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May 12, 2026

- Microplastics absorb heat in the atmosphere and contribute to global warming — as if they weren't bad enough

- A 2025 Alaskan tsunami was one of the largest on record, new research finds

- 'The name was inaccurate': PCOS gets a new name after years-long effort

PLANET EARTH > CLIMATE CHANGE

PATRICK PESTER | MAY 12, 2026, 6:55 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Microplastics absorb heat in the atmosphere and contribute to global warming — as if they weren't bad enough

Climate scientists have discovered that microplastics and nanoplastics are helping to drive global warming by absorbing sunlight and radiation in the atmosphere.

Microplastics are absorbing heat in the atmosphere and contributing to global warming, a new study reveals.

Microplastics are infamous for being everywhere, contaminating ecosystems and accumulating inside our bodies. Scientists have known for a while that plastics are also blown high into the atmosphere, where they are now pervasive, but it was unclear what impact they might be having up there.

Now, the new study, published Monday (May 4) in the journal Nature Climate Change, has found that overall, plastic particles create a warming effect. This is because, while very-light-colored plastics scatter sunlight back into space, darker-colored plastics absorb sunlight and radiation.

Study co-author Drew Shindell, a distinguished professor of Earth science at Duke University, told Live Science that the climate change impact of plastic particles is fairly small ‪—‬ comparable to the emissions of a small country. In numbers, this is the equivalent of around a couple of percent of the contribution from carbon dioxide (CO_2) — the main driver of climate change — or a couple hundredths of a degree of warming. However, the researchers' modeling was based on a limited understanding of the amount of plastic in the atmosphere, so the extent of the warming effect is uncertain.

"The key finding is really that the warming strongly outweighs the cooling," Shindell said. "I think we have a lot of confidence in that because we did all of these measurements in the laboratory of how [microplastics and nanoplastics] interact with sunlight. What we don't have so much confidence in and what's still a big uncertainty is exactly how many of these are in the atmosphere."

Microplastics come from larger plastic debris that breaks up and from plastic products that are designed to be microscopic in the first place, such as the tiny beads used in some facial scrubs and shower gels. A plastic is classified as a microplastic when it has a width of 1 micrometer to 5 millimeters (0.00004 to 0.2 inches). Anything less than 1 micrometer is classified as a nanoplastic.

To better understand how different colors of microplastic and nanoplastic particles behave, Shindell's colleagues in Shanghai collected plastic debris and studied its reaction to sunlight and radiation. They also checked whether very light colors would darken in the atmosphere over time ‪—‬ and found that they did.

"Sometimes if you get a parking pass or something that you put on your windshield, the plastic yellows with time because it's out in the sunlight," Shindell said. "We thought maybe particles of plastic do that, too."

Once the team understood how the plastic particles behaved, Shindell and his colleagues in the U.S. used that data alongside data on plastic emissions to model their impact. This modeling was hampered by uncertainty surrounding the quantity and distribution of plastics in the atmosphere.

"People have mostly taken measurements near the ground because they were thinking of these as a health hazard, which they are, but the climate is influenced by not just the amount at the surface but throughout the atmospheric column," Shindell said.

The analysis revealed that the warming effect from the microplastics and nanoplastics is about five times larger than their scattered cooling effect, establishing them as a previously unrecognized driver of global warming. And while the impact of microplastics on warming is tiny compared with the effect of burning fossil fuels, getting rid of plastic waste is another thing humanity could do to slow climate change, Shindell noted.

"It just adds another compelling reason why we should pay more attention to keeping plastic waste out of the environment," he said.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/microplastics-absorb-heat-in-the-atmosphere-and-contribute-to-global-warming-as-if-they-werent-bad-enough at May 12, 2026 at 9:53 AM EDT.

PLANET EARTH

STEPHANIE PAPPAS | MAY 12, 2026, 6:55 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

A 2025 Alaskan tsunami was one of the largest on record, new research finds

A tsunami that rocked an Alaskan fjord in 2025 was the second largest ever recorded and formed a standing wave that sloshed for a day.

A tsunami that struck an Alaskan fjord in 2025 sloshed higher than the height of the top floor of One World Trade Center in New York, new research shows.

The study, published May 6 in the journal Science, found that the tsunami reached 1,578 feet (481 meters) up the slopes of the fjord, making it one of the tallest tsunamis ever recorded. It would have easily washed over the roof of New York's One World Trade Center, which stands 1,368 feet (417 m), not including its spire.

The study also found that the tsunami formed a standing wave, or "seiche," that sloshed back and forth in the narrow fjord for over a day. It's only the second time such a seiche has been recorded.

The tsunami hit Tracy Arm fjord, south of Juneau, on Aug. 10, 2025, when a massive landslide dropped 2.1 billion cubic feet (60 million cubic meters) of rock into the fjord's waters. The fjord is the outlet for the South Sawyer Glacier, which had been on a rapid retreat. It's not clear whether that retreat destabilized the slope or whether recent rains were more to blame, but the resulting tsunami was one of the largest on record. The only one known to be higher is a 1958 earthquake-triggered wave in Lituya Bay, Alaska, which scoured one slope to the height of 1,720 feet (524 m).

Although the fjord is often visited by cruise ships, it was empty on Aug. 10. Kayakers at the fjord's mouth, miles away, reported that their equipment was washed away by strong waves, but no one was hurt or killed by the tsunami.

Because no one saw the wave, discovering exactly what happened took some detective work. Thomas Monahan, a senior research associate in engineering at the University of Oxford, and his colleagues used satellite imagery and seismic data to build computer models of the tsunami. They observed long-lasting reverberations indicating that the wave splashed back and forth as a seiche. This phenomenon was previously observed in Greenland in 2023. The signal was more complex in Alaska than in Greenland, however, the researchers reported.

"This study shows that enclosed basins like fjords can effectively act as giant tuning forks, with the resonance determined by their shape and geometry," Monahan said in a statement. "This gives each fjord a unique 'signature' when they are affected by energetic events such as megatsunamis."

The satellite observations, gleaned from the Surface Water Ocean Topography satellite operated by NASA and France's space agency, also showed that the wave was more energetic than computer models would have predicted, Monahan said.

Image 1

Image 2

Credit: The OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 and Landsat 9.

Cruise lines have canceled their incursions into the fjord this year due to the possible risk of another slide. Study co-author Stephen Hicks, an Earth scientist at University College London, said the research might point to a way to predict such slides.

"With hindsight, there were some warning signs," he said in the statement. "Tiny earthquakes occurred at an increasing rate in the days to hours before the landslide, signaling that this mass of rock was starting to crack. Many seismic monitoring stations provide data in real-time, so this gives us some optimism that we can turn what we have learned into a warning system."

Article Sources

Shugar, D. H., Barnhart, K. R., Berdahl, M., Caplan-Auerbach, J., Ekström, G., Fathian, A., Geertsema, M., Hicks, S. P., Higman, B., Jensen, E. K., Karasözen, E., Lynett, P., Lyons, J., Monahan, T., Roe, G., Svennevig, K., Toney, L., Van Wyk De Vries, M., & West, M. E. (2026). A 481-meter-high landslide-tsunami in a cruise ship–frequented Alaska fjord. Science, eaec3187. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aec3187

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/a-2025-alaskan-tsunami-was-one-of-the-largest-on-record-new-research-finds at May 12, 2026 at 9:53 AM EDT.

HEALTH > REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH

NICOLETTA LANESE | MAY 12, 2026, 5:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

'The name was inaccurate': PCOS gets a new name after years-long effort

Polycystic ovary syndrome, or PCOS, has just been given a new name that experts say better reflects the nature of the condition.

A hormonal disorder that affects 1 in 8 women just got a new name.

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) will now be called polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS). Experts say that the new name better reflects the nature of the disease.

"It was very clear that the name was inaccurate," said Dr. Helena Teede, an endocrinologist and professor of women's health at Monash University in Australia. Teede, who is also the director of the Monash Centre for Health Research & Implementation, chaired the steering group that led the name-change effort.

The decision to change the name was not made lightly. The process involved surveying thousands of people with the syndrome around the world, as well as thousands of healthcare professionals. The funding and oversight of the effort involved 56 academic, clinical and patient organizations. There's a plan to raise awareness of the new name and adopt it in practice over the next three years.

"It was a really robust process, and the community was involved at all stages," Teede told Live Science. "We hope that people will understand and respect the process — understand that it wasn't made behind closed doors with a few small expert groups, which is what normally happens."

What's in a name?

The idea to pick a new name for PCOS isn't new, with some calls for action dating to the 1990s and early 2000s. In 2012, the U.S. National Institutes of Health recommended a name change after experts concluded the name PCOS was a confusing "distraction" for both patients and providers.

"The name focuses on a criterion — polycystic ovarian morphology — which is neither necessary nor sufficient to diagnose the syndrome," NIH experts wrote in the report.

The old name implied that people with PMOS have many abnormal cysts on their ovaries, Teede explained. When the condition was first described in the 1930s, doctors physically examined patients' ovaries during operations and noticed "they looked lumpy and bumpy, like they had cysts on them," she said. "But a true abnormal cyst has a particular type of lining and behaves in a certain way."

Known as "pathological noncancerous ovarian cysts," those types of cysts can grow larger, rupture, bleed and cause pain, and they can require surgery to treat. Teede and other researchers have found that PMOS patients aren't more likely to have these pathological cysts than people without the condition. Rather, they often have a large number of "arrested follicles," meaning eggs that have failed to fully mature within the ovaries due to the syndrome's hormonal effects.

In short, the term "polycystic" is incorrect, because arrested follicles are not cysts. What's more, the focus on ovaries ignores the disruptions in multiple hormones that drive downstream issues with metabolism, weight, reproduction, the skin and mental health.

We needed to move away from the inaccurate towards the accurate.

Dr. Helena Teede, an endocrinologist and professor of women's health at Monash University

Up to 70% of people with PMOS are undiagnosed, estimates suggest, and part of that diagnostic gap may stem from misconceptions about what the condition actually is. Over the years, surveys have repeatedly suggested that both doctors and patients find the name PCOS confusing and often think abnormal ovarian cysts are a key feature of the condition. In a recent survey, nearly 86% of patients and 76% of health professionals who responded agreed that the name should change.

Because the syndrome has largely been viewed as gynecological, research, funding and medical education has often focused on the reproductive aspects of PMOS. This has left knowledge gaps among doctors in other specialties, despite the condition impacting many bodily systems. The new name could also help to turn that tide, stakeholders think.

"We needed to move away from the inaccurate towards the accurate," Teede said of the new name.

A new name, at last

After the NIH issued its 2012 recommendation, a series of renaming efforts followed, but they each failed to gain traction. Experts recognized that a successful renaming would require international leadership, a democratic process to reach consensus, the inclusion of patient advocacy groups and a clear plan to roll out the new terminology.

In addition to asking whether the syndrome should be renamed, leaders of the effort asked whether the acronym should remain "PCOS," for ease of adoption, or if it was more critical for the name to accurately reflect the disease's features. The latter turned out to be more important to respondents, the organizers reported Tuesday (May 12) in The Lancet. The new name will also be announced in person on Tuesday at the European Society of Endocrinology Conference in Prague.

"We got a very strong vote for the first two terms, which is the 'polyendocrine' and the 'metabolic,'" Teede said. Weighing the word "ovarian" proved tricker, she said, but it was ultimately chosen because other terms, such as "reproductive," were seen as more stigmatizing.

"In many cultures, the worth or value of a woman is linked to her fertility," Teede said. "So, implying that women have a condition that might impact that is — it can be very harmful."

She added that, when diagnosed and treated appropriately, people with PMOS can often bear children and achieve the family sizes they want; it's when they go undiagnosed and untreated that fertility issues can get in the way, she said.

Some experts have suggested that, with this name change, there may be an opportunity to research a possible "male version" of PMOS. Some males have low levels of androgens that cause sparse hair growth and early balding, as well as some of the same issues seen in PMOS, such as insulin resistance, obesity and mental health problems.

For her part, though, Teede doesn't think there's enough evidence to call this phenomenon in males a form of PMOS, even though it shares some similar hormonal and metabolic features. It's "way too premature, based on the science," she said. "It's a different condition in that it doesn't have the same reproductive implications as it does in females."

As follow-up work, Teede and colleagues will work to tweak some of the language used in the diagnosis of PMOS. When examining ovaries on ultrasound, doctors look for what they call "polycystic ovarian morphology," but really, they're looking for signs of arrested follicles. So to align with the syndrome's new name, that terminology will need a change, too.

For those looking for accurate information about PMOS, Teede recommended the app AskPCOS, which will soon be renamed AskPMOS.

Disclaimer

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

Article Sources

Teede, H.J., et al. (2026). Polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, the new name for polycystic ovary syndrome: a multistep global consensus process. The Lancet. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(26)00717-8

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/health/reproductive-health/the-name-was-inaccurate-pcos-gets-a-new-name-after-years-long-effort at May 12, 2026 at 9:53 AM EDT.

May 11, 2026

- 'Insect apocalypse' is already fueling malnutrition in some regions, first-of-its-kind study reveals

- Lion's head pendant: An ancient Egyptian board game piece that was later repurposed into a magical religious object with baboons

- New 'trick' fixes major flaw in neutral-atom quantum computers — inching us closer to a superpowerful system

- 'More than 100 million years of evolution': How snakes evolved and lost their legs

- James Webb telescope zooms in on a black hole that could reveal the truth about 'little red dots'

- Declassified Apollo 12 images show UFOs on the moon — Space photo of the week

ANIMALS > INSECTS

JOANNA THOMPSON | MAY 11, 2026, 5:52 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

'Insect apocalypse' is already fueling malnutrition in some regions, first-of-its-kind study reveals

In a first, researchers quantify how pollinator declines contribute to food insecurity.

Insects are disappearing, and they are leaving global food security gaps in their wake. Over the past three decades, bugs have been declining at an alarming rate across the globe — up to 1% per year, by some estimates. The drop has been so intense that some scientists have dubbed it an "insect apocalypse."

Because many insects pollinate crops, lower insect abundance has hurt everything from ecosystem health to crop yields. But historically, such consequences have been tough for scientists to measure directly. Now, in a new paper published May 6 in the journal Nature, researchers have quantified the impact of insect pollinator declines on human health for the first time.

The scientists studied the relationships between wild pollinator populations, crop yields and human diet in 10 Nepalese farming villages over one year. Most of the food eaten in these settlements is grown on-site. The team conducted pollinator surveys every two weeks to determine which bugs (and how many of them) were visiting which crops, and then correlated this data with instances of malnutrition.

The finding was stark: Insect pollinators were responsible for an estimated 44% of the villagers' farming income and over 20% of their intake of some essential nutrients, including vitamin A, vitamin E and folate. As fewer and less-diverse pollinators visited the crops, people's income and dietary health declined.

"Over half of the children in our study were too short for their age, which is largely driven by poor diets that depend upon insect pollinated vegetables, legumes and fruits," study co-author Naomi Saville, a researcher at the University College London Institute for Global Health and a study co-author, said in a statement.

Insects like bees play a pivotal role in boosting crop yields, so their global decline is bad news for food security.

(Image credit: NurPhoto via Getty Images)

When Saville's team extrapolated their data into a future with even fewer pollinators, the impacts were more pronounced. If no agricultural practices changed, they predicted a 7% loss of vitamin A and folate intake for the villagers by 2030. Deficiencies in these nutrients can lead to vision loss and birth defects.

Although the researchers only studied farming communities in Nepal, the new results offer a glimpse into the hidden burden of pollinator loss worldwide. Roughly 2 billion people rely primarily on smallholder farming like the villages in the study. About three-quarters of global crops need insect pollination to thrive, and a few crops ‪—‬ like coffee, almonds and chocolate ‪—‬ are totally reliant on pollinating insects to survive. If current trends continue, it could jeopardize many farmers' ability to grow food on a meaningful scale, the study authors said.

But the new study also found ways to counteract this downward spiral. According to the team's models, simple interventions ‪— like planting native wildflowers near farms, keeping wild bees and reducing pesticide usage ‪— can help boost pollinator numbers. Such measures could increase farming income above current levels by up to 30% and boost vitamin A and folate intake by 5% and 9%, respectively.

"Biodiversity is not a luxury," study co-author Thomas Timberlake, an ecologist at the University of York in England, said in a statement. "It is fundamental to our health, nutrition and livelihoods."

Why Trust Live Science

Timberlake, T. P., Sapkota, S., Saville, N. M., Cirtwill, A. R., Baral, S. C., Bhusal, D. R., Devkota, K., Giri, S., Harris-Fry, H. A., Joshi, D., Kortsch, S., Myers, S. S., Roslin, T., Smith, M. R., & Memmott, J. (2026). Pollinators support the nutrition and income of vulnerable communities. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10421-x

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/animals/insects/insect-apocalypse-is-already-fueling-malnutrition-in-some-regions-first-of-its-kind-study-reveals at May 12, 2026 at 9:53 AM EDT.

ARCHAEOLOGY > ANCIENT EGYPTIANS

KRISTINA KILLGROVE | MAY 11, 2026, 2:57 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Lion's head pendant: An ancient Egyptian board game piece that was later repurposed into a magical religious object with baboons

An ancient Egyptian board game piece was repurposed centuries later in Sudan into a dazzling gold-and-amethyst pendant.

A lion's head carved out of amethyst has been set into a golden base decorated with baboons.

(Image credit: Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund 1987.1, Cleveland Museum of Art (Public Domain))

In 1987, the Cleveland Museum of Art acquired an unusual pendant depicting a lion's head carved out of amethyst on a gold base decorated with baboons. But one part was much older than the other and was originally carved as a game piece.

The lion's head pendant was crafted out of an ancient Egyptian gemstone as far back as 3,500 years ago. Then, around 2,700 years ago, an artisan in Sudan set the much-older Egyptian gemstone into a new metal mount made of eight seated baboons to create a magical religious object.

According to the Cleveland Museum of Art, the pendant measures about 1.4 inches (3.5 centimeters) tall. A hole just under the lion's chin pierces the pendant, which would have been suspended on a string.

The purple amethyst and gold frame are a unique combination. The lion is similar to pieces found in the ancient Egyptian game senet, in which players would move their pawns across a board with 30 squares. The amethyst likely dates to the New Kingdom period (circa 1550 to 1070 B.C.), according to a 1996 study of the artifact. But the gold mount was added considerably later, likely in the Napatan period (circa 750 to 300 B.C.), named for the town that was used as the religious center of Nubia.

Recycling of old stone carvings was common among the ancient Nubians, who lived in what is now southern Egypt and northern Sudan. In the early first millennium B.C., Nubian rulers viewed themselves as descendants of Ramesses II (who reigned from 1279 to 1213 B.C.) and repurposed and retrofitted semiprecious gems into new gold mounts to show their Egyptian connections. Under the later Kushite kings (circa 712 to 664 B.C.), this practice continued in Napata as the rulers incorporated Egyptian customs into their own culture.

Both the lion and the baboon were sacred in Kushite religion. The lion was associated with the god Amun, who was tasked with protecting the state and who merged with the sun god, Ra, and became known as the powerful creator deity Amun-Ra. The baboons were connected to the sun and the moon and were often depicted with their arms raised. In this pendant, the baboons lift the representation of Amun.

The lion's head pendant was meant to be worn in life, rather than as a funeral gift, and it demonstrates the ancient Nubians' clever use of Egyptian heirlooms to create new and religiously charged jewelry.

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

TOPICS

astonishing artifacts gold

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/ancient-egyptians/lions-head-pendant-an-ancient-egyptian-board-game-piece-that-was-later-repurposed-into-a-magical-religious-object-with-baboons at May 12, 2026 at 9:53 AM EDT.

TECHNOLOGY > COMPUTING > QUANTUM COMPUTING

ALAN BRADLEY | MAY 11, 2026, 11:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

New 'trick' fixes major flaw in neutral-atom quantum computers — inching us closer to a superpowerful system

A new "geometry‑based" quantum swap gate makes neutral‑atom computers far less sensitive to laser noise — bringing large‑scale, stable quantum processors a step closer to reality.

Researchers have created a new type of "quantum operation" that is dramatically more stable than previous methods. The achievement brings one hardware design, in particular — neutral‑atom qubits — a step closer to powering useful quantum computers.

Quantum computers use qubits that can exist in a state of 0, 1 or a superposition of both. Key to their processing power are "gates" capable of shuffling qubits between those states so they can run calculations in parallel. One critical type of gate is called a swap gate, which allows information to be routed through a machine by exchanging two qubits' states.

Many quantum systems rely on highly excited electronic states or collisions between atoms, as well as on the tunnel effect, in which particles slip through obstacles that would be impassable according to classical physics. However, swap gates that use those techniques (particularly the tunnel effect) are subject to how quickly lasers — which suspend neutrally charged atoms in place to form the qubits — can be turned on and how powerful they are.

This means that tiny fluctuations in the timing or strength of a laser could introduce errors and a lack of fidelity into the system, making a gate unreliable.

It feeds into the major bottleneck preventing scientists from scaling up quantum computing so they can be more powerful than the world's fastest supercomputers: qubits are highly susceptible to sustaining errors and breaking down during calculations. This rate is roughly 1 in 1,000 versus 1 in 1 trillion for conventional bits.

To resolve this issue, scientists at ETH Zurich devised a way to make qubits in neutral-atom quantum computers far more stable than ever before. They outlined their findings in a study published April 8 in the journal Nature.

Opening the gateway to more stable quantum computers

Rather than relying on conventional gates, the team used a subtler physical effect called a geometric phase. Unlike other methods for implementing quantum gates for neutral atoms or trapped particles, which depend on how fast and hard atoms are pushed, their swap gate exploits the path the atoms take through an artificial "crystal of light" built by intersecting laser beams (called an optical lattice).

Neutral‑atom platforms promise thousands of qubits in a single device. This setup uses tens of thousands of potassium atoms cooled to near absolute zero and held in place by laser light. Yann Hendrick Kiefer, a postdoctoral researcher at the ETH Zürich Institute for Quantum Electronics and first author of the study, told Live Science how this works.

"Laser light is nothing but monochromatic electromagnetic radiation," Kiefer said in an email. "If a neutral atom is placed inside this electric field a dipole moment is induced which leads to a force that enables us to hold atoms in place."

When two of those potassium atoms are brought close enough that their quantum waves overlap, their combined state changes in a way that depends only on the geometry of their motion, not on how quickly they move or how intense the lasers are. This makes the swap operation far less sensitive to experimental noise.

"Quantum mechanics is described by wave functions," Kiefer said. "Manipulation of this wavefunction generally introduces a phase on the wavefunction, which can be either of dynamical or geometric origin."

"Quantum computing on a practical scale still requires significant advancements."

Yann Hendrick Kiefer, postdoctoral researcher at the ETH Zürich Institute for Quantum Electronics

Dynamical quantum methods create this phase based on highly precise control over things like energy levels, timing, and laser strength, which means even tiny mistakes can cause errors. The geometric approach works differently: instead of depending on exact timing or force, it depends mainly on the overall path the system takes from start to finish. Because of that, it’s naturally less sensitive to outside disturbances or small imperfections, making these quantum operations more stable and reliable.

Building machines that will need far fewer qubits than we thought

Using this method, the research team achieved a very robust swap gate with a precision of better than 99.91%, operating in under a millisecond (one-thousandth of a second) across a system with a remarkable 17,000 qubit pairs. While some superconducting or trapped‑ion gates can be sub‑microsecond (one-millionth of a second), those systems typically run such gates on only a handful of qubit pairs at once.

The team also proved that they were capable of creating "half-swap" gates, which are critical for running real quantum algorithms. Half‑swap gates — a quantum operation that only swaps two qubits partway instead of completely — are vital because entanglement is the special ingredient in quantum computing. A full swap mostly just moves information around, but a half-swap can both partially exchange information, and create correlations between qubits that classical bits can't have. The scientists hope to eventually pair these robust swaps with a quantum gas microscope — which can image and target individual atom pairs — to build a more flexible, programmable quantum computing architecture.

That said, Kiefer admits a practical quantum computer is still way off. "Quantum computing on a practical scale still requires significant advancements," he said. "The most limiting factors are twofold: scale and fidelity."

However, Kiefer remains optimistic. He cited a recent study that explored how we could one day solve complex problems like Shor's algorithm with a system that uses as few as 10,000 qubits, rather than the millions we previously assumed we would need.

Shor's algorithm is a quantum recipe that can quickly crack certain kinds of modern encryption by finding the secret prime‑number ingredients of a big number faster than a classical computer can, and it remains a widely used benchmark in quantum computing research.

"There is a lot of work to be done before actually solving Shor's algorithm," Kiefer said, "but we are entering the phase in which the dream of quantum computing might actually be slowly converted into reality — exciting times!"

Article Sources

Kiefer, Y., Zhu, Z., Fischer, L., Jele, S., Gächter, M., Bisson, G., Viebahn, K., & Esslinger, T. (2026). Protected quantum gates using qubit doublons in dynamical optical lattices. Nature, 652(8110), 609–614. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10285-1

Can you match these ancient devices to their pictures? Find out with our computing quiz!

TOPICS

quantum computers

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/technology/quantum/new-trick-fixes-major-flaw-in-neutral-atom-quantum-computers-inching-us-closer-to-a-superpowerful-system at May 12, 2026 at 9:53 AM EDT.

ANIMALS > REPTILES > SNAKES

KNOWABLE MAGAZINE, AMBER DANCE | MAY 11, 2026, 8:26 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

'More than 100 million years of evolution': How snakes evolved and lost their legs

Huge snakes, tiny snakes, poisonous snakes and constrictor snakes, snakes that slither, burrow or swim: New fossils and modern technology are tracing serpent origins

Back when dinosaurs stomped the Earth, dinky mammals scurried about in their shadows. The little furballs, hiding out in underground burrows, provided a fresh niche for a novel reptile: the snake. Skinny snakes could squeeze into the homes of mammals and gobble them up.

At least, that's how the dawn of snakes is imagined by Marc Tollis, an evolutionary biologist at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. No one knows for sure. Like the creatures themselves, the snake fossil record is long and thin, leaving gaps in snaky history. Major questions, such as where they got their start and who their closest relatives are, remain unanswered.

Today, new fossils and modern techniques are updating the story of snakes. Starting about 125 million years ago, snakes used their flexible body plans to diversify like crazy, conquering regions that now make up six continents, plus the Indian and Pacific Oceans — and Tollis would not be surprised to find snake fossils in once-balmy Antarctica, either.

There are serpents slithering across the land, burrowing into the soil, swimming in the sea and gliding between trees, even catching rides on trains and, yes, planes. There are itty-bitty threadsnakes just a few inches long and thin as spaghetti, and there are pythons that exceed 20 feet. There are snakes that chase their prey and snakes that lie in wait to ambush it, snakes that strangle their meals and others that immobilize their dinner with venom. Snakes that lay eggs, snakes that bear live young, snakes that can reproduce without males.

It's an impressive smorgasbord of abilities for what is, essentially, a freaky offshoot on the lizard family tree. Serpents are basically predatory tubes, Tollis notes. They can't walk or chew their food. These seem like seriously limiting factors.

The Barbados threadsnake, Tetracheilostoma carlae, is one of the smallest snakes in the world.

(Image credit: BLAIR HEDGES / PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY)

"Despite that, snakes are some of the most successful animals," marvels Tollis, who coauthored an overview of early snake and lizard evolution in the 2025 Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics. "They definitely have superpowers that we would normally associate with the fantastic."

By sea, by land, or below?

There are more than 4,000 described living species of snakes, accounting for about one-third of the larger lizard group, and probably hundreds more awaiting official discovery, says Alex Pyron, an evolutionary biologist at George Washington University in Washington, DC. Scientists estimate that the ancestors of this wildly diverse group emerged around 160 million years ago, but they haven't figured out what the first snakes were like — land snakes, sea snakes, perhaps underground snakes?

These mysterious, ancestral snakes should sit at the very base of the snake family tree, but their fossils haven't been found. The oldest snake fossils known come from a variety of environments, making it hard to determine which kind of habitat snakes wriggled out of, says Tiago Simões, a coauthor on the Annual Review  paper and an evolutionary biologist at Princeton University in New Jersey.

One longstanding hypothesis is that snakes got their start underground. The original idea was based, in part, on the barely-there eyes of the blind snakes that are the lowest branch on the family tree of living snakes. But blind snakes are quite specialized for the anthills and termite mounds they inhabit, says Catie Strong, a vertebrate paleontologist and graduate student at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

They have weird, alien-looking skulls fit for their subterranean environment and insectivore diet. For example, Strong says, a "pronounced underbite" helps keep dirt out of their mouths. While training with vertebrate paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Michael Caldwell at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, Strong concluded, as have other researchers, that these hyperspecialized critters can't correspond to the root of the snake family tree.

In the late 20th century, evidence supporting a possible marine origin floated up. Scientists described early snakes that lived nearly 100 million years ago in the Middle East, when that land was underwater. Caldwell and colleagues also linked the snake clan to mosasaurs, extinct aquatic reptiles, raising the possibility that snakes emerged in the water. But favor for that hypothesis has sunk: There are other snakes that predate those aquatic snakes and were clearly terrestrial, says Simões. So the current consensus is that the Middle Eastern swimmers didn’t spring from the water but dived into it from land.

Scientists suspect that snakes share an ancestor with extinct, aquatic reptiles called mosasaurs.

(Image credit: Restoration illustration from Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0)

Modern-day Patagonia has yielded a trove of additional snake fossils, such as Najash rionegrina, dated to about 95 million years ago, and Dinilysia patagonica, from about 80 million years ago, when that environment was desertlike. But were these South American serpents on the ground, or under it? Dinilysia probably lived aboveground, but the situation with Najash is trickier, says Simões.

Najash has skull and spinal features that, to its discoverers, suggested it spent at least some time underground. But both of these Patagonia species were "big-bodied snakes," adds Caldwell, similar to modern-day pythons. Like pythons, they might have hid out underground, but hunted on the surface, he speculates.

Additional evidence for a mixed dry land/underground origin comes from predictions about early snakes' brains. Scientists used 3D X-ray imaging to analyze the braincase — the part of the skull protecting the brain — of nearly 60 snakes and lizards, plus a few snake fossils. From those inner contours, they could infer the shape of the brain. The researchers identified burrower brain anatomy: Diggers usually possess, for example, a small, flattened, triangular cerebellum, a brain section involved in movement. When the researchers used their data to predict the ancestral snake brain shape, they wound up with some burrower-like features, including that little cerebellum, but other features inconsistent with underground living.

Bringing all the evidence together, Strong subscribes to a theory that snakes evolved on land, maybe in a sandy environment like the one Dinilysia and Najash inhabited. This, she suspects, also happened to set them up to navigate underground on occasion.

New fossils of the early snake Najash, found in Patagonia, were reported in the journal Science Advances in 2019.

(Image credit: ADAPTED FROM F.F. GARBEROGLIO ET AL / SCIENCE ADVANCES 2019, CC by 4.0)

A better way to slither

Another major event in snake evolution was, of course, the shedding of their legs. This is not as innovative as it might seem; among lizard-kind, several long, skinny groups have kicked their legs to the curb. When one is crawling underground or moving through grass, limbs are literally "a drag," says Daniela Garcia Cobos, an evolutionary biologist and graduate student at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Snakes do, however, seem to have been among the first lizards to master this streamlined shape in a variety of different types of habitats, which might underlie their success with it.

Pyron estimates this change happened between 150 million and 125 million years ago, but scientists haven’t been able to pin down exactly when or where. The known fossil snakes had hind limbs but not forelimbs, though Dinilysia’s status is uncertain because there hasn't been good evidence of pelvic region preservation in those fossils. At some earlier point, there must have been a four-legged snake ancestor, but this missing link has been elusive. One candidate was reported in 2015, but Caldwell and collaborators showed it was just a lizard.

Then came Breugnathair elgolensis, a four-legged Jurassic fossil found in Scotland and described in Nature in 2025. "If you saw it in the street, walking across the road, you’d think it was just an iguana or ordinary lizard," says Susan E. Evans, a paleontologist at University College London, who described the specimen with colleagues.

But B. elgolensis's jaw does have some snaky features, like the shape of its teeth. Caldwell, who wasn't part of the team that described it, thinks it's a snake. "It's got all the right skull features," he says.

Snakes make up the suborder Serpentes, within the order Squamata, that includes all lizards and snakes. Snakes are related to other reptiles in a clade called Toxicofera, which includes all venomous lizards as well as nonvenomous species.

(Image credit: Knowable Magazine)

Evans isn't so certain, an opinion evident in the name she chose: Breugnathair derives from Gaelic for "false snake." When Evans and colleagues tried to place it in the reptile family tree, the results were wishy-washy. It might be a snake ancestor, she concedes, or it could be a lizard that independently evolved snakelike features but left no living descendants.

Heady changes

What distinguished snakes from all other legless lizards were the other changes they made, says Pyron. To investigate further innovations, Pyron and collaborators embarked on a massive reptile census, which they published in Science in 2024. They measured the skulls of thousands of snakes and lizards. They examined the stomach contents of museum specimens and pored over written dietary records. They amassed genetic data — not the whole genome, but 5,400 specific genes — from more than 1,000 snake and lizard species.

When they lined up those features, snakes stood out. About 125 million years ago, the group underwent sudden and significant changes to their skulls, diets and spines that would position them to diversify and spread.

Snakes' biggest claim to evolutionary fame is their weirdly flexible craniums, made of bony pieces connected by soft tissue; Caldwell thinks this key alteration might have happened even before they gave up their legs. En route to those piecework noggins, snakes first changed up their braincase. In most lizards, this looks like a sandwich: bone on top, bone on the bottom, brain within and open on the sides. But in snakes, it's more like a wrap, a bony tube that's only open toward the face and spine. Protecting the brain that way meant snakes were free to let the rest of the skull's bones move about. And boy, did they.

Those skull changes enabled new diets with the evolution of the serpentine jaw. While jaw anatomy varies within the group, in many snakes, the lower and upper parts are connected by stretchy ligaments, enabling a wide gape. The two sides of the lower jaw can splay apart, further expanding the snake's maw. The palate at the top of the mouth has right and left parts that move independently to convey food throatward. That's how a python can swallow a pig. Indeed, the Science team found that snakes, as a clan, can eat pretty much anything that moves. There are snakes that nosh on gooey slugs and armored snails, slippery eels and even other serpents.

And around the same time, snakes grew longer, adding hundreds of vertebrae between their necks and nether regions. "Being elongate allows you to locomote more quickly and efficiently," says Caldwell. Extra belly flesh supplies more surface area to push along the ground or climb tree trunks. For aquatic snakes, increased body length enables more efficient weaving back and forth.

In sum, these changes to body, head and diet meant the evolving serpents were flexible not just in form, but also in lifestyle. Snakes adapt rapidly to new environments, says Frank Burbrink, curator of herpetology at the American Museum of Natural History and a coauthor of the Annual Review  article. In other words, these evolutionary superstars were primed to make the most of any habitat they slithered into.

Making up for absent fossils

The fragmented skulls and the body length that were so beneficial for snakes' spread create a headache for paleontologists: Dead snakes go to pieces, making complete fossils scarce and leaving many questions unanswered. For example, researchers know serpents are related to groups containing iguanas and Komodo dragons, as well as possibly those mosasaurs, but it's not certain which are their closest cousins. Knowing that would help to predict what snake ancestors should look like, says Evans.

When fossils falter, genetics can come to the rescue. The more dissimilar the genes from different animals, the longer it's been since they went their separate ways as species. Already, genetic analyses have forced a reshuffling of the lizard family tree; trees based on body shape alone turned out to be "totally wrong," says Pyron.

Genes have also illuminated how snake bodies build some of their special features. The lack of legs is linked to lost function in a limb-promoting sequence called ZRS. And scientists recently reported that snakes lack the gene encoding the "hunger hormone" ghrelin. This might make it easier for them to endure long fasts; some snakes can go for a year or more between repasts.

Burbrink, Pyron and Simões are now sequencing whole genomes of more than 100 snakes and lizards, which will double the number of high-quality genomes available. With that plus additional data on living and fossil reptiles, they expect to build better family trees and further investigate the genes behind a snake's sinuous shape.

Still, Evans says, scientists really need more fossils to fill in the twists and turns in the serpents’ tale.

As paleontologists keep digging, Burbrink counsels us to take a moment to marvel the next time we come across a garter snake or other modern wriggler: "You're looking at the culmination of more than 100 million years of evolution."

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

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This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/animals/snakes/more-than-100-million-years-of-evolution-how-snakes-evolved-and-lost-their-legs at May 12, 2026 at 9:53 AM EDT.

SPACE > ASTRONOMY > COSMOLOGY

IVAN FARKAS | MAY 11, 2026, 8:26 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

James Webb telescope zooms in on a black hole that could reveal the truth about 'little red dots'

A peculiar object dubbed an 'X-ray dot' could help solve the mystery of the 'little red dots' discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope.

A unique, X-ray-spewing black hole may help to confirm the enigmatic identity of "little red dots," a curious class of objects that are observed mostly in the very early universe, approximately 12 billion light-years away.

Astronomers have sought to classify little red dots (LRDs) since the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) first spotted them shortly after it began science operations in 2022.

Over the following few years, JWST discovered hundreds more of these ancient, compact curiosities, which look like little red dots partially because their light has been redshifted — stretched into longer wavelengths — as it has traveled across billions of light-years of expanding space-time to reach us. LRDs appear to be ephemeral, emerging around 600 million years after the Big Bang and then mostly disappearing over the next billion years.

Now, in a paper published March 16 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, astronomers have described an object that may illuminate the murky nature of LRDs.

Formally known as 3DHST-AEGIS-12014 and colloquially called the X-ray dot (XRD), this object had remained hidden in a survey conducted by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory more than a decade ago. Its importance was revealed only recently, after JWST observed the same cosmic field.

"It is always wonderful to see archival data aid in solving mysteries that were completely unknown when the data were first taken," Anthony Taylor, an astrophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin who was not involved in the study, told Live Science via email. "This is a prime example of legacy science programs that continue to provide scientific value both upon their initial release and far into the future."

A single black hole may solve two cosmic mysteries

The XRD discovered by Chandra resembles an LRD, save for a few differences. The biggest one is that it is a bright source of X-ray light.

Normally, LRDs do not seem to emit X-rays. This anomaly has deepened the mystery of their identity, because active black holes commonly emit X-rays from their chaotic coronas, where infalling material reaches near light speeds and intense temperatures.

An illustration depicting a close-up view of the "X-ray dot."

(Image credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/M. Weiss; adapted by K. Arcand & J. Major)

"If little red dots are rapidly growing supermassive black holes, why do they not give off X-rays like other such black holes?" co-author Anna de Graaff, an astrophysicist at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in a statement.

As suggested in this study and in previous research, the X-rays may be blocked by thick cocoons of gas surrounding LRDs.

The XRD offers evidence of this process. As the black hole at its heart gorges on the surrounding gas, it clears holes in its cocoon. This forms sight lines into the object's interior and allows X-rays to escape, while also preserving its overall reddish appearance ‪—‬ picture a cosmic jack-o'-lantern with its eerie inner light bleeding into the dark.

"This single X-ray object may be — to use a phrase — what lets us connect all of the dots," lead author Raphael Hviding, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, said in the statement.

Little red dots, as they appeared more than 12 billion years ago, were discovered through early-universe surveys.

(Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Dale Kocevski (Colby College))

Unveiling an early-universe enigma

Overall, the XRD may help strengthen the idea that LRDs are young black holes in the midst of a transitional phase, during which they're enveloped in a dense cloud of gas. This gaseous shroud is similar in composition to some stellar atmospheres, earning LRDs an awe-inspiring appellation: "black hole stars."

Accordingly, if LRDs represent a phase of rapid gas accretion by young black holes, this period of quick consumption may help to explain how early supermassive black holes (SMBHs) grew so fat, so fast, accumulating many millions or billions of solar masses when the universe was only about 10% of its current age.

It is essential to study the evolution of these objects in more recent times. "LRD-like objects have actually been found in the modern universe but it is clear that LRD analogues are exceedingly rare," Hviding told Live Science via email. "Why? The short answer is that we don't know." One possibility is that giant gas reservoirs grow thinner as the universe evolves, he said.

Next-generation observatories like the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will scan the sky for the rare, modern LRDs in the evolved universe. "They cannot go nearly as deep or as detailed as Webb," Hviding added, "but because they survey wide areas of the sky, finding rare analogues becomes viable."

In the meantime, the XRD warrants further observations. Maybe it isn't an elderly LRD, after all, but a more common SMBH veiled in an exotic dust never seen before. Either way, astronomers appear to have made a distinctive discovery that may elucidate a chain of cosmic mysteries in the evolution of the universe.

Article Sources

Hviding, R. E., De Graaff, A., 刘 H. 翰. L., Goulding, A. D., 马 Y. 逸. M., Greene, J. E., Boogaard, L. A., Bunker, A. J., Cleri, N. J., Franx, M., Hirschmann, M., Leja, J., Matthee, J., Naidu, R. P., Setton, D. J., Übler, H., Venturi, G., & 王 B. 冰. 洁. W. (2026). The X-Ray dot: exotic dust or a late-stage little red dot? The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 1000(1), L18. https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ae4c88

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

TOPICS

James Webb Space Telescope

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/space/cosmology/james-webb-telescope-zooms-in-on-a-black-hole-that-could-reveal-the-truth-about-little-red-dots at May 12, 2026 at 9:53 AM EDT.

SPACE > EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE

BRANDON SPECKTOR | MAY 11, 2026, 8:25 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Declassified Apollo 12 images show UFOs on the moon — Space photo of the week

Newly declassified images from the Apollo 12 mission highlight strange, unidentified lights spotted by astronauts on the moon.

In mid-November 1969, a trio of NASA astronauts launched to the moon on the Apollo 12 mission and would soon become the second group of humans ever to set foot on the lunar surface.

Now, more than half a century later, the crew's historic mission is capturing the public's attention again — not because of what the astronauts did, but because of what they saw.

On Nov. 19, mission commander Charles "Pete" Conrad Jr. and lunar module pilot Alan L. Bean descended to the lunar surface in a landing craft dubbed Intrepid. (The third crewmember, Richard F. Gordon, spent a lonely 31 hours piloting the empty command module through lunar orbit.)

While looking through the lander's alignment optical telescope — a small, periscope-like device that offered a narrow, unmagnified view outside the spacecraft — Bean saw something that perplexed him.

"You can see these lights — particles of light, flashes of light… just sailing off in space," Bean told mission control, according to a transcript of the communication. While this transcript has been publicly available for decades, it was resurfaced among a tranche of declassified UFO-related files released by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) on Friday (May 8).

Bean initially thought the particles were leaking from the lander's water boiler, but he soon added, "It looks like some of those things are escaping the moon. They really haul out of here and just press off at the stars."

Newly released images from the crew's lunar excursion may reveal what they were seeing. In a series of lightly altered photographs — declassified Friday along with roughly 150 other files, videos and images of alleged UFO sightings from various government agencies — unidentified lights dance in the sky over the lunar horizon, as seen from the Apollo 12 landing site.

The lights, which look bluish in some of the images, appear on their own or in small groups; one particularly packed photo highlights the unidentified lights in five separate regions of the sky.

Like the transcripts, these astronaut images have been publicly available since the Apollo era. But in the newly released versions, NASA has highlighted and zoomed in on the light sources, hinting that they were once the subject of an agency investigation. (NASA has made no conclusions about the source or nature of these lights.)

An Apollo 12 photo of the moon showing strange lights in five regions of the sky.

(Image credit: NASA)

Later in the transcript, mission control asks the astronauts if the strange flashes could be electromagnetic interference — unwanted signals emitted either from human-made technology or sources of cosmic radiation, like solar flares. The astronauts agree this is possible and leave the investigation at that.

This case, along with all the other newly declassified files, remains unresolved due to poor-quality data. Scant scientific information can be gleaned from these blurry, decades-old images and off-the-cuff remarks.

"It looks like some of those things are escaping the moon. They really haul out of here and just press off at the stars."

Alan L. Bean, lunar module pilot

NASA maintains that unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP, the government's preferred name for UFOs) are real but they have nothing to do with aliens. The space agency has been hunting for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence for decades, using the most advanced and expensive telescopes ever created, and so far, they've turned up nothing. Some dancing lights on the moon won't overturn decades of scientific research.

The more likely sources of UAP are far more mundane: airborne debris, photo defects (like glare) and optical illusions are all common, according to a 2022 DOD investigation. Down on Earth, birds, weather balloons and foreign spy craft are regular culprits.

These NASA-altered photos may not be a giant leap for UAP studies, but their declassification — decades after being snapped — is a small step for government transparency.

See more Space Photos of the Week

'Human minds should not go through this'

The Artemis II crew recalls the unreal moment when Earth disappeared

Hidden structure in 1st Vera Rubin image

First-light images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory reveal a 163,000-light-year stream of stars emanating from a nearby galaxy.

JWST peeps the 'Eye of God'

A spectacular James Webb telescope image reveals intricate structures inside the Helix Nebula.

Are you a UFO fanatic? Find out with our extraterrestrials quiz!

TOPICS

space photo of the week

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/space/extraterrestrial-life/declassified-apollo-12-images-show-ufos-on-the-moon-space-photo-of-the-week at May 12, 2026 at 9:53 AM EDT.

May 10, 2026

- More polar bears are approaching human sites as the climate warms, and it's not just the skinny ones

- Are we more closely related to cats or dogs?

ANIMALS > LAND MAMMALS > BEARS

DOUGLAS CLARK | MAY 10, 2026, 10:10 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

More polar bears are approaching human sites as the climate warms, and it's not just the skinny ones

It's not just thinner bears that are coming ashore as the climate warms.

Polar bears are intensely curious animals. That curiosity often brings them into contact with people and can put both species at risk from one another.

As the Arctic climate warms, some polar bears are spending more time on shore, away from the sea ice habitats they rely on to hunt seals. As the bears are under nutritional stress due to ice loss, some wonder if they're being forced to take more risks around people as they seek food, increasing interactions and conflicts between polar bears and people. But until now, there're been little research into this relationship.

Between 2011 and 2021, research colleagues and I placed trail cameras at three camps in Wapusk National Park in Manitoba and, later, at the nearby Churchill Northern Studies Centre (CNSC) to see how often polar bears visited these sites on the west coast of Hudson Bay.

The project began at the invitation of Parks Canada when their newly constructed field camps at Broad River and Owl River turned out to receive more bear visits than they expected. Those camps had been located away from the coast to reduce the likelihood of polar bear encounters, so answering this immediate question was a priority.

We investigated whether human activity, the length of the ice-free season — or both — were influencing polar bear visits. In approximately 80% of the bear visits, our photos showed enough of the animal that we could rate their body condition using an established fatness index.

We observed 580 bear visits with our cameras, mostly between July and November, when bears are well-known to be abundant in the area. What we found was that human presence at the camps and the CNSC didn't have any effect on the number of bear visits. The length of the ice-free season each year, however, had a notable effect.

It’s all about ice

The ice-free season can be longer if sea ice breaks up earlier in spring than normal, forms later in fall than normal, or both. During our study period, there was no long-term trend in the ice-free season's length, but it did vary a lot year to year. We found that the longer western Hudson Bay remained ice-free in a year, the more frequently bears visited our study sites.

Poor body condition is considered an indicator of nutritional stress, and a healthy body condition to survive on-shore fasting is critical for polar bear survival.

But rather than getting visits from hungrier bears that were detectably thinner — which is what we had expected — we found that the more time bears were off the ice, the more likely all bears were to approach our study sites, regardless of their nutritional health.

This result was unexpected since other research shows underweight polar bears are more likely to attack people, which has been taken to mean that those particular bears would take more chances to find food and so be more likely to approach or prey on people.

The research suggests that underweight polar bears are more likely to come into conflict with people.

(Image credit: Prisma Bildagentur/UIG via Getty Images)

Instead, what we're seeing is that body condition may play a different role. Rather than influencing the bears to seek human interactions, body condition might instead influence whether interactions between people and polar bears escalate.

In other words, if polar bears are around people to begin with, a skinny bear might be more likely to aggressively try to obtain human food sources, or even prey on people, than a bear under less nutritional stress.

We were also surprised not to see many lone sub-adult bears in our photos. Those other studies have also shown that they're usually the ones most likely to come into conflict with people.

These observations, though, are consistent with other research on this sub-population. As the ice-free season has on average lengthened in western Hudson Bay, the production and survival of juvenile bears has dropped. Our unexpected results, then, are probably due to there simply not being many young bears in the population during our study.

Scientific and Indigenous observations

Our findings suggest that sea ice loss probably doesn't lead to more interactions with people just because polar bears are thinner or hungrier, so we need to better understand what can cause interactions to worsen into attacks.

What does this mean for current approaches to reducing the risk of polar bear-human conflicts? Bringing it back to the Parks Canada's original question, it appears that the likelihood of bear visits to their camps isn't affected by anything under human control, but the outcomes of any bear visits that do take place certainly are.

What we found may also help explain why scientific explanations and Indigenous and local observations of polar bear-human interactions have differed. Scientific literature has long maintained that poor body condition drives polar bears into northern communities.

However, documented observations from those communities themselves indicate bears who come into communities are not necessarily in poorer condition than would be expected.

Our findings align more closely with Indigenous observations, highlighting how untested assumptions can, through repetition in scientific literature, solidify into accepted wisdom.

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/animals/bears/more-polar-bears-are-approaching-human-sites-as-the-climate-warms-and-its-not-just-the-skinny-ones at May 12, 2026 at 9:53 AM EDT.

ANIMALS > LAND MAMMALS > CATS

CLARISSA BRINCAT | MAY 10, 2026, 5:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Are we more closely related to cats or dogs?

The answer of whether humans are more closely related to cats or dogs depends on how you look at the question.

They sleep on our beds, steal our food, and generally rule the house. Between them, cats and dogs make up two-thirds of pet ownership worldwide. But which of the two companion animals are we more closely related to?

The answer depends on how you look at the question.

"From an evolutionary perspective we are equally related to dogs and cats," Mark Springer, a professor emeritus of evolution, ecology and organismal biology at the University of California, Riverside, told Live Science in an email.

Cats, dogs and humans are all mammals. In the mammalian family tree, which maps out how different mammal species are related to one another, both cats and dogs belong to the order Carnivora, while humans are primates. These two groups split from a common ancestor about 90 million to 95 million years ago, Springer said. Meanwhile, cats and dogs split from each other much later, around 55 million years ago.

In terms of common ancestry, "dogs and cats are more closely related to mammals such as pangolins, horses, cows, whales, bats, shrews and moles than they are to humans," Springer said. And "humans are more closely related to colugos [flying lemurs], tree shrews, rabbits, rats, and mice than they are to cats and dogs."

Genetic ties

Another way of deciding which species we are more closely related to is through a genetic lens.

If you measure how much the DNA code has changed over time, humans are about equally related to cats and dogs, William Murphy, a comparative genomicist at Texas A&M University, told Live Science in an email.

However, scientists also compare how DNA strands are organized within chromosomes. Here, a difference emerges.

Murphy explained that the ancestors of modern-day dogs went through extensive chromosome rearrangements over evolutionary time. (Such rearrangements are not unique to dogs; they occur across different animal and plant species, though scientists don't fully understand why some lineages rearrange faster than others.) Cats, on the other hand, retained a genome organization that's closer to ours. "In terms of how genes are arranged within chromosomes, humans and cats are twice as similar to each other as humans are to dogs," he said.

Humans and cats are twice as similar to each other as humans are to dogs in terms of how genes are arranged within chromosomes.

(Image credit: wildpixel via Getty Images)

Because the way DNA is organized affects how genes are switched on and off, cats may be a better model than dogs for understanding human gene regulation, Murphy said.

That also makes them useful for studying genetic diseases. For example, polycystic kidney disease occurs in both humans and cats, and treatments developed for cats could help inform therapies for people.

Cats may also provide clues about cancer. A recent study found that cancer-related genes in cats are strikingly similar to those in humans, both in number and variety. One notable example involves a gene called FBXW7, which was mutated in more than half of the feline mammary tumors studied. In humans, mutations in the same gene are linked to worse outcomes in breast cancer

That said, dogs are also used to model and analyze human illness, including Alzheimer’s disease, idiopathic epilepsy, eye disease and heart disease.

Although cats may share more similarities with humans in gene regulation, to date more research has focused on dogs. This may be due in part to the fact that the complete feline genome became available later than the canine genome, as well as historical bias — cats have long been perceived as less cooperative in research settings.

So, which are we more closely related to? From an evolutionary standpoint, it's a tie, but genetically, at least in terms of genome structure, we are closer to cats.

How much of a cat fan are you? Find out by taking our cat quiz!

TOPICS

Life's Little Mysteries

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/animals/cats/are-we-more-closely-related-to-cats-or-dogs at May 12, 2026 at 9:53 AM EDT.

May 9, 2026

- Pregnancy quiz: Can you deliver on the science of growing babies?

- 'Feuding tech bros' go head to head in legal showdown. But what does it mean for the future of AI?

- US government declassifies nearly 200 UAP files, including strange sightings from Apollo astronauts

- If humans are getting smarter, why are our brains shrinking?

HEALTH > REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH

SOPHIE BERDUGO | MAY 9, 2026, 10:05 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Pregnancy quiz: Can you deliver on the science of growing babies?

How much do you know about pregnancy? Take our quiz to find out.

As placental mammals, humans give birth to live young. Pregnancy begins on the first day of the last menstrual period, roughly two weeks before conception.

A human pregnancy consists of three trimesters and generally lasts around nine months. But how much do you know about how babies develop? For example, did you know some cell types appear only during pregnancy, or that hair usually grows thicker and lusher during pregnancy due to hormones, but that this extra hair falls out months later after giving birth?

Think you can conceive of all things related to pregnancies? Take this quiz to find out if you can deliver! Remember to log in to put your name on the leaderboard; hints are available if you click the yellow button. Good luck!

More science quizzes

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

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

- Heart quiz: What do you know about the body's hardest-working muscle?

TOPICS

babies

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/health/reproductive-health/pregnancy-quiz-can-you-deliver-on-the-science-of-growing-babies at May 12, 2026 at 9:53 AM EDT.

TECHNOLOGY > ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

ROB NICHOLLS | MAY 9, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

'Feuding tech bros' go head to head in legal showdown. But what does it mean for the future of AI?

Elon Musk and Sam Altman battle it out in court, and the outcome could carry significant ramifications for how AI development is shaped.

There was a time when Elon Musk and Sam Altman were friends. But the two tech billionaires are now embroiled in a bitter legal battle in the United States that could reshape not just OpenAI, the artificial intelligence (AI) firm behind ChatGPT they cofounded in 2015, but also the future of the technology more broadly.

Launched by Musk in 2024, the lawsuit is the culmination of a years-long feud that centers on the evolution of OpenAI from a non-profit to a for-profit enterprise.

The trial, which kicked off this week in California, is expected to last roughly three weeks. But its ripple effects could be felt for many years to come.

The case and the cast

The lawsuit pits Musk against Altman, OpenAI president Greg Brockman, OpenAI itself, and Microsoft, the AI firm's largest backer.

Musk cofounded and helped fund OpenAI to the tune of about US$44 million. By his own account from the witness stand this week, he "came up with the idea, the name, recruited the key people, taught them everything I know, provided all of the initial funding".

Brockman served as technical cofounder; Altman became chief executive in 2019. Their alliance with Musk fractured as the organization grew. Musk departed the board in 2018. He says he was pushed out.

However, OpenAI says he walked when denied majority control. Musk subsequently launched his own rival AI venture, xAI, which is now part of SpaceX.

What Musk is alleging

As part of the lawsuit, Musk is alleging breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, false advertising and unfair business practices.

His core claim is that Altman and Brockman induced him to donate on the understanding that any artificial general intelligence – or AGI – built at OpenAI would stay "open" and shared with humanity.

Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI explores different narratives about how the company was founded.

(Image credit: Nikolas Kokovlis/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Instead, Musk argues, the founders turned the charity into a "wealth machine". They did this in two stages. First, via a 2019 capped-profit subsidiary. Here, OpenAI's for-profit unit limited the returns, with the excess handed back to the nonprofit. Second, through a full restructure into a public benefit corporation, which is now valued at roughly US$852 billion.

Musk's lawyers told jurors Altman and Brockman "stole a charity, full stop". Outside court, Musk has been throwing insults at his opponents, prompting the judge to threaten a gag order.

OpenAI flatly rejects Musk's narrative. As its lead counsel, William Savitt, told jurors:

We are here because Mr. Musk didn't get his way with OpenAI.

The company alleges, as described in two pre-trial blog posts, that Musk himself proposed merging OpenAI with Tesla in 2017 and walked away when denied majority control.

The lawsuit, OpenAI says, is "motivated by jealousy" and designed to damage a competitor.

A company under pressure

The trial arrives at a precarious moment for OpenAI.

The New Yorker magazine recently published an investigation describing Altman as a "pathological liar". The investigation drew on an internal dossier compiled by OpenAI's former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever which alleged a "consistent pattern of lying" to the company's board.

Altman called the piece "incendiary" but acknowledged "a bunch of mistakes". Musk has been amplifying the article to his X followers throughout the trial.

Financially, OpenAI is bleeding.

Internal projections point to roughly US$14 billion in losses for 2026 alone, with cumulative losses expected to top US$44 billion before any profit materializes.

Shortly before the trial began, OpenAI quietly shut down Sora, its flagship video-generation model.

Before closing, it burned around US$1 million a day in computing costs. The closure took down a US$1 billion Disney partnership with it.

Even a fresh US$122 billion fundraise from Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank has not eased the pressure.

What Musk wants

Musk wants the jury to unwind OpenAI's for-profit conversion, remove Altman from the nonprofit board, and strip both Altman and Brockman of their roles in the for-profit entity.

He is also demanding US$130 billion in damages from OpenAI — for what his team calls "ill-gotten gains".

He has accused Microsoft of "aiding and abetting" and argues it is liable for a share.

His legal team argues OpenAI's existing models already constitute AGI, because they have surpassed human intelligence in many tasks. Under the founding agreement, AGI could not be commercially licensed. This would include the licence currently used by Microsoft for CoPilot.

Elon Musk wants more than $130 billion in damages from Sam Altman. #ElonMusk #SamAltman #BBCNews - YouTube

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What's at stake

If Musk wins, the consequences would be significant.

OpenAI's planned initial public offering would almost certainly be derailed. This is expected in late 2026 at a US$1 trillion valuation. Investors in the recent funding round could face clawbacks.

Altman, the public face of the AI boom, could be removed from the company he has led since 2019. The broader question of whether AI labs founded as charities can lawfully pivot into commercial enterprises would be settled, at least in California. This has potential implications for Anthropic and other mission-driven peers.

Even a defeat for Musk would not end the controversy.

The trial has already pried open Silicon Valley's normally sealed boardrooms, surfacing diaries, Slack threads and HR memos that paint an unflattering portrait of OpenAI's governance.

The case crystallizes a wider public anxiety: an incredibly powerful technology is being built and controlled by a tiny number of feuding tech bros. And it's the rest of us who have to live with the consequences.

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

TOPICS

Elon Musk

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SPACE > EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE

BRANDON SPECKTOR | MAY 9, 2026, 5:40 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

US government declassifies nearly 200 UAP files, including strange sightings from Apollo astronauts

The Department of Defense just declassified more than 160 documents, images and recordings related to UFO/UAP sightings dating back to before the Apollo era.

UFOs have come to Washington again — this time, in a newly released tranche of more than 150 previously classified documents that cover nearly 80 years of alleged sightings.

Available to read today (May 8) on the Department of Defense website, the 162 newly declassified documents, photos, and videos cover reports of UFOs and UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomena, the government's preferred name for such sightings today) dating back as far as 1947.

The reports come from agencies across the government, including the Department of Defense (DOD), the FBI and NASA. The NASA offerings include images, audio files and transcripts of Apollo-era astronauts reporting anomalous sightings in space. However, most of these materials have been available for decades and never resulted in any compelling answers.

"The materials archived here are unresolved cases, meaning the government is unable to make a definitive determination on the nature of the observed phenomena," DOD representatives wrote on the agency's website. "This can occur for a variety of reasons, including a lack of sufficient data."

Are there any aliens?

Due to the poor data quality, the reports do not contain any compelling evidence of alien intelligence.

While NASA has not weighed in directly on the newly declassified files — save for a statement of support from Administrator Jared Isaacman — the space agency's official position remains that UAP are real but they have nothing to do with aliens.

"Are there any data supporting the idea that UAP are evidence of alien technologies?

"No," NASA's official UAP webpage states. "Most UAP sightings result in very limited data, making it difficult to draw scientific conclusions."

Indeed, NASA conducted its own independent investigation into UAP sightings in 2022 and 2023 and found no evidence of alien activity, again pointing to low-quality data among the alleged sightings.

A composite image of a field where an alleged UAP sighting of an "ellipsoid bronze metallic object materializing out of a bright light in the sky" took place in 2023. The FBI has added a sketch of what this ellipsoid might look like.

(Image credit: NASA)

What did the NASA astronauts see?

Some of the most interesting documents, from a historical perspective, are files related to UFO sightings reported by NASA astronauts in the 1960s. They include a transcript and audio recording of two NASA astronauts reporting an unidentified object in Earth orbit during the 1965 Gemini VII mission.

Just four hours into the flight on Dec. 5, 1965, astronauts Frank Borman and Jim Lovell reported seeing a "bogey" (military slang for an unidentified aircraft) out their spacecraft window, which Borman describes as "hundreds of little particles going by."

When NASA ground control pressed Borman on whether it could be a piece of the recently detached rocket booster, the astronauts said no, maintaining that they could see the booster in a separate part of orbit. The Gemini spacecraft soon drifted away from the object, never to see it again.

A photo of the moon taken by Apollo 12 astronauts shows unidentified lights in five different regions of the sky.

(Image credit: NASA)

The files also include photos and transcripts from the Apollo 11, Apollo 12 and Apollo 17 missions, in which astronauts describe seeing various unidentified "flashes" and "particles of light" on the moon. These cases, like the others, remain unresolved due to a lack of sufficient data.

The underlying files have been available in public archives for decades. However, some newly released images from the Apollo 12 mission show zoomed-in boxes to highlight anomalous phenomena on the moon.

What are UAP?

So, if they're not aliens, what are UAP? According to a 2022 DOD investigation, most UAP sightings can be explained by birds, optical illusions, poor-quality photographs and foreign surveillance technology.

Many UAP files remain classified not due to the object sightings themselves, but because of the sensitive military technology used to record them, according to NASA.

The DOD plans to release additional declassified UAP documents every few weeks for the near future.

Editor's note: This article was updated at 6:00 p.m. ET on May 8 to clarify that all the Apollo materials have been available in public archives for decades.

Are you a UFO fanatic? Find out with our extraterrestrials quiz!

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ARCHAEOLOGY > HUMAN EVOLUTION

OWEN JARUS | MAY 9, 2026, 5:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

If humans are getting smarter, why are our brains shrinking?

Human brains have been shrinking since prehistoric times, some studies suggest. Whether this is true and why it has happened are debated.

Over the past two decades, some studies have suggested that human brains are shrinking. But there is also evidence that IQ scores have risen over the past century.

But is it possible for us to get smarter as our brains shrink? Live Science contacted experts to find out.

First, it's important to note that a bigger brain size does not necessarily mean higher intelligence, said Jeremy DeSilva, an anthropology professor at Dartmouth College. Brain size "is only weakly related to measures of intelligence in humans. Albert Einstein's brain, for instance, was quite small, and he was Einstein!" he told Live Science in an email.

In Einstein's case, it appears that extraordinary folding patterns in several of his brain regions may help account for his genius. While there is some debate, studies suggest that there is little or no relationship between our intelligence and brain size in humans.

Have human brains shrunk?

Not all scientists agree on whether human brains have gotten smaller. However, many experts we spoke with said there is evidence for shrinkage over time.

"My research indicates that human brain size declined during the [entire span of the] Holocene by about 10% of its volume or about 150 ml on average," Maciej Henneberg, a professor emeritus of anthropological and comparative anatomy at Adelaide University in Australia, told Live Science in an email. The Holocene is an epoch that followed the last ice age, and spans from 11,700 years ago to the present day. In his research, Henneberg looked at the brain size by analyzing skulls from all over the world. In many cases, he analyzed the skeletons personally.

It's important to remember that Homo sapiens emerged around 300,000 years ago, so a brain shrinkage starting around 11,700 years ago would be a relatively recent development.

An 11,000-year-old skull of a woman found in Slovakia.

(Image credit: Adam Ján Figeľ via Alamy)

Other scientists have reported similar findings. "Our lab thinks that the data currently available show a clear, global trend toward a decrease in brain size in more recent times," said DeSilva, whose research looked at more than 5,000 skulls from people who lived in Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia. Many of the skulls date to the Holocene.

Jeff Stibel, who holds a doctorate in brain science and has published a number of papers on the topic of brain shrinkage, said the "Holocene warming period has coincided with more than a 10% reduction in brain size in modern humans." Stibel took part in DeSilva's research, and then gathered more data by analyzing the brain size of roughly 800 additional skulls from around the world.

However, some scientists disagree. Research by Brian Villmoare, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and his team found no evidence that human brains are shrinking. "I see no evidence that, once we acquired our modern form, that our brains have changed in any meaningful way," Villmoare said in an email.

Some say more nuance needs to be considered. "Brain size in some human populations decreased over the last 15000 years," John Hawks, an anthropology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Live Science in an email. "But there are some complexities."

Hawks noted that datasets of brain size tend to overrepresent men of European ancestry, making it difficult to determine whether there is a global trend among diverse populations.

"Brain size did rebound toward larger sizes during the last 150 years in industrializing countries," Hawks said. "This was likely mostly attributable to nutrition and correlated with body size, but whether body size accounts for the entire effect is not clear from the limited data."

Why are human brains getting smaller?

If our brains have shrunk, then why? Scientists have proposed a few ideas.

One has to do with the introduction of farming.

"During the Holocene, humans gradually introduced food production [such as agriculture and animal husbandry] that allowed them to live in larger communities," Henneberg said. "The brute physical strength required for hunting big game and protecting families against strong predators became less necessary while a smaller body size required less food, so it was favoured by natural selection."

In fact, it's not just our brains; our bodies have also shrunk. "At the end of the Ice Age, male body height was about 1.75 m [5.74 feet], whereas in mid-Holocene agricultural communities it was 1.65 m [5.41 feet]," Henneberg said. "Body mass has declined even more since we see thinner (less robust) human bones." Heights have rebounded recently in some parts of the world, and Hawks said that our brain sizes may be rebounding also.

The warming that occurred after the end of the last ice age also may be a factor. Stibel said two biological principles, known as Bergmann's rule and Allen's rule, state that "bodies and organs tend to become leaner in warmer climates to increase surface area and dissipate heat."

Another possible explanation is that human intelligence itself has changed as we have taken on more specialized jobs and share more information with each other, meaning we don't have to know everything, just a subset of knowledge to keep society going.

Some eusocial insects like ants and wasps have specific roles for each individual. It's possible that collective intelligence seen in these insects is similarly happening in humans, which may be associated with a smaller brain size.

(Image credit: Tomekbudujedomek via Getty Images)

DeSilva said his team proposed that a "population increase, the subsequent specialization of people into specific roles in society and the growth of collective intelligence may have contributed to individual brain size decrease as modeled in some eusocial insects like ants and wasps." For instance, "I'm a decent enough anthropologist and anatomist, but you wouldn't want me fixing your car or investing your retirement savings on Wall Street."

Stibel agrees that this is a significant factor. "Some ant species that develop complex social systems see similar reductions in individual brain size as the colony carries more of the cognitive load," he said. "We appear to have done something remarkably similar with culture and technology.

"What our research suggests is that we've undergone a fundamental shift in how cognition works," Stibel added. "Rather than relying solely on individual brainpower, we've become extraordinarily dependent on cultural and technological networks."

Stibel noted that large brains can be a burden, consuming more energy which requires people to eat more food to survive. "Large brains are metabolically expensive, consuming roughly 20% of our resting energy and producing significant heat." During times when food is scarce, such as during an Ice Age, this can result in people with larger brains being more likely to die of starvation.

This doesn't mean humans are smarter or dumber than they were; it just shows our intelligence is different.

"We've likely traded some raw computational capacity for the ability to leverage collective intelligence," Stibel said. "Whether that's a gain or a loss depends entirely on how you define intelligence. And, of course, how stable the cultural and technological systems we now depend on turn out to be in the long run."

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

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May 8, 2026

- Some gene therapies no longer require clinical trials, thanks to new FDA rule. Is this safe, and who will it help?

- The brain's memory center doesn't start as a blank slate, study suggests

- Live 'quantum network' being tested in New York — overcoming key hurdles could bring us closer to an 'unhackable' internet

- Flowering plants transformed into 'hopeful monsters' in 9 dire bursts across evolutionary time, study finds

- Both very low and very high heart rates may be linked to higher stroke risk, study says

HEALTH

KAMAL NAHAS | MAY 8, 2026, 6:34 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Some gene therapies no longer require clinical trials, thanks to new FDA rule. Is this safe, and who will it help?

The FDA is launching a new framework to deliver tailor-made gene therapies to people with rare genetic disorders. Discussions about whom to treat and how to monitor patients are ongoing.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is implementing a new strategy to provide experimental gene therapies to patients with rare disorders without going through clinical trials. This framework could grant these patients access to individualized therapies, but experts are divided over whether the regulatory change is safe enough for patients.

Dr. Senthil Bhoopalan, a genome-editing expert at St. Jude's Children Research Hospital in Tennessee, said that, although the framework is still emerging and the details require more discussion between the public and stakeholders, "it's an exciting step in the right direction."

But other experts are concerned that the FDA's past track record with accelerated approval processes doesn't inspire trust.

Arthur Caplan, a medical ethicist at New York University, said more pressure to permit access to new therapies has led the FDA "to allow more risk to subjects, and more risk of failure post-approval, by being willing to accept weaker evidence."

Before receiving FDA approval, most therapies require clinical trials with hundreds or thousands of participants to show a drug is safe and works. In some cases, the agency grants accelerated approval for interventions that appear to show a benefit in small trials, when patients are very sick and have no other treatment options.

However, the new strategy, called the plausible mechanism pathway, would enable the FDA to grant permission to use therapies that haven't been tested in humans but could plausibly succeed.

The pathway would apply only to certain treatments, such as gene therapies that correct single-letter DNA errors, where large-scale clinical trials would be impossible. Take cystic fibrosis as an example. Around 40,000 people in the U.S. have this disorder, but hundreds of mutations can cause it, Bhoopalan said. As a result, you can't use one gene therapy formulation to treat every patient.

However, if a gene-editing tool and delivery technique have been shown to be safe in past human trials, the pathway would allow drug developers to tweak the sequence-specific element of the formulation, such as a guide RNA that tells the DNA "scissors" where to correct a mutation. Then, the specific gene-editing tool, such as a base editor, could be customized for specific mutations in each cystic fibrosis patient. This is similar to how food producers need only show that an ingredient is safe once before including it in multiple food items.

"It's possible that in the fullness of time, we'll see that they've lowered the bar."

Dr. J. Paul Taylor, neurologist at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

"The safety data can be extrapolated if you're using the same delivery mechanism," Bhoopalan said. "You're really only changing the guide." If the change you make in the body is swapping a faulty mutation with the form that healthy people have, you wouldn't anticipate side effects, he added.

Caplan agreed that this particular use of the pathway doesn't seem, on its face, to be high-risk. However, the safety of base editors has been tested only in relatively small trials thus far, with no more than 15 participants. With a sample size this small, it’s difficult to show a given gene therapy led to positive health outcomes. What’s more, without performing larger trials involving hundreds or thousands of participants, it’s impossible to know whether base editors cause rare side effects.

For example, at least 65 small-scale trials have investigated the use of certain viruses as vehicles to deliver liver-targeting gene therapies that treat hemophilia. While most of these studies show promise, a larger trial involving 134 participants revealed rare side effects, such as elevated liver enzymes, inflammation and allergic reactions.

"The level of risk doesn't keep me awake at night, but there are unknowns," Caplan said. "I think it would be very important to have serious follow-ups following FDA drug approval."

That's where he sees the potential for problems to creep in. Post-approval monitoring of drugs has "never been done with earnestness," despite promises made by pharmaceutical companies. "If we're going to take more risk to go faster at the front end, you have to beef up what's required and what's going to be monitored at the back end, post approval."

Still, that doesn't mean the level of post-approval scrutiny will be lower than it has been previously.

"It's possible that in the fullness of time, we'll see that they've lowered the bar," said Dr. J. Paul Taylor, a neurologist who treats genetic neurodevelopmental disorders at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. "But the stated intent is not to change the level of substantial evidence [through post-approval monitoring]."

Who will it help?

In an article published last November in The New England Journal of Medicine, the FDA outlined which criteria a disease would need to meet to qualify for this pathway. The plausible mechanism pathway would be ruled out for disorders with unclear causes, such as dementia, Taylor noted.

"This is great for monogenic disorders, which are caused by mutations in a single gene," Bhoopalan said. It would be harder to use this pathway for polygenic diseases, which are brought on by an array of mutations, he added, as you would have to successfully correct multiple mutations to see a benefit.

Rather than correcting a faulty mutation, gene therapy could be used to "switch on" a backup gene in the case of spinal muscular atrophy, Taylor said, which is fatal in children who don't receive treatment.

"I think we have to start thinking about this as an inevitable next step."

Dr. Senthil Bhoopalan, genome-editing expert at St. Jude's Children Research Hospital

There are some monogenic disorders that may not meet the criterion, however. Diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma is a brain tumor that appears in young children who carry a faulty gene. Taylor said specialists are split on whether reversing this mutation alone could shrink the tumors or if other mutations that appear as the tumor develops could continue to drive the cancer even if the initial mutation were corrected.

Another FDA criterion requires doctors to confirm that the patient's tissues have been edited. "It might be harder to quantitate when you're editing a critical organ like the liver, because you cannot get a piece of liver and measure how much has been edited," Bhoopalan said.

Doctors may need to repeatedly sample tissues from patients, as studies in mice have shown that gene therapies can wane over time, suggesting that some may not work as a "one-and-done" treatment. This would be much harder to accomplish if you could only sample tissues with invasive surgery.

Some body locations might be difficult to target with gene delivery systems in the first place. The blood, bone marrow, liver and lungs could make easy targets, Bhoopalan said. The heart, on the other hand, could be difficult to edit because a layer of tightly-packed cells creates a barrier that stops gene therapy vectors from crossing into heart tissue.

Though more discussion is needed to clarify which disorders can benefit from this expedited approval and how patients' health can be monitored afterward, experts hope the new pathway could help people with rare disorders.

"I think we have to start thinking about this as an inevitable next step," Bhoopalan said.

Disclaimer

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

TOPICS

news analyses

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/health/some-gene-therapies-no-longer-require-clinical-trials-thanks-to-new-fda-rule-is-this-safe-and-who-will-it-help at May 12, 2026 at 9:53 AM EDT.

HEALTH > NEUROSCIENCE

ROBERTA MCLAIN | MAY 8, 2026, 1:42 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

The brain's memory center doesn't start as a blank slate, study suggests

Early in life, neural networks in the brain's memory center are highly connected, and they are only later refined into precise systems, a mouse study finds.

The brain's memory center may come "prewired," rather than being built from scratch after birth, a new study in mice finds.

The research, published in April in the journal Nature Communications, offers a new perspective on a long-standing question in neuroscience: Does the brain begin as a blank slate and build memories by adding connections through experience, or does it come with built-in wiring? The new research focused on the hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped structure deep in the brain that's essential for forming memories.

Rather than supporting either theory directly, the research points to the latter idea but adds a significant twist.

The researchers focused on a region of the hippocampus called cornu ammonis 3 (CA3), which plays a central role in storing and recalling memories. A trait known as plasticity enables neurons within CA3 to continuously strengthen and weaken their connections and thus strengthen or weaken different memories.

The team examined mouse brain tissue collected shortly after birth, during adolescence or during adulthood. They found that early in life, hippocampal networks are densely wired, with many neurons hyperconnected in a seemingly random pattern. As the brain matures, these haphazard networks become sparser yet more structured as connections are pruned. This pruning begins soon after birth, with significant declines in connectivity by adolescence.

The finding discounts the idea that the hippocampus starts out as a blank slate, or "tabula rasa."

"We find, in a nutshell, that the system is not a tabula rasa, as we thought originally, where you can just write information and then at some point, this information fills the system," said study co-author Peter Jonas, a neuroscientist at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria. "Rather, it starts out as a tabula plena [full slate] and then becomes more sparser and specifically connected."

This pattern may help to explain why we remember so little from infancy.

Memories are thought to be stored within networks of neurons that fire together, representing specific experiences. In a young brain, however, these connections between neurons, called synapses, behave differently, the study suggests. In young brain tissue, a single input could cause a neuron to fire, the team found, while in mature networks, neurons typically require multiple inputs to fire.

In very young mice, neurons in a region of the hippocampus called CA3 form a dense, highly interconnected network (yellow), with connections that are largely random.

(Image credit: Jake Watson / ISTA)

Jonas said the team was surprised by not only the early pruning of connections but also how strong those early connections were. "You might think that early in development, you have poor synapses and weak synapses, but we found the opposite," he told Live Science.

This excitability comes at a cost, however: When neurons are activated too easily, different experiences can trigger overlapping patterns of activity. If that overlap is too great, the brain may struggle to distinguish one memory from another. Instead of forming distinct networks, it may generate broader, less-specific memories. In other words, the system is very active but not very precise.

This imprecision may affect behavior, too. For example, rodent studies show that young animals learn to fear an area of a cage where they received a mild shock, freezing when they return to it. But unlike adults, who freeze at that exact location, young animals also have this response in similar environments — so the memory is there, but it's not precise.

As mice mature, the network within CA3 becomes sparser but more organized (blue) with pruning refining the once-dense web of neural connections.

(Image credit: Jake Watson / ISTA)

As the brain matures, neurons become more selective and require multiple inputs to fire. The result is more distinct, separate networks that translate to specific and stable memories. So in regard to the inability to recall early childhood, it may be that our earliest memories are too poorly defined to be retained in the long term.

The findings are consistent with a growing body of research on how memory develops, said Hauður Freyja Ólafsdóttir, an assistant professor at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University in the Netherlands.

"It's exciting on multiple fronts," Ólafsdóttir, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. "There is plenty of developmental psychology work that suggests that memory becomes more specific with age. And so it's kind of interesting that now, at the circuit level, we're also seeing that the connectivity patterns are becoming sparser."

So what drives brain wiring before birth? That dense, early connectivity may result from a genetically programmed developmental process. Then, after birth, experience refines the wiring, Jonas suggested.

The findings do not rule out the possibility that experiences before birth leave lasting traces in the brain. But Ólafsdóttir thinks those early forms of learning rely on different neural systems than mature hippocampal circuits.

"I'm not disputing that they're there and that they have influence," she said, referencing prenatal experiences. "They leave a trace, let's say, in our brain and probably in our psychology even." But those traces may not resemble the detailed memories formed later in life.

When asked whether the connections that form before birth represent true memories or are just a byproduct of prenatal development, Jonas said, "The latter is more likely."

The "full slate" may give the brain a crucial head start by enabling neurons to quickly link different types of information, such as sights, sounds and smells. If the brain began as a blank slate, neurons might be too sparsely connected to find each other, making early communication difficult, the study authors think.

By starting with an overconnected network, the hippocampus may ensure that the necessary wiring is already in place, Jonas theorized.

Article Sources

Vargas-Barroso, V., Watson, J.F., Navas-Olive, A. et al. Developmental emergence of sparse and structured synaptic connectivity in the hippocampal CA3 memory circuit. Nature Communications (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-71914-x

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TECHNOLOGY > COMPUTING > QUANTUM COMPUTING

ALAN BRADLEY | MAY 8, 2026, 1:24 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Live 'quantum network' being tested in New York — overcoming key hurdles could bring us closer to an 'unhackable' internet

Scientists tested a live quantum internet between three locations across New York, inching closer to an unhackable internet.

Researchers have created a network that they say demonstrates the real-world feasibility of a quantum internet that's physically impossible to hack, at least without detection.

Working with quantum startup Qunnect and networking company Cisco, the scientists connected a trio of nodes across New York's existing fiber-optic cables with quantum signals in the form of photons (packets of light), where quantum states are used to carry information through entangled qubits. By distributing and swapping entanglement between the signals, the scientists effectively connected them into a small quantum network.

The demonstration builds on work in 2023, in which the same team connected a pair of nodes between Brooklyn and Manhattan. The addition of a third node shows that it's possible to use existing physical infrastructure to create something approaching a true quantum network, the scientists say. They outlined their findings in a study uploaded Feb. 17 to the arXiv preprint database.

This third node acts as an intermediate hub where the team could perform entanglement swapping and routing, turning two links into a small multi‑node quantum network that can distribute entanglement across different pairs on demand. This would act more like a true network rather than a single line.

"Manhattan is a very compact place," said Javad Shabani, director of NYU's Center for Quantum Information Physics and the NYU Quantum Institute. "Everything is within five or six miles, and you can find hundreds of financial institutions in a very small radius. That density — of infrastructure, institutions, and potential users — may make the city one of the first places where a quantum internet begins to take shape. Having this network right now is important. It's a huge investment that will pay off probably in the next decade or so."

A blueprint for future quantum networks

A quantum internet is deemed "unhackable" due to device-independent quantum key distribution (DI-QKD), a method by which cryptography keys are encoded in the quantum state of particles such as photons. It's not possible to copy quantum states, and measuring them disturbs them — meaning that eavesdropping is difficult and simple to detect.

Information travels via photons, but they can get easily lost in fiber. In addition, "noise" — disturbances caused by the environment or other stimuli — scrambles their states, thus limiting data transfers to very short distances.

To extend this range, the team created a "hub-and-spoke" network — an intermediary hub for swapping and routing with two outlying spokes. To accomplish this, they created simple nodes at Qunnect's Brooklyn facility and generated pairs of photons that are entangled — meaning their quantum states are linked so they share information over space and time. These flowed across 5 to 6 miles (8 to 10 kilometers) of deployed commercial fiber to a central hub at a QTD Systems facility, a commercial data center and network facility in Lower Manhattan.

The success of the quantum internet relies on entanglement, where particles' internal quantum states are interdependent on each other.

(Image credit: koto_feja via Getty Images)

One vital advance came in the form of "entanglement swapping" — a process by which particles that have never previously interacted can become entangled. This is key for building short connections into a larger network, the scientists said.

This relies on measurements that "transfer" entanglement from initial pairs to distant ones. It relies on quantum teleportation — the phenomenon where two or more particles share linked quantum states — so measuring one instantaneously determines correlated properties of the others. However, instead of teleporting data between two entangled qubits, it teleports the state of entanglement itself.

The swapping happened at the QTD center, where cryogenic detectors ‪—‬ ultra-sensitive photon detectors cooled to extremely low temperatures to reliably detect single photons carrying quantum information ‪—‬ measured the photons and linked pairs that had never interacted. The result was city-spanning entanglement between the original outer sources.

Addressing the internet's Achilles' heel

Conventional data transfers are highly susceptible to eavesdropping. Scientists say the quantum internet would solve this issue because any interception disturbs the photons, making the tampering immediately apparent.

This experiment proves metropolitan-scale quantum links work with live telecom fibers, solving the issues of weakening or loss of photons as they travel through optical fiber cables, alongside temperature extremes and vibration that can wreck fragile entanglement.

The hub-and-spoke design addresses scalability by centralizing complex cryogenic gear at one hub. This sidesteps the issue of every node requiring pricey, power-hungry cooling, meaning the network can be expanded without ballooning costs.

In the short term, this demonstration paves the way for QKD, the sharing of unhackable encryption keys to protect sensitive data from sources like banks, the government or the healthcare industry.

In the longer term, it's a step toward true distributed quantum computing, which could link multiple devices to address highly sophisticated problems, like drug discovery or climate modeling, that no single operator could handle.

Entangled networks could also be deployed to boost quantum sensing, which could lead to ultraprecise clocks, navigation without GPS and other high-precision sensor arrays.

Among the key challenges are that fiber-optic cables absorb and scatter photons exponentially with length — about 0.2 decibels per kilometer at telecom wavelengths — dropping entanglement success to near zero beyond 62 miles (100 km) without boosting. The new experiment transmitted information over a mere 5 to 6 miles (8 to 10 km) per leg; spanning longer distances will require quantum repeaters, which lack the quantum memories required to function effectively.

However, the experiment was important in proving the viability of quantum networks outside a strictly controlled laboratory environment. The scientists showed that the effects of noise and loss can be adequately managed to sustain entanglement across a dense metropolis like New York.

Article Sources

A. N. Craddock, T. Cowan, N. Bigagli, S. Robinson, D. Herrington, I. Luciano, J. Nguyen, A. B. B. de Oliveira, V. V. Ramasesh, & M. G. Raymer, High-rate Scalable Entanglement Swapping Between Remote Entanglement Sources on Deployed New York Fiber, arXiv:2602.15653v2 [quant-ph], https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602.15653 (2026).

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PLANET EARTH > PLANTS

SARAH WILD | MAY 8, 2026, 11:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Flowering plants transformed into 'hopeful monsters' in 9 dire bursts across evolutionary time, study finds

In hard times, like when the dinosaur-killing asteroid hit Earth, some plants transformed into "hopeful monsters" to save themselves. Now, a new paper shows that these monsters are more common than we thought.

When the dinosaur-killing meteor hit Earth 66 million years ago, many flowering plants transformed into "hopeful monsters" to endure the resulting environmental crisis. Now, new research suggests that this was not the only time these plants responded this way. In nine separate events over the past 150 million years, flowering plants have duplicated their whole genome to give themselves a better chance of survival in the face of catastrophe.

The work could help scientists understand what will happen to flowering plants, which include most of the crops people eat, as the climate changes and organisms endure another environmental upheaval.

"Waves of whole genome duplications correlate with important geological events or periods in evolution," Yves Van de Peer, a genome biologist at Ghent University in Belgium and a co-author of the paper, told Live Science.

For almost a century, whole-genome duplication has puzzled scientists. Organisms that have more than two sets of genomes are called polyploids. Humans, which have two sets of chromosomes, are diploids. Polyploids are sometimes called "hopeful monsters" because they are "monstrously" different from their parent organisms — but have the potential to survive conditions that their parents cannot and, therefore, offer hope to a species.

But these organisms are a paradox, Van de Peer said. "When you go outside and start collecting plants, there is a very high chance that you will collect polyploid plants," which are plants that have undergone a whole genome duplication, he explained. "Nevertheless, when we analyze plant genomes, we find very little evidence for many whole-genome duplications that have survived in the longer term."

That's because whole-genome duplication is a risky gamble for a plant. "It's not an easy thing, from a cell biology point of view, to deal with," he said. "There are costs involved," such as larger cells, reduced fertility and other consequences. For this reason, polyploids are often seen as evolutionary dead ends because these mutations are unlikely to endure.

Many of the crops we eat are polyploids that humans have subconsciously selected over time because of their bigger fruit or ability to survive environmental stresses, Van de Peer said. But polyploid individuals struggle to compete with other members of their species when conditions are stable, so they die out during good times. But during difficult periods, polyploids may be able to adapt better, he said.

"Bursts throughout the history of plants"

In the new study, published Friday (May 8) in the journal Cell, the researchers analyzed the genomes of 470 flowering plants, called angiosperms. They hunted within those genomes for the remnants of whole-genome duplication. Ultimately, they discovered 132 independent duplication events over the past 150 million years and used information from fossilized plants, among other methods, to date when these events took place.

In 2009, Van de Peer and colleagues showed that duplication in a handful flowering plant species clustered around the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. However, the latest research shows that the blossoming of polyploid angiosperms was not a one-off event; it has occurred many times in the past 150 million years. The researchers identified at least nine clusters of duplication incidents, all of which corresponded to important environmental events.

"We see clusterings of whole genome duplications in time, and every time it corresponds with a described, important geological event, whether it's a global cooling period, whether it's a global warming period, or whether there's an extinction event," Van de Peer said.

Kevin Bird, a researcher who studies the evolutionary genomics of polyploids at Kew Garden in London and was not involved in the new study, said the new research helps build on past work. "The study's findings are a very exciting hint at how life survives and evolves through the most extreme periods in our planet's history," he said. "Given that the initial findings in 2009 were about a single cluster of ancient duplication events around 60-70 million years ago, it was a shock that they discovered evidence for as many as nine of these bursts throughout the history of plants."

Experts believe that many flowering plants may have survived thanks to duplicating their genomes.

However, he noted that the research should be a starting point for further investigation. "Overall, the work is done very carefully with some of the best methods currently available, but there is always a lot of uncertainty when you're projecting back hundreds of millions of years in the past," Bird told Live Science.

In the future, as the climate changes, research into polyploids is likely to become increasingly important, scientists say.

"Polyploids are better able to cope with stress, and stressful conditions can also induce polyploidy," said Douglas Soltis, a biologist at the Natural History Museum of Florida who was not involved in the research but who collaborates with Van De Peer. "The Anthropocene [human era] will be — and probably already is — a time of stress that will induce polyploidy and also select for polyploids."

Bird agreed that climate change could trigger another burst of genome duplications, but he noted that it would take millions of years to see how this burst will shape plant evolution. "What we might expect to see in the present is that polyploid populations are better able to tolerate the weather volatility, intensification and habitat degradation brought on by climate change and other human disturbances to habitats," he said.

Van De Peer and his team are artificially making polyploid plants and investigating how they respond to stress. "There must be a stress advantage in the polyploids, but there is so much that we still don't know about that," he said.

Article Sources

Chen et al. The rise of polyploids during environmental upheaval. (2026). Cell. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2026.04.008

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HEALTH > HEART & CIRCULATION

ISHA ISHTIAQ | MAY 8, 2026, 9:57 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Both very low and very high heart rates may be linked to higher stroke risk, study says

Both unusually low and high resting heart rates may be linked to an increased stroke risk, though more research is needed to confirm a causal relationship.

A low resting heart rate is often seen as a sign of good health, but now, a large study suggests that both very low and very high heart rates may be linked to an increased risk of stroke.

The findings, presented May 6 at the European Stroke Organisation Conference 2026 in Maastricht, Netherlands, are based on data from nearly 460,000 people whose data is included in the UK Biobank, a large repository of health data from U.K. adults. On average, each person was monitored for 14 years, and researchers recorded more than 12,000 cases of stroke among the participants.

The researchers identified a U-shaped association between resting heart rate and stroke risk.

"When we looked across the data, the lowest risk was in the middle, around 60 to 69 beats per minute, and increased at both ends," said first author Dr. Dexter Penn, a clinical fellow in cerebrovascular disease at Imperial College London. "The common idea is that the higher the heart rate, the higher the stroke risk, but the relationship isn't as linear as it seems," he told Live Science.

The study included people ages 40 to 69. Compared with the people whose heart rates were in the middle range, people with heart rates at or above 90 beats per minute (bpm) had a 45% higher stroke risk. Those with heart rates below 50 bpm had a 25% higher risk, even after the researchers adjusted for other factors that affect the likelihood of stroke, such as age, blood pressure and atrial fibrillation (AFib), a common form of irregular heart rhythm.

So the U-shaped pattern was seen in people without any history of AFib.

I would advise people to mention it to their doctor and continue managing established cardiovascular risk factors, such as high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol.

Dr. Sanskriti Mishra, assistant professor of neurology at Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine in New Jersey

"That's likely because atrial fibrillation itself is such a strong risk factor that it masks any additional signal from heart rate," said study co-author Alastair Webb, a stroke medicine researcher at Imperial College London. "In people without AF[ib], resting heart rate may act as a marker of underlying risk, though we need more data to confirm how reliable it is."

Dr. Sanskriti Mishra, director of the Comprehensive Stroke Center within the Hackensack Meridian Neuroscience Institute at Jersey Shore University Medical Center, said the results are clinically relevant because resting heart rate is easy to measure. "It may help flag cardiovascular risk in patients at either extreme," said Mishra, who was not involved in the work.

However, she emphasized that the findings are observational, meaning they cannot show that high or low heart rate directly causes stroke. More research is needed to confirm the exact relationship between the two.

When the data was broken down by stroke type, very low heart rates were linked specifically to ischemic stroke, which is caused by blocked blood flow to the brain. High heart rates were associated with both ischemic and hemorrhagic strokes, the latter of which involves bleeding in the brain.

It may be that lower heart rates stretch the pause between heartbeats, potentially reducing steady blood flow to small brain vessels and making blockages more likely, Penn suggested. Meanwhile, higher heart rates may increase stress on blood vessel walls, making them more vulnerable to both blockages and bleeds. "But these are still hypotheses," he said.

Webb cautioned that the findings should not cause anyone to panic.

"A low resting heart rate can still mean good fitness, particularly in physically active people," he said. "But in others, it may be a useful signal worth considering alongside traditional risk factors."

Mishra agreed that a low heart rate is often normal in both healthy adults and athletes. "Still, I would advise people to mention it to their doctor and continue managing established cardiovascular risk factors, such as high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol," she said.

The findings of the new study have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal yet.

Editor's note: This article was updated on May 8, 2026, to adjust Dr. Sanskriti Mishra's title and affiliation.

Disclaimer

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

Article Sources

Penn, D., Gill, F., Warrington, O., Webb, A. (2026). Reduced and elevated resting heart rates predict risk of stroke, independently of atrial fibrillation: A UK Biobank analysis. Oral presentation. European Stroke Organisation Conference (ESOC) 2026.

What do you know about the body's hardest-working muscle? Find out with our heart quiz!

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/health/heart-circulation/both-very-low-and-very-high-heart-rates-may-be-linked-to-higher-stroke-risk-study-says at May 12, 2026 at 9:53 AM EDT.

Table of Contents

Live Science: 2026 May 12

May 12, 2026

Microplastics absorb heat in the atmosphere and contribute to global warming — as if they weren't bad enough

A 2025 Alaskan tsunami was one of the largest on record, new research finds

'The name was inaccurate': PCOS gets a new name after years-long effort

May 11, 2026

'Insect apocalypse' is already fueling malnutrition in some regions, first-of-its-kind study reveals

Lion's head pendant: An ancient Egyptian board game piece that was later repurposed into a magical religious object with baboons

New 'trick' fixes major flaw in neutral-atom quantum computers — inching us closer to a superpowerful system

'More than 100 million years of evolution': How snakes evolved and lost their legs

James Webb telescope zooms in on a black hole that could reveal the truth about 'little red dots'

Declassified Apollo 12 images show UFOs on the moon — Space photo of the week

May 10, 2026

More polar bears are approaching human sites as the climate warms, and it's not just the skinny ones

Are we more closely related to cats or dogs?

May 9, 2026

Pregnancy quiz: Can you deliver on the science of growing babies?

'Feuding tech bros' go head to head in legal showdown. But what does it mean for the future of AI?

US government declassifies nearly 200 UAP files, including strange sightings from Apollo astronauts

If humans are getting smarter, why are our brains shrinking?

May 8, 2026

Some gene therapies no longer require clinical trials, thanks to new FDA rule. Is this safe, and who will it help?

The brain's memory center doesn't start as a blank slate, study suggests

Live 'quantum network' being tested in New York — overcoming key hurdles could bring us closer to an 'unhackable' internet

Flowering plants transformed into 'hopeful monsters' in 9 dire bursts across evolutionary time, study finds

Both very low and very high heart rates may be linked to higher stroke risk, study says