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January 27, 2026

- 'Earthquake on a chip' uses 'phonon' lasers to make mobile devices more efficient

TECHNOLOGY > ELECTRONICS

NEWS | OWEN HUGHES | JAN 27, 2026, 5:41 AM EST | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

'Earthquake on a chip' uses 'phonon' lasers to make mobile devices more efficient

A new technology that generates tiny, earthquake-like effects could shake up the wireless device industry with smaller, less power-hungry devices, scientists say.

(Image credit: Catherine Falls Commercial/Getty Images)

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Engineers have created a device that produces tiny, earthquake-like vibrations on the surface of a chip. They say it could one day be harnessed for signal processing inside everyday electronics, potentially paving the way to smaller, faster and more efficient wireless devices.

In a new study published Jan. 14 in the journal Nature, the scientists described their device as a surface acoustic wave (SAW) phonon laser that generates very small, rapid vibrations.

"Think of it almost like the waves from an earthquake, only on the surface of a small chip," lead study author Alexander Wendt, a graduate student at the University of Arizona Wyant College of Optical Sciences, said in a statement.

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In nature, SAWs are produced on a massive scale when tectonic plates slide against each other and cause earthquakes.

SAWs are also used as filters in smartphones to help clean up wireless signals. A phone's radio receives radio waves from a cell tower and then converts them into tiny mechanical vibrations, making it easier for chips to remove unwanted noise.

Multiple chips convert radio waves into SAWs and back again every time you send a text, make a call or access the internet.

SAWs in modern technology

Although they're conceptually similar to seismic surface waves released by earthquakes, SAWs are far too small to be measured on any scale like the moment magnitude scale, which is used to estimate the energy released by movement in Earth's crust.

SAW devices are essential to many of the world's most important technologies, senior study author Matt Eichenfield, a professor of quantum engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, said in the statement. This includes cell phones, key fobs, garage door openers, most GPS receivers, and radar systems.

The scientists said a completely solid-state, single chip that generates coherent SAWs at very high frequencies, without needing an external radio-frequency source, has never been achieved before.

Traditional SAW components typically require two separate chips plus a power source. The team's design aimed to deliver similar functionality using a single chip — potentially enabling much higher frequencies to be powered by a typical smartphonebattery.

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The researchers built the device by stacking ultrathin layers of different chip materials into a tiny "bar" about 0.02 inches (0.5 millimeters) long.

This included a silicon base; a thin layer of lithium niobate, a type of piezoelectric crystal that converts electrical signals into mechanical vibrations; and a final layer of indium gallium arsenide, a semiconductor material that can accelerate electrons to extremely high speeds when exposed to an electric field.

The system works by repeatedly amplifying vibrations as they bounce back and forth inside the structure, similar to how light intensifies in a diode laser between two mirrors. Surface vibrations in the lithium niobate interact with electrons in the indium gallium arsenide, boosting the energy of the waves as they move forward.

"It loses almost 99% of its power when it's moving backward, so we designed it to get a substantial amount of gain moving forward to beat that," Wendt said in the statement.

The team generated surface waves at around 1 gigahertz — equal to billions of vibrations per second — and believes the design could be pushed into the tens or hundreds of gigahertz. That's well beyond the capabilities of typical SAW devices, which often top out around 4 GHz, the researchers said.

The long-term goal is to simplify how phones handle wireless signals — namely, by designing a single chip that can convert radio waves into SAWs and back again, using surface waves for much of the signal processing. Doing so could potentially enable future wireless devices to filter and route signals on smaller chips, using less power.

"This phonon laser was the last domino standing that we needed to knock down," Wendt added. "Now we can literally make every component that you need for a radio on one chip using the same kind of technology."

Article Sources

Wendt, A., Storey, M.J., Miller, M. et al. An electrically injected solid-state surface acoustic wave phonon laser. Nature 649, 597–603 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09950-8

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/technology/electronics/earthquake-on-a-chip-could-speed-up-smartphones-thanks-to-phonon-laser-invention at Jan 27, 2026 at 7:22 AM EST.

January 26, 2026

- How to see 2 total solar eclipses in the next 2 years — including the 'eclipse of the century'

- A drying climate is making East Africa pull apart faster

- IVF hormones could be delivered with painless 'microneedle' patch someday, early study hints

- 1,400-year-old Zapotec tomb discovered in Mexico features enormous owl sculpture symbolizing death

- The UK has lost its measles elimination status — again

- People with more 'brown fat' have healthier cardiovascular systems. A new study in mice may explain why.

- James Webb telescope peers into 'Eye of God' and finds clues to life's origins — Space photo of the week

- Some of the oldest harpoons ever found reveal Indigenous people in Brazil were hunting whales 5,000 years ago

- Microsoft says its newest AI chip Maia 200 is 3 times more powerful than Google's TPU and Amazon's Trainium processor

- World's oldest known rock art predates modern humans' entrance into Europe — and it was found in an Indonesian cave

- 2,500 years ago, people in Bulgaria ate dog meat at feasts and as a delicacy, archaeological study finds

- 480,000-year-old ax sharpener is the oldest known elephant bone tool ever discovered in Europe

- Why don't you usually see your nose?

- 6 tips to kickstart your exercise routine and actually stick to it, according to science

SPACE > ASTRONOMY > THE SUN

NEWS | JAMIE CARTER | JAN 26, 2026, 6:34 PM EST | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

How to see 2 total solar eclipses in the next 2 years — including the 'eclipse of the century'

After a two-year gap, there will be two total solar eclipses within 12 months of each other, on Aug. 12, 2026, and Aug. 2, 2027.

The moon will fully eclipse the sun for millions of lucky skywatchers in August 2026 and 2027. Here's where and when to see it. (Image credit: Getty Images)

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There has not been a total solar eclipse since the "Great American Eclipse" on April 8, 2024 — but now, two are coming up in the next two years.

The first of these total solar eclipses, on Aug. 12, 2026, will grace parts of Greenland, Iceland and Spain. The second, on Aug. 2, 2027, will occur across parts of North Africa, southern Spain and the Middle East and is being dubbed the "eclipse of the century."

Here's what you need to know about the back-to-back sky spectacles.

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The August 2026 solar eclipse

The path of totality in August, 2026. "GE" marks the point of greatest eclipse, where the moon will appear largest in front of the sun. (Image credit: OpenStreetMap contributors / US NSF National Solar Observatory)

The 2026 total solar eclipse will begin as an eclipsed sunrise in a remote part of northern Siberia, with the path of totality — the path of the moon's dark central shadow, where a total eclipse is visible — sweeping across eastern Greenland, the west coast of Iceland and northern Spain, before concluding as an eclipsed sunset over the Mediterranean Sea.

For European observers, this marks the first total eclipse visible from mainland Europe since 1999. In Spain, cities like León, Burgos and Valladolid will be the best places to witness totality.

The eclipse will be visible about 10 degrees above the horizon, which is about the width of your fist held at arm's length.

Totality there will occur close to sunset, and clear skies are likely for both the eclipse and the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower later that night. It may even be possible to spot a meteor in the twilight-like skies of totality, which will last less than two minutes.

Travelers seeking the longest totality — just over two minutes — may head to Iceland's Snæfellsnes Peninsula or the fjords of eastern Greenland. At these latitudes in August, the nights are too short for reliable meteor spotting. However, the northern lights may make an appearance during the brief night or, perhaps, during a fleeting totality.

August 2027: The 'eclipse of the century'

The path of totality in August, 2027. "GE" marks the point of greatest eclipse, where the moon will appear largest in front of the sun, and "GD" marks the point of greatest duration, where totality will last longest. (Image credit: OpenStreetMap contributors / US NSF National Solar Observatory)

Although any total solar eclipse is special, the 2027 event is a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle.

The Aug. 2, 2027 total solar eclipse will last up to an extraordinary 6 minutes, 22 seconds and will be seen from a path of totality that touches parts of Spain, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Somalia.

This eclipse is already being billed as the "eclipse of the century," with observers near Luxor, Egypt, enjoying the longest land-based totality of the 21st century. Besides being the longest total solar eclipse of this era, this event is special for another reason: The climate in the path of totality means clear skies are likely throughout the region.

While these two total solar eclipses are already getting skywatchers excited, a lesser-known totality lies just beyond. On July 22, 2028, a total solar eclipse will cross Australia and New Zealand, with Sydney witnessing its first totality since 1857. For eclipse chasers across the globe, a boom time beckons.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/space/the-sun/how-to-see-2-total-solar-eclipses-in-the-next-2-years-including-the-eclipse-of-the-century at Jan 27, 2026 at 7:22 AM EST.

PLANET EARTH

NEWS | STEPHANIE PAPPAS | JAN 26, 2026, 6:34 PM EST | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

A drying climate is making East Africa pull apart faster

A switch from a humid to a dry climate has led the Eastern African Rift Zone to pull apart more freely, new research finds.

(Image credit: Paul & Paveena Mckenzie/Getty Images)

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Over the past 5,000 years, East Africa has dried out. Now, new research finds that this change may be making the continent pull apart faster.

Faults in the East African Rift Zone have sped up since the levels of large lakes have dropped, according to research published in November in the journal Scientific Reports.

The findings highlight the two-way relationship between the climate and plate tectonics, said study senior author Christopher Scholz, a geologist, physicist and professor emeritus at Columbia University.

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"Usually it is something we think about the other way around: Mountains build, and that changes the local or regional climate," Scholz told Live Science. "But it can work the other way around too."

Scholz and his colleagues conducted their research at Lake Turkana in Kenya, which is 155 miles (250 kilometers) long, 19 miles (30 km) wide, and up to 400 feet (120 meters) deep in places. That's nothing, however, compared with the level more than 5,000 years ago, when the lake was up to 500 feet (150 m) deeper.

That was during the African Humid Period, when much of Africa was wetter than it is today. In East Africa, this period persisted from about 9,600 years ago to 5,300 years ago, with drier conditions prevailing over the past 5,300 years. The researchers studied lake-bed sediments to determine ancient water levels and sediment flows into Lake Turkana. In the process, they noticed many small faults and the fingerprints of long-ago earthquakes in the sediments.

The tectonic plate that underlies Africa is pulling apart in eastern Africa and may one day split into two plates with an ocean between them. The deep, narrow lakes in the region — including Lake Turkana and nearby waterways, such as Lake Malawi in Tanzania and Mozambique —, are the result of this rifting process, which is creating a deep valley in the region.

Scholz and his team wanted to know if the changes in the lakes themselves were influencing this rifting process. Water matters to tectonics: When glaciers retreat, for example, the lifting of their weight actually causes the land beneath to spring up like rising bread — a process called isostatic rebound. Large amounts of water similarly press down on the crust beneath, potentially affecting processes like earthquakes.

The researchers found that after the end of the African Humid Period, the faults in Lake Turkana began to move faster, at an average rate of 0.007 inches (0.17 millimeters) of extra movement per year. In general, Africa is rifting apart at 0.25 inches (6.35 millimeters) per year.

Using computer simulations, the researchers figured out that this seismic speedup likely has two causes. One is that with less water pressing down on the crust, the faults have more freedom to move: Imagine a vise loosening around two slabs of wood. The other cause is more indirect. On an island in the south side of Lake Turkana is a volcano with an active magma chamber. The removal of water from the African Humid Period decompresses the mantle under this volcano, leading to more melting. That melt, in turn, moves into the volcano's magma chamber, inflating it and leading to more tectonic activity on nearby fault lines.

"We see enhanced faulting during this time interval, so more pronounced earthquakes are presumably prevalent in this broader region now compared to 8,000 years ago," Scholz said.

The researchers are now working on a project at Lake Malawi looking at water level changes going back 1.4 million years, hoping to get a better sense of how the climate affects the separation of continents.

"This information about these huge changes in water volumes in these lakes is a really important part of the story," Scholz said.

Article Sources

Muirhead, J. D., Xue, L., Moucha, R., Paciga, M. K., Judd, E. J., & Scholz, C. A. (2025). Accelerated rifting in response to regional climate change in the East African Rift System. Scientific Reports, 15(1), 38833. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-23264-9

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/a-drying-climate-is-making-east-africa-pull-apart-faster at Jan 27, 2026 at 7:22 AM EST.

HEALTH > MEDICINE & DRUGS

NEWS | THERESA SULLIVAN BARGER | JAN 26, 2026, 5:07 PM EST | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

IVF hormones could be delivered with painless 'microneedle' patch someday, early study hints

Scientists are developing a microneedle patch that they hope could someday simplify IVF hormone delivery. They've tested it in animals.

A new microneedle patch could someday help patients undergoing IVF treatment do so without painful hormone shots. (Image credit: Tempura via Getty Images)

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Patients undergoing in vitro fertilization (IVF) must give themselves daily hormone shots in weeks leading up to having eggs collected for the procedure. Now, a research team has developed what it calls a painless, automated way to deliver these hormones using a light-activated microneedle patch.

A preliminary study conducted in rats has shown that delivering the hormone leuprolide from a patch could be done painlessly and without releasing foreign substances into the body. A light can be preprogrammed to turn on at specific times, such that the patch releases the hormone at the correct cadence.

These results, published in the journal Small in November 2025, suggest that the patch could someday help address two of the challenges of IVF: the pain of the hormone shots and the inconvenience of self-administering the shots at the same time daily for two weeks, said lead study author Marta Cerruti, a materials chemist at McGill University in Montreal. Most patients report feeling a brief, pinching pain when administering the shots, but the pain level can vary depending on a given patient's anxiety level with needles.

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Vivienne Tam, who was a doctoral student at the time of the study, suggested the potential of their research for helping IVF patients, Cerruti said. The group had previously been thinking about using the patch for administering cancer drugs to patients, Cerruti said.

"From what we read, one of the main reasons for the failure of IVF is that the drug is not given consistently," she told Live Science. The hope is that, someday, the patch could solve that challenge.

Designing a hormone-delivery system

In the new study, the team incorporated prior discoveries made in two separate labs at McGill and the INRS research center in Quebec.

The patch is composed of tiny needles that contain nanoparticles, which are packed with the hormone leuprolide. The researchers had already developed a potential coating for the nanoparticles that breaks down when exposed to low-energy light, called near-infrared light (NIR). Upon NIR exposure, the nanoparticles then spill their contents.

How this works is that the NIR is converted to higher-energy ultraviolet (UV) light by the nanoparticle's core. This UV light can then break the bonds in the coating of the particle, releasing the molecules held inside. "We had this coating that we knew worked," Cerruti said.

The team had also shown that the nanoparticles, which are made of rare-earth materials, are nontoxic in animal tests. To then make their patch, they incorporated the nanoparticles into microneedles made of a nonsoluble, synthetic polymer, which should not degrade, Cerruti said.

The needles prick microscopic holes in the outer layer of the skin, called the stratum corneum, which is made up of dead skin cells. These pricks are painless because the needles do not penetrate deep enough to reach the sensory nerve endings housed in deeper layers of the skin, Tam said.

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In rats, the NIR successfully released the drug from the microneedles without releasing any foreign substances — namely, the nanoparticles themselves — into the body, Cerruti said. If the nanoparticles had entered the body along with the hormones, they would have accumulated in the liver and other organs, she said, but the team didn't observe that in tests.

One potential challenge of this method is that skin thickness and blood flow vary among patients, said Lifeng Kang, an associate professor at The University of Sydney School of Pharmacy who was not involved in the study. Ensuring that an NIR pulse releases the light needed across different body types may be more challenging than delivering the medicine with a standard shot, he wrote in an email to Live Science.

Although NIR penetrates skin better than visible light does, its efficiency decreases with increases in fat tissue, Kang added. "Since IVF injections are traditionally subcutaneous [delivered under the skin], the researchers have to ensure the microneedles and the light source can effectively communicate at the necessary depth to trigger the release," he explained.

The new findings show that the hormone went into the rats' circulatory system as intended, but researchers have yet to test whether this delivery method has the desired effect of encouraging egg maturation, Cerruti said.

The biggest hurdle for any nanoparticle-based therapy is biocompatibility, Kang said, meaning the material must be compatible with living tissue and not cause toxic effects or harmful immune reactions. The researchers "must prove these nanoparticles are either safely excreted or remain inert in the skin without long-term toxicity," he said.

Although the microneedles should not degrade in the body proving their durability could be difficult, Cerruti said, since "polymers are made of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen — the same elements we're made of."

Before moving on to studies in larger animals, Cerruti said, the researchers want to conduct additional rat studies to determine the efficacy of this hormone-delivery system.

In their initial experiments, the team released only a small dose of the hormone. For the dose to be equivalent to that used in IVF, they would need to use more patches on a given mouse, or include more nanoparticles in a given patch, Cerruti said. They could also increase the size of the patch, so the number of nanoparticles scales up.

One of the "biggest barriers to overcome before eventual clinical translation is the limited dose of the drug available in the bloodstream," Cerruti said.

Article Sources

Tam, V., Trana, R., Nieto‐Arguello, A., Olasubulumi, O., Babity, S., Skripka, A., Vetrone, F., Brambilla, D., & Cerruti, M. (2025). Upconverting nanoparticle‐Loaded Microneedles for near‐infrared responsive delivery of gonadotropins to increase success of in vitro fertilization. Small, 22(1). https://doi.org/10.1002/smll.202513138

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/health/medicine-drugs/ivf-hormones-could-be-delivered-with-painless-microneedle-patch-someday-early-study-hints at Jan 27, 2026 at 7:22 AM EST.

ARCHAEOLOGY

NEWS | KRISTINA KILLGROVE | JAN 26, 2026, 4:58 PM EST | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

1,400-year-old Zapotec tomb discovered in Mexico features enormous owl sculpture symbolizing death

The president of Mexico called the discovery of a 1,400-year-old Zapotec tomb in Oaxaca the "most significant archaeological discovery in a decade."

A sculpted owl, whose beak covers the painted face of a Zapotec lord, decorates the front of a 1,400-year-old tomb in Oaxaca. (Image credit: Luis Gerardo Peña Torres/INAH)

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Archaeologists in Mexico have discovered a 1,400-year-old tomb from the Zapotec culture that features well-preserved details, including a sculpture of a wide-eyed owl with a man in its beak, multicolored murals and calendrical carvings.

Officials found the tomb after following up on an anonymous report of looting at the site. Their investigation revealed the "most significant archaeological discovery in a decade in Mexico," Mexico's president, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, announced at a Jan. 23 news conference in Spanish.

The tomb was discovered in San Pablo Huitzo, a municipality in Oaxaca in southern Mexico, in 2025. It dates to about A.D. 600, when the Indigenous Zapotecs — also known as the "Cloud People" — flourished in the area. The Zapotec civilization was established around 700 B.C. and collapsed due to the Spanish conquest in 1521. However, hundreds of thousands of Zapotec-speaking people still live in Mexico today.

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At the entrance to the newly announced tomb, archaeologists found a large carved owl whose beak opens to reveal the painted face of a Zapotec lord. In ancient Zapotec culture, the owl represented death and power, suggesting it held in its mouth a portrait of the ancestor the tomb honors, according to a translated statement from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).

Inside the tomb, a threshold between two chambers boasts an elaborately carved doorway. The top has a horizontal beam made of stone slabs engraved with "calendrical names" — a naming system in which deities and important people were given a specific symbol associated with their birth date. Flanking the doorway were engraved figures of a man and a woman, perhaps representing ancestors buried in the tomb or guardians of the palace, according to the INAH statement.

Inside the tomb, there is a chamber flanked by carved male and female figures. (Image credit: Luis Gerardo Peña Torres/INAH)

The walls of the burial chamber preserved multicolored murals in white, green, red and blue. They depict a funeral procession of people carrying bags of "copal," a tree resin that was burned as incense during ceremonies in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica.

The highly decorated tomb is an "exceptional discovery due to its level of preservation and what it reveals about Zapotec culture: its social organization, its funerary rituals, and its worldview, preserved in its architecture and mural paintings," Claudia Curiel de Icaza, Mexico's secretary of culture, said in the statement.

An interdisciplinary team from the INAH is currently working to conserve and protect the tomb, and further research will address the ceramic evidence, the iconography, and the handful of human bones recovered from the tomb.

The Huitzo tomb joins a dozen other ancient Zapotec tombs discovered in Oaxaca in the past decade, many of which had been looted before archaeologists could study them. But even though some information about the ancient Zapotec civilization has been lost to looting, the Huitzo tomb is "a source of pride for Mexicans; a testament to the greatness of Mexico," Sheinbaum said.

Archaeology Fragments Quiz: Can you work out what these mysterious artifacts are?

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/1-400-year-old-zapotec-tomb-discovered-in-mexico-features-enormous-owl-sculpture-symbolizing-death at Jan 27, 2026 at 7:22 AM EST.

HEALTH > VIRUSES, INFECTIONS & DISEASE

NEWS | NICOLETTA LANESE | JAN 26, 2026, 3:35 PM EST | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

The UK has lost its measles elimination status — again

Measles has been spreading continuously in the U.K. for over a year, meaning the country has lost its elimination status.

Measles has been reestablished in the U.K. after the country had eliminated the disease for several years. (Image credit: _jure via Getty Images)

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The U.K. has officially lost its measles elimination status, meaning the highly infectious disease has been circulating continuously in the region for at least a year.

Within the past decade, the U.K. has gained, lost and regained its measles elimination status, according to an update posted Jan. 26 by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA). It eliminated the disease in 2016 but saw a resurgence in 2018, along with the rest of Europe. It then regained its elimination status in 2021, when precautions taken to stop the spread of COVID-19 also drove down measles rates.

But in the years since, measles rates have rebounded again in the country — and based on data from 2024 that was submitted to the World Health Organization (WHO), the infection is now officially reestablished in the U.K.

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Ben Kasstan-Dabush, an assistant professor of global health and development at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, called the news "unsurprising."

"Sustained measles transmission reflects a decade-long decline in routine vaccination coverage and the persistent failure in the UK to reach the 95% measles vaccine coverage threshold recommended by WHO," Kasstan-Dabush said in a statement. "Profoundly low coverage in areas such as Hackney [in East London] underscores the unequal distribution of risk and harm to children."

Because measles is so contagious, most of a population must have immunity — either through vaccination or prior infection — to stop the disease from spreading. Measles vaccines are given in a two-dose series, which, once completed, is about 97% effective at preventing measles. To reach herd immunity via vaccination, 95% of a population must have received two doses of the vaccine, the WHO states.

In the U.K., vaccines are not mandatory, but measles vaccination is recommended as part of the National Health Service's national immunization program. Young children were previously offered the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, with the first dose at age 1 and the second at age 3. As of 2026, young children are recommended the MMRV vaccine, which additionally protects against chickenpox (varicella), and are offered doses at 12 and 18 months old. The MMR vaccine is still given to kids born before 2019, as well as adults who have not yet completed their two-dose series.

In 2024, the U.K. reported 92.3% coverage with the first MMR dose and 84.4% with the second, which roughly matched the coverage levels reported in 2023. In recent years, 2016 saw the highest coverage levels, with 95.3% for the first dose and 88.2% for the second. Coverage has fallen steadily since then.

"As history teaches us, elimination can only be achieved and sustained by improving coverage of the MMRV vaccine in children to meet the WHO 95% target and by using all opportunities to catch up older children and adults who missed out when they were younger," the UKHSA statement says.

According to the 2024 data, additional countries within the WHO European Region have lost their measles elimination status, including Spain, Austria, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan.

Meanwhile, Canada lost its measles elimination status in November 2025, and the U.S. is poised to lose its status any day now. In the United States, health officials are currently investigating whether various outbreaks unfolding across the country are linked. If they can confirm that the same outbreak strain has been spreading for a year, the country's measles elimination status will be lost.

Experts have pointed to prominent anti-vaccine advocates, such as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as contributing to the U.S.' falling vaccine coverage and skyrocketing measles rates. But in mid-January, the principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dismissed the issue, saying he wouldn't consider America losing its status to be a significant event.

Disclaimer

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

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/health/viruses-infections-disease/the-uk-has-lost-its-measles-elimination-status-again at Jan 27, 2026 at 7:22 AM EST.

HEALTH > HEART & CIRCULATION

NEWS | ZUNNASH KHAN | JAN 26, 2026, 3:33 PM EST | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

People with more 'brown fat' have healthier cardiovascular systems. A new study in mice may explain why.

A mouse study shows that beige fat, previously known for its heating function, may also lower blood pressure by keeping blood vessels relaxed. The same may go for brown fat in humans.

"Brown fat" in the body may help to keep blood pressure in check by offsetting the effects of a specific enzyme, a study suggests. (Image credit: San Francisco Chronicle / Hearst Newspapers / Contributor via Getty Images)

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Not all fat is created equal — while one type of fat in the body raises blood pressure, another helps keep it in check, a study in mice suggests.

In people, excess body fat has long been tied to high blood pressure, or hypertension, and a number of other cardiovascular problems. But the body carries two types of fat: "brown" fat, which burns energy and helps keep the body warm, and "white" fat, which stores excess calories.

For a long time, it was thought that brown fat withers away after childhood, said senior study author Dr. Paul Cohen, a cardiologist and physician-scientist at The Rockefeller University in New York. However, about 15 years ago, it was discovered that adult humans retain some amount of brown fat, which gets activated primarily by cold exposure. Moreover, Cohen has since shown that higher levels of brown fat are linked to a lower prevalence of obesity and hypertension.

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"We wanted to better understand how brown fat might do this," Cohen told Live Science.

Now, in a new study published Jan. 15 in the journal Science, Cohen and his team showed that eliminating the gene that makes "beige" fat — the mouse equivalent of adult human brown fat — converted all the beige fat around blood vessels into white fat. This, in turn, caused mice to develop high blood pressure.

The team traced the effect to an enzyme released by fat cells. Normally kept in check by beige fat cells, the enzyme's levels spiked when beige fat was converted into white fat, the study showed. This triggered excessive tightening of blood vessels and higher blood pressure.

This is an important study that, for the first time, establishes how beige fat directly affects cardiovascular health, said Lawrence Kazak, an associate professor at McGill University who studies the energy expenditure of brown fat and was not involved in the work.

It's well documented that obesity influences blood pressure and cardiometabolic health on a system level, Kazak told Live Science. But this work highlights a "niche role" for beige fat and the mechanism behind its "local effects" on the blood vessels, he said.

How fat controls blood pressure

Cohen's team began their study by deleting the Prdm16 gene from the fat cells of lab mice, turning the beige fat around their blood vessels white. This gene is known to be highly active in beige fat, acting as a master regulator that helps them maintain an energy-burning function rather than becoming white fat.

This change was visible just by looking at the tissue, said first study author Mascha Koenen, a postdoctoral fellow at Cohen's lab. Beige-fat-laden tissue, which normally looks dusky and speckled with tiny droplets, turned pale, resembling ordinary white fat.

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The researchers observed that the animals that lacked beige fat also developed higher blood pressure, and their blood vessels became stiffer and accumulated more fibrous tissue, making it harder for them to relax as the blood surged through them.

The team then treated the mice's blood vessels with a hormone called angiotensin II, which is known to raise blood pressure by tightening arteries, similar to how pinching a hose restricts the flow of water. Blood vessels from mice lacking beige fat constricted more strongly in response to the hormone, compared with vessels from normal mice.

To identify the mechanism behind this, the team sifted through molecular signals released by fat cells near the blood vessels and identified an enzyme called QSOX1. This enzyme stiffens the connective tissue around blood vessels and makes it harder for them to relax.

Normally, the protein encoded by the Prdm16 gene keeps the production of this enzyme in check. But without beige fat, the levels of QSOX1 surge, leading to stiff blood vessels and high blood pressure, the team concluded.

Importantly, the researchers found that deleting both beige fat and QSOX1 from mice prevented this chain reaction, and those mice did not develop high blood pressure, suggesting that QSOX1 is essential for driving this mechanism, they concluded.

Beige fat in mice and brown fat in humans are known for their heat production; they contain high numbers of mitochondria, which are the cells' energy factories and impart the tissue its brown color. However, Koenen noted that this heat-producing function is not related to the QSOX1 mechanism they identified. Their study instead highlights an additional role of beige fat as "secretory" cells, which release important proteins into the blood.

Even if the beige fat cells are small, "they can have this huge impact on whole body physiology," Koenen told Live Science. And the study could point to new ways of treating high blood pressure.

"You can imagine that molecules that can inhibit QSOX1 could be potentially therapeutically beneficial," Kazak suggested.

Cohen also believes that targeting QSOX1 could help scientists develop precision therapies for hypertension in the future. This would require them to first learn more about this mechanism in order to counter it, he noted. Nonetheless, the research points to a "pathway forward" for studying the effects of QSOX1 inhibitors in humans.

Article Sources

Koenen, M., Becher, T., Pagano, G., Del Gaudio, I., Barrero, J. A., Montezano, A. C., Ruiz Ortiz, J., Lin, Z., Gómez-Banoy, N., Amblard, R., Schriever, D., Kars, M. E., Rubinelli, L., Halix, S. J., Huang Cao, Z. F., Zeng, X., Butler, S. D., Itan, Y., Touyz, R. M., … Cohen, P. (2026). Ablation of Prdm16 and beige fat identity causes vascular remodeling and elevated blood pressure. Science, 391(6782), 306–313. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ady8644

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/health/heart-circulation/people-with-more-brown-fat-have-healthier-cardiovascular-systems-a-new-study-in-mice-may-explain-why at Jan 27, 2026 at 7:22 AM EST.

SPACE > ASTRONOMY

NEWS | JAMIE CARTER | JAN 26, 2026, 12:42 PM EST | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

James Webb telescope peers into 'Eye of God' and finds clues to life's origins — Space photo of the week

A spectacular new image from the James Webb Space Telescope reveals intricate structures inside the Helix Nebula, where a dying sunlike star is enriching the galaxy with the elements needed for life.

The James Webb Space Telescope's new image of the Helix Nebula reveals comet-like knots, stellar winds and dramatic gas transitions. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, A. Pagan (STScI))

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A spectacular new image of the Helix Nebula captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveals the death throes of a sunlike star — and perhaps a harbinger of our own solar system's fate.

The Helix Nebula, also called the "Eye of God" or "Eye of Sauron," is one of the closest, most colorful and most studied planetary nebulas in space. The well-known and nearby starscape was destined to get JWST's near-infrared treatment, which reveals cosmic structures only hinted at by other space telescopes.

A planetary nebula is the slightly confusing name for a cloud of gas (primarily hydrogen and helium) and fine cosmic dust ejected by a dying, sunlike star as it sheds its outer layers, according to NASA. That star, a dense and hot white dwarf at the center of the cloud, ionizes the surrounding gas, causing it to glow in vibrant colors — in this case, in a helix-like (or corkscrew-like) structure, as seen from the solar system. (These bright, often circular nebulas resembled planets when viewed through early telescopes, earning them their title.)

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Within this colorful scene, a vital process is unfolding: A star's former outer layers, now expanding into interstellar space, are seeding the galaxy with carbon, oxygen and nitrogen — the same elements that make life on Earth possible.

Using its Near-Infrared Camera, JWST pierced the Helix Nebula deeper than ever before. In this close-up of a small section of the nebula around the white dwarf, thousands of orange and gold, comet-like pillars stream upward. These features, technically called "cometary knots," separate high-speed stellar winds from the dying star and older, cooler layers of gas shed earlier in its life.

The James Webb Space Telescope's new image of the Helix Nebula reveals comet-like knots, stellar winds and dramatic gas transitions. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, A. Pagan (STScI))

A partial orange semicircle at the bottom, where the pillars are more densely concentrated, is the circumference of the shell. The blackness of space hovers above, along with some blue background stars.

As is typical in space telescope images, filters have teased out the temperature and chemistry of the nebula, which changes according to its distance from the white dwarf. Close to the star, a blue glow is produced by ultraviolet radiation, igniting hot, ionized gas. Farther from the star, it gets cooler, with molecular hydrogen shown in yellow and deep-red dust even farther out.

A zoomed-out view of the Helix Nebula taken with multiple telescope observations (Image credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/Univ Mexico/S. Estrada-Dorado et al.; Ultraviolet: NASA/JPL; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI (M. Meixner)/NRAO (T.A. Rector); Infrared: ESO/VISTA/J. Emerson; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/K. Arcand)

As the potential seeds of the next generation of stars and planets, that dust is, in part, what makes this image so exciting — the image shows the life cycle of matter. Radiation and expelled material from a dying star create regions where more complex molecules can survive and grow.

It may be beautiful, but the Helix Nebula is a cosmic recycling center and, ultimately, a blueprint for what will happen to the sun when it expands into a red giant, sheds its outer layers, and leaves behind a white dwarf in about 5 billion years.

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

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/space/astronomy/james-webb-telescope-peers-into-eye-of-god-and-finds-clues-to-lifes-origins-space-photo-of-the-week at Jan 27, 2026 at 7:22 AM EST.

ARCHAEOLOGY

NEWS | SOPHIE BERDUGO | JAN 26, 2026, 12:42 PM EST | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Some of the oldest harpoons ever found reveal Indigenous people in Brazil were hunting whales 5,000 years ago

The origins of whaling are highly debated. Now, some of the earliest signs of active whale hunting have appeared somewhere unexpected: southern Brazil.

(Image credit: Museu Arqueologico de Sambaquis de Joinville)

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Harpoons crafted from the bones of humpback and southern right whales show Indigenous groups in what is now Brazil were hunting whales 5,000 years ago.

The discovery, which included 118 whale bones and crafted artifacts, reveal that prehistoric whaling was not confined to people in temperate and polar climates in the Northern Hemisphere, according to a study published Jan. 9 in the journal Nature Communications.

"Whaling has always been enigmatic," because it's difficult to distinguish bone tools made from actively hunted and stranded animals in the archaeological record, study co-author André Carlo Colonese, a research director at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, told Live Science.

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So the new tools are significant because their discovery alongside multiple bone remains from members of the same species represents some of the oldest evidence of active whale hunting in the world, the authors wrote in the study.

Prehistoric whaling

For prehistoric people, whales provided huge feasts, oil for warmth, and bones for tools and cultural ornaments and accessories. Although coastal communities have opportunistically salvaged these resources from beached whales for at least 20,000 years, the evidence of active hunting is much younger. For example, people hunted large whales with deer bone harpoons 6,000 years ago in what is now South Korea, and harpoons from around 3,500 to 2,500 years ago have been uncovered in the Arctic and sub-Arctic.

Colonese and his team did not originally set out to investigate early whaling. Instead, they were trying to document the marine species that were used by Indigenous Sambaqui populations in southern Brazil. To do so, they analyzed the molecular signature of precolonial cetacean (whale, dolphin and porpoise) bones at the Joinville Sambaqui Archaeological Museum in Brazil. Of the 118 bone remains with an identifiable cetacean species, most were from southern right whales, but many bones were from humpback whales. Only 37 had been crafted into items such as pendants.

It was "completely random" that one of the museum's curators brought out a box of what were believed to be sticks, Colonese said. But based on their design, such as hollow centers for a wooden shaft and carved tips, he immediately recognized them as harpoons. The team identified 15 harpoon elements, including heads and shaft components, made from either southern right whale or humpback whale rib bones.

The researchers took tiny samples from two harpoon foreshafts to determine their age, which revealed that the tools were between 4,710 and 4,970 years old. Colonese said he jumped for joy when he saw the results because these are some of the oldest harpoons found anywhere in the world — over 1,000 years older than the Arctic and sub-Arctic examples.

Image 1 of 2

(Image credit: McGrath et al, Nature Communications (2026) CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 )

Harpoon socket pieces crafted from southern right whale bones.

(Image credit: McGrath et al, Nature Communications (2026) CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Harpoon shaft components crafted from southern right whale and humpback whale bones.

The discovery also showed that these Indigenous populations in Brazil were not simply gathering mollusks and catching fish. "The conventional idea was that the Sambaquis didn't have the technology" for whaling, Colonese said. "This is telling us that they were actually hunting."

"It's a very spectacular, informative discovery," Jean-Marc Pétillon, an archaeologist at the University of Toulouse in France who was not involved in the research, told Live Science.

Although it's not clear that these particular harpoons were used to hunt whales — as opposed to other marine animals, such as seals — this new evidence helps to contradict the assumption that whaling was practiced only in the Northern Hemisphere, according to Pétillon.

"Having these people living in southern Brazil in tropical conditions that also did whaling is also a way to change our perspective on these maritime exploitation systems," he said.

Article Sources

McGrath, K., Montes, T.A.K.d.S., Fossile, T. et al. Molecular and zooarchaeological identification of 5000 year old whale-bone harpoons in coastal Brazil. Nat Commun 17, 48 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-67530-w

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/some-of-the-oldest-harpoons-ever-found-reveal-indigenous-people-in-brazil-were-hunting-whales-5-000-years-ago at Jan 27, 2026 at 7:22 AM EST.

TECHNOLOGY > ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

NEWS | ROLAND MOORE-COLYER | JAN 26, 2026, 11:06 AM EST | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Microsoft says its newest AI chip Maia 200 is 3 times more powerful than Google's TPU and Amazon's Trainium processor

The Maia 200 AI chip is described as an inference powerhouse — meaning it could lead AI models to apply their knowledge to real-world situations much faster and more efficiently.

Microsoft’s Maia 200 chip is being integrated into its Azure cloud infrastructure (Image credit: Microsoft)

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Microsoft has revealed its new Maia 200 accelerator chip for artificial intelligence (AI) that is three times more powerful than hardware from rivals like Google and Amazon, company representatives say.

This newest chip will be used in AI inference rather than training, powering systems and agents used to make predictions, provide answers to queries and generate outputs based on new data that's fed to them.

Maia 200 is already being deployed in Microsoft's U.S. central data center region, with the company set to use the chips to generate synthetic data and in reinforcement training to improve next-generation large language models (LLMs). The AI accelerator will also be used to power Microsoft Foundry and 365 Copilot AI, and be part of the infrastructure that the company can provide through its Azure cloud platform.

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The new chip delivers performance of more than 10 petaflops (10^15 floating point operations per second), Scott Guthrie, cloud and AI executive vice president at Microsoft, said in a blog post. This is a measure of performance in supercomputing, where the most powerful supercomputers in the world can reach more than 1,000 petaflops of power.

The new chip achieved this performance level in a data representation category known as "4-bit precision (FP4)" — a highly compressed model designed to accelerate AI performance. Maia 200 also delivers 5 PFLOPS of performance in 8-bit precision (FP8). The difference between the two is that FP4 is far more energy efficient but less accurate.

"In practical terms, one Maia 200 node can effortlessly run today’s largest models, with plenty of headroom for even bigger models in the future," Guthrie said in the blog post. "This means Maia 200 delivers 3 times the FP4 performance of the third generation Amazon Trainium, and FP8 performance above Google’s seventh generation TPU."

Chips ahoy

Maia 200 could potentially be used for specialist AI workloads, such as running larger LLMs in the future. So far, Microsoft's Maia chips have only been used in the Azure cloud infrastructure to run large-scale workloads for Microsoft’s own AI services, notably Copilot. However, Guthrie noted there would be "wider customer availability in the future," signaling other organizations could tap into Maia 200 via the Azure cloud, or the chips could potentially one day be deployed in standalone data centers or server stacks.

Guthrie said that Microsoft boasts 30% better performance per dollar over existing systems thanks to the use of the 3-nanometer process made by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the most important fabricator in the world, allowing for 100 billion transistors per chip. This essentially means that Maia 200 could be more cost-effective and efficient for the most demanding AI workloads than existing chips.

Maia 200 has a few other features alongside better performance and efficiency. It includes a memory system, for instance, which can help keep an AI model’s weights and data local, meaning you would need less hardware to run a model. It's also designed to be quickly integrated into existing data centers.

Maia 200 should enable AI models to run faster and more efficiently. This means Azure OpenAI users, such as scientists, developers and corporations, could see better throughput and speeds when developing AI applications and using the likes of GPT-4 in their operations.

This next-generation AI hardware is unlikely to disrupt everyday AI and chatbot use for most people in the short term, as Maia 200 is designed for data centers rather than consumer-grade hardware. However, end users could see the impact of Maia 200 in the form of faster response times and potentially more advanced features from Copilot and other AI tools built into Windows and Microsoft products.

Maia 200 could also provide a performance boost to developers and scientists who use AI inference via Microsoft’s platforms. This, in turn, could lead to improvements in AI deployment on large-scale research projects and elements like advanced weather modeling, biological or chemical systems and compositions.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-says-its-newest-ai-chip-maia-200-is-3-times-more-powerful-than-googles-tpu-and-amazons-trainium-processor at Jan 27, 2026 at 7:22 AM EST.

ARCHAEOLOGY

NEWS | SOPHIE BERDUGO | JAN 26, 2026, 9:45 AM EST | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

World's oldest known rock art predates modern humans' entrance into Europe — and it was found in an Indonesian cave

The hand stencil is more than 1,000 years older than the previous earliest evidence of rock art.

The faint outline of a handprint (above the dark bird figure) in the Liang Metanduno cave in Sulawesi is the oldest known rock art in the world. (Image credit: Maxime Aubert)

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Scientists have identified the world's oldest known rock art — a hand stencil created at least 67,800 years ago in Indonesia.

This artwork, nestled in a cave in southeast Sulawesi, is also the earliest archaeological evidence of modern humans (Homo sapiens) living on the islands between the Asian and Australian continental shelves, according to a study published Wednesday (Jan. 21) in the journal Nature. The hand stencil is surrounded by younger rock art, including another hand stencil.

This discovery could fill a major gap in scientists' understanding of the journey the ancestors of Indigenous Australians took before reaching the continent at least 60,000 years ago. "It is very likely that the people who made these paintings in Sulawesi were part of the broader population that would later spread through the region and ultimately reach Australia," study first author Adhi Agus Oktaviana, an archaeologist at the National Research and Innovation Agency in Indonesia, said in a statement.

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Although the rock art's original meaning is unknown, the hand stencils hint that the artists belonged to a relatively large group with its own cultural identity, study co-author Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist and geochemist at Griffith University in Australia, told Live Science. The hand stencils could have been made to signify group membership, Aubert said. "If you know about that cave and you know about this rock art, you're part of that group, you're part of that culture," he said.

Prehistoric art

Prehistoric rock art — or art on a rock face like a cave wall or a rock shelter — has been discovered all around the world, from 12,000-year-old engravings in Saudi Arabia to 4,000-year-old paintings along the U.S.-Mexico border. The oldest dated rock art previously identified — a roughly 66,700-year-old hand stencil in Spain — was believed to have been made by Neanderthals, as current evidence suggests modern humans didn't reach Europe until 54,000 years ago. But the dating technique used for that discovery is debated.

However, humans have been creating art for even longer than these examples. The oldest known drawing is a 73,000-year-old hashtag on a stone from South Africa, and a 540,000-year-old shell with zigzag carvings from Indonesia may have been crafted by Homo erectus.

Sulawesi also has a longstanding artistic legacy, with a depiction of a human interacting with a warty pig dating to 51,200 years ago. As part of a broader project documenting the prehistoric artwork on Sulawesi, Aubert and his team inspected 11 designs found in eight caves: seven hand stencils, two human figures and two geometric patterns.

All these prehistoric works had lumps of calcium carbonate — called "cave popcorn" — growing over them. Because the cave popcorn must have developed after the artwork was created, dating these growths provides a minimum age for the underlying image. In a handful of instances, maximum ages could also be obtained as the pigment overlaid one of these mineral deposits.

During the project, the researchers dated one hand stencil, measuring 5.5 by 3.9 inches (14 by 10 centimeters), to at least 67,800 years ago, making it 1,100 years more ancient than the rock art linked to Neanderthals in Spain. The image has faded considerably, but the remains of the fingers and palm are still faintly visible. The fingers had been purposefully narrowed — an artistic technique only found in Sulawesi.

The purposefully narrowed finger hand stencils have been found elsewhere in Sulawesi, such as at Leang Jarie in south Sulawesi (shown here). (Image credit: Ahdi Agus Oktaviana)

About 4.4 inches (11 cm) to the left of this artwork is a hand stencil created using darker pigment that dates to no older than 32,800 years ago. This shows that prehistoric humans used this cave as their canvas over a period of at least 35,000 years.

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Although other human species once called Sulawesi home, the researchers believe H. sapiens created these artworks, because the narrowed fingers are technically complex to produce and modern humans are known to have lived in the region at the time.

The stencils may have been created by the individuals spraying pigment over their hands with their mouths. This opens up the possibility for DNA to be extracted from the artwork. "We could have the genetic signature of the people doing this," Aubert said. "That would be amazing."

The identification of the oldest rock art in Sulawesi is an important discovery because it adds another data point on the journey humans took to spread across Island Southeast Asia and Australia. As a critical point on the journey to Australia, this discovery supports the suggestion that modern humans reached Australia by sailing a northern route from present-day Borneo to Sulawesi and then through to western Papua (the western half of the island of New Guinea) or the Indonesian island of Misool, the authors wrote in the study.

The newly dated rock art, as well as other findings, suggest that that modern humans reached Australia by sailing a route from present-day Borneo (red) to Sulawesi (orange) and then through to western Papua (blue) or the Indonesian island of Misool (purple). (Image credit: Google Maps; Map data Copyright 2026, INEGI)

"This is a stunning discovery," Chris Clarkson, a professor of archaeology also at Griffith University who was not involved in the new research, told Live Science in an email.

He agreed with the conclusion that ancient modern humans are the most likely artists of the hand stencils because the dates align perfectly with when H. sapiens arrived in the region.

"What amazes me most is that these artworks sit directly on a migration route into Australia," he said. What's more, it shows that the first people to populate Australia had rich cultural lives. "The first people to cross Island Southeast Asia and reach Australia weren't just surviving, they were creating art, crossing oceans, and carrying complex symbolic traditions," Clarkson said.

Article Sources

Oktaviana, A. A., Joannes-Boyau, R., Hakim, B., et al. Rock art from at least 67,800 years ago in Sulawesi. Nature (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09968-y

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

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/worlds-oldest-known-rock-art-predates-modern-humans-entrance-into-europe-and-it-was-found-in-an-indonesian-cave at Jan 27, 2026 at 7:22 AM EST.

ARCHAEOLOGY

NEWS | KRISTINA KILLGROVE | JAN 26, 2026, 5:58 AM EST | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

2,500 years ago, people in Bulgaria ate dog meat at feasts and as a delicacy, archaeological study finds

A study of dog bones across several Iron Age sites in Bulgaria has shown that people ate dog meat.

An Iron Age dog burial from Chirpan, Bulgaria (Image credit: Stella Nikolova)

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Cut marks on dozens of canine skeletons found at archaeological sites in Bulgaria suggest that people were eating dog meat 2,500 years ago — and not just because they had no other options.

"Dog meat was not a necessity eaten out of poverty, as these sites are rich in livestock, which was the main source of protein," Stella Nikolova, a zooarchaeologist at the National Archaeological Institute with Museum of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and author of a study published in December in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, told Live Science. "Evidence shows that dog meat was associated with some tradition involving communal feasting."

Although consuming dog meat — a practice sometimes called cynophagy — is considered taboo in contemporary European societies, this hasn't always been the case. Historical accounts mention that the ancient Greeks sometimes ate dog meat, and archaeological analysis of dog skeletons from Greece has confirmed those stories.

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During the Iron Age (fifth to first centuries B.C.), a cultural group known as the Thracians lived to the northeast of the Greeks, in what is now Bulgaria. The Greeks and Romans considered the Thracians to be uncivilized and warlike, and in the middle of the first century A.D., Thrace became a province of the Roman Empire. Like the Greeks, the Thracians were said to have consumed dog meat.

To look into the question of whether the Thracians ate dogs, Nikolova examined skeletons and previously published data from 10 Iron Age archaeological sites spread throughout Bulgaria. She discovered that most of the dogs had medium-sized snouts and medium-to-large withers heights, making them roughly the size of modern German shepherds.

But the large number of butchery marks on many of the bones revealed the dogs were not man's best friend. "It is most probable they were kept as guard dogs, as the sites have a lot of livestock," Nikolova said. "I don't believe they were viewed as pets in the modern sense."

At the site of Emporion Pistiros, an Iron Age trade center in inland Thrace, archaeologists found more than 80,000 animal bones — and dogs made up 2% of the total. When Nikolova looked closely at the dog bones from Pistiros, she found that nearly 20% of them had butchery marks made by metal tools. Two lower dog jaws also had burned teeth, possibly the result of someone removing hair and fur with fire prior to butchering and cooking the animals.

A dog skull with cut marks from Emporion Pistiros, Bulgaria. (Image credit: Stella Nikolova)

"The highest number of cuts and fragmentation is observed in the parts with the densest muscle tissue — the upper quarter of the hind limbs," Nikolova said. "There are also cuts on ribs, although in dogs they would yield little meat." The cuts Nikolova noticed on the dogs followed roughly the same pattern as those on sheep and cattle at the site, suggesting all of the animals were being butchered in a similar manner.

Because the Thracians had many other animals more traditionally associated with meat consumption, such as pigs, birds, fish and wild mammals, Nikolova does not think the Thracians were eating dogs as a last resort.

At Pistiros, butchered dog bones were discovered within the discarded remains of feasts and in general domestic trash heaps, Nikolova said, meaning dog flesh may have been consumed in different ways. "So, while linked to a certain tradition, it was not confined to that title and was an occasional 'delicacy,'" she said.

Several other Bulgarian archaeological sites Nikolova investigated had evidence of cut and burned dog bones, as did sites in Greece and Romania, meaning "we cannot label dog meat consumption as unique to Ancient Thrace, but a somewhat regular practice that was carried out in the 1st millennium BC in the North-East Mediterranean," Nikolova wrote in her study.

Nikolova plans to further investigate the role of dogs at Pistiros as part of the Corpus Animalium Thracicorum project. She noted that the butchered dogs at Pistiros are from the first part of the Iron Age, but later on the people there began burying intact dogs, so she hopes to determine whether there was a change in people's attitude over time that made dogs a less acceptable source of food.

Article Sources

Nikolova, S. (2025). Dog meat in late Iron Age Bulgaria: necessity, delicacy, or part of a wider intercultural tradition? International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. https://doi.org/10.1002/oa.70062

Animal quiz: Test yourself on these fun animal trivia questions

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/2-500-years-ago-people-in-bulgaria-ate-dog-meat-at-feasts-and-as-a-delicacy-archaeological-study-finds at Jan 27, 2026 at 7:22 AM EST.

ARCHAEOLOGY

NEWS | ARISTOS GEORGIOU | JAN 26, 2026, 5:58 AM EST | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

480,000-year-old ax sharpener is the oldest known elephant bone tool ever discovered in Europe

The "very rare" find provides an extraordinary glimpse into the ingenuity of early human relatives who lived around half a million years ago.

The 480,000-year-old elephant bone tool was discovered at the Boxgrove archaeological site in the United Kingdom. (Image credit: NHM Photo Unit)

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A triangular artifact crafted from elephant bone was used by archaic human relatives to sharpen hand axes around 480,000 years ago in what is now the U.K., a new analysis reveals.

The item — which measures about 4.3 by 2.3 inches (10.9 by 5.8 centimeters) — represents the oldest known elephant bone tool ever found in Europe, according to the study, which was published Wednesday (Jan. 21) in the journal Science Advances, and demonstrates human relatives' high level of resourcefulness and ability to adapt to new environments as they settled in northern climates.

While evidence suggests that early human relatives used elephant bones and tusks throughout the Paleolithic period for a wide range of purposes, it's "very rare" to find an elephant-bone tool of this age or older anywhere in the world, said study co-author Silvia Bello, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London.

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The "unexpected" find of one of the world's oldest elephant bone tools indicates a relatively advanced level of technological development, thus highlighting the innovation, resourcefulness and craftsmanship of archaic human relatives almost half a million years ago, the researchers said in the study.

While the researchers are unsure which group of human relatives used the elephant tool, given the age of the tool and the location where it was found, two candidates are early Neanderthals or Homo heidelbergensis, Bello told Live Science in an email.

The tool "provides an extraordinary glimpse into the ingenuity of the early human ancestors who made it," Bello said.

The fossilized bone artifact was originally uncovered in the early 1990s during excavations at the archaeological site of Boxgrove in southern England. This internationally renowned site has yielded many finds that have shed light on Paleolithic life around half a million years ago. These include various bone and stone tools, numerous animal remains displaying signs of butchery, and even the oldest human remains ever found in Britain.

A map showing Stone Age sites with known elephant-bone tools. (Image credit: Parfitt et al., Sci. Adv. 12, eady1390)

The significance of the bone artifact was not immediately apparent. But a recent analysis of the artifact conducted by Bello and her co-author Simon Parfitt, an archaeologist at the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, revealed that the artifact represents an elephant bone fragment deliberately shaped into a "retoucher" tool.

Retouchers were used to shape and resharpen the edges of hand axes. The elephant bone retoucher would have contributed to the production of the "finely worked" hand axes that were thought to have been used primarily as cutting tools and are typical of Boxgrove, according to the study.

"The elephant bone tool shows signs of being shaped and used to knap and re-sharpen lithic tools while the bone was still fresh, suggesting that these humans knew that elephant bone was a great material for this," Bello said.

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The find represents the only documented case of elephant bone being used to make a retoucher, according to the researchers. Knapping tools made from organic materials such as bone, antler and wood were essential pieces of equipment for early humans but are rarely preserved in the archaeological record.

Four views of a hand ax from the Boxgrove, U.K. (Image credit: Parfitt et al., Sci. Adv. 12, eady1390)

Furthermore, prehistoric elephant bone remains are "exceptionally rare" at Boxgrove, suggesting that archaic humans in the area came across this resource infrequently, the study authors noted. Nonetheless, it appears that the creators of the tool recognized the usefulness of the material.

"This remarkable discovery showcases the resourcefulness of our ancient relatives," Parfitt told Live Science in an email. "They possessed not only a deep knowledge of the local materials around them, but also a sophisticated understanding of how to craft highly refined stone tools."

"Elephant bone would have been a rare but highly useful resource, and it's likely this was a tool of considerable value," he said in a statement.

Article Sources

Parfitt, S.A., Bello, S.M. The earliest elephant-bone tool from Europe: An unexpected raw material for precision knapping of Acheulean handaxes. Science Advances 12(4) (2026). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.ady1390

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

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/480-000-year-old-ax-sharpener-is-the-oldest-known-elephant-bone-tool-ever-discovered-in-europe at Jan 27, 2026 at 7:22 AM EST.

HEALTH

FEATURES | ASHLEY HAMER | JAN 26, 2026, 5:58 AM EST | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Why don't you usually see your nose?

Our nose is right in front of us. So why don't we normally notice it?

Why don't we normally notice our noses? (Image credit: Getty Images)

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Close one eye, and focus straight ahead, without moving your eyes. You'll notice a fleshy blur in your peripheral vision — your nose. It's there every waking moment, yet you're hardly ever aware of it. So why can't we see our noses, even though they're literally right in front of us?

"You can see your nose," said Michael Webster, a vision scientist and co-director of the neuroscience program at the University of Nevada, Reno. We’re just not aware of it most of the time.

The main reason our noses don't take up space in our vision comes down to a somewhat startling fact: We don't see the world as it is but rather as a model our brains have constructed to help us survive.

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"Vision is actually a prediction about what you think the world is," Webster said. "You want to be aware of, 'How does the world differ?' 'What are the surprises and errors and the things that I didn't predict?' Normally, you're not aware of your nose because you already know about it and you just don't want to be aware of it. … It's a big disadvantage to waste some of your energy attending to that."

This makes sense from a survival perspective; constantly processing unchanging features, like your nose, would be a waste of limited mental resources when you need to detect threats, find food or navigate your environment. In fact, your brain cancels out all sorts of information about your own body to help you perceive the outside world.

Take your eyes’ blood vessels, for example. The photoreceptors that collect light from the outside world are located in the back of the eye, behind a tangle of blood vessels.

"It's like you're sitting up in a tree of dead branches and you're actually seeing the world through all these dead branches," Webster said.

Your brain usually cancels that out, but there are ways to make your eye's blood vessels appear so your conscious mind can see them. If you’ve ever had an eye exam, you might have noticed dark squiggles in your vision when the optometrist passed a light across your eye. Those are the shadows cast by your eyes’ blood vessels.

Your brain doesn’t just cancel out unwanted information — sometimes it creates information from scratch. Take your blind spot: the blank region in your vision that corresponds to where the optic nerve leaves the eye. Your blind spot is about 5 degrees wide, or more than twice the size of the full moon's appearance in the sky. Yet we usually aren't aware of this huge gap in our vision.

"We're actually filling in that information," Webster said. "Instead of seeing the absence, we've got clues from what's around the blind spot telling us, 'OK, if I'm looking at a white piece of paper, it's very likely that the part that's in the blind spot is also white.'"

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It's even easier to perceive your nose — in fact, you might be hyperaware of it right now simply because you're thinking about it.

" If you actually are consciously trying to see something, then you do become aware of it," Webster said.

Our "disappearing" noses reveal something profound about how we experience reality: Our vision isn't like a camera recording what's really there; it's more akin to an artist creating a model of the world that's most useful to us.

Webster took this idea even further. We may not perceive reality at all. "Even this model itself is really just the information that you need to get by. It's not really telling you what the reality of the world is."

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/health/why-dont-you-usually-see-your-nose at Jan 27, 2026 at 7:22 AM EST.

HEALTH > EXERCISE

FEATURES | ANNA GORA | JAN 26, 2026, 4:42 AM EST | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

6 tips to kickstart your exercise routine and actually stick to it, according to science

Struggling with your New Year’s fitness resolutions? Do not give up just yet. Here are 6 expert tips on how to successfully form and maintain new habits.

(Image credit: Getty Images)

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It is an all-too-familiar cycle: As the New Year starts, we are brimming with motivation, promising ourselves that this is the year we finally get fit. We go to the gym regularly, diligently track our workouts and fill our schedules with fitness classes two weeks in advance. But then reality sets in. Life gets busy, motivation drops, and our fitness goals start fading into the background. For many, that ultimate surrender comes around 'Blue Monday' — the third Monday in January. This is when we tend to crumble under the weight of unrealistic expectations and fading motivation, and finally consign our fitness goals to history.

The good news is that this vicious cycle can be broken. Behavioral science is getting ever closer to understanding what makes us kickstart and maintain an exercise routine, and what derails or slows down our efforts to form new habits — and we can use that knowledge to our advantage.

With that in mind, we asked experts in psychology, physiology and fitness coaching for their advice on how to successfully establish an active lifestyle in 2026. Here are six simple, science-backed tips that can help you finally get fit.

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1. Start small

(Image credit: Getty Images)

This is the most important one. If you want to succeed with your New Year's fitness resolutions, do not overload yourself from the get-go. When you set a lofty goal like "work out every day," you are more likely to get anxious about it, procrastinate and, ultimately, abandon it altogether.

Instead, focus on tiny habits, a concept popularized by the Stanford behavioral scientist B.J. Fogg — scale the behavior down to something so small it feels almost effortless.

"Psychologically, starting small works because it avoids triggering the brain’s threat response, which is activated when the perceived cost of a change is high. Tiny, manageable goals create early mastery experiences that boost dopamine and strengthen self-efficacy: the belief that ‘I can do this,’ Dr. Michael Swift, a British Psychological Society media spokesperson and clinical director at Swift Psychology, a counselling service in Birmingham, U.K., told Live Science by email. "Even a few minutes of movement is enough to begin building the neural pathways that underpin habit formation."

Top tip: Forget the marathon: start with a stroll or a 15-minute bodyweight workout in your living room. The goal here is not to train like an athlete from day one, but to successfully repeat a new behavior. Consistency beats intensity every time in the habit-formation phase.

"People tend to set the bar really high when they are starting a new exercise routine. It is important to choose a program that you will enjoy, and that is going to fit into your lifestyle and be sustainable long term," Michelle D’Onofrio, a Pilates instructor and co-founder of Yatta Studios, a chain of boutique exercise studios in the U.K., told Live Science by email.

It is also worth noting that this slow-burn approach has tangible benefits for your muscular health and general well-being. "Your body adapts to new physical stress through progressive overload — gradually increasing intensity, duration, or frequency so muscles and cardiovascular system can adapt safely," D'Onofrio said.

If you do too much exercise too soon, you are more likely to struggle with brutal bouts of DOMS (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness) and even painful injuries.

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2. Schedule and stack it

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Motivation is a fickle fuel source — it starts bright and intense, but fizzles out quickly. Scientists know that our actions are heavily automated, with most of our behaviors being cued by time, location or preceding events.

Exercise is no different. If you plan and schedule your workouts in advance, you give yourself a powerful cue and a direct call to action that helps when your motivation inevitably runs low. This is why people who create and follow a specific plan detailing when, where and how they would exercise are more likely to follow through than those who do not plan their workouts at all, according to a 2013 meta-analysis published in the journal Health Psychology Review. This phenomenon is called "implementation intention."

Top tip: Move exercise from a vague "I should" to a non-negotiable appointment. Use time blocking — put your exercise session in your daily calendar, just like a meeting with your boss or a school class, then set a reminder. Simple yet effective.

“Too often people think a gym session has to be a massive time commitment, or that they need to overhaul their lives completely to exercise. That’s rarely realistic and often backfires," Steve Chambers, a senior personal trainer and gym manager at Ultimate Performance in Manchester, U.K., told Live Science by email.

"Start by mapping out your real-world schedule (work hours, family, social commitments, sleep, stress etc), then build a custom plan that fits around your life, not the other way around," Chambers advised.

(Image credit: Getty Images)

When planning a new activity, use habit stacking. In essence, this is the practice of piggybacking a new exercise routine onto an existing habit. For example, "After I get home from work and put my keys down, I will immediately change into my workout clothes." This method uses the established neural pattern of the old habit as a runway for the new one.

"Habits form through the cue-routine-reward loop. You are more consistent when exercise is tied to a stable anchor such as 'after breakfast' or 'after work'," D'Onofrio said.

Also, tie in temptation bundling — combine doing something you ought to do with doing something you love. "This could mean that you only listen to your favourite playlist or podcast whilst doing your workout," Rex Fan, a lead behavioural insights advisor at Bupa Health Clinics in the U.K., told Live Science by email.

This also means that you should remember to reward yourself. "When you structure in your workout, why not also structure in something nice to look forward to afterwards? It could be anything from a nice coffee to a phone call with a friend," Fan said.

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3. Make exercise fun

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If you frame exercise purely as a punitive tool for weight loss, or penance for all the hours spent watching your favorite TV show, your brain will subconsciously resist it. Doing something because it feels good is far more sustainable than doing something out of guilt or peer pressure. If you want to increase your chance of succeeding with your New Year's fitness resolutions, make exercise as fun and engaging as possible.

"From a neuroscience perspective, the brain repeats what it finds rewarding, and attaching positive emotion to movement accelerates habit consolidation. Pairing activity with something enjoyable, such as music, a favourite podcast or the satisfying tick of crossing off a plan, enhances the brain’s reward circuitry and reinforces the behaviour," Swift said.

Top tip: This one is simple — do what makes you happy. If you are not a fan of gym workouts or the thought of going for a run makes you queasy, consider dancing, martial arts or some of the more atypical sports, such as frisbee, futsal, Quidditch or trampoline. Every movement counts.

(Image credit: Getty Images)

As Dr. Nicolas Berger, a senior lecturer in exercise physiology at Teesside University in the U.K., told Live Science by email: "Dancing on your own, with your friends, or partner is a brilliant way to improve coordination and cardiovascular fitness, which is low impact but good for your joints and bones. It also brings massive social benefits, improving mental health as well as self-confidence. It’s one of the best ways to do exercise without feeling like it is."

If going to a Zumba class or hopping on a trampoline does not appeal to you, consider some of the less strenuous activities you can do in the great outdoors. “Is there a sea or lake nearby? Rent a kayak or rowing boat, even a pedalo. This all helps with upper body, lower back and core strength," Berger said. “Any outing where you have to walk a lot and maybe carry a backpack is beneficial. If it is interesting, you will not notice it is exercise.”

All in all, by making exercise easy, accessible and rewarding, we work with the brain rather than against it, giving new routines the best possible chance to take root, Swift concluded.

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4. Optimize for convenience

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Human behavior is often governed by "friction costs" — the more steps, decisions or effort required to start a task, the less likely we are to do it. Our brains naturally gravitate toward the path of least resistance, and exercise is no different. If you want to increase your chance of succeeding with your New Year's resolutions, identify and remove or minimise any potential barriers and hurdles that can slow you down on your fitness journey.

"One of the strongest findings in behavioural science is that motivation is unstable, so the goal is to design the behaviour to require as little activation energy as possible," Swift explained. "Reducing friction by laying out clothes the night before, choosing an activity with minimal setup, or linking movement to an existing cue engages the brain’s habit system, which favours predictability and ease. When a task feels simple, the prefrontal cortex does not have to work as hard to overcome resistance, making follow-through far more likely."

Top tip: Identify your potential barriers and challenges (lack of time? no access to exercise equipment? poor sleep?), then make a plan to remove or minimize them as much as possible. In simpler terms, make starting your workout as easy and frictionless as possible. For example, the night before your scheduled exercise session, place your workout clothes by the bedside and your water bottle by the door. Have your workout video bookmarked or your podcast playlist ready. If morning gym travel is the hurdle, join an online fitness class from the comfort of your living room.

The hurdle is almost always in the starting, not the continuing. Getting over that initial friction is half the battle.

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5. Embrace imperfection

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All-or-nothing thinking is a major hurdle to succeeding on your fitness journey. You miss one day of training, convince yourself you have failed and abandon the entire effort. However, getting fit is a marathon, not a sprint. Sometimes a little self-compassion goes further than bashing yourself for not living up to your expectations.

"When people interpret lapses as normal variability rather than personal failure, they are far more likely to resume," Swift said.

Top tip: Try the "two-day rule." It is simple: never let yourself skip your planned exercise for two days in a row. Life happens. You’ll get sick, work will run late, or motivation will dip. Permission to miss one day is crucial to prevent shame and the subsequent spiral. But by committing to not missing a second day, you build resilience and prevent a lapse from becoming a collapse. This builds self-compassion and a flexible, sustainable mindset, which is far more durable than rigid perfectionism.

“In practice, that means: Accept that progress won’t always be linear. There will be plateaus or regressions. That doesn’t mean failure. Be forgiving of slip-ups, but don’t give up! If you fall off the wagon, then get on again next session." Chambers said.

6. Involve others

(Image credit: Getty Images)

Last, but not least: involve other people. According to a 2017 systematic review published in the journal International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, social support can have a small but significant impact on helping you stick to your new exercise routine long-term. Whether it is the local running club, a guided Pilates session or working out with your gym buddies, having someone to check in with you on a regular basis can be a huge motivator. It does not even have to be someone you are particularly close to.

"Sharing your intentions with someone you trust, like a fitness coach or health adviser, can help you to stay closer to your goals. Speaking to a health adviser may also help you to prepare for the physical demands of a new workout, depending on your individual health," Fan said.

Top tip: Train with a partner (friend, spouse) or have a regular “gym buddy.” Join a fitness class, whether in your local leisure center or online. Start a fitness blog. The options are endless!

"If you know someone’s counting on you, you are more likely to show up. Having a system of external accountability dramatically raises the odds that you won’t just ‘fall off the wagon," Chambers concluded.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/health/exercise/6-tips-to-kickstart-your-exercise-routine-and-actually-stick-to-it-according-to-science at Jan 27, 2026 at 7:22 AM EST.

January 23, 2026

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SPACE > ASTRONOMY > BLACK HOLES

FEATURES | ADAM MANN | JAN 23, 2026, 7:29 PM EST | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

'A real revolution': The James Webb telescope is upending our understanding of the biggest, oldest black holes in the universe

MEMBER EXCLUSIVE

For years, the James Webb Space Telescope has been spotting enormous black holes in the early universe that defy all expectations. Now, astronomers are finally deciphering the origins of these cosmic behemoths.

JWST data is revealing new insights into the universe's earliest black holes. The data is reshaping what we know about black hole formation. (Image credit: Adapted by Matt Smith/Future from Lukas J. Furtak, Adi Zitrin, Adèle Plat, et al., NASA, ESA, CSA, StSci, Ivo Labbe (Swinburne), Rachel Bezanson (University of Pittsburgh), Alyssa Pagan, Joseph Olmsted, P. van Dokkum (Yale University), NASA/CXC/SAO/Ákos Bogdán; NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare & K. Arcand, Simon Lilly (ETH Zurich), Daichi Kashino (Nagoya University), Jorryt Matthee (ETH Zurich), Christina Eilers (MIT), Rob Simcoe (MIT), Rongmon Bordoloi (NCSU), Ruari Mackenzie (ETH Zurich))

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Colossal monsters lurk in the centers of all galaxies. Known as supermassive black holes, these gravitational beasts can have millions to billions of times more mass than the sun.

For decades, astronomers have wondered where these behemoths came from and how they got so huge. Early on, physicists thought that supermassive black holes formed like other, smaller black holes do — with large stars collapsing and becoming sun-size black holes that slowly devoured surrounding matter and merged with one another over billions of years.

But it has become increasingly clear this model is broken.

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The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has peered back to some of the earliest epochs in cosmic history to spot gigantic black holes that are too big, too early to be explained by traditional models. Researchers are beginning to piece together a story of how they originated, which likely involved strange and exotic processes.

Science Spotlight takes a deeper look at emerging science and gives you, our readers, the perspective you need on these advances. Our stories highlight trends in different fields, how new research is changing old ideas, and how the picture of the world we live in is being transformed thanks to science.

Emerging research suggests enormous black holes could have existed since the universe's earliest days, perhaps even before stars and galaxies, and that they came about in multiple ways. While future discoveries will help narrow down the predominance of each formation mechanism, many in the field are already thrilled to be chipping away at a long-standing cosmic mystery.

"This is one of the most exciting phases of my career," Roberto Maiolino, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge, told Live Science. "I'm tempted to call it a real revolution in our understanding of the formation of these objects."

Mystery giants

Hints of the cosmic size discrepancy arose in the early 2000s, when instruments like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey helped capture data on tens of thousands of extremely bright objects called quasars in the faroff universe. These luminous entities are thought to be gargantuan black holes in the centers of galaxies. They feed on vast amounts of gas and dust, and then spew powerful radiation. The Sloan survey showed that many quasars existed when the universe was just 800 million years old — a fraction of its current 13.8 billion-year age. The existence of these behemoths, which have millions to billions of times the sun's mass, was a head-scratcher for cosmologists.

That's because a typical black hole arises when a huge star nears the end of its life and explodes as a fiery supernova. The core of the titanic star collapses into a superdense point from which nothing, including light, can escape. Such stellar-size black holes are generally around 10 to 100 times as massive as the sun. While these objects can become gravitationally attracted to one another and merge into ever larger black holes, there didn't appear to be enough time for such processes to build them up into quasar-scale territory at the earliest points in cosmic history.

Quasars are some of the brightest objects in the universe. Their early appearance in the universe's history raised questions about how black holes formed. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI))

"We knew that either they grow very fast or there had to be some other ways of forming them," astrophysicist Ignas Juodzbalis, also of the University of Cambridge, told Live Science.

The question was how. One leading theory posits that, in the past, ginormous clumps of gas and dust could collapse under their own weight, rapidly forming a black hole with perhaps 1,000 to 1 million times the sun's mass. These direct-collapse black holes, as they're called, would then grow by feeding on gas and dust and merging into the supermassive black holes seen in today's galactic centers.

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Models predicted that as such black holes gorged, they would become extremely bright compared with their host galaxies, either matching or topping surrounding stars' luminosities. In other words, they would become quasars.

X-ray emissions, seen in both JWST and Chandra X-ray Observatory data from a galaxy 13.2 billion light-years away, suggest that a supermassive black hole was already forming early in the universe's history. (Image credit: Chandra/JWST)

In 2023, JWST spotted a distant galaxy, dubbed UHZ1, that seemed to align neatly with the direct-collapse black hole model. The galaxy existed when the universe was a mere 470 million years old and contains a black hole with an estimated mass of 40 million suns.

Astronomers lucked out because UHZ1 was spotted both by JWST, which sees in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, which sees in X-ray light. Infrared light mostly comes from stars and warm dust heated by starlight, whereas the more powerful X-rays blast out from the devouring black hole.

And UHZ1's infrared and X-ray brightness are quite similar to one another, which suggests a black hole so large that it rivals the mass of all the stars in its galaxy. (For comparison, a modern galaxy like our Milky Way has around 20,000 times more mass in its stars, gas and dust than in its central black hole.) No one had ever seen anything like this before.

But researchers had predicted exactly how the colors emitted by a direct-collapse black hole would appear in JWST's instruments, along with several other key properties that could identify such an object .

"It turns out that UHZ1 remarkably satisfies all these properties," Priyamvada Natarajan, an astrophysicist at Yale University and lead author of the paper making those predictions, told Live Science.

Little red dots

UHZ1 is not alone. From almost the moment it turned on, JWST has been detecting extremely compact red entities that existed mainly when the cosmos was between half a billion and 1.5 billion years old. Known as "little red dots," they were originally thought to be galaxies far too big to have formed in the early universe, leading some scientists to call them "universe breakers" for upending models of cosmic history. The prevailing consensus is now moving toward the possibility that, rather than unusually large galaxies, these are bizarre, humongous black holes.

Data from James Webb's Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science survey (CEERS), JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) and Next Generation Deep Extragalactic Exploratory Public (NGDEEP) survey have revealed extremely dense, compact entities from between 600 million and 1.5-billion years after the Big Bang that seem to defy traditional cosmological explanations. Dubbed "little red dots," these objects may be black holes, data suggests. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Dale Kocevski (Colby College))

For instance, an object called QSO1 that existed when the universe was around 700 million years old has been studied intensely since it was discovered in 2023. A recent investigation looked at gas swirling around QSO1's center to try to pin down its mass with high precision. Swirling gas travels at a certain speed depending on the gravitational force tugging it as it spins. Using this technique, astronomers have shown that QSO1's mass is around that of 50 million suns. Moreover, all of the mass appears to be in a compact region around the black hole, with very little evidence of a large stellar population.

"We still don't see where the host galaxy is," Lukas Furtak, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin, told Live Science. "There doesn't really seem to be one."

QSO1 is a strange object discovered in 2023 that seems to be a black hole without a host galaxy. (Image credit: Lukas J. Furtak, Adi Zitrin, Adèle Plat, et al., CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

This prospect — a gigantic black hole with no visible host galaxy — has been conjectured but never previously observed. Yet that appears to be what many of these little red dots are. Another recent study analyzed an object named "The Cliff," which likely weighs billions of times as much as the sun and is from about 1.8 billion years after the Big Bang. JWST's data showed a very sharp jump in The Cliff's light at a narrow wavelength that usually arises from dense hydrogen gas at a specific temperature. The findings indicate that The Cliff might be a long-hypothesized object called a quasi-star or a black hole star.

JWST may have found a new type of object known as a black hole star. (Image credit: MPIA/HdA/T. Müller/A. de Graaff)

A quasi-star would be a potential stage in the evolution of a direct-collapse black hole. After the central huge chunk of gas crumpled to form a black hole, an outer sphere of gas and dust would remain, get heated by the black hole's emissions and glow in red wavelengths. This entity would look somewhat like a giant red star but would in fact be an envelope of hot hydrogen gas cocooned around a supermassive black hole.

In the very beginning

While direct-collapse models can explain a lot of what JWST is seeing, there remain a few other possibilities for supermassive black hole formation.

First proposed by Stephen Hawking in the 1970s, primordial black holes are a class of objects that could have arisen in the first few moments after the Big Bang, when dense regions collapsed under their own weight. Such black holes could come in a wide range of sizes, including ones large enough to act as the initial seeds for later supermassive black holes. One study has shown that mergers of primordial black holes could explain GN-z11, a galaxy from when the universe was a mere 400 million years old that contains a black hole with an estimated mass of 2 million suns.

A million-solar-mass black hole seems to be lurking within the ionized gas (shown in green) in the Infinity galaxy, and new images from the JWST suggest it may have formed via a process known as direct collapse. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, P. van Dokkum (Yale University))

Another theory has posited the existence of "not-quite-primordial black holes ." These would have come about within the first few million years after the Big Bang — later than primordial black holes but still long before any stars — when large clouds of hydrogen and helium collapsed under their own weight.

"For primordial black holes, you need these really extremely dense regions in the very early universe," Wenzer Qin, a theoretical physicist at New York University, told Live Science. That generally requires a lot of fine-tuning of parameters in a cosmological model, she added. When you relax such tight constraints a bit, dense regions appear at slightly later times in cosmic history, creating direct-collapse black holes that can go on to merge and end up as supermassive black holes.

Astronomers think that almost all elements heavier than hydrogen and helium were created in the nuclear bellies of giant stars and were then strewn about the universe when those stars went supernova. Many of the early black holes and young galaxies that JWST is seeing contain low amounts of these heavy elements. That could suggest that at least some of these objects formed from either primordial or not-quite-primordial black holes, given that both would have arisen long before any stars existed.

Researchers are still debating which of these models might be dominant for monster-black-hole formation, but most favor a blended view.

"I think, in the end, it will be some combination of all these mechanisms that gives rise to the entire population of supermassive black holes," Qin said.

Other missions such as the European Space Agency's Euclid observatory, launched in 2023, and NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, expected to launch in 2027, will team up with JWST to discover and study more early supermassive black holes. That should help researchers differentiate between these formation mechanisms and determine which, if any, is more common.

An illustration of the Nancy Grace Roman telescope, which will launch in 2027 and should shed further light on how some of the earliest black holes formed. (Image credit: GSFC/SVS)

One thing that appears to be growing clearer to many astronomers is that supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies probably didn't come from stellar-size ones.

Thanks to its unparalleled abilities, JWST has upended our understanding of early cosmic history and is helping to rewrite the story of how gigantic black holes may have developed.

"The universe is littered with supermassive black holes that form extremely early," Natarajan said. "I can't tell you how exciting that is."

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/space/black-holes/a-real-revolution-the-james-webb-telescope-is-upending-our-understanding-of-the-biggest-oldest-black-holes-in-the-universe at Jan 27, 2026 at 7:22 AM EST.

HEALTH > MIND > NEUROSCIENCE

NEWS | PAYAL DHAR | JAN 23, 2026, 7:29 PM EST | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

'Pain sponge' derived from stem cells could soak up pain signals before they reach the brain

Scientists are developing a "sponge" that can soak up pain signals in the body before they reach the brain, potentially offering an alternative to painkillers.

This microscopy image shows pain-sensing neurons derived from stem cells. These cells form the basis of a new "pain sponge" that sequesters inflammatory pain signals and halts cartilage degeneration in mice with arthritis. (Image credit: SereNeuro Therapeutics)

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An experimental treatment uses specialized neurons derived from stem cells to "soak up" triggers of pain and inflammation in the arthritic knees of mice.

This lab-mouse experiment suggests the therapy could potentially help with chronic pain in people, caused by conditions like osteoarthritis, for example. The hope is that the "pain sponge" could enable patients to stop relying on opioid medications for pain relief, the researchers say.

And as a bonus side effect, the engineered neurons also promoted bone and cartilage repair in the mice they were tested in, the researchers reported in a preprint posted to the server bioRxiv in December 2025. The work has not yet been peer-reviewed.

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"The possibility that the therapy could both relieve pain and slow cartilage degeneration is particularly compelling for osteoarthritis," Chuan-Ju Liu, an orthopedics professor at Yale University who wasn't involved in the study, told Live Science.

How the pain sponge works

The therapy, known as SN101, uses human pluripotent stem cells (hPSC), which can differentiate into any type of cell in the body. In the study, led by Gabsang Lee, a neurology professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, researchers engineered the hPSC to differentiate into specialized sensory neurons.

These neurons effectively worked as a sponge for inflammatory pain signals. They sequestered the signals before they could be transmitted to the brain and cause pain.

Theoretically, the therapy could work for any kind of chronic pain, said Daniel Saragnese, co-founder of SereNeuro Therapeutics, the biotech company developing SN101. That said, the researchers have so far tested its effectiveness for only osteoarthritis, the most common form of arthritis.

The degenerative condition is characterized by inflammation and chronic pain that affects the joints, mainly the hips, knees, lower back and neck. It causes pain and stiffness, as well as inflammation driven by the breakdown of bone, cartilage and other tissues. There is no cure.

Currently, osteoarthritis symptoms are managed with lifestyle changes, including physical therapy, and various pain relievers, such as over-the-counter and topical painkillers, opioids, and steroid injections.

In the context of neurodegenerative diseases — such as multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease, and Parkinson's disease — scientists have been working on using hPSCs to replace or repair damaged neurons. With SN101, though, the researchers are taking an alternative approach. The new hPSC-derived neurons are injected at the site of inflammation and exist alongside other pain-sensing neurons, rather than replacing them.

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The new neurons serve as biological decoys, binding nearby inflammatory factors before they can be picked up by the body's original neurons.

Potential pros of SN101

Chronic pain, which is defined as pain that lasts three months or more, is often managed with opioid drugs that bind to receptors in the body to reduce the intensity of pain. However, opioids cause unwanted side effects, such as nausea and vomiting, and carry a risk of addiction.

Despite their downsides, it is estimated that about 9% of patients with knee osteoarthritis turn to opioids, which can lead to excessive, long-term use. As such, scientists are always on the lookout for safer and more efficient pain-management techniques.

By using biologically complex cells that naturally express multiple pain receptors, SN101 may more closely reflect the way pain and inflammation manifest in living tissues, Liu said. This could help snuff out pain at its source. Opioids, on the other hand, bind to receptors in the brain to temporarily block painful sensations, so they don't get at the signals at the root of pain.

"However, this work remains at a preclinical stage," Liu emphasized.

The research will need to pass significant milestones before human use, including formal toxicology studies, long-term safety assessments, and first-in-human clinical trials, he said. Nonetheless, he called the idea behind the therapy "innovative."

The researchers pointed out several limitations in their recent study that would need investigation before SN101 could be deemed safe for humans. One is the treatment's immunogenicity — that is, whether it triggers a harmful immune response in the body. Another limitation is that human and mouse knee joints are very different, so some results from the arthritic mouse study might not translate to people.

"Human joints are larger [than mouse joints], more mechanically complex, and subject to decades of cumulative stress," Liu noted. Additionally, "pain processing and immune-neuronal interactions can differ substantially between mice and humans, which may affect both therapeutic efficacy and durability."

Article Sources

Ectopic engraftment of nociceptive neurons derived from hPSCs for pain relief and joint homeostasis. Zhuolun Wang, Weixin Zhang, Ju Wang, Zhiping Wu, Xu Cao, Junmin Peng, Gabsang Lee, Xinzhong Dong. bioRxiv 2025.12.16.694733; doi: https://doi.org/10.64898/2025.12.16.694733

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/health/neuroscience/pain-sponge-derived-from-stem-cells-could-soak-up-pain-signals-before-they-reach-the-brain at Jan 27, 2026 at 7:22 AM EST.

HEALTH > MEDICINE & DRUGS

OPINION | JAN 23, 2026, 6:53 PM EST | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Antibiotic resistance is the 'silent pandemic' — here are four steps to stop it

Four major trends that will shape how we as a society will confront antibiotic resistance in the coming decade.

Scientists are fighting back against antibiotic resistance with new strategies and tools.  (Image credit: wildpixel via Getty Images)

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Imagine going to the hospital for a bacterial ear infection and hearing your doctor say, “We’re out of options.” It may sound dramatic, but antibiotic resistance is pushing that scenario closer to becoming reality for an increasing number of people. In 2016, a woman from Nevada died from a bacterial infection that was resistant to all 26 antibiotics that were available in the United States at that time.

The U.S. alone sees more than 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant illnesses each year. Globally, antimicrobial resistance is linked to nearly 5 million deaths annually.

Bacteria naturally evolve in ways that can make the drugs meant to kill them less effective. However, when antibiotics are overused or used improperly in medicine or agriculture, these pressures accelerate the process of resistance.

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As resistant bacteria spread, lifesaving treatments face new complications – common infections become harder to treat, and routine surgeries become riskier. Slowing these threats to modern medicine requires not only responsible antibiotic use and good hygiene, but also awareness of how everyday actions influence resistance.

Since the inception of antibiotics in 1910 with the introduction of Salvarsan, a synthetic drug used to treat syphilis, scientists have been sounding the alarm about resistance. As a microbiologist and biochemist who studies antimicrobial resistance, I see four major trends that will shape how we as a society will confront antibiotic resistance in the coming decade.

1. Faster diagnostics are the new front line

For decades, treating bacterial infections has involved a lot of educated guesswork. When a very sick patient arrives at the hospital and clinicians don’t yet know the exact bacteria causing the illness, they often start with a broad-spectrum antibiotic. These drugs kill many different types of bacteria at once, which can be lifesaving — but they also expose a wide range of other bacteria in the body to antibiotics. While some bacteria are killed, the ones that remain continue to multiply and spread resistance genes between different bacterial species. That unnecessary exposure gives harmless or unrelated bacteria a chance to adapt and develop resistance.

In contrast, narrow-spectrum antibiotics target only a small group of bacteria. Clinicians typically prefer these types of antibiotics because they treat the infection without disturbing bacteria that are not involved in the infection. However, it can take several days to identify the exact bacteria causing the infection. During that waiting period, clinicians often feel they have no choice but to start broad-spectrum treatment – especially if the patient is seriously ill.

Amoxicillin is a commonly prescribed broad-spectrum antibiotic. (Image credit: TEK IMAGE via Getty Images)

But new technology may fast-track identification of bacterial pathogens, allowing medical tests to be conducted right where the patient is instead of sending samples off-site and waiting a long time for answers. In addition, advances in genomic sequencing, microfluidics and artificial intelligence tools are making it possible to identify bacterial species and effective antibiotics to fight them in hours rather than days. Predictive tools can even anticipate resistance evolution.

For clinicians, better tests could help them make faster diagnoses and more effective treatment plans that won’t exacerbate resistance. For researchers, these tools point to an urgent need to integrate diagnostics with real-time surveillance networks capable of tracking resistance patterns as they emerge.

Diagnostics alone will not solve resistance, but they provide the precision, speed and early warning needed to stay ahead.

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2. Expanding beyond traditional antibiotics

Antibiotics transformed medicine in the 20th century, but relying on them alone won’t carry humanity through the 21st. The pipeline of new antibiotics remains distressingly thin, and most drugs currently in development are structurally similar to existing antibiotics, potentially limiting their effectiveness.

The antibiotic discovery void

Due in part to a lack of financial incentive for the pharmaceutical industry to invest in antibiotic development, there has not been a new class of antibiotics since 1987. (Image credit: Chart: The Conversation, CC-BY-ND  Source: ReAct Group  Get the data)

To stay ahead, researchers are investing in nontraditional therapies, many of which work in fundamentally different ways than standard antibiotics.

One promising direction is bacteriophage therapy, which uses viruses that specifically infect and kill harmful bacteria. Others are exploring microbiome-based therapies that restore healthy bacterial communities to crowd out pathogens.

Researchers are also developing CRISPR-based antimicrobials, using gene-editing tools to precisely disable resistance genes. New compounds like antimicrobial peptides, which puncture the membranes of bacteria to kill them, show promise as next-generation drugs. Meanwhile, scientists are designing nanoparticle delivery systems to transport antimicrobials directly to infection sites with fewer side effects.

Beyond medicine, scientists are examining ecological interventions to reduce the movement of resistance genes through soil, wastewater and plastics, as well as through waterways and key environmental reservoirs.

Many of these options remain early-stage, and bacteria may eventually evolve around them. But these innovations reflect a powerful shift: Instead of betting on discovering a single antibiotic to address resistance, researchers are building a more diverse and resilient tool kit to fight antibiotic-resistant pathogenic bacteria.

3. Antimicrobial resistance outside hospitals

Antibiotic resistance doesn’t only spread in hospitals. It moves through people, wildlife, crops, wastewater, soil and global trade networks. This broader perspective that takes the principles of One Health into account is essential for understanding how resistance genes travel through ecosystems.

Researchers are increasingly recognizing environmental and agricultural factors as major drivers of resistance, on par with misuse of antibiotics in the clinic. These include how antibiotics used in animal agriculture can create resistant bacteria that spread to people; how resistance genes in wastewater can survive treatment systems and enter rivers and soil; and how farms, sewage plants and other environmental hot spots become hubs where resistance spreads quickly. Even global travel accelerates the movement of resistant bacteria across continents within hours.

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Together, these forces show that antibiotic resistance isn’t just an issue for hospitals – it’s an ecological and societal problem. For researchers, this means designing solutions that cross disciplines, integrating microbiology, ecology, engineering, agriculture and public health.

4. Policies on what treatments exist in the future

Drug companies lose money developing new antibiotics. Because new antibiotics are used sparingly in order to preserve their effectiveness, companies often sell too few doses to recoup development costs even after the Food and Drug Administration approves the drugs. Several antibiotic companies have gone bankrupt for this reason.

To encourage antibiotic innovation, the U.S. is considering major policy changes like the PASTEUR Act. This bipartisan bill proposes creating a subscription-style payment model that would allow the federal government up to US$3 billion to pay drug manufacturers over five to 10 years for access to critical antibiotics instead of paying per pill.

Global health organizations, including Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), caution that the bill should include stronger commitments to stewardship and equitable access.

Still, the bill represents one of the most significant policy proposals related to antimicrobial resistance in U.S. history and could determine what antibiotics exist in the future.

The future of antibiotic resistance

Antibiotic resistance is sometimes framed as an inevitable catastrophe. But I believe the reality is more hopeful: Society is entering an era of smarter diagnostics, innovative therapies, ecosystem-level strategies and policy reforms aimed at rebuilding the antibiotic pipeline in addition to addressing stewardship.

For the public, this means better tools and stronger systems of protection. For researchers and policymakers, it means collaborating in new ways.

The question now isn’t whether there are solutions to antibiotic resistance – it’s whether society will act fast enough to use them.

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

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/health/medicine-drugs/antibiotic-resistance-is-the-silent-pandemic-here-are-four-steps-to-stop-it at Jan 27, 2026 at 7:22 AM EST.

TECHNOLOGY > VIRTUAL REALITY

OPINION | JWAN SHABAN, MAX L WILSON | JAN 23, 2026, 3:35 PM EST | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Google Glass has found yet another lease of life — but is it too little too late for smart glasses?

Augmented reality-powered smart glasses have seen a muted resurgence lately. Will Google's intervention reinvigorate what feels like a tired concept?

(Image credit: Tete Escape)

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It has been over a decade since Google Glass smart glasses were announced in 2013, followed by their swift withdrawal — in part because of low adoption. Their subsequent (and lesser known) second iteration was released in 2017 and aimed at the workplace. They were withdrawn in 2023.

In December 2025, Google made a new promise for smart glasses — with two new products to be released in 2026. But why have Google smart glasses struggled where others are succeeding? And will Google see success the third time around?

What is clear from developments in wearable tech over the last decade, is that successful products are being built into things that people already like to wear: watches, rings, bracelets and glasses.

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These are the types of accessories that have emerged over centuries and currently adopted as normal in society.

Some of the most recent academic research is taking this approach, building sensors into jewellery that people would actually want to wear. Research has developed a scale to measure the social acceptability of wearable technology (the WEAR scale, or Wearable Acceptability Range), which includes questions like: "I think my peers would find this device acceptable to wear."

Noreen Kelly, from Iowa State University, and colleagues showed that at its core, this scale measured two things: that the device helped people reach a goal (that made it worth wearing), and that it did not create social anxiety about privacy and being seen as rude.

This latter issue was highlighted most prominently by the term that emerged for Google Glass users: Glassholes. Although many studies have considered the potential benefits of smart glasses, from mental health to use in surgery, privacy concerns and other issues are ongoing for newer smart glasses.

All that said, "look-and-feel" keeps coming up the most common concern for potential buyers. The most successful products have been designed to be desirable as accessories first, and with smart technologies second. Typically, in fact, by designer brands.

A fine spectacle

After Google Glass, Snapchat released smart glasses called "spectacles", which had cameras built in, focused on fashion and were more easily accepted into society. The now most prominent smart glasses were released by Meta (Facebook's parent company), in collaboration with designer brands like Ray-Ban and Oakley. Most of these products include front facing cameras and conversational voice agent support from Meta AI.

So what do we expect to see from Google Smart Glasses in 2026? Google has promised two products: one that is audio only, and one that has "screens" shown on the lenses (like Google Glass).

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The original version of Google Glass was released in 2014. (Image credit: Hattanas / Shutterstock)

The biggest assumption (based on the promo videos) is that these will see a significant change in form factor, from the futuristic if not scary and unfamiliar design of Google Glass, to something that is more normally seen as glasses.

Google's announcement also focused on the addition of AI (in fact, they announced them as "AI Glasses" rather than smart glasses). The two types of product (audio only AI Glasses, and AI Glasses with projections in the field of view), however, are not especially novel, even when combined with AI.

Meta's Ray-Ban products are available in both modes, and include voice interaction with their own AI. These have been more successful than the recent Humane AI Pin, for example, which included front-facing cameras, other sensors, and voice support from an AI agent. This was the closest thing we've had so far to the Star Trek lapel communicators.

Direction of travel

Chances are, the main directions of innovation in this are, first, reducing the chonkyness of smart glasses, which have necessarily been bulky to include electronics and still look like that are normally proportioned.

"Building glasses you'll want to wear" is how Google phrases it, and so we may see innovation from the company that just improves the aesthetic of smart glasses. They are also working with popular brand partners. Google also advertised the release of wired XR (Mixed Reality) glasses, which are significantly reduced in form factor compared to Virtual Reality headsets on the market.

Second, we could expect more integration with other Google products and services, where Google has many more commonly used products than Meta including Google Search, Google Maps, and GMail. Their promotional material shows examples of seeing Google Maps information in view in the AI Glasses, while walking through the streets.

Finally, and perhaps the biggest area of opportunity, is to innovate on the inclusion of additional sensors, perhaps integrating with other Google wearable health products, where we are seeing many of their current ventures, including introducing their own smart rings.

Much research has focused on things that can be sensed from common touchpoints on the head, which has included heart rate, body temperature and galvanic skin response (skin moistness, which changes with, for example, stress), and even brain activation through EEG for example. With the current advances in consumer neurotechnology, we could easily see Smart Glasses that use EEG to track brain data in the next few years.

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

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/technology/virtual-reality/google-glass-has-found-yet-another-lease-of-life-but-is-it-too-little-too-late-for-smart-glasses at Jan 27, 2026 at 7:22 AM EST.

TECHNOLOGY > ROBOTICS

OPINION | BERRY BILLINGSLEY | JAN 23, 2026, 3:29 PM EST | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Why the rise of humanoid robots could make us less comfortable with each other

Living with robots could lead to plenty of societal improvements, but they also pose risks to how we socialize and co-exist with other human beings.

Optimus is a general-purpose robotic humanoid under development by Tesla. (Image credit: Raman Shaunia/Shutterstock)

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When Elon Musk talks about robotics, he rarely hides the ambition behind the dream.

Tesla's Optimus is pitched as an all-purpose humanoid robot that can do the heavy lifting on factory floors and free us from drudgery at home. Tesla is targeting a million of these robots in the next decade.

But is Musk likely to succeed? A few years ago, the thought of a friendly, capable household robot belonged in science fiction. We could imagine machines that danced, shifted boxes or played chess, but not ones that understood us well enough to be genuinely helpful. Then came generative artificial intelligence, or gen AI.

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Whether your first encounter was with ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot, many of us felt the same jolt of surprise. Here was a bot that seemed to understand us in a way we didn't expect. That has made Musk's dream of a robot companion feel if not close then certainly closer.

Imagine leafing through a catalogue of robots the way we browse for home appliances. If a personal robot still feels too expensive, perhaps we might hire one part time. Maybe a dance instructor that doubles as a therapist. Families could club together to buy a robot for an elderly relative. Some people might even buy one for themselves.

The future Musk describes isn't just mechanical, it's emotional.

Why the humanoid shape matters

The idea of robots that look like us can seem creepy and threatening. But there's also a practical explanation for the drive to make robots that look like us.

A dishwasher is essentially a robot but you have to load it yourself. A humanoid robot with hands and fingers could clear the table, load the dishwasher and then feed the pets too. In other words, engineers create humanoid robots because the world is designed for human bodies.

But the humanoid form also carries an emotional charge. A machine with a face and limbs hints at something more than functionality. It's a promise of intelligence, empathy or companionship. Optimus taps into that deep cultural imagery. It is part practical engineering, part theatre and part invitation to believe we are close to creating machines that can live alongside us.

There are moments when a personal robot might be genuinely welcoming. Anyone who has been ill, or cared for someone who is, can imagine the appeal of a helper that preserves dignity and independence. Robots, unlike humans, are not born to judge. But there is also a risk in outsourcing too much of our social world to machines.

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If a robot is always there to tidy up the mess, practical or emotional, we may lose some of the tolerance and empathy that come from living among other people.

Would you like a robot who fetches you popcorn? (Image credit:  Josiah True/Shutterstock)

That is where the question of design becomes crucial. In the most dystopian version of life with generative AI-powered, chatty, dexterous robots, we retreat indoors, sealed into our homes and attended to by machines that are endlessly "understanding" and quietly adoring. Convenience is maximised, but something else is lost.

If sociability really does matter — if it is worth a little extra inconvenience to practise being human with other humans rather than only with chatbots — then the challenge becomes a practical one. How do we engineer a future that nudges us towards one another, instead of gently pulling us apart?

One option is to rethink where conversation lies. Rather than building all-purpose, ever-chatty assistants into every corner of our lives, we could distribute AI across devices and limit what those devices talk about. For example, a washing machine might discuss laundry, while a navigation system might discuss routes. But open-ended chatter, the kind that shapes identity, values and relationships, remains something that people do with people.

At a collective level, this kind of design choice could reshape workplaces and shared spaces, turning them back into environments that cultivate human conversation. That is, of course, only possible if people are encouraged to show up in person, and to put their phones away.

The real design challenge is not how to make machines more attentive to us, but how to make them better at guiding us back towards one another

So, it is worth asking what kind of domestic future we are quietly building. Will the robots we invite inside help us connect, or simply keep us company?

Good bots, bad bots

A good bot could help a socially anxious child get to school. It may nudge a lonely teenager towards local activities. Or it may tell a cantankerous old person: "There's a crime club starting in an hour at the library. We can pick up a paper on the way."

A bad bot leaves us exactly where we are: increasingly comfortable with a machine and less comfortable with each other.

Musk's humanoid dream may yet become real. The question is whether machines like Optimus will help us build stronger communities, or quietly erode the human connections we need most.

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

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/technology/robotics/why-the-rise-of-humanoid-robots-could-make-us-less-comfortable-with-each-other at Jan 27, 2026 at 7:22 AM EST.

ARCHAEOLOGY

NEWS | SASCHA PARE | JAN 23, 2026, 2:47 PM EST | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

People, not glaciers, transported rocks to Stonehenge, study confirms

A new analysis of mineral grains has refuted the "glacial transport theory" that suggests Stonehenge's bluestones and Altar Stone were delivered to Salisbury Plain by glaciers.

Stonehenge's megaliths were not transported by glaciers to their current location, researchers say. (Image credit: Captain Skyhigh via Getty Images)

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Humans — not glaciers — transported Stonehenge's megaliths across Great Britain to their current location in southern England, a new study confirms.

Scientists have believed for decades that the 5,000-year-old monument's iconic stones came from what is now Wales and even as far as Scotland, but there is still debate as to how the stones arrived at Salisbury Plain in southern England.

Now, an analysis of microscopic mineral grains from rivers around Stonehenge has revealed that glaciers didn't reach into the region during the last ice age (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago), refuting an idea known as the "glacial transport theory" that suggests Stonehenge's bluestones and 6.6-ton (6 metric tons) Altar Stone were delivered by ice sheets to Salisbury Plain. The new study was published Jan. 21 in the journal Communications Earth and Environment.

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"While previous research had cast doubt on the glacial transport theory, our study goes further and applies cutting-edge mineral fingerprinting to trace the stones' true origins," study authors Anthony Clarke, a research geologist at Curtin University in Australia, and Christopher Kirkland, a professor of geology also at Curtin University, wrote in The Conversation.

Stonehenge's bluestones, so called because they acquire a bluish tinge when wet or freshly broken, are from the Preseli Hills in western Wales, meaning people likely dragged them 140 miles (225 kilometers) to the site of the prehistoric monument. More remarkable still, researchers think the Altar Stone inside Stonehenge's middle circle came from northern England or Scotland, which is much farther away — at least 300 miles (500 km) — from Salisbury Plain and may have required boats.

The glacial transport theory is a counterproposal to the idea that people moved the stones from elsewhere in the U.K. to build the monument on Salisbury Plain, instead using stones that had already been transported there by natural means. However, as Stonehenge’s rocks show no signs of glacial transport, and the southern extent of Great Britain’s former ice sheets remain unclear, archaeologists have disputed the idea.

To investigate further, the researchers behind the new study used known radioactive decay rates to date tiny specks of zircon and apatite minerals left over from ancient rocks in river sediments around Stonehenge. The age of these specks reveals the age of rocks that once existed in the region, which, in turn, can provide information about where these rocks came from.

Different rock formations have different ages, so if the rocks that became parts of Stonehenge were dragged across the land by glaciers, they would have left these tiny traces around Salisbury Plain that could then be matched with rocks in their original locations.

The researchers analyzed more than 700 zircon and apatite grains but found no significant match for rocks in either western Wales or Scotland. Instead, most of the zircon grains studied showed dates between 1.7 billion and 1.1 billion years ago, coinciding with a time when much of what is now southern England was covered in compacted sand, the researchers wrote in The Conversation. On the other hand, the ages of apatite grains converged around 60 million years ago, when southern England was a shallow, subtropical sea. This means the minerals in rivers around Stonehenge are the remnants of rocks from the local area, and hadn’t been swept in from other places.

The results suggest glaciers didn't extend as far south as Salisbury Plain during the last ice age, excluding the possibility that ice sheets dropped off the megaliths of Stonehenge for ancient builders to subsequently use.

"This gives us further evidence the monument's most exotic stones did not arrive by chance but were instead deliberately selected and transported," the researchers wrote.

Article Sources

Clarke, A. J. I., & Kirkland, C. L. (2026). Detrital zircon–apatite fingerprinting challenges glacial transport of Stonehenge’s megaliths. Communications Earth & Environment, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-03105

Stonehenge quiz: What do you know about the ancient monument?

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/people-not-glaciers-transported-rocks-to-stonehenge-study-confirms at Jan 27, 2026 at 7:22 AM EST.

SPACE > ASTRONOMY > THE MOON

FEATURES | ALICE SUN | JAN 23, 2026, 2:34 PM EST | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Why does the moon look larger when it's on the horizon?

The moon looks enormous when it's near the horizon — why is that?

A very large full moon sets behind the mountains. (Image credit: Daniel Garrido/Getty Images)

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When a full moon peeks just above the horizon, it appears enormous. This is a curious phenomenon, as when it is at this position, the moon is the furthest away from us and so should appear about slightly smaller than when it is at its zenith.

"You actually have to look across the distance of the Earth, so [the moon is] one Earth radius further away than when it's directly overhead," Susanna Kohler, an astronomer and spokesperson for the American Astronomical Society, told Live Science.

So why does the moon look larger when it's on the horizon?

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This mystery, dubbed the "moon illusion," has baffled skywatchers for millennia — and to this day, "we don't fully understand how it works," Kohler said. Early explanations, including ideas from Aristotle, blamed the illusion on the magnifying properties of mist or the refraction of light in the atmosphere. However, photographs taken in modern times debunk this theory, showing how refraction instead makes the moon look squished rather than enlarged.

So instead, the moon illusion is probably "something that happens inside the brain" when we construct our perceptions of size, said Bart Borghuis, a neuroscientist at the University of Louisville who wrote a literature thesis on the subject during his undergraduate studies and now researches visual processing.

Researchers have proposed many explanations for how the moon size tricks our brains, Kohler noted. One idea is that when the moon is closer to the horizon, it is held in contrast with the smaller objects, such as trees and buildings, on Earth's surface. However, Kohler added that the moon still appears larger even on a "featureless plane," like the ocean, which suggests there are more factors at play.

The theory backed by the most evidence, and frequently cited in textbooks, focuses on the fallacies of how we often use distance to perceive size. According to Borghuis, size perception is a "two-step process." First, our retinas record the size of the object. And second, we judge its size by accounting for its perceived distance away from us, a visual perception principle known as Emmert's Law.

This principle is at play when it comes to the moon, according to research published in the journal Science in 1962. The study found that when a simulated moon is shown at the end of a horizon, people perceive it to be larger because the terrain makes it seem like it is farther away. In contrast, when a moon is shown without any terrain, where it lacks indicators suggesting visual distance, the augmenting illusion disappears.

The Ponzo illusion occurs when same-sized lines appear to differ in length because they are placed at different perspectives. (Image credit: PeterHermesFurian/Getty Images)

This was an observation "that was repeated many times in psychophysics experiments": A filled-in space is perceived to be more extended and longer than an empty space," Borghuis told Live Science.

As a result, "most of us perceive the sky as kind of a flattened bowl," Kohler said, even though the sky is technically a half sphere. This is another way to think about the moon illusion. With a flattened sky, when something is on the horizon, we think it is farther away than if it's overhead, which tricks us into thinking that a same-sized object is larger when it's lower in the sky.

This idea is similar to the basis of the Ponzo illusion, in which the same-sized lines appear to differ in length because they are placed at different perspectives.

You can also see this illusion in action through an at-home experiment. If you stare at a bright object, like a light bulb, for a few seconds and then look at a blank wall, you'll likely see a darker shadow, which should stay the same size no matter what you look at. However, as you switch from looking at a faraway wall to a closer one, you may notice that the size of the spot changes. "It's the most illustrating little test or experiment that you can do," Borghuis said.

These illusions persist even if we know our brain's limits in estimating size. Regardless, "checking out the moon in all of its phases is always a great idea, because it's really cool," Kohler said. "But being able to also look at the cool side of brain science at the same time is neat."

Moon quiz: What do you know about our nearest celestial neighbor?

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/space/the-moon/why-does-the-moon-look-larger-when-its-on-the-horizon at Jan 27, 2026 at 7:22 AM EST.

SPACE > ASTRONOMY > BLACK HOLES

NEWS | MATTHEW WILLIAMS | JAN 23, 2026, 1:40 PM EST | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Astronomers discover a gigantic, wobbling black hole jet that 'changes the way we think about the galaxy'

Combining observations from several powerful telescopes, astronomers have detected a gargantuan, 'wobbling' black hole outburst that's as wide as an entire galaxy.

This artist’s rendering illustrates a precessing jet erupting from the supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy VV 340a. (Image credit: W. M. Keck Observatory / Adam Makarenko)

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It's a well-known fact that supermassive black holes (SMBH) play a vital role in the evolution of galaxies.

Their powerful gravity and the way it accelerates matter in its vicinity causes so much radiation to be released from the core region — aka. an active galactic nucleus (AGN) — that it will periodically outshine all the stars in the disk combined.

In addition, some SMBHs accelerate infalling dust and gas into jets that emanate from the poles, sending streams of super-heated material millions of light-years at close to the speed of light.

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Since the first of these "relativistic jets" was observed, scientists have been eager to learn more about them and their role in galaxy evolution. In a surprising first, a team of astronomers led by researchers at the University of California, Irvine (UC Irvine) and the Caltech Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) recently uncovered the largest and most extended jet ever observed in a nearby galaxy.

Their observations also revealed vast "wobbly" structures, the clearest evidence to date that SMBHs can dramatically reshape their host galaxies far beyond their cores.

Their findings, published in the journal Science, were also the subject of a presentation made at the 247th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix, Arizona.

The team observed the galaxy VV340a using the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaii, and identified a jet extending up to 20,000 light-years from its center. Thanks to the Keck Cosmic Web Imager (KCWI) on the Observatory's Keck II telescope, they discerned a spear-like structure aligned with the galactic nucleus.

The data obtained from KCWI allowed the team to model the amount of material being expelled and determine whether the outflow could be affecting the galaxy's evolution. Said Justin Kader, a UC Irvine postdoctoral researcher and the lead author on the study, in a W.M. Keck Observatory press release:

The Keck Observatory data is what allowed us to understand the true scale of this phenomenon. The gas we see with Keck Observatory reaches the farthest distances from the black hole, which means it also traces the longest timescales. Without these observations, we wouldn't know how powerful — or how persistent — this outflow really is.

The team combined the Keck data with infrared observations made with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and radio images from the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA). While Webb's infrared data revealed the energetic heart of the galaxy, Keck's optical data showed how that energy propagates outward. The VLA radio data, meanwhile, revealed a pair of plasma jets twisted into a helical pattern as they move outward. The combined data presented a compelling picture, with a few surprises along the way.

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For instance, the Webb data identified intensely energized "coronal" gas, the superheated plasma erupting from either side of the black hole, measuring several thousand parsecs across. Most observed coronae measure in the hundreds of parsecs, making this the most extended coronal gas structure ever observed. Meanwhile, the VLA radio data revealed a pair of plasma jets twisted into a helical pattern as they moved outward, evidence of a rare phenomenon in which a jet's direction slowly wobbles over time (known as jet precession).

In addition, the KCWI data showed that the jet arrests star formation by stripping the galaxy of gas at a rate of about 20 Solar masses a year. But what was most surprising was the fact that these jets were observed in a relatively young galaxy like VV340a, which is still in the early stages of a galactic merger. Typically, such jets are observed in older elliptical galaxies that have long since ceased star formation. This discovery challenges established theories of how galaxies and their SMBHs co-evolve and could provide new insights into how the Milky Way came to be. Said Kader:

This is the first time we've seen a precessing, kiloparsec-scale radio jet driving such a massive outflow in a disk galaxy. There's no clear fossil record of something like this happening in our galaxy, but this discovery suggests we can't rule it out. It changes the way we think about the galaxy we live in.

The next step for the team will involve higher-resolution radio observations to determine whether a second SMBH could be at the center of VV340a, which could be causing the jets' wobble. "We're only beginning to understand how common this kind of activity may be," said Vivian U, an associate scientist at Caltech/IPAC and the second and senior author of the study. "With Keck Observatory and these other powerful observatories working together, we're opening a new window into how galaxies change over time."

The original version of this article was published on Universe Today.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/space/black-holes/astronomers-discover-a-gigantic-wobbling-black-hole-jet-that-changes-the-way-we-think-about-the-galaxy at Jan 27, 2026 at 7:22 AM EST.

ARCHAEOLOGY

NEWS | KRISTINA KILLGROVE | JAN 23, 2026, 12:46 PM EST | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

5,500-year-old human skeleton discovered in Colombia holds the oldest evidence yet that syphilis came from the Americas

An ancient DNA analysis of a 5,500-year-old human skeleton reveals that an ancestor of the bacterium that causes syphilis was present in the Americas at least 3,000 years earlier than previously thought.

The archaeological rock shelter site where the Treponema genome was recovered, at the border of the Bogotá Savanna (Sabana de Bogotá) in Colombia. (Image credit: Angélica Triana)

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The world's oldest evidence of Treponema pallidum, the bacterium that causes syphilis and several chronic skin infections, has been found in a 5,500-year-old skeleton buried in a rock shelter in Colombia. But the genetic evidence suggests that the person was infected with a previously unknown strain of T. pallidum, adding to an already-complicated picture of the evolution of syphilis.

Researchers have debated the geographical origin and spread of the treponemal diseases — syphilis, bejel, yaws and pinta, all of which are caused by bacteria in the genus Treponema — for centuries. Because the best-documented epidemics of syphilis occurred in Europe in the 15th century, early theories suggested that Christopher Columbus brought syphilis to the Americas or, conversely, that Indigenous people in the Americas transmitted syphilis to Columbus and his crew.

More recent DNA studies, however, have identified T. pallidum in a person buried around A.D. 1000 in Chile and in several people buried between 350 B.C. and A.D. 570 in Brazil, placing the bacterium in the Americas long before the Columbian expedition.

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In a study published Thursday (Jan. 22) in the journal Science, researchers isolated the oldest T. pallidum genome yet, from the skeleton of a middle-aged hunter-gatherer who was buried in Colombia 5,500 years ago.

"Our results push back the association of T. pallidum with humans by thousands of years," study lead author Davide Bozzi, a computational biologist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, said in a statement.

Ancient genomes of Treponema are exceptionally difficult to recover and are usually found in skeletons with bony evidence of treponemal disease lesions, such as holes that make the bone appear moth-eaten, which are often associated with the later stages of infection. Surprisingly, the 5,500-year-old skeleton containing evidence of T. pallidum did not have any obvious skeletal lesions, although other skeletons in the area did.

While investigating the new T. pallidum genome, which they named TE1-3, the researchers found that it was a different lineage than all other subspecies of T. pallidum identified to date. Based on a statistical analysis of the differences among the genomes, the researchers estimated that TE1-3 diverged from today's lineages around 13,700 years ago. This suggests that Treponema began circulating in the Americas thousands of years earlier than experts previously thought.

But the new genome does not clarify whether early Treponema lineages like TE1-3 were capable of sexual transmission like venereal syphilis.

"Current genomic evidence, along with our genome presented here, does not resolve the long-standing debate about where the disease syndromes themselves originated, but it does show there's this long evolutionary history of treponemal pathogens that was already diversifying in the Americas thousands of years earlier than previously known," study co-author Elizabeth Nelson, a molecular anthropologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said in the statement.

In a related perspective published in Science, Molly Zuckerman and Lydia Bailey, anthropologists at Mississippi State University who were not involved in the study, wrote that the new finding "points to an origin for syphilis in the Americas rather than Europe." Comparing progressively ancient genomes of Treponema with modern genetic data could help inform infection control strategies for syphilis, which has rebounded globally over the past decade, they wrote, as well as help researchers understand the history of infectious disease.

"It is possible that 15th century syphilis was the first globalized emerging infectious disease and a harbinger of all subsequent ones, from HIV/AIDS to COVID-19," Zuckerman and Bailey wrote.

The new discovery shows "the unique potential of paleogenomics to contribute to our understanding of the evolution of species, and potential health risks for past and present communities," study co-author Lars Fehren-Schmitz, a geneticist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in the statement.

Article Sources

Bozzi, D., Broomandkhoshbacht, N.Z., Delgado, M., et al. A 5500-year-old Treponema pallidum genome from Sabana de Bogotá, Colombia. Science (2026). http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.adw3020

Human skeleton quiz: What do you know about the bones in your body?

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/5-500-year-old-human-skeleton-discovered-in-colombia-holds-the-oldest-evidence-yet-that-syphilis-came-from-the-americas at Jan 27, 2026 at 7:22 AM EST.

TECHNOLOGY > ROBOTICS

NEWS | OWEN HUGHES | JAN 23, 2026, 12:46 PM EST | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Creepy robotic hand detaches at the wrist before scurrying away to collect objects

EPFL's robotic appendage features fingers that bend both ways and is designed to retrieve objects from spaces too hazardous for human hands.

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Engineers have built a detachable robotic hand that can crawl into hard-to-reach spaces to retrieve objects.

The spider-like device can be fitted with multiple fingers and is reversible, meaning it can grip objects in both directions and operate as though it has two functional palms.

In a study published Jan. 20 in the journal Nature Communications, scientists at the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne (EPFL) said the robot was designed to combine two capabilities that are usually kept separate in robotics: manipulation and locomotion.

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The hand can also operate without a full, mobile robot base. Instead, it simply detaches itself from a robotic arm and scuttles off to wherever it is needed, picks up the object and returns to reattach itself.

This could make it useful in situations where robots need to reach or retrieve objects from spaces that are too tight or too dangerous for human arms to access, such as industrial or exploratory environments and areas affected by disasters, the researchers noted.

"We can easily see the limitations of the human hand when attempting to reach objects underneath furniture or behind shelves, or performing simultaneous tasks like holding a bottle while picking up a chip," study co-author Aude Billard, head of the Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory in EPFL's School of Engineering, said in a statement.

"Likewise, accessing objects positioned behind the hand while keeping the grip stable can be extremely challenging, requiring awkward wrist contortions or body repositioning."

Handy robotics

Robotic appendages, like hands, have been built before. The human hand is, after all, considered a biological marvel; it's given humans the dexterity needed to make tools, prepare food and build shelter, all of which have proved key to our survival as a species.

Still, human hands do have some distinctly biological limitations, the scientists noted. For example, our asymmetrical thumbs and our hands' permanent attachment to our arms.

EPFL's robot is essentially a self-contained system that can either act like a normal "gripper" on the end of an arm or detach itself and scurry about on its own. The design draws inspiration from nature, with the researchers likening it to how an octopus uses its arms to move across the seafloor and open shells, or how a praying mantis uses its spiked forearms to both move around and catch prey.

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In experiments, the researchers demonstrated the hand performing various standard gripping and grasping exercises, as well as accomplishing more fiddly feats of dexterity that humans routinely struggle with. These included holding multiple objects at once or gripping objects without using the thumb or forefinger.

Not only can the robotic hand grasp up to four objects simultaneously, it can also crawl across the floor while carrying items on its "back."

Each of the robot's fingers is driven by small electric motors and linked by lightweight 3D-printed joints, allowing them to curl and spread much like human fingers. Unlike a human hand, however, each finger joint can bend both forward and backward, allowing it to grab objects in both directions and "flip" its working orientation without needing to rotate at the wrist.

The fingertips are capped with a soft silicone layer to add friction, making it easier to hold objects securely and maintain traction when crawling. "There is no real limitation in the number of objects it can hold; if we need to hold more objects, we simply add more fingers," Billard said.

The hand reattaches itself to the arm using a "snap-and-lock" system. Magnets help align the connectors, and a small motor drives a locking bolt that secures the joints.

The system could eventually be adapted for human prosthetics or "extra limb" augmentation, the team said, though this isn't the focus of the current prototype.

"The symmetrical, reversible functionality is particularly valuable in scenarios where users could benefit from capabilities beyond normal human function," Billard said.

"For example, previous studies with users of additional robotic fingers demonstrate the brain's remarkable adaptability to integrate additional appendages, suggesting that our non-traditional configuration could even serve in specialized environments requiring augmented manipulation abilities."

Article Sources

Gao, X., Yao, K., Junge, K. et al. A detachable crawling robotic hand. Nat Commun 17, 428 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-67675-8

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/technology/robotics/creepy-robotic-hand-detaches-at-the-wrist-before-scurrying-away-to-collect-objects at Jan 27, 2026 at 7:22 AM EST.

TECHNOLOGY > ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

OPINION | ALESSANDRA BUCCELLA | JAN 23, 2026, 11:58 AM EST | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

AI may accelerate scientific progress — but here's why it can't replace human scientists

The achievements of AI-augmented science are mixed, but that doesn't mean the technology can't play a role in future endeavors.

Human scientists lay the foundations for every scientific breakthrough. (Image credit: Qi Yang/Moment via Getty Images)

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Consistent with the general trend of incorporating artificial intelligence into nearly every field, researchers and politicians are increasingly using AI models trained on scientific data to infer answers to scientific questions. But can AI ultimately replace scientists?

The Trump administration signed an executive order on Nov. 24, 2025, that announced the Genesis Mission, an initiative to build and train a series of AI agents on federal scientific datasets "to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs."

So far, the accomplishments of these so-called AI scientists have been mixed. On the one hand, AI systems can process vast datasets and detect subtle correlations that humans are unable to detect. On the other hand, their lack of commonsense reasoning can result in unrealistic or irrelevant experimental recommendations.

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While AI can assist in tasks that are part of the scientific process, it is still far away from automating science — and may never be able to. As a philosopher who studies both the history and the conceptual foundations of science, I see several problems with the idea that AI systems can "do science" without or even better than humans.

AI models can only learn from human scientists

AI models do not learn directly from the real world: They have to be "told" what the world is like by their human designers. Without human scientists overseeing the construction of the digital "world" in which the model operates — that is, the datasets used for training and testing its algorithms — the breakthroughs that AI facilitates wouldn't be possible.

Consider the AI model AlphaFold. Its developers were awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the model's ability to infer the structure of proteins in human cells. Because so many biological functions depend on proteins, the ability to quickly generate protein structures to test via simulations has the potential to accelerate drug design, trace how diseases develop and advance other areas of biomedical research.

As practical as it may be, however, an AI system like AlphaFold does not provide new knowledge about proteins, diseases or more effective drugs on its own. It simply makes it possible to analyze existing information more efficiently.

What Is AlphaFold? | NEJM - YouTube

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As philosopher Emily Sullivan put it, to be successful as scientific tools, AI models must retain a strong empirical link to already established knowledge. That is, the predictions a model makes must be grounded in what researchers already know about the natural world. The strength of this link depends on how much knowledge is already available about a certain subject and on how well the model's programmers translate highly technical scientific concepts and logical principles into code.

AlphaFold would not have been successful if it weren't for the existing body of human-generated knowledge about protein structures that developers used to train the model. And without human scientists to provide a foundation of theoretical and methodological knowledge, nothing AlphaFold creates would amount to scientific progress.

Science is a uniquely human enterprise

But the role of human scientists in the process of scientific discovery and experimentation goes beyond ensuring that AI models are properly designed and anchored to existing scientific knowledge. In a sense, science as a creative achievement derives its legitimacy from human abilities, values and ways of living. These, in turn, are grounded in the unique ways in which humans think, feel and act.

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Scientific discoveries are more than just theories supported by evidence: They are the product of generations of scientists with a variety of interests and perspectives, working together through a common commitment to their craft and intellectual honesty. Scientific discoveries are never the products of a single visionary genius.

Breakthroughs are possible through collaboration across generations of scientists. (Image credit: Jacob Wackerhausen/iStock via Getty Images Plus)

For example, when researchers first proposed the double-helix structure of DNA, there were no empirical tests able to verify this hypothesis — it was based on the reasoning skills of highly trained experts. It took nearly a century of technological advancements and several generations of scientists to go from what looked like pure speculation in the late 1800s to a discovery honored by a 1953 Nobel Prize.

Science, in other words, is a distinctly social enterprise, in which ideas get discussed, interpretations are offered, and disagreements are not always overcome. As other philosophers of science have remarked, scientists are more similar to a tribe than "passive recipients" of scientific information. Researchers do not accumulate scientific knowledge by recording "facts" — they create scientific knowledge through skilled practice, debate and agreed-upon standards informed by social and political values.

AI is not a 'scientist'

I believe the computing power of AI systems can be used to accelerate scientific progress, but only if done with care.

With the active participation of the scientific community, ambitious projects like the Genesis Mission could prove beneficial for scientists. Well-designed and rigorously trained AI tools would make the more mechanical parts of scientific inquiry smoother and maybe even faster. These tools would compile information about what has been done in the past so that it can more easily inform how to design future experiments, collect measurements and formulate theories.

But if the guiding vision for deploying AI models in science is to replace human scientists or to fully automate the scientific process, I believe the project would only turn science into a caricature of itself. The very existence of science as a source of authoritative knowledge about the natural world fundamentally depends on human life: shared goals, experiences and aspirations.

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

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/ai-may-accelerate-scientific-progress-but-it-cannot-replace-human-scientists at Jan 27, 2026 at 7:22 AM EST.

Table of Contents

Live Science: 2026 Jan 27

January 27, 2026

'Earthquake on a chip' uses 'phonon' lasers to make mobile devices more efficient

January 26, 2026

How to see 2 total solar eclipses in the next 2 years — including the 'eclipse of the century'

A drying climate is making East Africa pull apart faster

IVF hormones could be delivered with painless 'microneedle' patch someday, early study hints

1,400-year-old Zapotec tomb discovered in Mexico features enormous owl sculpture symbolizing death

The UK has lost its measles elimination status — again

People with more 'brown fat' have healthier cardiovascular systems. A new study in mice may explain why.

James Webb telescope peers into 'Eye of God' and finds clues to life's origins — Space photo of the week

Some of the oldest harpoons ever found reveal Indigenous people in Brazil were hunting whales 5,000 years ago

Microsoft says its newest AI chip Maia 200 is 3 times more powerful than Google's TPU and Amazon's Trainium processor

World's oldest known rock art predates modern humans' entrance into Europe — and it was found in an Indonesian cave

2,500 years ago, people in Bulgaria ate dog meat at feasts and as a delicacy, archaeological study finds

480,000-year-old ax sharpener is the oldest known elephant bone tool ever discovered in Europe

Why don't you usually see your nose?

6 tips to kickstart your exercise routine and actually stick to it, according to science

January 23, 2026

'A real revolution': The James Webb telescope is upending our understanding of the biggest, oldest black holes in the universe

'Pain sponge' derived from stem cells could soak up pain signals before they reach the brain

Antibiotic resistance is the 'silent pandemic' — here are four steps to stop it

Google Glass has found yet another lease of life — but is it too little too late for smart glasses?

Why the rise of humanoid robots could make us less comfortable with each other

People, not glaciers, transported rocks to Stonehenge, study confirms

Why does the moon look larger when it's on the horizon?

Astronomers discover a gigantic, wobbling black hole jet that 'changes the way we think about the galaxy'

5,500-year-old human skeleton discovered in Colombia holds the oldest evidence yet that syphilis came from the Americas

Creepy robotic hand detaches at the wrist before scurrying away to collect objects

AI may accelerate scientific progress — but here's why it can't replace human scientists