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August 10, 2026

- 'They would come in with a chord change': Composer Jim Nollman has collaborated with turkeys, kangaroo rats and whales. Now he's dropping 'Orcas' Greatest Hits.'

- Where and when to see the Aug. 12 solar eclipse — exact times for North America and Europe

- Most-detailed-ever view of the sun's surface revealed in new images from the world's largest solar telescope

- 'Now our lives have changed': Drop in coal burning is helping the African Sahel turn green after decades of drought

- 'His urine goes on tour around Europe, showing the kings and queens this glowing pee': The weird world of alchemy before chemistry

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

- Will you be looking up on Aug. 12, the best skywatching day and night of the year?

- Could we prevent dementia? A new trial may point the way.

- Berlin gold hat: A 3,000-year-old ceremonial headdress that a cult used to track the sun, moon and lunar eclipses

ANIMALS > MARINE MAMMALS > DOLPHINS > ORCAS

SASCHA PARE, LAURA MONDRAGÓN, LAURA GEGGEL | AUG 10, 2026, 12:41 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

'They would come in with a chord change': Composer Jim Nollman has collaborated with turkeys, kangaroo rats and whales. Now he's dropping 'Orcas' Greatest Hits.'

Staff writer Sascha Pare spoke with musical composer and sound artist Jim Nollman about his new album, "Orcas' Greatest Hits," created with killer-whale bandmates.

By Edited by ,

Published 10 August 2026 In Interview

MEMBER EXCLUSIVE

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

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

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

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

Jim Nollman

Jim Nollman is a Washington state-based musician, sound artist and author interested in interspecies communication. He has released several music albums, including "Playing Music with Animals" in 1982 (Folkways Records), "What the Dolphin Said" in 1997 (Beluga Records) and "Music for Swimming and Flying" in 2021 (Other Minds Records).

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

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

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

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

Jim Nollman's new album, "Orcas' Greatest Hits," will be released Aug. 14.

(Image credit: Jim O'Donnell)

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

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

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

Jim Nollman - "The 47 Whale Raga" (Official Audio) - YouTube

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

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

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

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

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

The wolves wouldn't play with me if I was out of their key.

Jim Nollman, musical composer and sound artist

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

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

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

Jim Nollman - “The Three Jimmies” (Official Visualizer) - YouTube

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nollman recorded orcas off the coast of British Columbia between 1985 and 2002.

(Image credit: Jim Nollman)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disclaimer

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

TOPICS

music

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/animals/orcas/they-would-come-in-with-a-chord-change-composer-jim-nollman-has-collaborated-with-turkeys-kangaroo-rats-and-whales-now-hes-dropping-orcas-greatest-hits at Aug 10, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

SPACE > ASTRONOMY > THE SUN

JAMIE CARTER, BRANDON SPECKTOR, LAURA MONDRAGÓN | AUG 10, 2026, 12:39 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Where and when to see the Aug. 12 solar eclipse — exact times for North America and Europe

Here's exactly when and where to watch the Aug. 12, 2026 solar eclipse in Europe, North America and North Africa.

By Edited by ,

Published 8 August 2026 In News

Millions of people across Europe and North America will witness a solar eclipse on Wednesday, Aug. 12, but the event will vary greatly depending on the location. A narrow corridor stretching from Greenland to northeastern Spain will experience a total solar eclipse, much of Europe will enjoy a deep partial eclipse, and parts of North America will see a smaller partial eclipse.

Want to know what you can expect to see from where you are? Here's an overview of the event from various locations, along with the exact viewing times for the Aug. 12 solar eclipse.

Remember, it's important to wear certified solar eclipse glasses during all partial phases of the eclipse. Totality ‪—‬ when the sun's face is completely blocked by the moon ‪—‬ is the only time it's safe to remove your eclipse glasses. (It’s not too late to order last-minute eclipse glasses if you don’t have a pair on hand.)

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If you're in the path of totality

A map of the path of totality (red) for the Aug. 12 solar eclipse.

(Image credit: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio)

If you're fortunate enough to be inside the 180-mile-wide (290 kilometers) path of totality — the path of the dark shadow of the moon — in eastern Greenland, western Iceland or northeastern Spain, you'll experience the moon completely covering the sun for up to 2 minutes, 18 seconds. The sky will darken to twilight, bright stars and planets may appear in the daytime sky, and the sun's spectacular corona (its wispy outer atmosphere) will become visible. Here’s a handy guide to all the gear you’ll need to get the most out of totality.

The closer you are to the centerline of the path, the longer totality will last. But the most important consideration is to stay within the boundaries of the path, because it has a hard edge. Madrid, for example, is barely outside the path and will see a 99.99% partial eclipse — and no totality whatsoever. The partial phases last an hour on each side of totality.

Here's when totality will occur in various locations for the Aug. 12 total solar eclipse:

- Scoresby Sund, Greenland: 4:35 p.m. WGST (up to 2 minutes, 17 seconds)

- Reykjavik, Iceland: 5:48 p.m. GMT (60 seconds)

- León, Spain: 8:28 p.m. CEST (1 minute, 45 seconds)

- Soria, Spain: 8:29 p.m. CEST (1 minute, 43 seconds)

- S'Arenal, Mallorca, Spain: 8:31 p.m. CEST (1 minute, 36 seconds)

If you're in North America

Viewers in North America will see a modest partial eclipse, with the biggest eclipse seen from northern and eastern Canada, Alaska and the northeastern U.S. The farther northeast you are, the deeper the eclipse will appear. Eclipse glasses are essential at every stage of the two-hour event, because there will be no totality. Here are the times of maximum eclipse in various locations:

- Iqaluit, Nunavut: 1:24 p.m. EDT (61% eclipse)

- St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador: 3:00 p.m. NDT (53%)

- Fairbanks, Alaska: 8:27 a.m. AKDT (37%)

- Anchorage, Alaska: 8:21 a.m. AKDT (28%)

- Bangor, Maine: 1:53 p.m. EDT (23%)

- Quebec City: 1:46 p.m. EDT (24%)

- Montreal: 1:45 p.m. EDT (18%)

- Boston: 1:55 p.m. EDT (16%)

- New York: 1:54 p.m. EDT (9%)

If you want to watch totality from outside the path, there are many live stream options available, including planned streams from NASA and the European Space Agency.

A deep partial eclipse will be visible in many locations throughout Europe, with a smaller eclipse visible in North America.

(Image credit: GAGAN NAYAR via Getty Images)

If you're elsewhere in Europe and North Africa

Most of Europe and far northwestern Africa will see a spectacular deep partial eclipse, with more than 90% of the sun covered in many western cities. Although the eclipse will never become total, it will still be an impressive sight, though solar eclipse glasses will be required throughout the event. Here are the times of maximum eclipse in some major cities:

- Madrid: 8:32 p.m. CEST (99.9%)

- Barcelona: 8:29 p.m. CEST (99.8%)

- Algiers, Algeria: 7:33 p.m. CET (96%)

- Nice, France: 8:24 p.m. CEST (95%)

- Lisbon, Portugal: 7:36 p.m. WEST (94%)

- Dublin, Ireland: 7:10 p.m. BST (94%)

- Cardiff, Wales: 7:13 p.m. BST (93%)

- Belfast, Northern Ireland: 7:08 p.m. BST (93%)

- Paris: 8:17 p.m. CEST (92%)

- Tangier, Morocco: 7:40 p.m. WEST (92%)

- London: 7:13 p.m. BST (91%)

- Edinburgh, Scotland: 7:05 p.m. BST (91% eclipse)

To check exactly what you'll see and when, enter your location on an interactive map of the eclipse, which will give you a schedule for when the eclipse begins, peaks and ends where you are.

TOPICS

Solar eclipse

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/space/the-sun/where-and-when-to-see-the-aug-12-solar-eclipse-exact-times-for-north-america-and-europe at Aug 10, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

SPACE > ASTRONOMY > THE SUN

OLIVIA MAULE, BRANDON SPECKTOR, LAURA MONDRAGÓN | AUG 10, 2026, 12:39 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Most-detailed-ever view of the sun's surface revealed in new images from the world's largest solar telescope

For the first time, scientists have directly observed a 150-year-old predicted phenomenon on the sun's surface that could explain why the sun's atmosphere is far hotter than its surface.

By Edited by ,

Published 6 August 2026 In News

New images captured by the world's most powerful solar telescope have revealed something that was hiding in plain sight on the sun for 150 years: thousands of tiny whirlpools twisting across our star's surface. The ultra-detailed observations could help to explain some of the sun's most violent behavior as well as hint at the answer to a long-standing solar mystery.

The new time-lapse footage offers the first direct proof of a long-predicted phenomenon called Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. The effect itself isn't new to science; it's named for physicists Lord Kelvin and Hermann von Helmholtz, who described it in the 19th century. The physicists found that whenever two fluids slide past each other at different speeds, the friction between them, or shear, rolls into spiraling patterns. However, this is the first time this effect has been seen on the sun, where that shear plays out between neighboring streams of solar plasma.

Researchers captured the swirls using the U.S. National Science Foundation's Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii and then compared the images against computer simulations of the sun's visible surface, called the photosphere. The findings were published Aug. 5 in the journal Nature.

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A time-lapse view of the Inouye telescope's obseravtions of the sun.

(Image credit: NSF/NSO/AURA/MPS)

The resulting time-lapse footage from the telescope is unlike anything solar physicists have captured before. It shows dozens of tiny vortices clustering along the edges of magnetic regions, some accompanied by delicate, dark stripes known as striations, according to a statement from the National Science Foundation. The telescope's resolution is sharp enough to pick out structures just tens of miles across — a scale so fine that the vortices had gone completely undetected until now.

When the researchers lined the images up against their simulations, the match was close enough ‪—‬ down to the average spacing between vortices ‪—‬ to confirm that they'd finally caught the instability in action.

Beyond the impressive visuals, researchers think these swirls may serve an important function. By constantly twisting and mixing the sun's magnetic-field lines, these vortices may play a part in building up the energy behind solar flares and coronal mass ejections.

The effect also might help to explain the long-standing mystery of why the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, reaches temperatures of around 2 million degrees Fahrenheit (around 1 million degrees Celsius) while its surface remains hundreds of thousands of degrees cooler, Thomas Rimmele, chief technologist at the National Solar Observatory, said in the statement.

The team now plans to use computer programs to automatically track these vortices across future observations. This will help them measure exactly how much these swirls contribute to heating the corona and driving the explosive space weather that can disrupt satellites, communications and power grids on Earth.

Article Sources

Kuridze, D., Wöger, F., van Noort, M. et al. Ubiquitous Kelvin–Helmholtz instabilities driving plasma mixing on the Sun. Nature (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10871-3

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

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/space/the-sun/most-detailed-ever-view-of-the-suns-surface-revealed-in-new-images-from-the-worlds-largest-solar-telescope at Aug 10, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

PLANET EARTH

YALE ENVIRONMENT 360, FRED PEARCE | AUG 10, 2026, 9:55 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

'Now our lives have changed': Drop in coal burning is helping the African Sahel turn green after decades of drought

Warming has brought extreme rain to the parched Sahel, which is seeing aquifers refill as monsoons grow stronger. But heavier downpours alone cannot explain the groundwater revival, say hydrologists, who believe efforts to harvest rainfall may also be paying dividends.

By ,

Published 9 August 2026 In News

This article was originally published by Yale Environment 360.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shallow groundwater storage in February 2003 and February 2025, as compared to the average from 1948 to 2012.

(Image credit: NASA / Adapted by Yale Environment 360)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The streets of the Keurs Massar area in Dakar are flooded on Sept. 7, 2020 after a monsoon in Senegal.

(Image credit: SEYLLOU via Getty Images)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dead trees in an arm of Lake Chad near Kiskawa, Chad, that was recently flooded.

(Image credit: JORIS BOLOMEY via Getty Images)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/now-our-lives-have-changed-drop-in-coal-burning-is-helping-the-african-sahel-turn-green-after-decades-of-drought at Aug 10, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

CHEMISTRY

HANNAH OSBORNE, LAURA MONDRAGÓN, BEN TURNER | AUG 10, 2026, 9:51 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

'His urine goes on tour around Europe, showing the kings and queens this glowing pee': The weird world of alchemy before chemistry

Editor Hannah Osborne spoke with science writer Kit Chapman about his book "The Age of Alchemy." In it, he explores how, long before modern science existed, people were finding extraordinary ways to solve problems and understand the world around them.

By Edited by ,

Published 9 August 2026 In Interview

MEMBER EXCLUSIVE

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

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

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

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

Kit Chapman

Science journalist

Kit Chapman is an award-winning science journalist and adventurer who has travelled to more than 100 countries in his quest to explore ancient innovations and discoveries. His first book, "Superheavy", was a finalist for the AAAS SB&F prize, his second, "Racing Green", was named the RAC Motorsport Book of the Year 2023, and his latest, "The Age of Alchemy", has been shortlisted for the Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize. Kit holds a masters degree in pharmacy from the University of Bradford, and a PhD in the history of science from the University of Sunderland. A former editor at Chemistry World, Kit is currently an honorary researcher at Falmouth University, UK.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nobel Prize winner Tu Youyou

(Image credit: STR / Stringer via Getty Images)

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

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

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

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

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

If you look at the traditional story of science, we talk about Europe. Occasionally, we might bring in China. But India, Africa, Mesoamerica, South America, North America ‪—‬ every single continent was having scientific discoveries and developments.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A painting of Paracelsus.

(Image credit: GL Archive via Alamy)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disclaimer

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

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The Age of Alchemy (Hardback)

£22 at profilebooks.com

"Age of Alchemy" is a fascinating and funny dive into chemistry long before chemistry existed. It captures the ingenuity of humans across cultures and time, revealing how ultimately the work of these early innovators would eventually meld into modern science.

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This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/chemistry/his-urine-goes-on-tour-around-europe-showing-the-kings-and-queens-this-glowing-pee-the-weird-world-of-alchemy-before-chemistry at Aug 10, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

CHEMISTRY

KIT CHAPMAN, HANNAH OSBORNE | AUG 10, 2026, 9:44 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

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

In this excerpt from "The Age of Alchemy," author Kit Chapman reveals the extraordinary story of how researchers reverse engineered the lost technique of forging Wootz steel in strange hilltop forges that resembled "oversized harmonicas."

By Edited by

Published 8 August 2026 In Features

MEMBER EXCLUSIVE

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

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

Kit Chapman interview: 'His urine goes on tour around Europe, showing the kings and queens this glowing pee'

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

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

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

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

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

A Damascus blade forged from Wootz steel.

(Image credit: HDesert via Getty Images)

As early as 500 BCE, steel began to originate from the Indian subcontinent that was far greater in quality than any other. The blades were forged with intricate, elaborate patterns and banding, like the marbling of the finest cut of steak. These were harder than any other blades, cut sharper and cost more.

Arabian, Greek, Roman and Chinese writers all described this wonder-material, which became so legendary that a Persian euphemism for cutting someone with a sword was an "Indian answer." It was known as Wootz steel. Just like pepper or other commodities from southern India that moved west along the Silk Road, the steel's rarity made it a luxury item.

"It's not a material that your everyday blacksmith would necessarily want," Juleff says. "High-carbon steel is an awful lot harder to work. It's not for arrowheads or kitchen knives. It became used by specialist swordsmiths." Then, around 1100 CE, the mysterious, intricately patterned blades simply vanished. Subsequent versions emerged (the most famous is Damascus steel), but Wootz steel had disappeared completely. It left a gaping hole in the history of chemistry.

No one could figure out how the Sri Lankans produced steel of such fine quality, and with such intricate patterning, well over a thousand years before it should have been possible. That is, until Juleff discovered the answer. She realised that archaeologists had been looking at the question based on how Europeans worked with iron.

"We discovered that the furnaces were all placed at the top of hills," Juleff explains. "Hundreds of them, of a type we'd never seen before; we only knew they were furnaces because there was slag everywhere. For some reason, the early Sri Lankans had their villages at the bottom of a hill, and then dragged all their iron to the top to smelt it." Initially, the strange furnaces were a puzzle. Typically, a furnace is tall and erect, like a chimney; this creates a natural draught that feeds oxygen to the fire, drawing air in and pushing out the exhaust gases. The Sri Lankan furnaces were totally different. They were flat, half a metre high and 2 metres long, with hundreds of holes bored into the front and back. They looked like oversized harmonicas.

Ancient people forged Wootz steel near Sri Lanka's central highlands at the tops of hills to utilize the monsoon winds.

(Image credit: Jakub Specjalski via Getty Images)

"The answer wasn't immediately obvious why," Juleff says. "And then we realised they were all facing into the wind." What if the Sri Lankans weren't using bellows at all? This is why Juleff asked me to come to Colombo in the off-season. Every year, Sri Lanka is buffeted by two wet seasons: the south-west monsoons from May to September, and the north-west monsoons from December to February. It's a kind of weather you have to experience yourself to truly appreciate.

"A monsoon wind blows up to 90km an hour [56 mph]," says Juleff. "When you're at the top of a hill, you get an aerodynamic effect, where all the wind's rushing up and cresting. You're battered by it. Everyone told me you couldn't run a furnace just using the wind, because it's not strong or reliable enough. So, I decided to experiment. I built one." Juleff's furnace was identical to the Sri Lankan ruins she had found. She fed it using charcoal and iron sourced locally from surface deposits — exactly as would have been available to the villagers who built them.

Then, she waited for the monsoon. "So, we ran this furnace," Juleff says. "And, to begin with, I thought it wasn't working. We had this line of fire behind the front wall, and nothing at the back. I thought everything needed to be burning." It looked like the experts had been right: the monsoon winds weren't regular or consistent enough to blow into the furnace's holes to create the temperatures required.

But then Juleff's mood changed. "It was like a Transformers toy, everything rearranged in my mind. I had a eureka moment! It wasn't wrong at all; it was how it was designed to work. The wind was blowing up the hill — it wasn't blowing into the tubes at all, it was blowing over the top of the furnace. It's like an aeroplane wing: by blowing over the furnace, you're creating this incredible pocket of low pressure." The Sri Lankan furnace wasn't a harmonica, with air puffed through it; instead, it was played like a flute.

This is the Bernoulli effect, the same principle that sticks a race car to the road, or keeps water moving through your plumbing. The change in pressure and the smooth, ordered air flow was creating a furnace beyond anything western science had considered possible. The team continued putting in ore and charcoal throughout the day, then allowed things to cool. The next day, they returned to see what they had produced. At the top was a knotted lump of pure iron — a bloom, as expected. "But then below that, stuck to the bottom of our slag, was another layer of metal," Juleff says. "High-carbon steel. The wind did it. We couldn't stop the wind doing it. We had created a furnace that could make the best steel anywhere in the world."

Juleff had solved the mystery of Wootz steel. Not only did we now know how it was made, we understood why the technology hadn't spread around the world: the technology was anchored in the unique geography of Sri Lanka, and the people who visited weren't scholars, but traders who didn't appreciate the small miracle they were witnessing.

"The metal-makers weren't moving," Juleff says. "They were here, sat in the interior of Sri Lanka, season after season, running these incredible furnaces." Why did Wootz steel vanish? In the twelfth century CE, Sri Lanka was invaded by the Pandya dynasty of southern India. It triggered a societal collapse, as Sri Lankans were forced to pay tribute to their conquerors. The most likely explanation is that, during the chaos of the invasion and its messy aftermath, the traders and middlemen who brought the Wootz steel to the coast, and the ships that transported it around the world, had stopped coming.

It wouldn't have occurred, or mattered, to a Sri Lankan metallurgist that their goods were ending up in the hands of kings and emperors in some distant land they'd never heard of; they'd have only seen that they couldn't sell to local traders any more. The villagers stopped making goods that didn't sell, and moved on to other, more profitable, careers.

Excerpted from "The Age of Alchemy: How Early Innovators Shaped Modern Chemistry," Profile Books, 2026.

Profile Books

The Age of Alchemy: How Early Innovators Shaped Modern Chemistry

£22 at profilebooks.com

"Age of Alchemy" is a fascinating and funny dive into chemistry long before chemistry existed. It captures the ingenuity of humans across cultures and time, revealing how ultimately the work of these early innovators would eventually meld into modern science.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/chemistry/these-were-harder-than-any-other-blades-cut-sharper-and-cost-more-how-ancient-sri-lankans-created-steel-of-legends-by-harnessing-monsoons at Aug 10, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

SPACE > ASTRONOMY

KENNA HUGHES-CASTLEBERRY | AUG 10, 2026, 7:13 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Will you be looking up on Aug. 12, the best skywatching day and night of the year?

Two big skywatching events are happening on Aug. 12. Will you have your eyes turned skyward? Let us know in our latest poll.

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Published 10 August 2026 In Opinion

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

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

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

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Solar eclipse

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/space/astronomy/will-you-be-looking-up-on-aug-12-the-best-skywatching-day-and-night-of-the-year at Aug 10, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

HEALTH > VIRUSES, INFECTIONS & DISEASE > ALZHEIMERS & DEMENTIA

RJ MACKENZIE, NICOLETTA LANESE, LAURA MONDRAGÓN | AUG 10, 2026, 7:04 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Could we prevent dementia? A new trial may point the way.

While much funding for dementia research goes toward treatments, some scientists want to reduce people's risk of developing the condition in the first place.

By Edited by ,

Published 1 August 2026 In News

MEMBER EXCLUSIVE

LONDON — In the packed halls of the recent Alzheimer's Association International Conference in mid-July, over 10,000 experts in brain research discussed strategies to beat dementia. But in one room, attendees gathered to watch a video from a nonscientist named Isabel Beltre, whose life was transformed by a recent trial.

Beltre was one of 1,200 participants ages 60 to 77 who took part in the Latin American Initiative for Lifestyle Intervention to Prevent Cognitive Decline (LatAm-FINGERS), the first trial to test a culturally adapted lifestyle intervention to prevent cognitive decline in Latin America. Rather than attempting to treat dementia after it has developed, the trial tackled risk factors that raise the likelihood of the condition, like smoking and a sedentary lifestyle.

In her native Spanish, Beltre thanked both God and the project for its impact on her life. There was a celebratory air in the conference room as the trial's results were released. The lifestyle interventions, which included exercise programs and brain training, had statistically improved participants' thinking skills, compared with a control group who received only bare-bones support, like general health advice.

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Trials like LatAm-FINGERS — including a related U.S.-based trial called the POINTER study — ultimately aim to cut rates of dementia around the world. The LatAm trial is the most successful of these trials to date, raising hopes that this approach could help to prevent dementia en masse.

Whether that promise pans out remains to be seen, though, experts told Live Science.

The lifestyle factors that increase dementia risk

When it comes to dementia prevention, few guidelines are as influential as those written by the Lancet Commission, an expert-led review of the available evidence on dementia. Three editions of this review have provided comprehensive overviews of risk factors; the most recent, published in 2024, identified 14 factors, including smoking, infrequent social contact, and a lack of physical activity.

The commission estimated that, together, the identified risk factors contribute to 45% of dementia cases at a population level.

Long before the 2024 report, Dr. Miia Kivipelto, a professor of clinical geriatrics at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, wanted to tackle these risk factors at the individual and population level in her work as a medical doctor and epidemiologist.

"I felt that I wanted to move on to interventions to really show that if you do something, you can change the risk," Kivipelto told Live Science.

The many contributing factors that lead to cognitive decline, and ultimately dementia, couldn't be tackled in isolation, Kivipelto realized. She designed a trial in her native Finland, called the Finnish Geriatric Intervention Study to Prevent Cognitive Impairment and Disability (FINGER) study, that would aim to tackle many risks simultaneously.

The two-year project recruited 1,260 participants ages 60 to 77 and divided them into two groups. The first group received general health advice, such as tips on healthy eating and exercise, at the start of the study and then again after six and 12 months.

The other group additionally received a multipart intervention consisting of meetings with nutritionists to discuss personalized meal plans, brain training, exercise programs, social activities, and metabolic and vascular tests. These programs lasted throughout the study period, with the brain training alone including 144 sessions over 12 months of the study.

At the end, the two groups' cognitive skills, such as thinking speed and memory, were tested; the trial did not track dementia rates, only overall cognition. In both groups, these skills improved by the end of the study. But the headline finding was that in the group given the comprehensive intervention, overall brain function was judged to be 25% stronger than in the control group.

What did that difference mean in concrete terms? It turns out, the improvement was relatively small.

I felt that I wanted to move on to interventions to really show that if you do something, you can change the risk.

Miia Kivipelto, professor of clinical geriatrics at the Karolinska Institute

It was calculated in terms of a statistical measure called a z-score, which represented the extent of the improvement in brain-function test scores in each group. In the end, the difference in z-scores between the two groups was just 0.04 points, which a 2021 review defined as "small."

However, Kivipelto maintained that the improvement is significant. "It's as big as anti-amyloid treatments," she said.

Several drugs approved by the U.S Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease target amyloid, a protein that forms unruly tangles in the brain. These drugs have been reported to marginally slow the disease's progression, but statistically, their overall effect is small.

Targeting those most at risk of dementia

Despite criticism of the trial's moderate effects, Kivipelto's FINGER intervention has since been repeated all over the world, including by the U.S.-based POINTER study, and, most recently, LatAm-FINGERS.

Dr. Gill Livingston, a psychiatrist at University College London who led the 2024 Lancet Commission report, told Live Science that the data from these trials shows that dementia interventions need to be tailored to the risks the participants actually face.

In the POINTER study, 70% of the participants had a college degree, compared with roughly 43% of the wider U.S. population. "People who are usually in randomized controlled trials are usually highly educated people who are very interested in health," Livingston noted. "And that means they're at less risk of developing dementia, and therefore, less can be done to help them" through lifestyle interventions.

The difference between the test group and the control group in the POINTER study was even smaller than in the original FINGER trial — just 0.029 points.

LatAm-FINGERS tried to maximize flexibility in its approach by better tailoring its interventions to its study participants, said study first author Dr. Lucía Crivelli, a neuropsychologist at the neurology center FLENI in Argentina. Dietary advice reflected the produce available in each region. Exercise programs considered local environmental factors; for example, sessions were held outside, avoiding hot gyms during the sweltering summers in Ecuador and Mexico.

Regular exercise and social interaction are associated with a lower risk of dementia, compared to infrequent exercise and social contact.

(Image credit: FG Trade Latin via Getty Images)

The trial recruited volunteers across Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay. The participants were less highly educated than the POINTER cohort had been; 37% had no education beyond a high school diploma, compared to just 5% in the POINTER study. That likely made the study participants more representative of people who might benefit from the trial's interventions.

When Crivelli announced the results of the trial at the conference, a large cheer filled the room. The intervention had achieved a difference of 0.11 points between the test and control groups' z-scores — more than twice the difference seen in the FINGER trial.

That difference corresponded to a relative 55% improvement in overall brain function in the test group compared to the control group at the end of the study.

What made the difference?

Crivelli, Kivipelto and Livingston all pointed to one key factor in explaining the project's relative success. "In Latin America, there are more modifiable risk factors," Kivipelto summarized.

The study participants had lower academic attainment and higher cardiometabolic risk factors, such as high BMI, than the participants in previous studies. The trial had reaped the rewards of delivering the intervention to people who needed it most, experts concluded.

But the approach wasn't perfect. said Dr. Claudia Suemoto, a neuroscientist at the University of São Paulo who presented a detailed breakdown of the trial's results. They found that the intervention didn't improve men's overall cognitive ability, compared with the control group. Only women benefited.

The difference may be that men simply didn't engage in the trial as much as women did, Suemoto's data suggested. Livingston pointed to the trials' exercise classes as an example of an activity that men may not be as likely to participate in, although that's an assumption rather than being based on the trial data.

Experts think that women may be more likely than men to participate in these types of lifestyle interventions.

(Image credit: FG Trade Latin via Getty Images)

Can we really prevent dementia?

The LatAm-FINGERS results show that addressing the dementia risk factors that people face is the most effective way to prevent dementia, Livingston said.

And Livingston is leaning into the idea. She's planning a dementia prevention trial in the U.K. that will ask participants about their risk factors and then give them tailored interventions based on the risks they can realistically avoid.

"We ask them to choose which ones they want," Livingston said. "If somebody doesn't want to stop drinking or smoking, then they're not going to."

While LatAm-FINGERS has been the most successful of the FINGER trials to date, it's still unclear whether such projects actually reduce dementia rates.

Only two previous prevention trials have attempted to measure dementia incidence, and neither saw a notable change in their test group. That said, neither trial included cognitive training interventions like FINGER did; they instead focused on cardiovascular risk factors, such as low exercise rates and high body weight.

Measuring changes in dementia rates requires trials much longer than two years, and they also need massive recruitment. Implementing an intensive study like LatAM-FINGERS in the wider community "is not practical," Crivelli said. Instead, she said the study's interventions would need to be distilled into their essential parts so that they could be implemented at scale.

Kivipelto is optimistic that advances in Alzheimer's screening, including new blood-based tests, could provide an early biological measure to show that FINGERS-style interventions can help stave off dementia. This would be an indirect measure but wouldn't require as long a trial as tracking dementia rates.

Some of the risk factors the Lancet Commission identified, like air pollution, can't be modified at an individual level, Livingston noted. A combination of personal and governmental change could address this, she said, as it has in the realm of infectious-disease prevention.

While the scientific field still has uncertainty about the scale of change that trials like FINGERS can bring about, Beltre has little doubt about the trial's impact.

While she previously relied on help from family members like her grandson to complete everyday activities, she said, "I do everything myself now."

Disclaimer

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

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This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/health/alzheimers-dementia/could-we-prevent-dementia-a-new-trial-may-point-the-way at Aug 10, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

ARCHAEOLOGY

KRISTINA KILLGROVE, LAURA GEGGEL, NICOLETTA LANESE | AUG 10, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Berlin gold hat: A 3,000-year-old ceremonial headdress that a cult used to track the sun, moon and lunar eclipses

The pointy gold hat reveals evidence of a Bronze Age sun cult whose leader could predict eclipses.

By Edited by ,

Published 10 August 2026 In Features

The Berlin gold hat was made around 3,000 years ago from a single sheet of gold and accentuated with motifs that represent a calendar.

(Image credit: Alamy)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Egyptian Relief

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Mummy Mask

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Elamite Helmet

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Can you put together last week's Astonishing Artifact?

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This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/berlin-gold-hat-a-3-000-year-old-ceremonial-headdress-that-a-cult-used-to-track-the-sun-moon-and-lunar-eclipses at Aug 10, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

August 9, 2026

- New James Webb telescope image may reveal the true identity of 'little red dots' — Space photo of the week

- Who are the least-contacted people on Earth?

SPACE > ASTRONOMY

JAMIE CARTER, BRANDON SPECKTOR, JAMES PRICE | AUG 9, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

New James Webb telescope image may reveal the true identity of 'little red dots' — Space photo of the week

A new James Webb telescope study suggests the universe's enigmatic "little red dots" may not have vanished after all — they may simply look different as we observe them across cosmic time.

By Edited by ,

Published 9 August 2026 In Features

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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space photo of the week James Webb Space Telescope

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/space/astronomy/new-james-webb-telescope-image-may-reveal-the-true-identity-of-little-red-dots-space-photo-of-the-week at Aug 10, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

HUMAN BEHAVIOR

EMMA BRYCE, LAURA GEGGEL, LAURA MONDRAGÓN | AUG 9, 2026, 5:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Who are the least-contacted people on Earth?

"Uncontacted" and "isolated" peoples live in roughly 10 countries around the world, including one group that erases their footprints so they cannot easily be found.

By Edited by ,

Published 9 August 2026 In Features 7 min read

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"They do not want to be disturbed"

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

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

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

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

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

Herlin Odicio Estrella, an Indigenous leader and president of the Native Federation of Kakataibo Communities, speaks at a press conference in Lima on May 4, 2023. The conference addressed how regional and municipal governments are failing to protect Indigenous communities from coca growers encroaching on their communities.

(Image credit: ZUMA Press, Inc. via Alamy)

"They erase their footprints"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Misconceptions about isolated peoples

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/human-behavior/who-are-the-least-contacted-people-on-earth at Aug 10, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

August 8, 2026

- Using AI has an environmental impact — here are 4 ways you can minimize it

- What's the difference between sweet potatoes and yams?

TECHNOLOGY > ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

KATARINA ZIMMER, KNOWABLE MAGAZINE | AUG 8, 2026, 11:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Using AI has an environmental impact — here are 4 ways you can minimize it

Escalating use of tools like Gemini and ChatGPT saps more and more power. Experts offer some tips on how to consume less.

By ,

Published 8 August 2026 In News

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

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

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

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

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

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Energy-hungry bots

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t give up on search

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

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

Smaller models use less energy

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

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

Using small, specialized models for particular tasks consumes a fraction of the energy guzzled by large, all-purpose models, with similar if even slightly better accuracy.

(Image credit: Knowable Magazine)

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

Less chatty chatbots

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

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

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

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

Keeping chatbot prompts short can conserve some energy, but asking chatbots to keep their responses brief amounts to much bigger savings.

(Image credit: Knowable Magazine)

Go low-res and batch video

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/using-ai-has-an-environmental-impact-here-are-4-ways-you-can-minimize-it at Aug 10, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

PLANET EARTH

CLARISSA BRINCAT, LAURA GEGGEL, LAURA MONDRAGÓN | AUG 8, 2026, 5:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

What's the difference between sweet potatoes and yams?

Here are the main differences between yams and sweet potatoes and how to tell them apart.

By Edited by ,

Published 8 August 2026 In Features

Yams and sweet potatoes are often confused, and the names are sometimes used interchangeably in the U.S. However, they're two different crops. So what sets them apart?

The differences lie mainly in these vegetables' classifications, plant growth, and nutritional profiles, experts told Live Science.

Despite both growing underground and appearing somewhat similar, "Botanically, sweet potatoes and yams are not closely related, as they belong to different plant families," said Phillip Wadl, a research geneticist at the U.S. Vegetable Laboratory in Charleston, South Carolina. Sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas) are in the morning glory family (Convolvulaceae). Yams (Dioscorea), by contrast, belong to the Dioscoreaceae family, and there are 11 yam species cultivated for food and income, Wadl told Live Science in an email.

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Yams and sweet potatoes also belong to different plant groups, or "cotyledon types," said Jeffrey Cole Denis Gregorie, a sweet potato specialist at the Sweet Potato Research Station in Chase, Louisiana. Yams are monocots, plants whose embryo has only one cotyledon, or seed leaf, like grasses and lilies. Sweet potatoes are dicots, plants with two embryonic seed leaves, which include many fruits and vegetables, such as grapes, squash, strawberries and tomatoes.

In addition, yams and sweet potatoes store food in different parts of the plant. "Sweet potatoes form storage roots which are enlarged parts of the root system," Wadl explained, "whereas yams form tubers, which are enlarged underground stems for nutrient storage."

The "garnet yam" is actually a sweet potato.

(Image credit: Sarawuth123 via Getty Images)

A single sweet potato plant typically produces about four to 10 sweet potatoes, while a yam plant yields about one to five yams. Sweet potatoes generally take about three to five months to mature, compared with about six months to a full year for yams, according to Craig Yencho, a professor of horticultural science and a sweet potato and potato researcher with North Carolina State University.

How do you tell sweet potatoes and yams apart?

Visually, sweet potatoes and yams are easy to tell apart when you know what to look for. Sweet potatoes tend to be shorter and blockier, with tapered ends. Yams are usually long and cylindrical, sometimes with "toes," or branching shapes.

Sweet potatoes come in various flesh colors, including orange ‪—‬ the most common color in the U.S. ‪—‬ as well as yellow, purple and white. Their skin is typically thin and smooth, whereas "yams often have a rough, bark-like skin and their flesh can be white, purple or reddish," Wadl said. One well-known purple yam, known as ube (Dioscorea alata), is a popular ingredient in treats such as ice cream, cookies and pound cake.

Sweet potatoes and yams also have noticeable differences in their culinary and nutritional profiles, Wadl said. "Sweet potatoes are generally sweeter and have a moist, creamy texture when cooked, although dry types are available," he explained. "Yams, on the other hand, tend to be starchier, drier, and have a more earthy, sometimes less sweet, flavor compared to sweet potatoes. Their texture can be more like a regular potato."

Nutritionally, the two crops are quite different, too. Sweet potatoes, particularly the orange-fleshed varieties, are an excellent source of beta-carotene (a precursor to vitamin A), vitamin C, dietary fiber, potassium and some B vitamins. "While nutritious, [yams] typically contain less beta-carotene than orange sweet potatoes," Wadl noted. Instead, yams are a good source of potassium, vitamin C, manganese and dietary fiber.

Sweet potatoes are generally considered safe to eat both raw and cooked, Wadl said. By contrast, many wild varieties of true yams, especially those not cultivated for commercial consumption, contain compounds like dioscorine that could make them toxic to humans if eaten raw. "These must be thoroughly cooked to remove the toxins and make them safe for consumption," Wadl said.

A woman sells yams in the market in Abobo in the Ivory Coast on April 22, 2020.

(Image credit: ISSOUF SANOGO via Getty Images)

Thanksgiving confusion around yams and sweet potatoes

If yams and sweet potatoes are so different, why do so many Americans call sweet potatoes "yams"?

Part of the answer lies in history. The yam was a key provision on voyages of enslaved people from West Africa to the Americas, "used to feed captives a familiar food," said Judith Carney, a professor of geography at UCLA. "In mainland plantation societies of North America where the African yam could not be grown, the sweet potato served as a substitute dietary staple." Because the two crops shared some characteristics, "the word 'yam' came to refer vernacularly to both tubers in mainland America, as we see in the U.S. today," Carney told Live Science in an email.

A purple yam, known as ube, from the Philippines.

(Image credit: Ezra Acayan / Stringer via Getty Images)

The U.S. sweet potato industry also leaned into the confusion, adopting the term "yam" for marketing reasons, Gregorie told Live Science in an email. "In the United States, many orange-fleshed, moist varieties of sweet potatoes are often mislabeled as "yams" to distinguish them from the drier, white-fleshed sweet potato varieties," Wadl explained.

As a result, the "yams" at most U.S. supermarkets are probably sweet potatoes. "Garnet yams" and "jewel yams" aren't actually yams, despite those labels; instead, they're softer, sweeter varieties of sweet potatoes, according to the University of California, Davis.

Although genuine yams are sold in many international markets in the U.S, "if you're buying a "yam" in a typical U.S. supermarket, you're almost certainly purchasing a sweet potato," Wadl said.

Do you know where pumpkins and blueberries come from? Find out with our fruits and vegetables quiz!

TOPICS

Life's Little Mysteries

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/whats-the-difference-between-sweet-potatoes-and-yams at Aug 10, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

August 7, 2026

- NASA grants Voyager 2 probe another year of power with risky 'Big Bang' maneuver. Now, will it work for Voyager 1?

- Bacterial 'postbiotic' may help preserve fertility in the aging uterus, preliminary research suggests

- Where to buy last-minute solar eclipse glasses and viewing gear before August 12

- Uberaba Geopark: A time capsule from the Late Cretaceous period nestled in Brazil's tropical savanna

- 'We're a bit late on the case, but we are on the case': Author Fred Pearce on the rise of renewables, a defused population bomb, and letting nature find its own way

- 'It would be a disaster': Ammunition for war and surging water withdrawals are putting the Caspian Sea ‪on the brink of collapse

- New recyclable yarn is as stretchy as spandex and could help tackle fashion's plastic waste problem

- AI found a weakness in one of the world's most studied encryption systems — is your data under threat?

SPACE > SPACE EXPLORATION

ELIZABETH HOWELL, BRANDON SPECKTOR, LAURA MONDRAGÓN | AUG 7, 2026, 3:45 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

NASA grants Voyager 2 probe another year of power with risky 'Big Bang' maneuver. Now, will it work for Voyager 1?

Voyager 1 is running low on power for science, but a successful energy-saving maneuver on Voyager 2 raises hope that the 50-year-old spacecraft can keep going.

By Edited by ,

Published 7 August 2026 In News

Scientists are preparing for an interstellar rescue of humanity's most distant spacecraft, Voyager 1, after fixing up its twin from billions of miles away.

According to a NASA statement released Aug. 4, a clever power-saving maneuver known as the "Big Bang" helped the agency avoid having to shut off another one of the Voyager 2 probe's three remaining science instruments later this year. The Big Bang procedure involves selectively shutting off some high-power instruments on the Voyager probes while switching on lower-power alternatives, all while keeping the spacecraft warm enough to operate in the frigid environment of interstellar space.

"The idea is to swap out a group of powered devices all at once — hence the nickname — turning some things off, and replacing them with lower-power alternatives, to keep the spacecraft warm enough to continue gathering science data," representatives from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the mission, wrote in an April blog post.

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NASA carefully ran tests on Voyager 2 before implementing the procedure in May and June. Now, sharing the results of those tests in the Aug. 4 statement, NASA reports a successful power transfer that should keep Voyager 2 running a while longer.

"The savings should provide power to keep its three instruments operating for at least an extra year," NASA wrote of the Big Bang.

But power is dwindling on both nuclear-powered spacecraft, and Voyager 1 is in worse shape than its twin. Mission scientists were forced to turn off one of Voyager 1's last remaining science instruments in April.

Voyager 1's turn for a life-extending Big Bang will happen within a few months, to keep science operating there as long as possible, agency officials added.

Going out with a bang

Scientists decided to do the "Big Bang" on Voyager 2 first because it is in better health, and closer to Earth, than Voyager 1. Voyager 1 is nearly 171 astronomical units (AU, where 1 AU is the average distance between Earth and the sun) from our planet, while Voyager 2 is about 143 AU away. Both spacecraft are crucial for revealing clues about the region outside the heliopause ‪—‬ the sphere of influence the sun exerts upon our solar system ‪—‬ as they are the only working spacecraft at such a distance.

That distance is no small factor. In November, Voyager 1 will reach a milestone "light day" from Earth — when it takes 24 hours for a radio signal to travel one way from our planet to the spacecraft. Both spacecraft will also turn 50 years old in 2027, assuming they keep working.

Both Voyager probes launched in 1977, with Voyager 2 getting an opportunity for a "grand tour" of our solar system. An alignment of the outer planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — that occurs only once every 176 years allowed both Voyager probes to maneuver from one planet to the next with minimal fuel usage.

Voyager 2 flew by all four planets, finishing its Neptune encounter in 1989, while Voyager 1 was tasked with flying above the plane, or "ecliptic," of our solar system after its closest approach to Saturn in 1981. As each spacecraft finished its close-up imaging of these planets, some instruments were shut off to extend their mission for as long as possible. But as the two spacecraft aged, more instruments needed to go quiet.

Plutonium, which the spacecraft rely on for power, has a natural decay rate, with the spacecraft now losing roughly 4 watts of power a year, according to NASA. In recent years, power supplies have turned critically low on both spacecraft. Voyager 2 would have needed to shut off one of its remaining three science instruments later this year if measures were not taken, and Voyager 1 was in slightly worse shape after an unexpected power drop in February occurred following a planned maneuver in deep space. Only two of Voyager 1's 10 science instruments remain powered after the latest was shut down in April.

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/space/space-exploration/nasa-grants-voyager-2-probe-another-year-of-power-with-risky-big-bang-maneuver-now-will-it-work-for-voyager-1 at Aug 10, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

HEALTH > REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH

ISHA ISHTIAQ, NICOLETTA LANESE, LAURA MONDRAGÓN | AUG 7, 2026, 9:58 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Bacterial 'postbiotic' may help preserve fertility in the aging uterus, preliminary research suggests

A bacteria-derived "postbiotic" may help restore the aging uterus, but experts say it is too early to know whether it could improve fertility as a treatment.

By Edited by ,

Published 7 August 2026 In News 4 min read

Bolstering a type of bacteria that lives in the uterus may help counter age-related changes that can make it harder to get pregnant, a new study suggests.

While fertility decline is often linked to changes in egg number or quality, the uterus also becomes less receptive to an implanting embryo with age. The new research suggests that changes in the bacteria living there may be part of the reason.

In experiments, treating aged mice and lab-grown human uterine cells with a specific species of Lactobacillus, a group of bacteria often found in the uterus, reduced signs of aging in the uterine lining and improved embryo implantation. This improvement was also seen with a specific byproduct of Lactobacillus.

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The findings, published Thursday (Aug. 6) in the journal Cell Host & Microbe, suggest that the uterine microbiome could be a promising target for treating age-related infertility. However, experts who were not involved in the study cautioned that the research is still preliminary.

"This is an interesting and promising approach, but we still don't know whether these findings will translate into meaningful improvements in human fertility," said Dr. Alex Robles, a fertility specialist at Columbia University Fertility Center who was not involved in the study.

"The microbiome can be influenced by many factors, including genetics, diet, geography, environmental exposures and other lifestyle practices," he told Live Science in an email, "which is why it's important to validate these findings across diverse populations before developing broadly applicable treatments."

To explore whether and how the uterine microbiome changes with age, the study researchers analyzed samples of the endometrium — tissue from the lining of the uterus — from 149 women ages 20 to 45 who were undergoing fertility treatment in China. The older women had lower levels of beneficial Lactobacillus bacteria, particularly L. gasseri and L. crispatus. These bacteria are generally associated with a healthy reproductive tract.

With age, the lining of the uterus typically becomes less receptive to implantation, lowering the chance of pregnancy.

(Image credit: BSIP / Contributor vis Getty Images)

"One finding that surprised us was that overall microbial diversity did not change markedly across the different age groups," study co-author Dr. Rong Li, deputy director of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Peking University Third Hospital in Beijing, said in a statement. "Instead, the major differences involved particular bacterial species."

Later, 93 of the women underwent in vitro fertilization (IVF), and of those, 56 became pregnant. Those who became pregnant had higher levels of Lactobacillus in their uterine lining than those who did not get pregnant. That said, the pregnancy rates were similar across women of different ages who underwent IVF.

To better understand the effect of these bacteria on the uterus, the team isolated five Lactobacillus species and tested how they interacted with uterine cells. L. gasseri stood out because it attached strongly to uterine cells, and this attachment was associated with reduced inflammation and lower damage from oxidative stress. The bacterium also produced large amounts of exopolysaccharides (EPS), a type of sugar molecule.

The researchers then purified these sugars into a postbiotic they call LG-EPS. Unlike probiotics, postbiotics are products of bacterial cells and thus do not contain live bacteria.

Then, the researchers ran tests in older female mice (roughly equivalent to a middle-aged woman) to see whether introducing L. gasseri or LG-EPS to the vaginal canal could affect the aging uterus. After four weeks of daily vaginal treatment with either the bacterium or the postbiotic, the mice had fewer signs of uterine aging, less inflammation and higher embryo implantation rates than the untreated animals did. (That said, the team did not measure how much of each treatment actually reached the uterus.)

When they tried the same test with a modified strain of L. gasseri that could not make EPS, they found that many of these benefits disappeared. That suggested that the exopolysaccharides were responsible for much of the benefit. LG-EPS also reduced signs of aging in artificially aged human uterine cells, improving their ability to support embryo implantation.

Further experiments suggested that the postbiotic works by modifying a signaling pathway that helps control cell growth and tissue repair. This pathway was overactive in aged mice and uterine cells, but treatment helped to normalize its activity. Blocking a key protein in the same pathway eliminated the treatment's effects.

Robles said postbiotic treatments could be especially interesting because they may be easier to manufacture than treatments containing live bacteria. "If confirmed in future studies, these treatments could potentially be used alongside IVF to improve the uterine environment before embryo transfer," he suggested.

But he cautioned that the study should not prompt people to try over-the-counter probiotics or other supplements as ad hoc fertility treatments.

"The reproductive tract is a delicate ecosystem, and introducing or eliminating certain bacteria could have unintended consequences," Robles said. "We do not fully understand what constitutes a 'healthy' uterine microbiome. As such, any intervention should be approached with caution."

Disclaimer

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

Article Sources

Li, M., Li, S., Zheng, D., Liao, B., Niu, H., Wang, Y., Liu, X., Pan, H., Yu, Y., Zhou, P., & Li, R. (2026). Lactobacillus gasseri postbiotics ameliorate age-related decline in endometrial receptivity. Cell Host & Microbe, S1931312826002787. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chom.2026.06.018

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/health/reproductive-health/bacterial-postbiotic-may-help-preserve-fertility-in-the-aging-uterus-preliminary-research-suggests at Aug 10, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

PRODUCTS > OPTICS

KIMBERLEY LANE | AUG 7, 2026, 9:35 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Where to buy last-minute solar eclipse glasses and viewing gear before August 12

A partial eclipse is still worth seeing, but only with the right protection. Here's where you can still find eclipse glasses, solar binoculars and filters before eclipse day.

By

Published 7 August 2026 In Deals

Even though August 12's solar eclipse won't be much to look at for observers in the U.S., it'll be even less impressive if you can't look at it at all. In order to see the partial phases, you MUST wear a pair of certified solar glasses or solar binoculars to view the sun safely.

The American Astronomical Society states, "ISO 12312-2 specifies the properties that a solar viewer should have in order to protect your eyes from injury and provide a comfortable view."

With the eclipse fast approaching, there is still time to pick up some last-minute solar viewing equipment, but some retailers are already selling out and won't be able to deliver before Wednesday, August 12.

Here are the best options you can still get hold of before the solar eclipse.

For the whole family

Lunt Solar Eclipse Glasses (5 pack): $9.95 at Amazon

This 5-pack of solar eclipse glasses from Lunt is ideal for viewing parties, for the whole family to use or just to have spare pairs for future eclipses.

They're ISO 12312-2 certified and Prime members can get them on free next-day delivery.

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Affordable 2-pack

Soluna solar eclipse glasses (2 pack): $7.99 at Amazon

This 2-pack of solar glasses from Soluna is super affordable, ISO 12312-2 certified and is even available for same-day delivery in some areas.

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For year-round solar viewing

Celestron EclipSmart 12x50 solar binoculars: was $129.95 now $99.99 at Amazon

The Celestron EclipSmart 12x50 solar binoculars provide safe solar viewing with 12x magnification, and Prime members still have time to have them delivered before August 12.

But there's a rather large caveat here. Buying them mere days before a solar eclipse is arguably the worst possible time to purchase them, as this is when they're most expensive. For example, last October, they went down to $26.82. (Ah, capitalism).

So unless you plan on observing the sun all-year round, perhaps stick to the solar glasses for now and buy them in a few months when they're cheap so you're ready for the next one.

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For your existing binoculars

DayStar binocular solar filters: $20.99 at BHPhoto

If you don't want to pay the inflated price for the solar binoculars, or you already have a pair of binoculars, these DayStar filters are a great option that fit on the front of the objective lenses to protect both your eyes and the lenses.

They come in various sizes, although they aren't suitable for objective lenses under 50mm.

While BHPhoto doesn't give exact shipping dates, you could still get them before the eclipse.

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View Deal

Portable smart telescope with solar filter

Dwarflab Dwarf Mini: $419 at Amazon

For the tech-nerds who want to take photos or a time-lapse of the eclipse, the Dwarf Mini is an affordable and portable smart telescope that comes with a solar filter and provides effortless solar imaging.

It was cheaper at the beginning of July, but it's still a great investment that you can use day and night all year round, so we wouldn't let the higher price put you off. Plus, it's still much more affordable than most, if not all, other smart telescopes.

Prime members can get same-day delivery (depending on location).

Read our full Dwarf Mini review

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View Deal

Best smart telescope

ZWO Seestar S30 Pro: $699 at BHPhoto

Now feels like the right time to grab a smart telescope, we reckon you can't get better than the ZWO SeeStar S30 Pro, and the included solar filter is ideal for capturing images or time-lapses of the eclipse. Plus, it produces absolutely stunning astro-images, too.

You can still get it before August 12 from BHPhoto, but we wouldn't wait too much longer.

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View Deal

TOPICS

Solar eclipse

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/products/optics/where-to-buy-last-minute-solar-eclipse-glasses-and-viewing-gear-before-august-12 at Aug 10, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

PLANET EARTH > GEOLOGY

SASCHA PARE, JAMES PRICE, LAURA MONDRAGÓN | AUG 7, 2026, 8:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Uberaba Geopark: A time capsule from the Late Cretaceous period nestled in Brazil's tropical savanna

Uberaba Geopark, also known as the "Land of the Giants," is a region in Brazil's Cerrado biome that preserved thousands of prehistoric fossils.

By Edited by ,

Published 7 August 2026 In Features 3 min read

Nestled within Brazil's Cerrado tropical savanna — the second-largest biome in South America, after the Amazon rainforest — Uberaba Geopark is a time capsule from the Late Cretaceous period (100.5 million to 66 million years ago).

The geopark boasts abundant, well-preserved fossils from the last chapters of the nonavian-dinosaur era, according to UNESCO, earning it the nickname the "Land of the Giants," or "Terra dos Gigantes" in Portuguese. Paleontologists have discovered more than 10,000 fossils belonging to dinosaurs, prehistoric crocodyliforms (a group encompassing living crocodiles, alligators, caimans and gharials, as well as their extinct relatives), turtles and other ancient creatures within the park's boundaries.

One of the best-known discoveries is the fossil of Uberabatitan ribeiroi, a titanosaur measuring 89 feet (27 meters) long and 33 feet (10 m) tall, according to UNESCO.

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The finds were clustered in impressive geological features, including the Serra da Galga formation and Serra Geral mountain range. These structures formed from ancient basalt flows, which came from giant volcanic eruptions that predate the breakup of the Gondwana supercontinent 180 million years ago.

The park has the ideal conditions to preserve fossils because it alternated between shallow lagoons and river systems when the dinosaurs roamed the region, meaning the animals' remains were conserved in mud when they died.

Uberaba Geopark preserved extinct crocodile relatives among other fossils.

(Image credit: Pulsar Imagens via Alamy)

Serra da Galga and Serra Geral also overlie one of the world's largest freshwater reservoirs, the Guarani aquifer, which supplies drinking water for more than 100 cities in Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay.

The Cerrado savanna, which houses the entire park, is a critical-yet-underprotected carbon sink that hosts more than 12,000 plant species and diverse animal life.

The "Land of the Giants" was added to UNESCO's list of geoparks in 2024 in recognition of the region's geological and natural heritage.

What is now the Uberaba Geopark was the birthplace of Brazil's modern livestock market, which is one of the biggest in the world. Farmers in the 19th century introduced zebu (Bos indicus) cattle from India because they are better suited to the climate in Brazil and require less food than common domesticated cattle (Bos taurus). Zebu cattle also produce lower greenhouse gas emissions than common domesticated cattle do, according to UNESCO.

Uberaba Geopark is open to visitors. There are several museums and trails to explore, including one that leads to the Vale Encantado, or "Enchanted Valley," which contains forests, waterfalls and prehistoric rock formations, according to the BBC.

Discover more incredible places, where we highlight the fantastic history and science behind some of the most dramatic landscapes on Earth.

TOPICS

incredible places

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/geology/uberaba-geopark-a-time-capsule-from-the-late-cretaceous-period-nestled-in-brazils-tropical-savanna at Aug 10, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

PLANET EARTH > CLIMATE CHANGE

HANNAH OSBORNE, JAMES PRICE, BEN TURNER | AUG 7, 2026, 7:12 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

'We're a bit late on the case, but we are on the case': Author Fred Pearce on the rise of renewables, a defused population bomb, and letting nature find its own way

Author and journalist Fred Pearce tells Live Science editor Hannah Osborne about his book "Despite it All" — looking at the changes that have taken place over the last 40 years that provide some hope that we can solve the climate crisis.

By Edited by ,

Published 2 August 2026 In Interview

MEMBER EXCLUSIVE

Climate change's impacts are being felt everywhere, from health and food security to extreme weather, sea level rise and collapsing ecosystems. World leaders have been slow to adapt to the warnings, despite an ever-growing body of evidence showing the compounding risks of greenhouse gas emissions.

But despite fossil fuels remaining the world's primary source of energy and emissions continuing to rise, there are changes afoot.

In his book "Despite it All" (Granta, 2026), author and journalist Fred Pearce looks at the shifts that have taken place over the last 40 years, highlighting how far humanity has come in the green transition. He believes this progress gives us reason to hope that we can eventually overcome the challenges we face today.

Pearce spoke with Live Science about his book, which has been shortlisted for the 2026 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize.

Fred Pearce

Fred Pearce is a London-based freelance environment journalist, reporting on global issues from more than 80 countries over more than 40 years.

Hannah Osborne: There are a lot of positive environmental stories throughout the book, including those that aren't necessarily being told. Do you think that there is a growing appetite for positive climate news now? And will it help us?

Fred Pearce: I detect a kind of desire to be told something other than it's all hopeless and there's nothing we can do. Some people are therefore saying, "Well, what can I do?" And they're very sort of personal stories about how they can contribute. But also people who think more, if you like, strategically: What can the world do, what can governments do, what, how can we influence that?

I try not to write what I think people want to read. I try to write what I want to say. And it seems to me that we do so many things so badly, whether it's managing our resources or water or handling forests or the climate, or pollution or whatever. We do things so badly that there is a great deal of scope for doing things a lot better. So, we need optimists and we need pessimists. We need pessimists to point out the problems. We need optimists to come up with some solutions or suggest where [there are] half open doors that we can push open.

I wrote this book in that kind of spirit to say "Look, yes, things are bad, yes, I'm not denying that they're bad, but there's an awful lot that we can do about it and in some cases are doing about it." That then divides into whether we're talking about human activity, our technical solutions to climate change. Tech fixes are good, not bad, which is something that can be a hard sell in the environment community sometimes, so I want to stress that.

I went to the Earth Summit 30 years ago where they agreed [upon] the original climate change convention. Back then they said we [need to] prevent dangerous climate change, but they really didn't know much about how to do it. Wind turbines were just, you know, a few masts on a hill in California. Nobody was dealing much in solar power because it was just so expensive. It had been developed for powering satellites and electric cars. Nobody was talking about [it].

We have made quite a lot of progress and it's not fast enough and CO_2 emissions are stable, they're not going down. We need to do a hell of a lot more and we may have passed climate tipping points. I'm not denying any of that, but rather than throwing up our hands or saying it's hopeless, let's get on with the tech, let's also recognize that nature is very good at recovering. You destroy a forest, a rainforest, it doesn't mean that it's destroyed forever. It will, given the chance, come back if we give it room. So let's give forests room to recover.

In large parts of the world it's already happening — in Europe, even in North America. Agricultural land is being abandoned, and when it's abandoned nature comes back and not necessarily in the sort of ways that we might think. But nature does come back, stuff regrows. We can see how evolution is being kickstarted, if you like, by the chaos that we're creating. That's not to say we shouldn't stop creating the chaos, but we can see how nature recovers.

These are things that we can recognize and respond to; giving nature room to recover, rewilding projects, therefore I'm all in favor of [them]. We're not rewilding where we're trying to garden nature to get back to some sort of perfected past, a pristine system where we thought that everything was great — pre-industrial revolution or before Europeans arrived in North America or whatever it might be. But, we can give nature room to evolve and adapt and change. We can see that nature's doing that all the time, with or without climate change and with or without humans. Nature is constantly, if you like, remaking itself.

I'm not saying nature always comes back in ways that we approve of. Let's recognize the distinction between our sort of slightly romanticized idea of what nature should be and what nature actually is.

HO: You talk about rewilding and letting nature take its course, but how do humans fit in with this? Can we adapt our own perceptions of what nature is allowed and what's not?

FP: I think we can probably forget about what's allowed and what's not. Nature will do what it wants to do. We pride ourselves on our ability to garden nature in a way, or manage ecosystems. We're not really very good at it. Nature will very often take over and do what it wants to do.

Some of the world's biggest rewilding projects have gone quite badly wrong because we haven't quite thought it through. The one I'm thinking of really is the large project in the Netherlands where they're trying to sort of recreate ancient European ecosystems and they ended up with mass deaths of animals because their conception of the ecosystem didn't quite figure out. They then largely abandoned the project because they didn't like to see large numbers of animals dying.

A hardline rewilder would say let nature take its course. I see the case for that, and often I would support that, but we have our own sensibilities and our own concerns and we are living in a world where we are very much in charge of what's going on. So while I'm in favor of standing back and letting nature take its course, we have our own sensibilities, and it's not wrong for us to want to intervene sometimes.

The UN International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994.

(Image credit: Getty Images)

HO: There's a chapter on human population and fertility rates, and how this is very much a climate change story as well. We're now seeing a lot of the rhetoric around this, and rights being stripped back and taken away. What's it like for you, having seen the changes from the UN International Conference on Population in Mexico in the 80s, to Cairo in the 90s to now?

FP: It's an extraordinary story. I've been working on these issues for 40 years now so I've seen a number of changes. Some of the changes I've seen are how technical fixes somehow became a reality when they seemed very distant a while ago.

But our perceptions change too on many things. We are, in many ways, more attuned to environmental issues now than we were 30 or 40 years ago. One of the big changes that I've seen is the notion of the population bomb, which for much of the 20th century was seen as the number one issue. People would say, "Well, there's no point in fixing the climate, there's no point in reducing our pollution because there are more and more people on the planet, and we're kind of doomed for that reason."

Well, it hasn't [happened]. When I went to my first international conference, which was the UN Population Conference in Mexico City in 1984, that was all the rage. They gave the UN Population prize to the mastermind of China's one child policy, which — in terms of human rights and what I would regard as acceptable human behavior — was dreadful. But such was the concern about population issues that they wanted to give a prize to the operator of that program.

A lot has changed. A feminist agenda, if I could put it that way, and I would say that approvingly, has taken over in reproductive politics. I saw it at a UN population conference in Cairo in 1994, 10 years after the Mexico event, that we need to assert reproductive rights. Many environmentalists said that's a cop out. It was all "it's feminist perspective, but it's dooming us."

Well, it didn't, because what we found was that by and large, women wanted to have smaller families because their children got to grow up. Medical improvements meant that you didn't have to have four or five children to secure the next generation. Two would usually do, sometimes you just wanted one. Women wanted to have lives outside the home. The population people seemed to be a bit surprised by that.

The environmental agenda was a very male-dominated one for a long time. So that came as a bit of a surprise, but the net result is that we've halved our fertility rates. They're more or less down to replacement levels [of reproduction] now globally.

I'm not just talking about Europe or North America. I'm talking about almost everywhere except Africa, and African levels have come down. Sometimes they're coming down to super low levels, so that people are now talking about not having enough babies and how we can encourage people to have babies. There are parts of the world where we're down to one child per woman and even a bit less.

My argument is that we need to carry on. Not take a sort of Elon Musk approach [or] send the women back to the home and [do] reproduction and that's what their job is. We need to complete the feminist revolution so that women have more rights, can make better choices, and indeed couples can make more and better choices about the family size that they want. We can arrange things so that it is possible to have children and a career, or make it easier to do that, and at that point probably reproduction levels will come back up.

What I'm really saying is that the agenda is now vastly different from what it was as recently as the 1980s and, and into the 1990s. The population bomb is being defused, to put it simply, there's a residual momentum effect which means that our numbers will carry on going up a bit. Sure, that creates strains on the planet, but we're not now talking about double the world population every 30 years, which is what was being talked about back in the mid 20th century. It's tailing off.

We now have, if you like, a consumption bomb more than a population bomb. The global issue is consumption in the rich world, and that's what's stressing the planet now — not too many babies in poor parts of the world.

It's important to level up, but also level down from the obscene riches that we see among a small number of individuals

HO: Inequality between the super rich and people in developing countries is becoming more and more stark. How do we bridge the gap to make sure there's a reasonable living standard for regular people without a huge cost to the environment?

FP: The truth is, and the numbers have been done by a number of different people, a reasonable standard of living for everybody on the planet is perfectly feasible without destroying the planet.

We need to do some things better, we need to have better technology, but for me, right up there with climate change is an issue of global inequality. When I was young, it was taken [that] inequalities were diminishing and it was taken almost as read that they would carry on diminishing, and a lot of aid policies were directed towards that. That's kind of disappeared since the sort of Reaganomics of the 1980s, all the changes in the finance system and perhaps the fall of the Berlin Wall, which meant that the sort of socialist or, or equality-based agendas collapsed politically.

We're now finding increased inequality, and that, it seems to me, is a threat to the lives of millions and billions of humans, but also to global stability and our ability perhaps to manage.

Serious global issues like climate change and many others are all undermined by the political stresses and economic stresses created by rising inequality. I see them going together.

It's also clear that it's important to level up, but also level down from the obscene riches that we see among a small number of individuals, who seem to be accumulating a greater share of the world's wealth, whether we're talking about dollars or natural resources.

HO: You have a whole chapter on renewables and how they're outpacing fossil fuels. They're the cheaper alternative. How do you see the political opposition to clean energy panning out over the next five to 10 years?

FP: It's fizzling out. It's a weird political backlash and yes, any big social trend or economic trend, they all have backlashes and it feels to me like this is it. What we see in the real world is that the U.S. — not just the U.S., but principally the U.S. — are in a state of near denial about climate and they're wanting to go back to fossil fuels.

In the rest of the world, if you look at it in terms of geopolitics of [the] U.S. versus China, then the U.S. is pushing this rather old agenda of fossil fuels, and China is absolutely going to reap the benefits in many, many ways in its drive towards renewables. China has been a really bad story in the past with its coal burning — and it's still building a few coal-fired power stations. But the really big story is how China has been principally responsible for bringing down the costs of renewable energy, particularly solar power.

You can now go to the most remote corners of rural Africa and you find people putting up their solar panels to recharge car batteries so that they can run their lights in the evening or whatever it is. And then you've got megacities operating using increasing amounts of solar power. India is getting on the bandwagon as well. It's got the fastest growing solar energy economy in the world.

In the real world, renewable [energy] is mostly cheaper than fossil fuels. It is also quicker to install, you don't have to build a huge power station, you can do it in bits and pieces, bolt bits on.

Yes, there are grid issues and they need to be addressed, and there are limits on operating. There are challenges, but renewables are just growing so fast, and it is growing so fast because it is so cheap.

And it's become so cheap, to put it very simply, because the Chinese 20 or 30 years ago decided this is what's going to happen. While everybody else was sort of talking about it and fussing about it and doing it in research labs, the Chinese kind of got to grips with it. I remember back in the 1990s talking about people who were going into China and coming back and telling me stories about how the Chinese are really serious about renewable energy. To be honest, I didn't quite believe them, but they were right, and 30 years on, the world is living with the benefits. That's true whether you're talking about Europe or rural Africa or big cities in Asia or wherever. It's coming.

There will be different solutions in different places and there are undoubtedly things that are harder to do than, you know, running our national grids on renewable energy, which is becoming really quite easy and something that everybody wants to do. The cement industries, fertilizers perhaps, some of these industries will take some more technical innovation. But it's happening, these are technical fixes that are working in the real world. Will we do it in time? Well, we're a bit late on the case, but we are on the case.

A large data center being built in Vernon, California.

(Image credit: Myung J. Chun/Getty Images)

HO: We're now seeing a massive rise in AI data centers as well. Is this bad tech, shall we say?

FP: It's a serious issue. Partly because they're growing so fast — they can't just plug into the grid because the grid really can't deliver, so these companies are developing their own energy systems. Even in the U.S. they are very often renewable systems because they're cheaper. If you've got a data center out in Texas, then you're going to use wind power or solar power because it's cheaper and you're in control of it.

I suppose we reach a point where [we have to decide], do we want to reduce our use of energy or have almost as much energy as we want, but just green it and green it very fast. It is true that if all the renewable investment is going into electricity for data centers, that leaves less investment for other sectors of the economy, so I'm sure there are trade-offs, and I'm not saying that we should embrace data centers. But they can be a driving force for adoption of different forms of energy, renewable energy, and for perhaps changes in the grid systems as well.

I think we can have both. I think we need to have both because we're probably not going to stop the data engines, so we've got to find ways of greening them. There are issues and there are challenges ahead, and I don't want to diminish any of those, but you know, let's, let's be hopeful.

The title of the book uses the word hopeful rather than optimist because I don't want to sound Panglossian, but I do want to inject some hope.

HO: When you started writing the book, what did you hope people would take from it, and did that change after you'd finished?

FP: Well it kind of evolved. It began as an idea to sort of [be a] retrospective of my reporting, and then the publisher said, "Well, the story changes rather a lot along the way, so rather than just showcasing your reporting over 40 years, why don't you showcase the change, and be hopeful in the context of how things have changed over the last 40 years?"

That was [the] kind of starting point, and we sharpened up on it, as we went along it did become "Despite It All" and you know, the title is important, and not diminishing the "All." There's a lot of bad stuff out there, but despite it all we can have hope and we can find, develop and demand solutions.

HO: Did you find anything during the process of writing the book that surprised you?

FP: As I say, it started as a sort of retrospective project and going through it, [there were places I went years ago] and it did look bad, then I checked up on what had happened over the intervening years and suddenly things looked a lot better.

I went to Alaska and saw how the conflicts over managing caribou herds and the huge migrations that go on and it felt like that was doomed. I was talking to people who were hunting the animals and they were trying to protect them because they wanted to hunt them, therefore they wanted them still to be there, which is kind of counterintuitive for many environmentalists, but you know, they were the best defenders of the caribou because they ate them.

But it felt doomed, and yet 20 years later I checked out the numbers and the population of that herd has doubled and tripled. So stuff does happen and I suppose my surprise was how much good change I found when I looked into it further. Maybe that's me being better at looking for good news stories. I've written quite a lot of "bad news" books over the years and done a lot of "bad news" journalism over the years, so I certainly don't discount that. But if you step back and you think, well did good stuff happen? Well, yeah, sometimes it did.

The bison herds are coming back on the plains of parts of North America, if you go to Montana. The ranches are disappearing and big areas are being set aside for bison, and I've been seeing how farmland in parts of southern and eastern Europe has been abandoned over the years. It's not necessarily good news that we're abandoning farmland, but again, the way that nature comes back and woodlands are growing, there are more forests in Europe than there have been for probably centuries.

There's a lot of bad stuff to say. But it does seem to me that we have to not just cling onto, but embrace good stuff and try [to] take it forward.

Something I really hadn't thought about till I went back was what were the big issues in the 1980s, 1970s when I started out. Well, all our industrial rivers in Britain were filthy. Now our industrial rivers are relatively clean. It's our agricultural rivers that are filthy, so, I mean, there's been a big change there.

Nobody has to talk much about the ozone layer now. That was the number one issue in the mid 1980s, and the absolutely terrifying prospect if we hadn't fixed that. But it's been fixed.

We banned the chemicals that were doing it.

Remember acid rain, lead in petrol. They were hot topics, headline news, part of the rise of the environmental agenda in the 1980s — and they're the ones that we don't have to talk about anymore.

Now we're talking about climate change. I think there are other things coming up. I think the issue of nitrogen pollution is a fast growing one, and we need technical solutions to that.

The green revolution of crops, the high-yielding crops, which got us out of a cycle of ever worsening hunger and famines in the mid 20 century. That was a solution which created new problems. Those crops grew very well, but they required large amounts of inputs, including water, and water is now a growing issue — finding enough irrigation water, but also fertilizer and other agrichemicals. We're now reaping some of the bad effects of that, and we need to solve that. Scientists I know are working on, if you like, high-yielding crops that don't require so much fertilizer and don't require so much water.

It's doable because as I think I said at the start, we do a lot of things really very badly, but that does give us a lot of scope to do things a lot better, so let's get on with it.

Disclaimer

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

Granta Books

Despite It All

$16.96 at amazon.com

In "Despite it All," Fred Pearce looks at the positive environmental changes that have taken place over the last four decades, from the defused population bomb to the unstoppable rise of renewables. While acknowledging there is still an enormous amount of work to prevent the worst impacts of climate change, Pearce shows there is hope for the future — HO

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/were-a-bit-late-on-the-case-but-we-are-on-the-case-author-fred-pearce-on-the-rise-of-renewables-a-defused-population-bomb-and-letting-nature-find-its-own-way at Aug 10, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

PLANET EARTH > RIVERS & OCEANS

SASCHA PARE, LAURA MONDRAGÓN, BEN TURNER | AUG 7, 2026, 7:04 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

'It would be a disaster': Ammunition for war and surging water withdrawals are putting the Caspian Sea ‪on the brink of collapse

Live Science spoke with professor of civil and environmental engineering Amir AghaKouchak about the reasons behind the Caspian Sea's stark decline over the past three decades.

By Edited by ,

Published 6 August 2026 In Interview

MEMBER EXCLUSIVE

The Caspian Sea, the world's largest inland body of water, is in major trouble. Since the mid-1990s, this saline lake, located between Europe and Asia, has lost an area nearly the size of Sicily. But until now, it wasn't clear why.

Researchers finally provided answers in a study published June 5 in the journal Earth's Future. Using ground- and satellite-based observations, they connected falling water levels to a drastic drop in river inputs from Iran, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Russia, all of which border the Caspian Sea.

The team particularly highlighted losses from Russia's Volga River, the longest river in Europe, which supplies roughly 80% of the Caspian's inflow.

To find out why the Volga is discharging less water into the Caspian Sea now than it did 30 years ago, we spoke with Amir AghaKouchak, a co-author of the study and professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine.

AghaKouchak, who directs UC Irvine's Center for Hydrometeorology and Remote Sensing, explained why river inputs have dropped and how decades of water withdrawals have put the Caspian Sea on a path to collapse. He also touched on a solution to this crisis — and revealed why Russia's hunger for ammunition to attack Ukraine is making it harder to save the Caspian Sea.

Amir AghaKouchak

Amir AghaKouchak is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine.

Sascha Pare: Falling water levels in the Caspian Sea have been attributed to natural variability, and more recently, there's been a focus on climate change and increased evaporation due to rising temperatures. But what did the results of your study show?

Amir AghaKouchak: People quickly jump to conclusions about climate change. Of course, that is important, but it cannot explain the change that we have observed. Over the last 30 years, water levels in the Caspian Sea have shrunk by around 2 meters [6.5 feet] or so. Just to put things in perspective, this translates to about 24,000 square kilometers [9,300 square miles] of sea area loss — about 5%. When we look at drivers, we notice that rainfall hasn't changed significantly over the lake and upstream, so the decline cannot be explained simply by changes in rain.

Evaporation has increased, so it explains maybe about one-third of the change. There is less water in the lake, and that indicates there's probably some water lost along the way. We don't have a lot of human-related data ‪—‬ for example, water withdrawal for irrigation or groundwater wells. That area is very difficult; the countries are not open to sharing data. A lot of our results are based on looking at proxies. Our interpretation is that temperature caused about 30% of the change and the rest is probably because of human activities.

SP: Which human activities does your research suggest are responsible for the Caspian Sea's decline?

AA: Several of the countries on the Caspian Sea have built large dams — Russia, for example. They are all desperate for hydropower. All of the countries around the lake [have also built infrastructure to supply agriculture], and one reason is that they want to create jobs and improve the local economy. Water demand is increasing in all those countries around the Caspian Sea. It's not surprising to see lakes drying or groundwater levels falling.

It's hard to find data about how much water countries are using; they keep data very private, especially places like Russia. We don't have detailed information, but the Volga-Don Canal in Russia is one of the projects that is contributing to this crisis. [Editor's note: The Volga-Don Canal is a ship canal that connects the Volga and Don rivers at their closest points.]

Opened in 1952, the Volga-Don Canal connects the Volga, which flows into the Caspian Sea, and the Don, which empties into the Sea of Azov (a northern extension of the Black Sea).

(Image credit: Gaika102 via Getty Images)

But we cannot blame this whole thing on that. We have to be careful with our language; we can't say one project is responsible. Most likely, this is the collective impact of many different small withdrawals from here and there, overall contributing to a significant decline in the Volga River outflow into the lake. In the paper, we have different rivers, but the Volga dominates because it's the largest river. The Volga has a higher impact than all the other rivers combined. There are lots of demands along that river basin.

SP: Did you expect human activities to play such a big role, or were you surprised?

AA: We did not have any expectations at the beginning. In fact, when we started this project, I reached out to a lot of colleagues from neighboring countries around the Caspian Sea. We didn't want to do it on our own, sitting in California, looking at another area of the world, without having local people involved. If you look at the co-authors, you see people from Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan — so, we have local experts. We thought this was really important to have those perspectives. I didn't want to reflect the opinions of only one research group. What we have here is the collective opinion of people who have not met in person; we only exchanged emails to look at the results, and then we came up with those conclusions.

We do have a Russian involved, but not from an official Russian institution. I thought this was really important, because there's more back-and-forth [with a large group of people]. If two people have to convince themselves of an idea, it's much easier than with 20. Also, we brought in people from other countries who had projects in the area; for example, there is one group from Finland and another group from Germany. We tried to come up with something that this large group of people could agree on. It was not easy, but it worked out.

The Volga River supplies roughly 80% of the Caspian Sea's inflow, but huge water demands have decreased its flow.

(Image credit: ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO )

SP: What is the worst-case future scenario for the Caspian Sea if shoreline countries fail to decrease their water demands?

AA: My concern is that, in the same general area, we have the Aral Sea, which is now about 5% to 10% of what it used to be, and Lake Urmia, in northwest Iran, that has also shrunk really fast and is now very small, with low levels of ecological activity. So we have two smaller lakes in a very similar climate that, from an ecological perspective, are dead. Because we have seen those degrade, we have to consider that this is the worst-case scenario for the Caspian Sea, too.

The Caspian Sea is much, much bigger. I hope it doesn't happen, but it's on the same path. Again, it's much larger, so it would probably take 100 years [to shrink as much as the Aral Sea and Lake Urmia], even with the current trend. But because we have seen those lakes shrink really fast, it deserves attention. Due to the size of this lake, the potential impacts will be huge. Even if 20% of the Caspian Sea dries out, the consequences will be very significant. It would be a disaster.

SP: You mentioned that drying lakes can become ecologically "dead." What other impacts could the Caspian Sea's falling water levels have on the surrounding landscape and people?

AA: The lake's retreat will expose the lake bed, and because it's saline, you have all kinds of minerals that will be exposed. With the next strong wind, they will go into the air. The health impacts include respiratory diseases, and even eye diseases, that are linked to salt minerals in the atmosphere. Those are the immediate consequences. Additionally, those minerals can travel long distances. In general, salt deposition on agricultural land reduces productivity. It takes a while, but if those lands are exposed for a long time, this will have an impact on the agricultural sector in those areas, which means potential food security issues. We don't exactly know what those materials are on the lake bed, so it's hard to know precisely what the consequences will be.

There is also serious shipping happening in this region. Right now, most of the shrinking is happening in the Caspian Sea's northern part, which is shallower [than the rest of the lake]. The drop in water levels is about 2 meters, and you can imagine that if you have a port and water levels drop more, you won't be able to operate. You'll need to extend your shipping routes southward; you'll need to invest and spend a lot of money to use other ports and docking sites. We have evidence of that around the Aral Sea and also Lake Urmia. There used to be these docking sites and ports, but those are now far away from the water.

SP: What must bordering countries do to save the Caspian Sea and prevent these negative effects?

AA: Demand management is absolutely critical. Demand management doesn't get a lot of attention, because unlike big projects that make the news, management means you have to cut things and do things that people don't notice. Some people argue that politicians don't show a lot of interest in demand management, but it's something that we have control over. The technological opportunities are there.

But when you look at that area, there is a big war ‪—‬ so probably it's not the priority to invest in management. There are a lot of things that we don't talk about in the paper that are relevant. I recently learned through discussions with people from the region — this is something that came to us from co-authors and collaborators — that many countries in that area grow cotton, which uses a lot of water. It has a lot of applications, but apparently, one of them is military. Cotton is used to produce ammunition. Russia needs a lot of ammunition, so not only are they growing it themselves, but they also bought neighboring reserves from Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. So now, even those countries have an incentive to grow more cotton. This is driving more irrigation, more groundwater extraction, more surface water depletion, and probably more impacts on the Caspian Sea.

Disclaimer

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

TOPICS

water

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/rivers-oceans/it-would-be-a-disaster-ammunition-for-war-and-surging-water-withdrawals-are-putting-the-caspian-sea-on-the-brink-of-collapse at Aug 10, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

CHEMISTRY

OLIVIA MAULE, LAURA GEGGEL, LAURA MONDRAGÓN | AUG 7, 2026, 7:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

New recyclable yarn is as stretchy as spandex and could help tackle fashion's plastic waste problem

A new yarn combines the stretch of spandex with the recyclability of a single plastic, offering a potential path toward more sustainable clothing.

By Edited by ,

Published 7 August 2026 In News

Your favorite stretchy workout clothes may be much easier to recycle one day, thanks to a new type of elastic yarn that is as strong and stretchy as today's spandex-containing fabrics.

The yarn, described in a July 25 study in the journal ACS Materials Letters, is built entirely from polyethylene, the plastic used in milk jugs and single-use grocery bags. By contrast, most of today's stretchy fabrics blend spandex, a bouncy-but-weak polyurethane fiber, with a tougher fiber like polyester or nylon.

That combination gives clothes their stretch and durability. But because the fibers are chemically different, it's difficult and costly to separate them for recycling, and chemicals used to break down the fabrics are toxic. The result is that almost none of this material is recycled. An estimated 80% of textiles sold in the U.S. contain spandex, and most end up incinerated or in a landfill, study co-author Svetlana Boriskina, a research scientist in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, said in a statement.

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To solve that problem, the MIT team turned to polyethylene, one of the world's most widely recycled plastics. For the yarn's stretchy core, the researchers created a soft, springy version of polyethylene akin to a rubber band. Around that core, they wound a second, stiffer polyethylene fiber, more like a fishing line, coiling it tightly the way a spring or a twisted phone cord is coiled. Because both materials come from the same plastic family, they don't need to be separated before they're recycled.

In laboratory tests, the researchers melted a spool of the yarn and respun it into new yarn 10 separate times. Each time, they tested its strength, and the recycled yarn performed just as well as the original in every case. In head-to-head tests, the new yarn even outperformed commercial spandex-polyester yarn in maximum load, meaning it could bear more force before breaking, according to the study.

The team has already shown that these lightweight polyethylene fibers can be engineered for other perks, too ‪—‬ like cooling, moisture wicking and stain resistance ‪—‬ building on their earlier work spinning polyethylene into wearable fabric. Even buttons, zippers and buckles could eventually be made from compatible plastics, so a whole garment could be melted down and remade without being taken apart first.

Article Sources

Kim, S., Xu, D., Korolovych, V., Flores-Hernandez, D. R., Moriam, K., Braconnier, D. J., & Boriskina, S. V. (2026). Polyethylene-Based Thermo-Mechanically recyclable stretchable yarns for circular sustainable textiles. ACS Materials Letters. https://doi.org/10.1021/acsmaterialslett.6c00337

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/chemistry/new-recyclable-yarn-is-as-stretchy-as-spandex-and-could-help-tackle-fashions-plastic-waste-problem at Aug 10, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

TECHNOLOGY > ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

CARLY PAGE, KEUMARS AFIFI-SABET, LAURA MONDRAGÓN | AUG 7, 2026, 5:30 AM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

AI found a weakness in one of the world's most studied encryption systems — is your data under threat?

No, AI hasn't cracked the encryption protecting your bank account. But experts say Anthropic's latest research could change how tomorrow's cryptography is tested.

By Edited by ,

Published 7 August 2026 In News less than a min read

MEMBER EXCLUSIVE

Artificial intelligence (AI) has helped uncover new weaknesses in two cryptographic systems, including a simplified version of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) that underpins much of today's internet. While these headline-grabbing findings don't put anyone's passwords or bank accounts at immediate risk, experts say the research could mark the beginning of a new era in which AI becomes a powerful assistant for discovering flaws in the mathematical foundations of digital security.

In a blog post published July 28, representatives from Anthropic's Frontier Red Team said Claude Mythos Preview independently developed new cryptanalytic techniques against two different targets: a version of AES-128, one of the world's most widely used encryption algorithms, and HAWK, an experimental post-quantum digital signature scheme currently being evaluated as part of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) effort to standardize cryptography for the quantum computing age.

It's tempting to interpret this news as AI cracking one of the internet's most important encryption algorithms, but the reality is less dramatic. Nonetheless, experts say the achievement could mark the start of a new age of digital security.

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The power of encryption

AES protects huge amounts of everyday digital life, from encrypted websites and messaging apps to Wi-Fi networks and financial transactions. But the version Anthropic attacked wasn't the full AES-128 algorithm used in those systems. Instead, the researchers studied a seven-round version of AES, a deliberately weakened variant long used by cryptographers to test new attack techniques.

The full AES-128 algorithm uses 10 rounds of encryption, while Anthropic's research focused on a seven-round version. In a self-published study that has not been peer-reviewed, scientists Milad Nasr and Nicholas Carlini said Claude found a faster way to recover the encryption key from that simplified version, making the best-known attack between 200 and 800 times faster. However, the study stressed that the technique does not work against the full version of AES used to protect real-world systems.

The more significant result may instead involve HAWK. Unlike AES, which has protected data for more than two decades, HAWK is a relatively new digital signature scheme designed to resist attacks from future quantum computers. It's one of the remaining candidates in NIST's additional post-quantum signature standardization process, meaning it is still being scrutinized by researchers before its widespread deployment.

This development illustrates how AI can act as a powerful accelerator in cryptanalysis.

Thomas Espitau, head of research at PQShield

In a separate study, Anthropic scientists Zygimantas Straznickas and Stephen A. Weis found that Claude spotted a mathematical property that researchers hadn't previously exploited. Combined with existing attack techniques, this property made it much easier to recover HAWK's secret key.

Thomas Espitau ‪—‬ head of research at PQShield, a cybersecurity company that specializes in post-quantum cryptography, and a cryptographer who has published research on HAWK ‪—‬ described the work as "one of the most, if not the most significant, cryptanalytic result of the year."

"To say it plainly, this is great work, and it is exactly what the NIST process is designed to produce," Espitau told Live Science. "Candidate schemes exist to be attacked before they are deployed, not after."

Espitau said the attack combined previously known techniques with one missing mathematical insight that Claude identified, substantially reducing HAWK's estimated security margin. He believes the work demonstrates how AI could increasingly help researchers evaluate the strength of cryptographic systems before they are adopted.

"This development illustrates how AI can act as a powerful accelerator in cryptanalysis," he said. "Claude Mythos Preview identified the exploitation of the sign-flip symmetry, providing the final piece of a puzzle that the research community had been assembling."

Building defensive measures

However, not everyone thinks the announcement means AI suddenly outsmarted human cryptographers.

"There is nothing you need to change," Roberta Faux, head of cryptography at cybersecurity and quantum encryption company Arqit, told Live Science. "Both Anthropic and the outside cryptographers agree that you don't need to change your key sizes or switch your cryptography."

Instead, Faux said the bigger story is AI's ability to apply expert-level cryptanalysis across thousands of algorithms that relatively few researchers have had time to examine.

"The interesting prospect is not a model outdueling the world's best lattice theorist on one problem but a model applying solid, roughly expert-level analysis at scale to the several thousand ciphers nobody ever had the human-hours to examine," she said.

Faux also cautioned against attributing the HAWK breakthrough solely to AI.

"The HAWK attack used no exotic ingredients; it simply competently assembled tools that were already lying around," she said. "A post-quantum candidate is seriously scrutinized by maybe a few dozen people on the planet, so beating two years of review mostly reveals how thin that layer of review is."

For consumers, the immediate implications are reassuring. The encryption protecting online banking, shopping, messaging and cloud storage has not suddenly become obsolete. But for the researchers designing the next generation of cryptography, Anthropic's work hints that AI could soon help cryptographers test tomorrow's encryption schemes more quickly and more thoroughly than has previously been possible.

TOPICS

news analyses

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/ai-found-a-weakness-in-one-of-the-worlds-most-studied-encryption-systems-is-your-data-under-threat at Aug 10, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

August 6, 2026

- Crystal made from 13-sided 'einstein' shape bends light in ways nobody imagined

- FDA approves first mRNA vaccine for seasonal flu

- First photos of SpaceX lunar rocket crash show blackened hole torn into the moon's surface

PHYSICS & MATHEMATICS

LARISSA G. CAPELLA, BRANDON SPECKTOR, LAURA MONDRAGÓN | AUG 6, 2026, 3:03 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

Crystal made from 13-sided 'einstein' shape bends light in ways nobody imagined

Scientists carved a 13-sided shape called an "einstein" into a chip and discovered that it steers light in ways no other crystal does.

By Edited by ,

Published 6 August 2026 In News 4 min read

Physicists have built a crystal out of an "einstein" tile — an elusive shape mathematicians spent years searching for — and found that it bends light in a way no ordinary crystal can.

In the new study, published July 29 in the journal Nature Communications, researchers arranged this never-repeating tile shape into a pattern of nanoscale holes. This structure, known as a photonic crystal, is designed to control the way light moves through it. When the team shined a laser at it, the crystal produced a swirling, pinwheel-shaped scattering pattern that responded differently depending on which direction the incoming light was spinning.

The tile solves what mathematicians call the "einstein problem," a decades-old puzzle asking whether a single shape could cover a flat surface endlessly without ever repeating its pattern. (The name is a pun on "ein stein," German for "one stone," not a reference to Albert Einstein).

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In the 1970s, mathematician Roger Penrose showed that two different shapes, used together like floor tiles, could cover a surface without the pattern ever repeating. Then, in 2023, geometry enthusiast David Smith and collaborators finally found one: a 13-sided shape that they nicknamed the "Smith hat"

Yuto Moritake, an experimental physicist at the University of Tokyo, first came across the hat tile in a popular science book in 2024. Moritake specializes in photonic crystals — materials patterned with repeating structures (often much thinner than a human hair) that bend and steer light for uses like lasers and optical sensors. Almost all photonic crystals rely on patterns that repeat in a regular grid. Moritake wondered what would happen if he swapped that repetition for the hat tile's never-repeating arrangement.

"I decided to include it in our photonic crystal structure," Moritake told Live Science, describing it as the starting point for the project.

To build the structure, Moritake and his colleagues used two precision manufacturing techniques, called electron beam lithography and etching, to punch hundreds of thousands of tiny holes — each just 100 nanometers in radius, or roughly 500 times thinner than a human hair — into a thin film of silicon nitride. This ceramic material is commonly used in computer chips. The holes were arranged according to the hat tile's pattern, covering a chip roughly half a millimeter across ‪—‬ about the width of a pencil tip.

When the team shined a laser at the finished chip, the light scattered, or diffracted, into a pinwheel-shaped pattern that appeared on a screen. Moritake first photographed the colorful pattern using his iPhone's long-exposure mode. The setting captured faint light over several seconds. Then, he switched to specialized cameras for more precise measurements.

The pattern was made up of well-defined bright spots, called Bragg peaks, that stayed in the same positions no matter where on the chip the laser hit. That consistency confirmed that the structure had the kind of long-range, predictable order found in a quasicrystal — a class of material whose atoms (or, in this case, holes) follow an orderly pattern that never repeats, unlike the repeating grids found in ordinary crystals such as table salt or diamonds.

Because the hat tile itself has no mirror symmetry — meaning it doesn't look the same as its own reflection, similar to how a left hand differs from a right hand — the scattering pattern it produced was also asymmetrical in this way. Scientists call this property chirality.

That chirality led to the study's biggest surprise. Light can be circularly polarized, meaning it spins either clockwise or counterclockwise as it travels, like a corkscrew. When Moritake tested the structure with both types of spinning light, he found a subtle difference in how each direction scattered off the crystal. Ordinary quasicrystals, which do have mirror symmetry, cannot produce this kind of effect.

"This structure can have some kind of circular polarization dependence," Moritake said, adding that the effect — made only possible by the tile’s asymmetry — was not something he initially expected to find .

Now, Moritake wants to apply this never-repeating pattern to control light traveling inside a photonic chip, rather than light that simply bounces off its surface. This could lead to future uses in optical communications and optical computing ‪—‬ technologies that use light instead of electricity to transmit or process information, Moritake said.

Article Sources

Moritake, Y., Takiguchi, M., Aihara, T., & Notomi, M. (2026). Chiral diffraction from aperiodic monotile structure. Nature Communications, 17(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-75023-7

See how much you know about Albert Einstein with our Albert Einstein quiz!

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/physics-mathematics/crystal-made-from-13-sided-einstein-shape-bends-light-in-ways-nobody-imagined at Aug 10, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

HEALTH > MEDICINE & DRUGS

NICOLETTA LANESE, PANDORA DEWAN, LAURA MONDRAGÓN | AUG 6, 2026, 1:54 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

FDA approves first mRNA vaccine for seasonal flu

The Food and Drug Administration's approval of an mRNA vaccine for flu comes after the agency initially refused to review the approval request for the shot.

By Edited by ,

Published 6 August 2026 In News 4 min read

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a new seasonal flu vaccine that uses mRNA as its base.

Moderna, the vaccine's maker, announced Wednesday (Aug. 5) that a vaccine advisory committee to the FDA unanimously agreed that the shot is safe and effective for preventing illness from seasonal influenza. The shot, called mFlusiva or mRNA-1010, has been approved for people ages 50 and older.

Similar to mRNA vaccines against COVID-19, the vaccine uses the genetic molecule mRNA to encode instructions for cells in the body. In this case, it prompts the cells to build hemagglutinin (HA), a protein found on the surface of influenza viruses. Flu viruses use this protein to infiltrate human cells, and it's the same protein targeted by conventional flu vaccines. Following vaccination with mFlusiva, the immune system learns to recognize the HA protein on targeted flu strains, thereby improving its ability to block the viruses from infecting cells.

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The HA protein poses a major challenge for conventional flu vaccines because it mutates very rapidly as the viruses multiply and spread — and these existing vaccines take months to manufacture. That's one reason the resulting shots aren't always a great match for the flu viruses that end up circulating in any given year. A benefit of the mRNA platform is that vaccines can be produced very quickly and thus made to better match the season's dominant strains.

mFlusiva's approval was based in part on a late-stage clinical trial involving over 40,000 people ages 50 and up who were vaccinated for the 2024-2025 Northern Hemisphere flu season. Half received the mRNA-based shot, and half received a standard dose of a conventional flu vaccine (as opposed to the higher-dose option available to older adults in the U.S.).

Of the 40,000 participants, about 970 got sick with flu, including 2% of the mRNA group and 2.8% of the standard group. That means the mRNA vaccine was 26.6% more protective than the conventional vaccine against illness from flu in this trial.

mFlusiva also offered superior protection against each of the three flu subtypes included in the vaccine. And in participants ages 65 and up, the vaccine was 27.4% more protective, overall.

More people in the mRNA group experienced side effects like injection-site pain, headache, fatigue and achiness, compared with the standard group, but these effects were mostly short-lived and mild to moderate in severity. These side effects were consistent with what was seen in earlier trials of the vaccine.

An additional trial involved a group of adults ages 65 and older and directly compared mFlusiva to an existing high-dose flu vaccine, which is approved only for older adults in the U.S. The findings suggested that the mRNA vaccine generated superior immune protection than the conventional option, based on antibody levels.

These results led the FDA advisory committee to decide that the vaccine's benefits outweigh its risks, and the agency ultimately approved it. For adults ages 50 to 64, the vaccine earned standard approval, and for adults 65 and up, it earned "accelerated approval," meaning further trials will be conducted to confirm the benefit of the shot over the high-dose option for this population.

"Flu remains a significant public health challenge, and mFLUSIVA provides an important new option for America's seniors," Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said in a statement.

The approval appears to mark a shift in the government's stance on mRNA vaccines.

Under the second Trump administration, the federal government has been broadly retracting its support for mRNA vaccines, directly canceling hundreds of millions of dollars in funds for research and development and indirectly sending a chilling effect through the mRNA field, experts previously told Live Science. Even Moderna has been pulling back from investments, citing opposition from the U.S. market. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly voiced his opposition to mRNA technology.

When Moderna initially filed for mFlusiva's approval in February, the FDA declined to review the application — but then changed its mind one week later. The exact motivation for this reversal was unclear to experts.

Disclaimer

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

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/health/medicine-drugs/fda-approves-first-mrna-vaccine-for-seasonal-flu at Aug 10, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

SPACE > SPACE EXPLORATION

BRANDON SPECKTOR, HARRY BAKER, PANDORA DEWAN, JAMES PRICE, HARRY BAKER | AUG 6, 2026, 1:22 PM EDT | VIEW ON LIVESCIENCE

First photos of SpaceX lunar rocket crash show blackened hole torn into the moon's surface

New images from South Korea's Danuri lunar orbiter reveal where a runaway SpaceX rocket part slammed into the moon on Wednesday.

By Contributions by , ,

Published 6 August 2026 In News

In the dead of night on Wednesday (Aug. 5), part of a defunct SpaceX rocket slammed into the moon at more than 5,000 mph (8,000 km/h) — and a Korean lunar satellite has just shared the first images of the aftermath.

A series of photos snapped by South Korea's Danuri lunar orbiter on Wednesday reveal a small, blackened crater at the alleged site where a used Falcon 9 upper stage crashed into the lunar surface around 2:35 a.m. ET. The crash occurred near Einstein crater, on the northwestern limb of the moon, close to the terminator zone where lunar day and night meet. The photos were shared by the Korea AeroSpace Administration on social media on Thursday (Aug. 6).

Because this region was on the sunlit side of the moon at the time, the initial flare from the crash was not visible from Earth; however, scientists at the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile reported seeing evidence of a debris plume lifting off of the lunar surface shortly after the collision, according to the CBC. (At this time, no photos of the debris plume have been released).

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A preprint study shared earlier this week predicted that the crash would create a new crater on the moon measuring roughly 90 feet (27 meters) wide and up to 16 feet (5 m) deep — a dent too small to be seen from Earth, even with a good telescope. No measurements of the newfound crater have been shared yet, but they are likely to arrive in the coming days as other lunar orbiters, such as NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and Earth-based observatories get a chance to examine the crash site.

What caused the crash?

Images from Korea’s Danuri orbiter showing the before and after views of the lunar crash site.

(Image credit: KASA)

The pesky piece of space junk that hit the moon on Wednesday is the second (or upper) stage of one of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets that launched into space on Jan. 15, 2025. It was carrying a pair of lunar landers: the Blue Ghost lander developed by private company Firefly Aerospace, which successfully touched down on the moon in March 2025; and the Hakuto-R lander developed by Japanese company ispace, which lost contact with Earth and crash-landed on the moon in June 2025.

Unlike Falcon 9's first (or lower) stages, which can return to Earth for reuse, the rocket's second stages are discarded in orbit. This rocket piece spent nearly a year drifting in an elliptical orbit around our planet before a combination of solar radiation and the moon's gravitational pull nudged it away from us, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. In May this year, independent astronomer Bill Gray first predicted the crash and when and where the collision would occur, before other experts confirmed his calculations.

The 4.4-ton (4 metric tons) rocket part is estimated to have struck the moon at roughly 5,400 mph (8,700 km/h). While many times faster than the speed of sound, that’s still much slower than the average meteoroid strike on the moon, making the crash that much harder to see.

More to come

This is not the first time that human-made objects have impacted the moon, nor will it be the last. Studying these crashes can lead to important insights about the moon’s composition.

For example, the 2009 crash of a Centaur rocket's upper stage near the moon's south pole was analyzed by NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite mission, which revealed subsurface ice in the area. As a result, the lunar south pole is now the most coveted location for missions that aim to establish a permanent human presence on the moon.

Studying human-made impacts like these will also be essential for managing the potential risks to future astronauts and missions, like the permanent moon base NASA hopes to build.

"Now that we're in an era where we're going to have more and more astronauts going back to the moon, perhaps permanently, we also want to understand how much of a risk these artificial impacts pose," Benjamin Fernando, a postdoctoral researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory and co-author of a recent study on the impact, told CBC.

"It presents a different set of hazards than say the Apollo astronauts faced on the lunar surface from the average background meteoroids that are striking the moon every day. And what we want to try and do with this event is understand both the direct [and indirect] hazards."

TOPICS

spacex

This article was downloaded from https://www.livescience.com/space/space-exploration/first-photos-of-spacex-lunar-rocket-crash-show-blackened-hole-torn-into-the-moons-surface at Aug 10, 2026 at 12:43 PM EDT.

Table of Contents

Live Science: 2026 Aug 10

August 10, 2026

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August 7, 2026

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'We're a bit late on the case, but we are on the case': Author Fred Pearce on the rise of renewables, a defused population bomb, and letting nature find its own way

'It would be a disaster': Ammunition for war and surging water withdrawals are putting the Caspian Sea ‪on the brink of collapse

New recyclable yarn is as stretchy as spandex and could help tackle fashion's plastic waste problem

AI found a weakness in one of the world's most studied encryption systems — is your data under threat?

August 6, 2026

Crystal made from 13-sided 'einstein' shape bends light in ways nobody imagined

FDA approves first mRNA vaccine for seasonal flu

First photos of SpaceX lunar rocket crash show blackened hole torn into the moon's surface