower — they have a program that limits how big that particular thing they grow will be," Jessica Savage, an associate professor in the Swenson College of Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota Duluth, told Live Science. "Other species don't have that kind of limit. … For some reason, the pumpkins don't seem to have a really strong one that limits their size, and so that allows us to breed for bigger ones."

With nothing to limit their growth potential, pumpkin plants can continuously add more leaves to generate energy for their fruit.

"With an indeterminate plant, its goal is to produce as much biomass as it can, as quickly as possible, so your pumpkin is going to put on leaves and stems and all kinds of stuff," Baliga said. "Then, if it needs to produce more energy, it just grows more leaves. It doesn't have that genetic choke point."

How to grow a giant pumpkin

Growers take advantage of this by removing all but one pumpkin from the vine.

"If you've got this plant that's able to bank all these resources and you pull eight pumpkins off the plant and just leave one, it's like 'Great, I'm just going to divert it all into this one fruit. This is my only chance to carry on my genetics,'" Baliga explained.

Technically, this trick also works with other fruits. Removing all but one peach from a tree, for example, can produce a larger peach. But that's where the laws of physics come into play.

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For one thing, pumpkins grow on the ground, so they're less subject to the pull of gravity; a giant peach would not be able to grow as large as a pumpkin because it would fall off the tree long before it reached that weight.

In addition, a pumpkin's hard rind allows it to grow larger than a fruit with soft skin. "You wouldn't be able to get a really big fruit on something that's really soft because it would start to weigh itself down and it would start to break," Savage said.

A 1,101-pound (499 kilogram) pumpkin took home the prize at the Alaska State Fair in Palmer, Alaska in 2010. (Image credit: Image Source Limited/Harry Walker via Alamy)

However, a rind that's too stiff won't allow the pumpkin to grow to a massive size. "The people who grow pumpkins work to get that sweet spot — you don't want them so stiff that they can't expand. … If the skin splits, it's not competitive. So you have to have the skin soft enough, but it has to be strong enough that it can support its own weight."

When they're young, giant pumpkins have soft, thin skin that allows them to grow rapidly. As they mature, the skin hardens, Savage said. Growers protect pumpkins from the sun by covering them with a tarp to keep them in that soft, rapid growth phase as long as possible.

At peak growth, giant pumpkins can pack on 44 pounds (20 kg) a day — and all that mass has to move through the fruit's vascular system, which Savage said is "superpowered." Savage and her team have found that, compared with other pumpkin varieties, giant pumpkins have more phloem, which is the part of the vascular system that transports sugar.

"I often think about it like a highway," she said. "You can move the same amount on a small highway, but you're limited by how fast it happens. If you want to move a lot more resources more rapidly … you have to have more roads."

Some pumpkins are so giant, people can go boating in them. Here, Cindy Tobeck paddles in a 634-pound (288 kilogram) pumpkin in the Sixth Annual West Coast Giant Pumpkin Regatta in Tualatin, Oregon. She took second place. (Image credit: Ken Hawkins/Alamy)

Giant pumpkins also have a lot of time to grow. "A pumpkin stays on the vine for months … they're like a five- to six-month crop, 180 days in some cases," Baliga said. "Whereas your apples, your peaches, your pears, a lot of your blueberries, they tend to be much quicker from flower to harvest."

But an equally important reason giant pumpkins get so big is that we made them that way. "They've been selectively bred for a really long time, just for size, which is different than a lot of other foods where we're also selecting them for taste," Savage said.

Pumpkins are a symbol of fall and central to Halloween and Thanksgiving traditions, so they hold a more prominent place in our culture than other fruits with similar growth potential, like cucumbers.

For her part, Savage thinks pumpkins will keep getting bigger. "There probably is eventually a limit, but I think we'll keep finding ways to push it," she said.

Fruits and vegetables quiz: Do you know where pumpkins, blueberries and broccoli come from?

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/plants/why-can-pumpkins-grow-so-large-but-blueberries-cant at Oct 31, 2025 at 3:21 AM EDT.

Table of Contents

Live Science: 2025 Oct 30

October 30, 2025

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There is such a thing as 'settled science' — anyone who says otherwise is trying to manipulate you

Decapitator nose ornament: 1,500-year-old gold jewelry depicting a bloodthirsty South American god

Why can pumpkins grow so large, but blueberries can't?