This intriguing astronaut photo shows a patch of land in Idaho that looks strikingly like a giant chessboard when viewed from space. The strange pattern comes from an environmental initiative dating back roughly 200 years.

The aerial shot shows a tract of land alongside the Priest River in the mountains of northern Idaho, around 40 miles (65 kilometers) south of the Canadian border. The closest point of interest is Whitetail Butte, a lookout point for forest fires, which is positioned on a large bend in the river (roughly halfway along the waterway in the photo).

The "chessboard" is around 5 miles (8 km) across at its widest point and contains approximately 185 squares, although not all of them are visible in this photo. Each square covers around 1.4 million square feet (130,000 square meters) — about the same size as 24 football fields.

This pattern results from a grid-based forest management initiative set up in the 1800s. Alternating squares have been cleared for their timber, leaving enough trees to sustain the forest ecosystem while new trees grow, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

New trees are then planted in the empty squares. When the trees have fully matured, the trees on alternating squares are harvested, and the cycle begins again. This photo was likely taken just a few years after the most recent harvest.

The pattern has been accentuated by snow, which has settled on top of saplings in the "empty" white squares. The checkering is also visible during the summer. However, there is much less distinction between some light and dark squares, which appear as various shades of green.

Related: See all the best images of Earth from space

This photo was taken just before sunset, so some mountainsides glow while others are covered in long shadows due to the low angle of the sun.

The Priest River, which is part of the Columbia River basin, was previously used to transport timber from this region to sawmills in other parts of Idaho and beyond. This was traditionally done by "log driving," which involved floating rafts of logs on the river's surface, often with people standing on top and using long poles to redirect the rafts and prevent them from jamming.

However, this practice was halted in the 1990s to allow for more recreational uses of the river.

The logs are now transported by road, and if you look closely, you can see the faint line of a purpose-built trucking road passing diagonally through multiple squares of the checkered forest.

The helmet was likely lost in the Battle of the Egadi Islands (also known as the Aegates Islands) in the First Punic War in 241 B.C.

In August 2024, a team of divers from the Society for the Documentation of Submerged Sites discovered the helmet, along with about 30 other metal artifacts, while investigating the area where the ancient battle occurred, according to a translated statement published Sept. 5 by the Sicilian Region, the regional government of Sicily.

"The 'Montefortino' helmet is one of the most beautiful and complete ever recovered," Francesco Paolo Scarpinato, regional councillor for cultural heritage, said in the statement.

This style of helmet was introduced to the Romans by the Celts and was a popular armor choice from the fourth century B.C. through the first century A.D. Notably, the Montefortino-style helmet has a small knob on the top where plumes were attached. It also had a projecting bill, like a modern baseball hat, and hinged cheek plates. At least six other helmets have been recovered from the Egadi Islands and are also thought to be associated with the Punic War battle.

On March 10, 241 B.C., the ancient city-state of Carthage (located in modern-day Tunis, Tunisia) and Rome engaged in the Battle of the Aegates, the Latin name for the islands off the west coast of Sicily. According to the ancient historian Polybius, although the Carthaginians outnumbered the Roman army, the Romans were better trained and defeated them. As a result, Carthage surrendered Sicily, and the First Punic War came to an end after 23 years.

Related: Skull of bear held captive to fight Roman gladiators discovered near ancient amphitheater in Serbia

Last year, a Roman "rostrum" — a naval battering ram that would have been attached to the bow of a warship — was also cleaned and studied. This revealed a new inscription linking the ram with Gaius Sulpicius Gallus, a Roman magistrate during the First Punic War.

When researchers used CT scans to investigate the roughly 30 newly discovered metal artifacts covered in rust, they identified swords, spears and javelins that they believe were used in the 241 B.C. battle. The metal objects may have ended up in the sea after a Roman ship was captured by the Carthaginians.

Several Montefortino helmets were previously discovered along with naval battering rams near the Egadi Islands. Archaeologist William Murray told Live Science in 2019 that the Carthaginian soldiers who captured a Roman ship may have jettisoned heavy equipment overboard in a vain attempt to escape the Roman navy. But another possibility, according to Murray, is that the Carthaginians employed mercenaries from Gaul and Iberia, who are also known to have worn Montefortino helmets.

"This was the most common type of helmet at that time," Jeffrey Royal, an independent archaeologist who was not involved in the new research but who has found several similar helmets from the Battle of the Aegates, told Live Science in an email. "The great thing about this one is it seems the cheek pieces were found with it; most of ours were scattered," Royal said.

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

3I/ATLAS is a roughly 7-mile-wide (11 kilometers) comet that was first spotted in early July and is zooming toward us from beyond the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars. Scientists quickly realized that the superfast object did not originate within our cosmic neighborhood. Instead, it was likely ejected from a distant star within the Milky Way and is now passing by us as it flies through the galaxy. It is unclear exactly where the comet originated, but initial findings hint that it is likely much older than the solar system.

On Aug. 27, astronomers at the Gemini South telescope in the Chilean Andes captured a detailed new photo of 3I/ATLAS, revealing the first clear look at the comet's tail. This plume of ice and dust is blown away from the comet by the solar wind, the stream of charged particles emanating from the sun. The tail is only starting to appear now, as the comet's frozen shell, or nucleus, soaks up more solar radiation, causing it to expel more particles from its icy surface. The tail will continue to grow as the comet gets closer to the sun in the coming months and will eventually become several times wider than the comet itself.

The new photo also shows a fuzzy cloud of ice and dust surrounding the comet. This cloud, known as a coma, will continue to swell as the comet is further heated by the sun. This will allow the comet to reflect more light that causes it to appear brighter in the night sky, although it will not become visible to the naked eye.

These classic cometary features are further proof that 3I/ATLAS is a natural object and not an extraterrestrial probe, which has been controversially proposed by some scientists with little to no supporting evidence.

Related: 8 strange objects that could be hiding in the outer solar system

3I/ATLAS is the third — and likely the largest — interstellar object ever discovered. It follows the past sightings of the mysterious object 'Oumuamua in 2017, which was also misidentified as a potential alien spacecraft, and Comet Borisov in 2019, which also grew a stunning tail.

The current extrasolar entity is shooting toward the sun at more than 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h) and will make a close approach to Mars next month, allowing Mars-orbiting spacecraft to get a better look at the comet and its tail, Live Science's sister site Space.com recently reported.

3I/ATLAS will reach perihelion, its closest point to the sun, on Oct. 29. But it will be on the opposite side of our home star as Earth, meaning we will lose sight of it during this time and may miss out on seeing its tail at its peak size. The comet will reach its minimum distance to Earth in December, when it will come within 170 million miles (275 million km) of our planet — around 700 times farther than Earth is from the moon — before beginning its long journey back out of the solar system.

Astronomers are racing to study the object as much as possible over the next year or so, to learn more about where it came from and how different star systems form and evolve. Recent observations from the James Webb Space Telescope hint that 3I/ATLAS has unusually high levels of water and carbon dioxide compared with other known comets. Additional photos of the comet, including a detailed shot from the Hubble Space Telescope and a colorful image from the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii, have also shed light on its composition.

Each new shot of the comet also acts as a permanent reminder of this rare cosmic encounter.

"As 3I/ATLAS speeds back into the depths of interstellar space, this [new] image is both a scientific milestone and a source of wonder," Karen Meech, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii and part of the Gemini observatories team, said in a statement. "It reminds us that our solar system is just one part of a vast and dynamic galaxy — and that even the most fleeting visitors can leave a lasting impact."

Photographers around the world pointed their cameras to the skies last night for a rare "blood moon" total lunar eclipse.

Total lunar eclipses occur when a full moon passes through Earth's darkest, innermost shadow, called the umbra. As only redder-colored light is able to penetrate our planet's atmosphere, the moon is cast in a blood-like hue that's often called a "blood moon". The U.S. was treated to a spectacular "blood moon" in March, but this time it was only visible in Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia.

Earth's natural satellite spent about 82 minutes totally covered by our planet's shadow on Sunday night into Monday morning (Sep. 7 to 8) in what was the longest total lunar eclipse since 2022. If you feel like you missed out, Live Science has rounded up some stunning snaps of the event.

In Beijing, China, photographer Sheng Jiapeng snapped a stunning shot of the blood moon rising above the capital's Olympic Park Observation Tower.

During a lunar eclipse, the moon travels behind Earth relative to the position of the sun, making it the opposite of a solar eclipse.

Related: Full moons of 2025: When is the next full moon?

Photographer Nicolas Economou caught the moon partially in shadow above residential buildings in the city of Eindhoven in the Netherlands.

The moon remains visible during a lunar eclipse because some of the sun's light refracts through Earth's atmosphere and hits the moon before reflecting back to the surface of Earth facing the moon.

In Germany, photographer Emmanuele Contini captured the "blood moon" rising behind a spire on Berlin's Oberbaumbruecke bridge.

The moon appears red because particles in Earth's atmosphere are scattering the sun's blue and other short-wavelength light. This leaves the longer-wavelength oranges and reds to pass through and reach the moon.

Photographer Nicolas Koutsokostas took this photo of the "blood moon" beside an air traffic control tower at Athens Airport in Greece.

A lunar eclipse like this only occurs when the moon is perfectly aligned behind our planet, relative to the sun. When the alignment is slightly off, and the sun's light can still directly hit some of the moon, it's a partial eclipse. When the alignment is a little further off, we see a regular full moon reflecting the sun's light back at us — as is the case most months.

The next total lunar eclipse will be on March 3, 2026, according to NASA. The March 2026 "blood moon" will be visible over the Americas, as well as the Pacific Islands, Asia and Australia.

This 5,000-year-old silver figurine depicts a bull kneeling in a human-like pose and holding a spouted vessel. It was made in southern Mesopotamia by someone from the Proto-Elamite culture, the oldest civilization in Iran, and was likely used in a ritual or ceremony.

The bull is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. It stands 6.4 inches (16.3 centimeters) tall and was made from 98.5% pure silver, according to a 1970 study by then-Met conservator Kate Lefferts. Inside the hollow figurine, Lefferts found five limestone pebbles, which were likely included by the artist to create a rattling sound. Fiber adhered to the statue was made from animal yarn.

In a 1970 study, Donald Hansen, then a fine arts professor at New York University, described the figurine as a remarkable blend of part-human and part-animal characteristics. The bovine head, complete with curved horns, rests atop human-like shoulders, and the creature is clothed in a decorated robe that covers its kneeling legs. The bull's outstretched arms are human-like but end in hooves that hold a vessel. The figurine does not have a flat base, Hansen noted, which means it could not have stood on its own on a hard surface.

Related: Haniwa Dancers: 1,500-year-old ghostly figurines thought to hold the souls of the dead

The figurine was made in Elam, an ancient region that corresponds to modern-day southwestern Iran. This area was the seat of the Proto-Elamite, an early Near East civilization in the Copper Age. The Proto-Elamites invented cylinder seals — cylinders that were engraved with figural scenes and were used for administrative purposes — many of which depict animals in human-like poses. The Kneeling Bull was likely made in this Proto-Elamite tradition of creating mythical-but-realistic-looking animal-human hybrids.

It is unclear why someone decided to make the Kneeling Bull five millennia ago. But the limestone pebbles inside the statuette and the fabric adhering to it suggest it was used in a ritual or ceremony, according to Hansen. It may have even been a "foundation figurine." These items were intentionally buried during the construction of Proto-Elamite temples to symbolically mark sacred ground. If the Kneeling Bull was created as a foundation figurine, it was never meant to be seen again.

The answer has to do with opposites. Scientists have found that the universe exists because it began with a slight imbalance between matter and antimatter. Particles of matter — that is, all of the electrons, protons and neutrons in the atoms and molecules of regular stuff — differ from particles of antimatter, which carry the opposite electric charge but are similar in many ways.

Matter and antimatter do not get along. When their particles collide, they annihilate each other in an intense burst of gamma-rays. Fortunately, antimatter is now extremely rare. Although antimatter had a foundational role in the formation of the universe, the fact that there is now so little of it is one of cosmology's great mysteries.

Antimatter was predicted by English physicist Paul Dirac almost 100 years ago as part of his pioneering work on quantum mechanics, and it has been confirmed experimentally since the 1930s. Nowadays, scientists can create antimatter in particle colliders like the Large Hadron Collider.

But Dirac predicted there should be equal amounts of matter and antimatter, according to Pasquale Di Bari, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Southampton in the U.K. So the fact there is now so little antimatter and so much matter — including all the stars in all the galaxies in the universe, although some scientists once suggested there might be "anti-galaxies" of "anti-stars" — is a big scientific problem.

Related: Do quantum universes really exist?

"We think the universe started as 50-50 matter-antimatter in the Big Bang but very quickly afterwards became dominated by matter," Tara Shears, a particle physicist at the University of Liverpool, told Live Science in an email. "For this to occur there needs to be a very slight difference, or asymmetry, in the behaviour of matter and antimatter to allow one to ultimately dominate over the other."

But "this difference is not predicted, it is not understood and it is certainly not explained," Shears continued. "Understanding this difference is the problem we want to solve; this is the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem."

According to Dirac, the terms "matter" and "antimatter" are almost arbitrary. "Matter" refers to regular particles, and "antimatter" refers to antiparticles — but it could have been the other way around. If they weren't mostly annihilated, antimatter particles might have formed a universe of anti-atoms and anti-molecules. In the end, whatever predominated was named matter, and its opposite was named antimatter.

Cosmic leftovers

Using observations from particle colliders, traces of the decay of antimatter in astronomical spectra, and gravitational waves, physicists are trying to better understand why there is this large unexplained discrepancy in the universe that has given rise to everything it contains.

Di Bari estimates there might originally have been many billions of times more matter and antimatter particles than there are now, before they mostly annihilated each other in the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang. "What we are made of is the leftovers," he told Live Science.

Raymond Volkas, a theoretical particle physicist at the University of Melbourne, added that a reason for the asymmetry was outlined in 1967 by Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov. (Sakharov, a critic of the Soviet system, was sentenced to "internal exile" for political dissent in 1980; he was freed in 1986, and died in 1989.)

Sakharov proposed that the asymmetry existed because matter and antimatter particles were not exact opposites but instead reacted differently to some fundamental forces in certain circumstances — a phenomenon known as "C and CP violation."

The general principles of "C and CP violation" are known, but the specifics are not, Volkas told Live Science in an email. "There are many possibilities on the table!" he said. "The challenge is to experimentally distinguish between them."

Solar system quiz: How well do you know our cosmic neighborhood?

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long been a critic of the vaccine court, calling it "biased" against compensating people, slow and unfair. He has said that he wants to "revolutionize" or "fix" this system.

I'm a scholar of law, health and medicine. I investigated the history, politics and debates about the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program in my book "Vaccine Court: The Law and Politics of Injury."

Although vaccines are extensively tested and monitored, and are both overwhelmingly safe for the vast majority of people and extremely cost-effective, some people will experience a harmful reaction to a vaccine. The vaccine court establishes a way to figure out who those people are and to provide justice to them.

Having studied the vaccine court for 15 years, I agree that it could use some fixing. But changing it dramatically will be difficult and potentially damaging to public health.

Deciphering vaccine injuries

The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program is essentially a process that enables doctors, lawyers, patients, parents and government officials to determine who deserves compensation for a legitimate vaccine injury.

It was established in 1986 by an act of Congress to solve a specific social problem: possible vaccine injuries to children from the whole-cell pertussis vaccine. That vaccine, which was discontinued in the U.S. in the 1990s, could cause alarming side effects like prolonged crying and convulsions. Parents sued vaccine manufacturers, and some stopped producing vaccines.

Congress was worried that lawsuits would collapse the country's vaccine supply, allowing diseases to make a comeback. The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 created the vaccine court process and shielded vaccine manufacturers from these lawsuits.

Here's how it works: A person who feels they have experienced a vaccine-related injury files a claim to be heard by a legal official called a special master in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. The Health and Human Services secretary is named as the defendant and is represented by Department of Justice attorneys.

Doctors who work for HHS evaluate the medical records and make a recommendation about whether they think the vaccine caused the person's medical problem. Some agreed-upon vaccine injuries are listed for automatic compensation, while other outcomes that are scientifically contested go through a hearing to determine if the vaccine caused the problem.

Awards come from a trust fund, built up through a 75-cent excise tax on each dose of covered vaccine sold. Petitioners' attorneys who specialize in vaccine injury claims are paid by the trust fund, whether they win or lose.

Some updates are needed

Much has changed in the decades since Congress wrote the law, but Congress has not enacted updates to keep up.

For instance, the law supplies only eight special masters to hear all the cases, but the caseload has risen dramatically as more vaccines have been covered by the law. It set a damages cap of US$250,000 in 1986 but did not account for inflation. The statute of limitations for an injury is three years, but in my research, I found many people file too late and miss their chance.

When the law was written, it only covered vaccines recommended for children. In 2023, the program expanded to include vaccines for pregnant women. Vaccines just for adults, like shingles, are not covered. COVID-19 vaccine claims go to another system for emergency countermeasures vaccines that has been widely criticized. These vaccines could be added to the program, as lawyers who bring claims there have advocated.

These reform ideas are "friendly amendments" with bipartisan support. Kennedy has mentioned some of them, too.

A complex system is hard to revolutionize

Kennedy hasn't publicly stated enough details about his plan for the vaccine court to reveal the changes he intends to make. The first and least disruptive course of action would be to ask Congress to pass the bipartisan reforms noted above.

But some of his comments suggest he may seek to dismantle it, not fix it. None of his options are straightforward, however, and consequences are hard to predict.

Straight up changing the vaccine court's structure would probably be the most difficult path. It requires Congress to amend the 1986 law that set it up and President Donald Trump to sign the legislation. Passing the bill to dismantle it requires the same process. Either direction involves all the difficulties of getting a contentious bill through Congress. Even the "friendly amendments" are hard — a 2021 bill to fix the vaccine court was introduced but failed to advance.

However, there are several less direct possibilities.

Adding autism to the injuries list

Kennedy has long supported discredited claims about harms from vaccines, but the vaccine court has been a bulwark against claims that lack mainstream scientific support. For example, the vaccine court held a yearslong court process from 2002 to 2010 and found that autism was not a vaccine injury. The autism trials drew on 50 expert reports, 939 medical articles and 28 experts testifying on the record. The special masters deciding the cases found that none of the causation hypotheses put forward to connect autism and vaccines were reliable as medical or scientific theories.

Much of Kennedy's ire is directed at the special masters, who he claims "prioritize the solvency" of the system "over their duty to compensate victims." But the special masters do not work for him. Rather, they are appointed by a majority of the judges in the Court of Federal Claims for four-year terms — and those judges themselves have 15-year terms. Kennedy cannot legally remove any of them in the middle of their service to install new judges who share his views.

Given that, he may seek to put conditions like autism on the list of presumed vaccine injuries, in effect overturning the special masters' decisions. Revising the list of recognized injuries to add ones without medical evidence is within Kennedy's powers, but it would still be difficult. It requires a long administrative process with feedback from an advisory committee and the public. Such revisions have historically been controversial, and are usually linked to major scientific reviews of their validity.

Public health and medical groups are already mobilized against Kennedy's vaccine policy moves. If he failed to follow legally required procedures while adding new injuries to the list, he could be sued to stop the changes.

Targeting vaccine manufacturers

Kennedy could also lean on his newly reconstituted Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to withdraw recommendations for certain vaccines, which would also remove them from eligibility in the vaccine compensation court. Lawsuits against manufacturers could then go straight to regular courts. On Aug. 14, 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services may have taken a step in this direction by announcing the revival of a childhood vaccine safety task force in response to a lawsuit by anti-vaccine activists.

Kennedy has also supported legislation that would allow claims currently heard in vaccine court to go to regular courts. These drastic reforms could essentially dismantle the vaccine court.

People claiming vaccine injuries could hope to win damages through personal injury lawsuits in the civil justice system instead of vaccine court, perhaps by convincing a jury or getting a settlement. These types of settlements were what prompted the creation of the vaccine court in the first place. But these lawsuits could be hard to win. There is a higher bar for scientific evidence in regular courts than in vaccine court, and plaintiffs would have to sue large corporations rather than file a government claim.

Raising the idea of reforming the vaccine court has provoked strong reactions across the many groups with a stake in the program. It is a complex system with multiple constituents, and Kennedy's approaches so far pull in different directions. The push to revolutionize it will test the strength of its complex design, but the vaccine court may yet hold up.

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

For decades, scientific literature described human conception this way, with the cells mirroring the perceived roles of women and men in society. The egg was thought to be passive while the sperm was active.

Over time, scientists realized that sperm are too weak to penetrate the egg and that the union is more mutual, with the two cells working together. It's no coincidence that these findings were made in the same era when new cultural ideas of more egalitarian gender roles were taking hold.

Scientist Ludwik Fleck is credited with first describing science as a cultural practice in the 1930s. Since then, understanding has continued to build that scientific knowledge is always consistent with the cultural norms of its time.

Despite these insights, across political differences, people strive for and continue to demand scientific objectivity: the idea that science should be unbiased, rational and separable from cultural values and beliefs.

When I entered my Ph.D. program in neuroscience in 2001, I felt the same way. But reading a book by biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling called "Sexing the Body" set me down a different path. It systematically debunked the idea of scientific objectivity, showing how cultural ideas about sex, gender and sexuality were inseparable from the scientific findings. By the time I earned my Ph.D., I began to look more holistically at my research, integrating the social, historical and political context.

From the questions scientists begin with, to the beliefs of the people who conduct the research, to choices in research design, to interpretation of the final results, cultural ideas constantly inform "the science." What if an unbiased science is impossible?

Emergence of idea of scientific objectivity

Science grew to be synonymous with objectivity in the Western university system only over the past few hundred years.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, some Europeans gained traction in challenging the religiously ordained royal order. Consolidation of the university system led to shifts from trust in religious leaders interpreting the word of "god," to trust in "man" making one's own rational decisions, to trust in scientists interpreting "nature." The university system became an important site for legitimizing claims through theories and studies.

Previously, people created knowledge about their world, but there were not strict boundaries between what are now called the humanities, such as history, English and philosophy, and the sciences, including biology, chemistry and physics. Over time, as questions arose about how to trust political decisions, people split the disciplines into categories: subjective versus objective. The splitting came with the creation of other binary oppositions, including the closely related emotionality/rationality divide. These categories were not simply seen as opposite, but in a hierarchy with objectivity and rationality as superior.

A closer look shows that these binary systems are arbitrary and self-reinforcing.

Science is a human endeavor

The sciences are fields of study conducted by humans. These people, called scientists, are part of cultural systems just like everyone else. We scientists are part of families and have political viewpoints. We watch the same movies and TV shows and listen to the same music as nonscientists. We read the same newspapers, cheer for the same sports teams and enjoy the same hobbies as others.

All of these obviously "cultural" parts of our lives are going to affect how scientists approach our jobs and what we consider "common sense" that does not get questioned when we do our experiments.

Beyond individual scientists, the kinds of studies that get conducted are based on what questions are deemed relevant or not by dominant societal norms.

For example, in my Ph.D. work in neuroscience, I saw how different assumptions about hierarchy could influence specific experiments and even the entire field. Neuroscience focuses on what is called the central nervous system. The name itself describes a hierarchical model, with one part of the body "in charge" of the rest. Even within the central nervous system, there was a conceptual hierarchy with the brain controlling the spinal cord.

My research looked more at what happened peripherally in muscles, but the predominant model had the brain at the top. The taken-for-granted idea that a system needs a boss mirrors cultural assumptions. But I realized we could have analyzed the system differently and asked different questions. Instead of the brain being at the top, a different model could focus on how the entire system communicates and works together at coordination.

Every experiment also has assumptions baked in — things that are taken for granted, including definitions. Scientific experiments can become self-fulfilling prophecies.

For example, billions of dollars have been spent on trying to delineate sex differences. However, the definition of male and female is almost never stated in these research papers. At the same time, evidence mounts that these binary categories are a modern invention not based on clear physical differences.

Related: Is there really a difference between male and female brains? Emerging science is revealing the answer.

But the categories are tested so many times that eventually some differences are discovered without putting these results into a statistical model together. Oftentimes, so-called negative findings that don't identify a significant difference are not even reported. Sometimes, meta-analyses based on multiple studies that investigated the same question reveal these statistical errors, as in the search for sex-related brain differences. Similar patterns of slippery definitions that end up reinforcing taken-for-granted assumptions happen with race, sexuality and other socially created categories of difference.

Finally, the end results of experiments can be interpreted in many different ways, adding another point where cultural values are injected into the final scientific conclusions.

Settling on science when there's no objectivity

Vaccines. Abortion. Climate change. Sex categories. Science is at the center of most of today's hottest political debates. While there is much disagreement, the desire to separate politics and science seems to be shared. On both sides of the political divide, there are accusations that the other side's scientists cannot be trusted because of political bias.

Consider the recent controversy over the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's vaccine advisory panel. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired all members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, saying they were biased, while some Democratic lawmakers argued back that his move put in place those who would be biased in pushing his vaccine-skeptical agenda.

If removing all bias is impossible, then, how do people create knowledge that can be trusted?

The understanding that all knowledge is created through cultural processes does allow for two or more differing truths to coexist. You see this reality in action around many of today's most controversial subjects. However, this does not mean you must believe all truths equally — that's called total cultural relativism. This perspective ignores the need for people to come to decisions together about truth and reality.

Instead, critical scholars offer democratic processes for people to determine which values are important and for what purposes knowledge should be developed. For example, some of my work has focused on expanding a 1970s Dutch model of the science shop, where community groups come to university settings to share their concerns and needs to help determine research agendas. Other researchers have documented other collaborative practices between scientists and marginalized communities or policy changes, including processes for more interdisciplinary or democratic input, or both.

I argue a more accurate view of science is that pure objectivity is impossible. Once you leave the myth of objectivity behind, though, the way forward is not simple. Instead of a belief in an all-knowing science, we are faced with the reality that humans are responsible for what is researched, how it is researched and what conclusions are drawn from such research.

With this knowledge, we have the opportunity to intentionally set societal values that inform scientific investigations. This requires decisions about how people come to agreements about these values. These agreements need not always be universal but instead can be dependent on the context of who and what a given study might affect. While not simple, using these insights, gained over decades of studying science from both within and outside, may force a more honest conversation between political positions.

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

This record was set on the ATP Automotive Testing Papenburg test track in northern Germany on Aug. 8 by BYD's YANGWANG U9 Track Edition.

With 2,960 horsepower and a power-to-weight ratio of 1,341.5 horsepower per ton (1,217 horsepower per tonne), the YANGWANG U9 Track Edition raced past the previous EV speed record of 268.2 mph (431.62 km/h), set by the Rimac Nevera R in July.

This car is the younger sibling to BYD's first fully electric supercar, the YANGWANG U9, which has 1,300 horsepower and was launched last summer. The Track Edition still bears a family resemblance to the standard U9 model, sharing the same aerodynamic design.

It is also built upon the same power system, which has four independent electric motors and four-wheel torque control, as well as a body control system, which keeps the car as flat as possible when speeding up, slowing down or going round corners.

The lithium iron phosphate "Blade Battery" remains the same, with its flat rectangular shape allowing for efficient cooling and increased energy density, BYD representatives said on the company's website. This battery can be charged from 30% to 80% in just half an hour.

Related: 'Springy' solid-state battery is twice the width of a white blood cell and could drastically increase EV range

To overtake the speed record of 233 mph (275 km/h) the U9 set in August 2024, BYD engineers built in a temperature control system for the battery and motor that is tailored to extreme conditions. They also added "the world's first mass-produced 1200V ultra-high-voltage vehicle platform", BYD representatives said in a statement.

This means that, on average, the battery, motor, power supply, air conditioning and other components are brought up to 1200 volts.

"Last year, I thought I'd peaked. I never expected to break my own record so soon" Marc Basseng, the German professional racing driver who set the record, said in the statement. "But here we are, at the same track, with new technologies that have made it possible."

This new record places EV supercars within touching distance of their gasoline counterparts. Currently, the fastest road legal cars are the Koenigsegg Jesko Absolut, which is estimated to reach a top speed of 310 mph (500 km/h) — though this hasn't been proven in the real world yet — and the SSC Tuatara, which has reached a speed of 295mph (475 km/h).

The Ptolemies were a Macedonian royal dynasty founded by one of Alexander the Great's generals, Ptolemy I Soter, during Egypt's Hellenistic period (circa 323 to 30 B.C.).

The coin was likely minted in Alexandria 2,270 years ago, according to the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), which made the find in Jerusalem. It may have been part of a collection of coins that were gifted to soldiers returning from the Third Syrian War (246 to 241 B.C.), a conflict between the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt and the Seleucid Empire of Syria.

"It's a gorgeous coin," Robert Kool, head of numismatics at the IAA, said in a video describing the discovery. "We [have] only found 17 of these coins over the past 100 years."

Of those coins, this one is the first to have been found outside Egypt and in organized excavations. It was unearthed in the City of David, an archaeological site in East Jerusalem that is considered the city's ancient settlement core.

Rivka Langler, who has been excavating an area of the site called the Givati Parking Lot for two years, spotted the coin while sifting through soil. "I was sifting the excavation soil when suddenly I saw something shiny," Langler said in a statement. "At first, I couldn't believe what I was seeing, but within seconds I was running excitedly through the excavation site."

Related: 'Extremely rare' 2,500-year-old broken silver coin unearthed near Jerusalem

One side of the coin shows a portrait of Queen Berenice II wearing a tiara, a veil and a necklace. The other side, which depicts a cornucopia and two stars, bears the ancient Greek inscription "Basileisses," which means "of the Queen."

Berenice II was the wife and consort of Ptolemy III, who ruled in Egypt between 246 and 221 B.C. — but the inscription on the coin suggests Berenice may have been a ruler in her own right, according to the statement.

"She was a queen of an area which was called Kirinyaka, today in eastern Libya," Kool explained in the video. "When she married her cousin Ptolemy III, this area became part of this large and very, very important and rich Hellenistic kingdom. When her husband, Ptolemy III, invaded Syria, she took over as the regent of Egypt."

Queens of the Ptolemaic dynasty occasionally appeared on coins, with one famous example being Cleopatra VII (known simply as Cleopatra), the daughter of Ptolemy XII. But the new discovery still stands out as one of the oldest such coins and suggests Queen Berenice II had great political power or influence, according to the statement.

It's unclear how the coin ended up in Jerusalem, but its discovery there indicates that the ancient city was rapidly recovering from the destruction of the First Temple in 586 or 587 B.C., when the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II laid siege to Jerusalem.

"Until now, the prevailing scholarly view was that [after the siege] Jerusalem was a small, marginal, resource-poor town," Yiftah Shalev, an archaeologist with the IAA who co-led the excavations, said in the statement.

However, "Jerusalem seems to have begun recovering already during the Persian period [586 to 333 B.C.] and grew stronger under Ptolemaic rule," Shalev said. "Jerusalem in the centuries after the destruction of the First Temple was not desolate and isolated, but rather a city in the process of renewal, reestablishing ties with the dominant political, economic, and cultural centers of the period."

The elite in Jerusalem likely shared ties with the ruling elite in Egypt, Yuval Gadot, a professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University and the excavation director, said in the video. "The golden coin we found here … tells us that Jerusalem was an important city," he said.

This spectacular new image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) shows a star cocooned within a massive disk of gas and dust. It's a protoplanetary disk — a ring of dense gas and dust surrounding a young star — where planets are likely forming.

The star is IRAS 04302+2247, better known as the "Butterfly Star" because of how our edge-on view separates the bright nebula into two lobes.

The star system is about 525 light-years away, in the Taurus star-forming region, or Taurus Molecular Cloud, which is within the constellation Taurus in the night sky. It's the closest star-forming region to the solar system, and it's rich in molecular hydrogen, dust and heavier elements from past supernovas. These are raw materials for new stars and planets.

Much of this region is invisible to optical telescopes but is revealed in infrared light. This image is a combination of mostly optical data from the archive of the Hubble Space Telescope and new infrared data from JWST's Near Infrared Camera and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) , the European Space Agency (ESA) wrote in a description of the image.

Related: Will the James Webb telescope lead us to alien life? Scientists say we're getting closer than ever.

MIRI revealed a dark, dusty lane — the protoplanetary disk — that divides the nebula. It blocks the star's light, while surrounding gas and dust scatter the star's light. It's huge — about 40 billion miles (65 billion kilometers) across, or several times wider than the solar system, according to ESA.

The line of sight determines what astronomers can learn from images like this. In face-on images of protoplanetary disks, scientists can sometimes see rings, spirals or gaps where planets are forming. With an edge-on view like this, it's possible to study the thickness of a protoplanetary disk and how dust is distributed around it, both of which are key to understanding how planets form and accumulate mass. Here, dust is expected to settle toward the midplane, creating conditions where grains can clump and grow into planetesimals.

The image comes from a paper published last year in The Astrophysical Journal. The study found that the brightness of the nebula changes, which suggests the inner disk may be warped or misaligned. It's a glimpse into processes that may have shaped our own solar system billions of years ago.

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

But is this actually true? And what does "similar DNA" actually mean?

The truth is that the frequently cited 98.8% similarity between chimp (Pan troglodytes) and human (Homo sapiens) DNA overlooks key differences in the species' genomes, experts told Live Science.

Human and chimp DNA is made of four basic building blocks, or nucleotides: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C) and thymine (T). The genomes of both species can be thought of as a "string of the letters A, C, G and T … about 3 billion letters long," David Haussler, scientific director at the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute, told Live Science in an email.

When scientists compare human and chimp DNA, they identify the letter (nucleotide) sequence in both genomes and look for stretches of DNA where there is a lot of overlap between the two genomes. Then, they count the number of matching letters in these regions.

"It is like comparing one version of a very long novel to another, very slightly edited version," Haussler said.

Related: Are you genetically more similar to your mom or your dad?

Early research suggested that human and chimp genomes are more than 98% identical. "What it means is that for each part of the human genome where the chimp has a corresponding DNA sequence, on average 1 out of 100 nucleotides (single A, C, T or G bases) is different," explained Katie Pollard, director of the Gladstone Institute of Data Science and Biotechnology at the University of California, San Francisco.

For context, humans share about 99.9% of their DNA with each other, Haussler said.

But the 99% figure is misleading because it focuses on stretches of DNA where the human and chimp genomes can be directly aligned and ignores sections of the genomes that are difficult to compare, Tomas Marques-Bonet, head of the Comparative Genomics group at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (CSIC/UPF) in Barcelona, Spain, told Live Science in an email.

Sections of human DNA without a clear counterpart in chimp DNA make up approximately 15% to 20% of the genome, Marques-Bonet said. For example, some bits of DNA are present in one species but missing in the other; these are known as "insertions and deletions." In the course of evolution from a common ancestor, some pieces of DNA in one species broke off and reattached elsewhere along the chromosome.

So, while earlier studies suggested a 98% to 99% similarity, comparisons that include harder-to-align regions push that difference closer to 5% to 10%, Marques-Bonet said. "And if we account for the regions still too complex to align properly with current technology, the true overall difference is likely to exceed 10%," he said.

In fact, a 2025 study found that human and chimpanzee genomes are approximately 15% different when compared directly and completely. But if this direct method is used, then there is even a lot of variability within species themselves — up to 9% among chimpanzees, the 2025 study found.

"Against this backdrop, the close genetic relationship between humans and chimpanzees has not changed," Martin Neukamm, a chemist at the Technical University of Munich who was not involved in the 2025 study, wrote in a translated article.

The differences between human and chimp genomes lie mostly in noncoding DNA, the segments that do not code for a specific protein and that make up about 98% of the genome, according to Pollard.

Differences in noncoding DNA have a big impact. While coding DNA contains the instructions for protein building, "regulatory regions" found in noncoding DNA control how, when and where these proteins are made, Marques-Bonet explained. They act like switches, controlling whether a gene is turned on or off.

That's why a small tweak in the genome, especially in these regulatory regions, can ripple out into large differences in traits. "A small change in the DNA can have big consequences for how that DNA is expressed," Haussler said, "and, in turn, changes in expression can lead to even bigger changes in phenotype — the scientific term for traits like hairy or not, large or small, etc."

So, while chimps and humans share the same genetic tool kit, how those tools are used makes a big difference. "Humans and chimps are made up of essentially the same building blocks (proteins), but these are used in somewhat different ways to make a human versus a chimp," Pollard said.

Her clients find themselves too thin, and they're suffering. "Last week, I signed up a client who wears leggings that have bum pads in them," says Barnes, who lives in Great Britain. "I've had another client recently that, in summer, wears three pairs of leggings just to try and make herself look a bit bigger."

These women belong to a demographic group that has been widely overlooked. As the world focuses on its billion-plus obese citizens, there remain people at the other end of the spectrum who are skinny, often painfully so, but don't want to be. Researchers estimate that around 1.9 percent of the population are "constitutionally thin," with 6.5 million of these people in the United States alone.

Constitutionally thin individuals often eat as much as their peers and don't exercise hard. Yet their body mass index is below 18.5 — and sometimes as low as 14, which translates to 72 pounds on a five-foot frame — and they don't easily gain weight. The condition is "a real enigma," write the authors of a recent paper in the Annual Review of Nutrition. Constitutional thinness, they say, challenges "basic dogmatic knowledge about energy balance and metabolism." It is also understudied: Fewer than 50 clinical studies have looked at constitutionally thin people, compared with thousands on unwanted weight gain.

Recently, researchers have started to investigate how naturally thin bodies are different. The scientists hope to unlock metabolic insights that will help constitutionally thin people gain weight. The work may also help overweight people lose pounds, since constitutional thinness appears to be "a mirror model" of obesity, says Mélina Bailly, a coauthor of the recent review and a physiological researcher at AME2P, a metabolism research lab at the University Clermont Auvergne in France.

Genetic and metabolic factors

Individuals who eat heartily but remain inexplicably skinny were first reported in the scientific literature in 1933. Decades later, a landmark 1990 experiment demonstrated how profoundly people differ in regulating their weight.

Twelve pairs of identical twins were fed 1,000 surplus calories for six days a week. After three months of such overfeeding — equivalent to an extra Big Mac and medium fries daily — the young men had gained an average of almost 18 pounds, mostly fat, but within a large range: One gained almost 30 pounds and another fewer than 10. The latter had somehow diffused around 60 percent of the extra energy.

The study also found that the variation of weight gain was three times greater between twin pairs than within them — indicating a genetic influence on the tendency to add pounds when overfed.

Other studies confirmed that constitutionally thin people largely "resist" weight gain, particularly when eating fatty foods. Whatever pounds they do gain through overfeeding rapidly vanish once they resume normal eating.

After bouts of overfeeding, bodies generally shed weight. But as this graph illustrates, there is variability in both responses to overfeeding and in the return to a body's "normal" weight. ("Ad libitum" refers to a period in the experiment when participants eat what they want.)

This aligns with current thinking to some extent. Many researchers believe that our bodies have a preprogrammed weight "set point" or "set range" to which they try to return. That's one reason few dieters manage to keep off lost weight long-term. Their metabolism slows down, burning fewer calories and making weight regain easier, particularly once the dieter stops restricting calories. (The system displays some flexibility, explaining why many of us put on inches around our midsections over the years.)

'Skinny shaming'

As a group, lean individuals are probably as heterogeneous as overweight people. Some may stay thin because they have smaller appetites or feel full sooner. Others consume just as many calories as heavier individuals. One study found that constitutionally thin people eat 300-plus calories more per day than their metabolism needs. "They have a positive energy balance and they still resist weight gain," says Bailly, a collaborator on NUTRILEAN, a project focused on constitutional thinness, at University Clermont Auvergne in France.

Like obese people, constitutionally thin people face their social stigma. Thin men may feel too scrawny to satisfy masculine ideals. Skinny women often lament lacking curves. People might suspect they are hiding eating disorders. They get "comments from random people on the street," says Jens Lund, a postdoc in metabolic research at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research at the University of Copenhagen. "These people feel like they can't go to toilet after a family dinner … because they are afraid that people would look at them as if they're going out to puke, like having bulimia."

Weight gain coach Barnes was never technically all the way in the constitutionally thin category, but she experienced plenty of such "skinny shaming" firsthand. Family members commented on her weight but dismissed her distress. "I felt like I could never speak about it," she says. "People would be like, 'That's not a real problem,' or 'Just take some weight from me.'"

Where do the calories in constitutionally thin people go? Researchers have started eliminating possibilities.

Researchers are learning that there are large individual differences in how the body uses up calories. (Thermogenesis is the metabolic process in which calories are burned to generate heat.)

A 2021 meta-analysis offered some surprises. When Bailly and colleagues compiled data on thin people's body composition, they discovered something unexpected: Constitutionally thin individuals carry nearly normal amounts of fat throughout their bodies. "It's really unusual to have such low body weight combined with quite normal fat mass," says Bailly.

What seems to be lacking is muscle mass. Constitutionally thin people have less of it — research has found that they have muscle fibers that are on average about 20 percent smaller than those of normal-weight people. Constitutionally thin people may also have reduced bone mass.

These facts suggest that there are health costs to leanness. Though studies are lacking, Bailly suspects that as they age, especially thin women might run a higher risk of osteoporosis, a dangerous weakening of the bones. The reduced muscle mass could also make everyday tasks, like opening jars or carrying groceries, more arduous.

And it could mean fewer protein reserves during illness, says Julien Verney, a physiological researcher at Clermont Auvergne's metabolic lab and coauthor of the Annual Review of Nutrition paper.

In addition to body composition differences, researchers speculate that constitutionally thin bodies "waste" calories. For example, some studies suggest that while thin individuals exercise less, they fidget more.

They may also excrete more calories than others. While this hasn't been explored specifically for lean people, it's known that some people lose up to 10 percent of ingested calories through feces (and to a lesser extent, urine), compared to just 2 percent in others. In one study, a woman excreted 200 calories daily — equivalent to half a liter of soda.

Additional metabolic idiosyncrasies of constitutionally thin people may still await discovery. "We recently found some clues that may suggest more metabolic activity of their fat mass tissues," says Bailly. "This is really surprising." Other studies have already suggested that naturally thin people have more "brown fat" — a calorie-burning tissue that generates body heat.

To find more specific answers, Lund plans to launch an inpatient study at the University of Copenhagen. The study will use a metabolic chamber to track energy intake, expenditure and all routes of energy loss — including feces, urine and exhaled gases — in constitutionally thin people. Since 2020, Lund's team has assembled a network of Danes who self-report as naturally lean, providing a unique pool for future research.

Constitutional thinness, as the 1990 twin study showed, has a strong genetic component: Research shows that 74 percent of very lean people have relatives with similar stature. As researchers identify gene variants, they realize that many of these — with names like FTO, MC4R and FAIM2 — are also involved in processes leading to obesity. Although they don't yet understand the specifics, scientists suspect that people with constitutional thinness may have unique activity patterns in genes related to energy production.

One such gene that has drawn researchers' attention is ALK  (anaplastic lymphoma kinase). When scientists deleted this gene in mice, the animals became resistant to weight gain when fed high-fat diets — even in mouse strains genetically prone to obesity. The ALK gene seems to act in the brain, which then sends signals affecting the rate at which fat cells burn energy.

Understanding genetic mechanisms like these could lead to new treatments for both unhappily thin and unhappily obese people, says Lund. "If you can figure out what protects them from developing overweight, then whatever that mechanism is, you can then try to turn that into a drug," he says. "There are so many signaling molecules in the body that we don't even know exist." The dream is to find a breakthrough as transformative as the latest obesity medications.

While researchers hunt for biological clues, Bella Barnes navigates the complexities of weight gain on her own. After years of trial and error, she gradually gained about 40 pounds by combining strength training with careful, intentional eating. At first, if she hadn't reached her calories for the day, she'd just grab a packet of cookies — anything to get the numbers up. But she found more balance over time. "Not all calories are the same. You want to be eating whole foods," she says. And a lot of them.

Today, Barnes has coached more than a hundred women on her weight gain techniques and has a strong TikTok following; she says that she's proud of the strong body she's built.

Maybe five more pounds, she adds, "would make me at my happiest."

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.

Although Kennedy agreed that Operation Warp Speed, President Donald Trump's signature initiative to produce COVID-19 vaccines in nine months, was a tremendous achievement, he also maintained that COVID-19 vaccines cause widespread and serious harm, including death, particularly in young people — a claim for which there is no evidence.

Some especially pointed questions came from Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a physician who provided the final vote needed for Kennedy's confirmation in February 2025 after Kennedy promised him that he would not change the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's process for recommending vaccines. Cassidy pointed out that with the limitations and confusion caused by the CDC's new rules around COVID-19 vaccines, "I would say effectively we are denying people vaccines." To which Kennedy replied, "Well, you're wrong."

At the hearing, Kennedy stood by his decision to cut US$500 million in HHS funding for 22 research contracts on mRNA vaccine technology. HHS has said it will instead pour these funds into research on a traditional approach to designing vaccines that was first used more than 200 years ago. With such vaccines, called whole-virus vaccines, a person's immune system is presented with the whole virus, often in weakened or inactivated form. This switcheroo has puzzled many scientists.

A few days before the hearing, on Sept. 1, Trump demanded that pharmaceutical companies prove that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines work, saying that the CDC was "being ripped apart over this question." It was his first public acknowledgment of the chaos roiling the CDC amid the firing of its director, Susan Monarez, and subsequent resignations of four high-level agency officials.

Meanwhile, public health experts and HHS staffers are calling for Kennedy to be fired, and several senators at the hearing echoed that call.

As a vaccinologist who has studied and developed vaccines for over 35 years, I see that the science behind mRNA vaccine technology is being widely misstated. This incorrect information is shaping long-term health policy in the U.S. — which makes it urgent to correct the record.

Are mRNA vaccines less safe than whole-virus vaccines?

HHS defended its cancellation of mRNA vaccine research based, in part, on a nonpeer-reviewed compilation of selected publications called the COVID-19 mRNA "vaccine" harms research collection. This document lists about 750 articles claimed to describe harms caused by mRNA vaccines against COVID-19. However, the vast majority of these articles aren't about vaccines but about the harms of getting infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. And notably absent from it is the huge body of data showing mRNA vaccines actually prevent these harms.

For example, the document being used to justify RFK Jr.'s claims about mRNA vaccines highlights 375 studies reporting that the virus's spike protein alone, which is produced when the virus replicates, can cause excessive inflammation and tissue damage. This is true. But the document marshals this evidence to support the claim that mRNA vaccines, which are designed to produce spike proteins, cause the same harm — which is not accurate.

While viral replication results in uncontrolled production of a large amounts of the protein, the way it's produced by the mRNA vaccine is very different. The vaccine produces a small, controlled amount of spike protein inside a few cells — just enough to induce an immune response without causing damage. And by blocking the virus's replication, it reduces the amount of spike protein in circulation, actually having the opposite effect.

What about side effects like myocarditis?

Early reports flagged a type of heart swelling called myocarditis as a rare side effect of the mRNA vaccine, particularly for young men ages 18 to 25 after a booster dose. A 2024 review identified about 20 cases out of 1 million people who received the vaccine. However, that same study found that unvaccinated people had an elevenfold higher risk of getting myocarditis after a COVID-19 infection than vaccinated people.

What's more, another 2024 study showed that people who developed myocarditis after vaccination had fewer complications than those who developed the condition after getting infected with COVID-19.

Do mRNA vaccines make the SARS-CoV-2 virus resistant?

Another claim from the compilation of supposed mRNA vaccine harms that was cited as a reason for cutting funding for mRNA technology is that mRNA vaccines cause mutations in the SARS-CoV-2 virus that make them resistant or less susceptible to the vaccine.

When a virus replicates in its host, it produces millions of copies of its genetic material. Mutations are copying errors that occur naturally during the replication process. These acquired mutations produce new variants, which is why both the COVID-19 mRNA and the whole-virus flu vaccine get updated annually — to keep up with natural changes in the virus.

Slowing down viral replication decreases the rate at which a virus can acquire new mutations. Since both mRNA and whole-virus vaccines stop or slow the virus from replicating, both types of vaccines help reduce the emergence of resistant viruses.

Viruses can mutate to escape from antibodies, but the mRNA vaccines are not causing the emergence of more virulent strains, likely for at least two reasons. First, mRNA vaccines induce immune responses that can attack the virus at multiple spots, so it would have to come up with many mutations at once to escape the vaccine's defenses. Second, even if the virus could acquire all these mutations, they would likely weaken it, making it unable to cause or even transmit disease.

mRNA vaccines versus new SARS-CoV-2 variants

Kennedy, in announcing cuts to mRNA vaccine research on Aug. 5, 2025, claimed that mRNA vaccines don't work against respiratory viruses and that HHS was moving toward "safer, broader vaccine platforms that remain effective even as viruses mutate."

Both whole-virus vaccines and mRNA vaccines protected against COVID-19 and prevented hospitalization and death for millions of people worldwide between 2020 and 2024, but there's clear evidence that the mRNA-based vaccines provided significantly better protection than whole-virus vaccines. And for COVID-19, mRNA vaccines are more effective against new variants, which emerge as viruses mutate, than whole-virus vaccines.

The COVID-19 mRNA vaccines started with exceptionally high efficacy, exceeding 94%. When the SARS-CoV-2 delta and omicron variants emerged in the spring and fall of 2021, mRNA vaccines became less effective in preventing infections. However, they remained highly effective in preventing severe illness, whereas in unvaccinated people the rates of severe illness and hospitalization remained high.

This is because mRNA vaccines induce the immune system to make both antibodies and specialized immune cells called T cells. These elements can recognize multiple parts of the virus, including ones that don't change, enabling significant protection against new variants.

What's more, the mRNA vaccines have a superpower that no other type of vaccine can currently match: They can be quickly updated and manufactured within two to three months. To develop a whole-virus vaccine, researchers must first spend months isolating and propagating the virus. Conversely, making an mRNA vaccine requires just sequencing the virus's genetic code — a process that today takes just hours.

If a new pandemic began today, mRNA vaccines are currently the only type of vaccine that could be developed quickly enough to disrupt its spread.

The future of mRNA vaccine technologies

Thirty years ago, when scientists first started developing mRNA vaccine technology, they recognized its potential to overcome major limitations of whole-virus vaccines — namely, slow production time and more limited ability to protect from new viral variants. Today, mRNA vaccines are also being developed to prevent or treat diseases including HIV and cancer, as well as autoimmune and genetic diseases.

Of course, this technology can be further improved. New mRNA vaccine technologies are aimed, among other things, at making mRNA vaccines easier to store to allow for faster distribution and reduce their short-term side effects, eliminate the rare risk of myocarditis and more quickly block a respiratory infection.

The National Institutes of Health is funneling money away from new mRNA technologies toward a single project developing universal vaccines based on traditional whole-virus vaccine technology. Universal vaccines are urgently needed to provide broader protection against ever-changing respiratory viruses, such as influenza, that are major pandemic threats.

A 2022 study in mice and ferrets showed that a universal flu vaccine NIH plans to support has promise. However, multiple studies of potential universal flu vaccines based on mRNA technology show even more potential. Such vaccines could induce broader immunity than whole-virus vaccines by eliciting antibody and T-cell responses that target an even wider range of flu viruses.

It's hard to square those benefits with the fact that HHS and NIH have named the planned new universal vaccine platform "Generation Gold Standard," insisting that it represents a new standard in science and transparency. The effort seems more akin to eliminating all e-bike technology and telling everyone who seeks one to get by with a single brand of a 10-speed bike: Getting to the intended destination may still be possible, but it will be slower and harder.

And in the case of abandoning mRNA vaccine research, it may lead to lives needlessly lost, whether due to potential medicines untapped or to pandemic unpreparedness.

This article was updated to include details from Kennedy's Sept. 4, 2025, hearing.

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

Cas A's progenitor star had between about 15 to 20 solar masses, though some estimates range as high as 30 solar masses. It was likely a red supergiant, though there's debate about its nature and the path it followed to exploding as a supernova. Some astrophysicists think it may have been a Wolf-Rayet star.

In any case, it eventually exploded as a core-collapse supernova. Once it built up an iron core, the star could no longer support itself and exploded. The light from Cas A's demise reached Earth around the 1660s.

There are no definitive records of observers seeing the supernova explosion in the sky, but astronomers have studied the Cas A SNR in great detail in modern times and across multiple wavelengths.

New research in The Astrophysical Journal explains Chandra's new findings. It's titled "Inhomogeneous Stellar Mixing in the Final Hours before the Cassiopeia A Supernova." The lead author is Toshiki Sato of Meiji University in Japan.

"It seems like each time we closely look at Chandra data of Cas A, we learn something new and exciting," said lead author Sato in a press release. "Now we've taken that invaluable X-ray data, combined it with powerful computer models, and found something extraordinary."

One of the problems with studying supernovae is that their eventual explosions are what trigger our observations. A detailed understanding of the final moments before a supernova explodes is difficult to obtain. "In recent years, theorists have paid much attention to the final interior processes within massive stars, as they can be essential for revealing neutrino-driven supernova mechanisms and other potential transients of massive star collapse," the authors write in their paper. "However, it is challenging to observe directly the last hours of a massive star before explosion, since it is the supernova event that triggers the start of intense observational study."

The lead up to the SN explosion of a massive star involves the nucleosynthesis of increasingly heavy elements deeper into its interior. The surface layer is hydrogen, then helium is next, then carbon and even heavier elements under the outer layers. Eventually, the star creates iron. But iron is a barrier to this process, because while lighter elements release energy when they fuse, iron requires more energy to undergo further fusion. The iron builds up in the core, and once the core reaches about 1.4 solar masses, there's not enough outward pressure to prevent collapse. Gravity wins, the core collapses, and the star explodes.

Chandra's observations, combined with modelling, are giving astrophysicists a look inside the star during its final moments before collapse.

"Our research shows that just before the star in Cas A collapsed, part of an inner layer with large amounts of silicon traveled outwards and broke into a neighboring layer with lots of neon," said co-author Kai Matsunaga of Kyoto University in Japan. "This is a violent event where the barrier between these two layers disappears."

The results were two-fold. Silicon-rich material travelled outward, while neon-rich material travelled inward. This created inhomogeneous mixing of the elements, and small regions rich in silicon were found near small regions rich in neon.

This is part of what the researchers call a 'shell merger'. They say it's the final phase of stellar activity. It's an intense burning where the oxygen burning shell swallows the outer Carbon and Neon burning shell deep inside the star's interior. This happens only moments before the star explodes as a supernova. "In the violent convective layer created by the shell merger, Ne, which is abundant in the stellar O-rich layer, is burned as it is pulled inward, and Si, which is synthesized inside, is transported outward," the authors explain in their research.

The intermingled silicon-rich and neon-rich regions are evidence of this process. The authors explain that the the silicon and neon did not mix with the other elements either immediately before or immediately after the explosion. Though astrophysical models have predicted this, it's never been observed before. "Our results provide the first observational evidence that the final stellar burning process rapidly alters the internal structure, leaving a pre-supernova asymmetry," the researchers explain in their paper.

For decades, astrophysicists thought that SN explosions were symmetrical. Early observations supported the idea, and the basic idea behind core-collapse supernovae also supported symmetry. But this research changes the fundamental understanding of supernova explosions as asymmetrical. "The coexistence of compact ejecta regions in both the "O-/Ne-rich" and "O-/Si-rich" regimes implies that the merger did not fully homogenize the O-rich layer prior to collapse, leaving behind multiscale compositional inhomogeneities and asymmetric velocity fields," the researchers write in their conclusion.

This asymmetry can also explain how the neutron stars left behind get their acceleration kick and lead to high-velocity neutron stars.

These final moments in a supernova's life may also trigger the explosion itself, according to the authors. The turbulence created by the inner turmoil may have aided the star's explosion.

"Perhaps the most important effect of this change in the star's structure is that it may have helped trigger the explosion itself," said co-author Hiroyuki Uchida also of Kyoto University. "Such final internal activity of a star may change its fate — whether it will shine as a supernova or not."

"For a long time in the history of astronomy, it has been a dream to study the internal structure of stars," the researchers write in their paper's conclusion. This research has given astrophysicists a critical glimpse into a progenitor star's final moments before explosion. "This moment not only has a significant impact on the fate of a star, but also creates a more asymmetric supernova explosion," they conclude.

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

It sits above the EOS R6 Mark II in Canon's lineup and serves as a clear upgrade from the original R5, especially for anyone frustrated by its overheating limitations. Against competitors like the Sony A1 or Nikon Z9, the R5 II holds its own, delivering top-tier specs on a more compact body.

Canon EOS R5 II review

Canon EOS R5 II: Design

• Large and detailed LCD screen
• Intuitive button layout
• Fully weather-sealed for worry-free wildlife photography

The Canon EOS R5 II refines the already excellent design of the original R5 with subtle but meaningful updates that elevate its handling and usability. The magnesium alloy body is robust and weather-sealed — and we can confirm that the weather sealing truly does hold up after an incredibly wet trip to Pembrokeshire, Wales, to shoot with it. It's built to withstand harsh shooting environments without adding unnecessary weight, and it feels rock solid in the hand, with a deep, ergonomic grip that balances nicely even with heavier RF lenses.

Button placement is similar to its predecessor, with a few small tweaks. The lock function has now been integrated into the on/off switch, which wraps around the mode dial on the right-hand side of the top plate. Having the power switch positioned here makes it easier to flick on and off with the right thumb, which we prefer over the original R5. However, with the lock function being set in-between on and off, we sometimes set it to lock by accident. Canon has also replaced the original on/off switch with a dedicated photo/video switch, making it faster to jump between shooting modes — a great move for hybrid shooters.

It also features the same LCD panel on the top-plate, with the controller joystick and vari-angle LCD screen on the back, now with improved brightness and responsiveness for outdoor use. The 3.2-inch touchscreen remains a standout feature, and we found it perfect for shooting macro at tricky angles where we couldn't look through the viewfinder. We wished the back dial featured up/down/left/right buttons, but overall, we like the layout.

The side of the body features dual CFexpress Type B/UHS-II card slots on one side, and a USB-C charging port, full-size HDMI, mid and headphone jacks and a flash sync terminal on the other — a clear nod to professional workflows.

Canon EOS R5 II: Performance

• Back-illuminated 45MP stacked sensor produces stunning images
• Handles noise well
• Accurate autofocus

Out in the field, the Canon EOS R5 II feels like a proper setup where it counts. Autofocus is snappy, confident and does a brilliant job of tracking birds in flight or fast-moving objects through tricky backgrounds. It locks on and holds focus effortlessly, even in low light. Shooting handheld with a long lens felt smooth, thanks to the in-body image stabilization, which works wonders when light is limited.

Image quality is seriously impressive. The new back-illuminated and stacked 45MP sensor pulls out loads of detail that is retained even when you crop in tight on a distant subject. We were reviewing the RF 100mm F2.8L Macro IS USM lens alongside the R5 II, and we were able to get some stunning close-up shots with incredible detail. We used the large LCD screen alongside the focus peaking feature from the camera to ensure our subject was sharp and in focus, which is notoriously tricky when shooting macro.

The R5 II also produces lovely astro images with minimal noise at most ISO levels. We were only able to use very short shutter speeds due to only having a 100mm lens at our disposal, but the images were clean, the stars were sharp, and the noise only started to become distracting when we bumped the ISO up above 5,000. And even then, noise reduction tools in editing software have become so good that even images with a lot of noise would still be salvageable.

Canon EOS R5 II: Functionality

• 30FPS blackout-free shooting
• Eye control AF needs perfecting
• 8K video recording

The Canon EOS R5 II is packed with smart upgrades that make it incredibly versatile, especially for fast action shooting. One of our favorite features is the blackout-free, continuous 30FPS burst rate. Using the electronic shutter, you can fire off full-res RAWs at lightning speed without any viewfinder lag, which is a huge advantage when tracking wildlife. The blackout-free experience keeps you locked in on your subject the whole time — no second-guessing if your timing was off. And when Pre-Capture is enabled, the camera will start capturing images when the shutter is half-pressed. We were shooting alongside the Sony A7R V, and we really appreciated how much of a difference this made. Combine that with Action Priority, and the camera can analyze and understand the movement of athletes for more accurate sports photography.

Canon has also introduced Eye Control AF, originally seen in the Canon EOS R3. It sounds great on paper, but we found it to be a little slow and not totally accurate. We calibrated this feature multiple times, but it seemed to be a little off on most occasions, so we didn't use it for real-world shooting. It's a good feature in theory, but it needs to be perfected before we can call it a game-changer.

A well-known complaint about the original R5 was how much it tended to overheat when shooting video. But on the R5 II, thanks to the built-in cooling fan, you can now shoot up to 8K video with more flexibility and be afforded longer recording times. This camera is ideal for anything from wildlife to sports to wedding photography.

Should you buy the Canon EOS R5 II?

The Canon EOS R5 II is ideal for wildlife, sports and hybrid shooters who want a high-end stills and video camera in one body. With blackout-free 30FPS shooting, Action Priority, excellent autofocus and longer recording times thanks to a cooling fan, it's clear Canon has listened to the needs of action-focused creators.

You should definitely consider the R5 II if you're serious about fast-moving subjects, need high-resolution images, or want a camera that can shoot pro-quality video without compromise. It's also a great fit for anyone upgrading from the original R5.

However, if you're a beginner, casual user or mostly shoot landscapes, the R5 II may be overkill, both in terms of price and power.

If this product isn't for you

How we test

We tested the Canon EOS R5 II over 10 days, focusing on real-world performance across a variety of conditions. The camera was taken to Skomer island to photograph puffins, where the camera's autofocus, burst speed and subject tracking were pushed to the limit — alongside its weather-sealing! We got the most out of its resolution and detail by shooting insects and flowers in our garden using the 100mm macro lens, and we used it for astrophotography in a Bortle class 5 area.

The new sand battery, designed by Polar Night Energy, is effectively a giant sandpit encased in a roughly 100 by 40 foot (30 by 12 meter) steel container.

The sand is heated using closed-loop heat transfer pipes and this heat is trapped by two layers of steel sandwiching an insulation layer. The energy is then extracted by blowing cool air through the pipes, capturing the heat to generate hot water, steam or hot air.

Renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power, differ from traditional energy sources, like oil and coal, because they do not contribute to the carbon footprint — making them essential for reaching net zero by 2050.

But solar and wind power is not constantly available, with supply waxing and waning over the course of each year. This makes it critical to find ways of storing renewable energy for use during periods of shortfall in the energy supply.

"The main challenge to large-scale implementation of renewable energy is energy storage," Matteo Chiesa, a professor of mechanical and nuclear engineering at the Khalifa University of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi who was not involved in the project, told Live Science.

Related: How to store renewable energy

By channelling excess energy from the grid and locally produced solar and wind energy to heat up sand to a whopping 1,112 degrees Fahrenheit (600 degrees Celsius), this new sand battery can store heat energy for potentially months on end, Polar Night Energy representatives say.

With a heating power of 10 megawatts — meaning it can provide 10 million joules of energy per second — it can output temperatures of 140-752 degrees F (60-400 degrees C).

"It’s proving successful in Finland," Chiesa said, adding that there’s strong potential for it to succeed elsewhere.

Heating using the power of sand

Using sand and sand-like materials to retain heat is an age-old phenomenon, with brick ovens being popular worldwide. This is because sand — which is most commonly made up of a combination of silicon and oxygen — is readily available globally. It can be heated to extremely high temperatures before it melts, and retains its heat for a long time.

Sand batteries are not batteries in a conventional sense as they do not directly produce electricity. Instead, they are thermal energy storage systems, meaning they are charged up using renewable energy, which is then stored as heat energy for use when energy demand exceeds supply.

Chiesa said that the Polar Night Energy design is "very robust," but the current configuration would be too expensive to translate over to household contexts, which face similar energy storage challenges.

"Every single time you add metal, you add costs," he said. "Ideally, we should design the sand battery’s porosity so that air can be distributed evenly throughout all pores without relying on expensive materials."

Chiesa also noted that Polar Night Energy does not currently provide seasonal storage, instead using its system to store energy for shorter durations — primarily to balance fluctuations in wind power generation.

Thermal energy storage systems like this are well-suited for storing renewable energy seasonally because it takes so long for sand to lose its heat.

"A battery that enables you to store summer solar energy and use it during winter — when heating demand is highest — is a powerful solution for seasonal energy needs," Chiesa said.

This idea quickly spread to other social animals and was even absorbed into popular culture, where it has come to describe a confident, assertive and often abrasive personality.

But over 20 years after publishing his seminal alpha male theory, Mech argued that subsequent observations showed wild wolf packs were simply family groups, with the alpha pair just the parents. In a video, he acknowledged that the "term implies that the wolves fought and competed strongly to get to the top of the pack. In actuality, the way they get there is merely by mating with a member of the opposite sex, producing a bunch of offspring, which are the rest of the pack then — and becoming the natural leaders that way."

Recent studies have also challenged this idea of alphas in other animal species. Females exclusively dominate in many animal groups, including hyenas, orcas and meerkats. Either sex may rule primate groups. And some species, such as African lions, form coalitions, with each individual sharing equal status.

So is the concept of alpha relevant or even real? Behavioral ecology suggests it is, although perhaps not exactly the way we thought.

The majority of gregarious (group) animals do adopt some form of social hierarchy. This internal structure defines each individual's access to different resources, such as food, mates and territory, thus helping the group deal with disputes and sometimes avoid conflict altogether.

Related: Do animals have friends?

"Alpha just means that that animal, at a certain moment or for a certain interval of time, is the top of the ranking," Paulo Mota, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Porto in Portugal, told Live Science.

The nature and complexity of these rankings can vary dramatically among species. Chickens have an extremely linear hierarchy — a single alpha female reigns supreme, but every other hen has a clearly defined position in the ranking. Others, like the naked mole rat (Heterocephalus glaber), have one dominant pair — an alpha male and alpha female that breed and control the colony while all other group members are approximately equal.

However, "in social species with complex brains, the pattern of social relationships becomes more complex, more diffuse, and not direct," Mota said. Primate species often have looser structures, with multiple hierarchies spanning different facets of group life.

"Most of the time, these dominance hierarchies are based on fighting and linked to power, so around priority of access to resources," explained Dieter Lukas, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. "But there are other aspects of power: the idea of leadership — for example, who determines where the group goes today or whether to fight against a neighboring group — and these aren't necessarily linked to the same hierarchies."

To add to this mixed picture, these group rankings aren't even permanent social positions. Alpha status is more like a temporary job role than an innate characteristic of the leading individual. "In most species, ranks can change frequently and quite quickly, especially in situations where high-ranking individuals get higher benefits," Lukas told Live Science. "If you look across the whole lives of individuals, each individual might have been an alpha at one point in their life."

Likewise, humans seen as alpha males may dominate in social situations, but they might not be the person who would win in a fistfight, or the person you would elect as a leader. "Most of what we talk about in animals is power, but we know there's also prestige," Lukas said. "This status is something where you have these different roles in the society and I think humans are really characterized by this huge flexibility."

But he added, if we look closely, we can also see this same flexibility across different animal populations.

So where does this leave the concept of the alpha male?

Some animal social groups are clearly dominated by a single male individual, and in certain species, it's even possible to identify physiological changes associated with this elevation in status, Mota said. "In mice, the testes will grow bigger and the animal will start to produce more testosterone. It will start urinating all around instead of in one place in order to mark the territory. These changes occur after the animal changes its dominance position."

However, Lukas argues that the term "alpha male" is overly simplistic and ignores the nuances of social behavior and structure in more intelligent species. "This concept about the alpha as the one with absolute power in the group is really not helpful because it obscures the fact that even if a male wins all the fights, he might not be the one making decisions. The power distribution isn't that simple," he said.

That's according to a new landmark study, which combined the predictions of 25 climate models to arrive at an "optimistic" prediction (under a moderate emissions scenario) that the current will begin to shut down due to climate change sometime in the 2060s. Given the current's vital role in regulating global climates, scientists have described the study as a "serious climate wake-up call."

Elsewhere, the signs of our warming world can be seen in the invasion of Antarctic icebergs around the South Atlantic Ocean's South Georgia Island. There, the former record-holder for the largest iceberg in the world, A23a, is undergoing a dramatic breakup. Meanwhile, deep beneath the Pacific Ocean, a team of scientists has discovered a giant hydrothermal system that could hold clues to the origins of life on Earth.

Mouse brain scans rewrite the textbook

Map of 600,000 brain cells rewrites the textbook on how the brain makes decisions

It's not often that a single piece of research comes along with the potential to rewrite everything that came before. Yet a massive collaboration of neuroscientists may have done just that with two new studies that mapped more than 600,000 individual mouse brain cells — or 95% of the rodents' brains.

The scientists hope the mammoth effort will help them study what parts of the mammalian brain are responsible for making decisions. In the past, scientists assumed that brain activity moves in a linear path, from visual recognition of a stimulus to regions responsible for abstract thinking, mixed with sprinklings from the memory regions to draw from experience.

But the new research found that significantly more of the mice's brains participated in this process, with decisions beginning to coalesce far earlier than expected. So far, the findings are only correlational, meaning the scientists still don't know whether all the regions are contributing, but they plan to attack this question as the next step of their work.

Discover more health news

— Diagnostic dilemma: Woman's severe knee pain reveals 'golden threads' in her joints

— Scraps of ancient viruses make up 40% of our genome. They could trigger brain degeneration.

— We finally have an idea of how the lifetime supply of eggs develops in primates

Life's Little Mysteries

Which animal has the best hearing?

Think of the animal with the world's sharpest ears and your mind might flutter onto bats. Take it a step further and one of their prey — the greater wax moth — could also be a contender, as the moths' ears are adapted to anticipate the ultrasonic chirps of their swooping hunters.

But just like any sense honed by natural selection, what qualifies as the best hearing is in the ear of the listener. Here are our major contenders for the animal world's best hearers.

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

Chatbot suicide prevention doubts

'Extremely alarming': ChatGPT and Gemini respond to high-risk questions about suicide — including details around methods

A new study has raised doubts about the suicide prevention safeguards of three popular artificial intelligence chatbots (OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude) finding that they were inconsistent in their replies to an extent that it could lead to serious harm.

The news came on the same day that the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming that the company's chatbot had coached the California boy into taking his life earlier this year.

The new study found that ChatGPT offered direct answers to high-risk questions 78% of the time — some of which Live Science independently found the chatbot replied directly to.

All of this raises pressing questions about how a growing number of people, many of them younger, increasingly rely on these bots for advice on their mental health and personal lives.

Discover more technology news

— There are 32 different ways AI can go rogue, scientists say — from hallucinating answers to a complete misalignment with humanity

— AI can't solve these puzzles that take humans only seconds

— Scientists taught an AI-powered 'robot dog' how to play badminton against humans — and it's actually really good

Also in science news this week

— 1.8 million-year-old human jawbone discovered in Republic of Georgia — and it may be earliest evidence yet of Homo erectus

— Dozens of mysterious blobs discovered inside Mars may be the remnants of 'failed planets'

— How the racist study of skulls gripped Victorian Britain's scientists

— Newly discovered bus-size asteroid will zoom close past Earth today — and will not return for exactly 100 years

Science Spotlight

'We've never been able to do this before': How the James Webb telescope is leading us toward alien life

A $10 billion floating telescope, training its state-of-the-art lens at distant worlds to search for alien life: Humanity's search for aliens has come a long way since early suggestions that we simply light some big fires and wait for the spaceships to arrive, but can the James Webb Space Telescope really find what we're looking for?

In this week's science spotlight, we dig into the telescope's search for signs of habitable worlds beyond our solar system, including the scientific debate engulfing the 120 light-year distant K2-18b. The one thing scientists can agree on is that the planet likely smells of sweet cabbage, but whether its pungent gases are the byproduct of biological processes or not remains highly contested.

Something for the weekend

If you're looking for something to do over the weekend, here are some of the best polls, skywatching guides and crosswords published this week.

— Live Science crossword puzzle #8: Lowest possible temperature in the universe — 3 down [Crossword]

— Do you think we should stop the progress of AI before it becomes a threat to our species? [Poll]

— Who will see the 'blood moon' total lunar eclipse this weekend? [Skywatching]

Science in pictures

The world's first view of Earth from the moon, taken 59 years ago — Space photo of the week

This grainy, black-and-white image snapped by NASA's Lunar Orbiter 1 is the first ever photo of our planet snapped from the moon. Rising above the lunar horizon with the South Pole cloaked in shadow, the photo is hardly the most impressive one humanity has taken of our world from the moon's surface. But it was a landmark first and happened entirely by accident, according to NASA.

Follow Live Science on social media

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

Researchers used hundreds of thousands of computer simulations to examine the remnants of these ancient magnetic fields, which still reside within the "cosmic web" billions of years later.

Magnetism is a natural force generated by the movements of electrical charges and has existed since the early days after the Big Bang, when the infant universe was full of jostling electrically charged particles. Experts have long suspected that the initial magnetic fields created by these particles, known as primordial magnetic fields, were much weaker than those created by complex cosmic objects that exist today, such as stars, black holes and planets.

But in the new study, published Aug. 13 in the journal Physical Review Letters, researchers have revealed that these primordial fields may have been even weaker than they previously imagined. Using exhaustive computer simulations, the team constrained an upper limit on these fields' magnetic strength and found that they likely maxed out at 0.00000000002 gauss, which is billions of times weaker than a standard fridge magnet (~100 gauss).

Such magnetic fields are "comparable to magnetism generated by [the electrical activity of] neurons in the human brain," the researchers wrote in a statement.

Despite their weakness, remnants of these magnetic fields still reside within the intergalactic cosmic web — a mysterious, sprawling structure that permeates the entire known universe — and this was key to uncovering the new findings.

Related: Scientists share groundbreaking image of the 'cosmic web' connecting 2 galaxies near the dawn of time

The cosmic web is an expansive network of ghostly filaments that connect all the galaxies in the universe like a giant 3D spider's web. There is still a lot we don't know about the cosmic web, including what it is really made of. However, in recent years, scientists have started to image this gigantic structure properly and have begun to map it out in detail.

One of the biggest mysteries about the cosmic web is why it has its own magnetic fields. This is especially confusing in regions of space in-between galaxies, where the web is isolated within large expanses of nothingness.

"Our hypothesis was that this [magnetism] could be a legacy of events occurring in cosmic epochs during the birth of the universe," study lead author Mak Pavičević, a doctoral candidate at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste, Italy, and co-author Matteo Viel, an astrophysicist at SISSA, jointly said in the statement. "This is what we sought to ascertain with our work."

Their team believes that the earliest primordial magnetic fields could have been caught up in the initial inflation of the universe and later become intertwined with the cosmic web as it grew in the expanding spaces between galaxies.

In the study, the researchers used approximately 250,000 computer simulations, based on observational data of the cosmic web, to reverse engineer this supposed series of events, allowing them to set "strict limits on the intensity of magnetic fields formed in the very early moments of the universe," Pavičević and Viel said.

These findings are still theoretical as there is currently no way of directly observing primordial magnetic fields. However, the researchers claim that the results align with recent findings concerning the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is the radiation leftover from the Big Bang, although it is unclear which specific findings they are referring to.

The study team also notes that continued observations of the cosmic web with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) could allow them to create more powerful simulations to further test their hypothesis in the future.

Trusting AI can mean many things — from letting it recommend a TV show to watch to relying on it for medical advice or putting it in charge of your car. On Aug. 29 we shared a poll asking Live Science readers where they stand on AI's trustworthiness — and 382 people responded.

At the time of writing, the results show that only 13% believe they can trust AI and that it will improve their lives, while 55% expressed no trust in AI to act safely or fairly. Around 32% were unsure and wanted stronger safeguards before making up their mind.

User comments suggested that readers are cautious about AI and expressed concerns about accuracy, autonomy and the limitations of the current technology. "Artificial general intelligence is still a work of fiction and always will be - nothing that Sam Altman [CEO of OpenAI] or any of the LLM shills have to say will ever change that," wrote BeneathTheClay.

Some commenters highlighted what they believe are LLMs' limitations.

"We don’t trust [large language models] LLMs, nor do we think the fundamental technology can ever become an 'AI' to any degree whatsoever," Varian commented. They added that"the fundamental truth is that LLMs have no concept of time, past, present, or future. A request is processed, the process is handled, and further requests can have previous requests force-fed back to it until it runs out of available ram. That’s the [entirety] of it."

Others suggested that LLMS are unlikely to ever be fully intelligent.

"AI is just about automation, the knowledge humans have acquired so far stored in computers is automatically retrieved on our request. I see no intelligence in AI," Jose p.koshy said. "We can trust it as long as our request to AI is unambiguous and pertains to data only. We cannot leave the decision making process to AI."

Some readers took a more philosophical look at the rapid growth of AI and LLMs.

"I trust Ai the way a sailor trusts the sea. It can carry you far, or it can drown you," Huhnverloren wrote. "We have a chance, maybe just one, to get it right. So, how do we want to receive the reflection of its mind?"

The trial results, published Thursday (Sept. 4) in JAMA, include data from 194 people with moderate to severe anxiety across the U.S. The study compared these participants' responses to different doses of LSD against a placebo treatment. It found that the drug alleviated symptoms in many patients for at least three months after just one exposure.

That said, participants who were given low doses of LSD — either 25 or 50 micrograms — did not see a significant change in their symptoms. The effect kicked in only at higher doses — either 100 or 200 micrograms — and those given 100-microgram doses had the best results.

In fact, 12 weeks out from treatment, about 47% of the people who were given 100 micrograms were in remission, based on a standardized anxiety rating scale. And about 65% of the people in that group saw their scores on the scale fall by at least half. By comparison, only about 20% of the placebo group was in remission at the 12-week mark and about 30% saw their scores halved.

"This work has the potential to make significant contributions to the emerging field of psychedelic drug research," Dr. Claudio Soares, a professor of psychiatry at the Queen's University School of Medicine in Ontario, wrote in a commentary about the trial. It's the first study to examine how different doses of LSD compare with a placebo for relieving anxiety. In addition, the trial didn't explicitly incorporate psychotherapy into the treatment, meaning it could help pin down whether LSD in and of itself has an anti-anxiety effect, he added.

"Furthermore, the study highlighted an early response to treatment and positive effects on comorbid depressive symptoms, both of which are promising findings that should guide future trials," Soares said.

Related: 1 psychedelic psilocybin dose eases depression for years, study reveals

While there are approved anti-anxiety drugs, not all patients respond to them, the trial runners noted in their report. Estimates suggest about 50% of patients do not have an adequate response to first-line anxiety treatments, such as benzodiazepines or serotonin selective reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs, which are also used for depression).

As such, there's still a need for more effective, well-tolerated anti-anxiety medicines, the trial runners argue.

Enter LSD. The psychedelic is thought to trigger its mind-altering effects — such as visual hallucinations and a feeling of being high — in part by enabling communication between brain cells that don't normally interact. It's thought that this action might trigger a period of enhanced plasticity in the brain, during which a person with anxiety could break out of the harmful thought patterns that characterize the condition. But this mechanism is not fully understood and is still being studied.

Trials that have combined LSD with psychotherapy hinted that the drug can have a positive and sustained effect in treating anxiety. But because these trials were testing two interventions — LSD plus therapy — it's hard to know what LSD was contributing on its own.

The new trial aimed to investigate that question by including people who were not undergoing psychotherapy. In all, 18% of the participants were receiving external psychotherapy when they entered the study and continued receiving therapy during the study, the report noted.

At baseline, the 194 participants scored an average of 30 on an anxiety scale from 0 to 56, where the threshold for "severe" anxiety is 24. A score of 7 or less indicates remission. Patients given the 100-microgram dose saw, on average, a 21-point drop in their scores.

"A treatment effect emerged 1 day after the dosing day and persisted through week 12," the report authors noted.

The vast majority of side effects tied to the treatment were expected and resolved once the dosing of the drug concluded. These effects included visual perception changes, nausea, headache and euphoric mood. Notably, side effects were reported across all the study groups, including the placebo group, but occurred at the highest rates in the high-dose groups. For instance, more than 90% of the 100-microgram group reported hallucinations, as did 100% of the 200-microgram group.

Two people reported "feeling intoxicated" in the 50- and 100-microgram groups, respectively, but felt normal by the end of the dosing session.

Although the side effects were generally mild to moderate in severity, they did prompt a handful of people to drop out of the trial, so the LSD treatment may not be tolerable to all patients.

The trial does have some limitations, including the short follow-up time of only three months and the inclusion of some patients who still underwent therapy during the trial, Soares said. But in all, the trial provides crucial data that could help "further inform regulatory pathways for the use of psychedelic drugs as stand-alone treatments," he said.

Future research will be needed to evaluate how well the effects of the drug last over longer time frames, particularly after a single dose, he concluded.

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

These tiny microrobots are bull sperm cells coated in magnetic nanoparticles. Researchers haven't tested them inside a real organism, whether cow or human, yet, but they demonstrated that they can control the sperm bots inside a life-sized anatomical model of the female human reproductive system and track their progress with X-rays.

The sperm bots, described Tuesday (Sep. 2) in the journal npj Robotics, could one day be used to improve reproductive medicine, drug delivery and infertility diagnosis, the researchers said in a statement.

"We're turning nature's own cell delivery systems into programmable microrobots," study lead author Islam Khalil, an associate professor in the robotics and mechatronics research group at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, said in the statement.

Related: 'I would never let a robot incubate my child': Poll on 'pregnancy robots' divides Live Science readers

Microbots are microscopic devices that scientists are developing so that they can be deployed inside the body for highly precise, targeted medical treatments. For example, in 2022, researchers used an army of swimming microbots to eradicate a deadly pneumonia infection in mice.

When it comes to reproductive health, scientists say that microbots have the potential to deliver drugs directly to the uterus, fallopian tubes and other difficult-to-access parts of the female reproductive system. Such a targeted drug delivery system could improve treatments for ailments such as uterine cancer and fibroids, the study authors propose.

Khalil was part of a team that unveiled biohybrid magnetic sperm microrobots in 2020. In the new study, researchers found that increasing the concentration of iron oxide nanoparticles on the bots' outer coating improved the team's ability to control and detect the little machines, while still ensuring the nanoparticles weren't harmful to the uterus. At least, the bots weren't toxic to human uterine cells after 72 hours of exposure.

The team tested their little sperm bots in a 3D printed model of a portion of the female reproductive tract, using an external magnetic field to pilot them from the ersatz cervix, through the uterine cavity, and toward the fallopian tubes, where fertilization most often occurs. They found that the bots could be tracked throughout the journey in real time using X-rays, something that isn't possible with natural sperm.

"Until now, visualising sperm inside the body was nearly impossible," Khalil said.

A lack of real-time sperm tracking has hampered scientists' understanding of reproductive health and fertility treatments, the authors say. The researchers noted that having a noninvasive way of tracking sperm could help them better understand sperm transport systems and male infertility, for instance.

Every day, a faint red star warms this ocean world and the uncountable masses of hungry, plankton-like creatures that inhabit it. They rise to the surface by the billions, joining together in a living, floating continent larger than Australia — spewing out a pungent gas as they knit sunlight into food.

The sulfurous gas steams out of the alien bloom, filling the air so fully that a lone telescope floating 700 trillion miles (over a quadrillion kilometers) away can sense it — faintly, for just a few hours every month, when the watery planet glides in front of its small, red star. For those few hours, the alien algae of the pungent planet make themselves known to Earth.

It sounds like science fiction ... but is it?

For the past two years, this question has been the subject of intense debate among alien-hunting scientists, with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) at its center. Captured in the powerful telescope's crosshairs is the planet K2-18b, located around 120 light-years from Earth. There's no question that the planet itself is real. But its surface conditions, as well as its likelihood of harboring life, remain contested.

One group of researchers who has studied K2-18b with JWST for the last few years claims to have detected signs of dimethyl sulfide (DMS). This compound, which has a cabbage-like odor, is what many Earthlings think of as "the smell of the sea" and is only known to be produced by living, breathing phytoplankton. The team first reported hints of DMS in K2-18b’s atmosphere in 2023, and has followed up with several papers since.

Outside researchers remain skeptical of this alleged DMS detection, however. They've cautioned that the team's detection relies on questionable data modeling and falls short of the threshold required to signify a new scientific discovery. Only further observations of the planet can truly settle the question.

But what isn't in doubt is that JWST's ultrapowerful infrared vision is giving humans the best-ever shot at finding extraterrestrial life.

Thanks to JWST, "we're learning more just in the last few years than we've learned in the preceding decades about the compositions of atmospheres outside the solar system," Eddie Schwieterman, an assistant professor of astrobiology at the University of California, Riverside who studies exoplanet habitability with JWST, told Live Science.

It's dogma in the search for alien life that where there's an atmosphere, there may also be water on a planet's surface — and where there's flowing water, there may be life. For the first time, JWST is bringing those alien atmospheres into focus.

"We are at a really important time in the search for life, in that we now have the technological capability to do it," said Victoria Meadows, a professor of astronomy at the University of Washington and director of the astrobiology graduate program. "Prior to JWST, we really did not have the capability to do this."

The breath of aliens

In the hunt for habitable planets — those that orbit in the "Goldilocks zone" of their home star, where liquid water can flow on the surface — JWST is in a class of its own.

Unlike Hubble and other optical telescopes, JWST can't directly image the surfaces of faraway planets. Nor can it detect radio waves and other potential "technosignatures" emitted by any advanced alien civilizations that might exist. The signs of life JWST seeks are far more elemental. They're not blurry snapshots of alien trackways or mysterious radio signals, but hints of molecules tumbling invisibly through space, far above a planet's surface.

"The first step in finding life is to find an atmosphere," Sebastian Zieba, a postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Live Science. "In order to have liquid water on the surface, you need an atmosphere."

Compared with its predecessor — NASA's infrared Spitzer Space Telescope (launched in 2003 and retired in 2020) — JWST is "better in every way," Zieba said. It can look farther across space and detect a broader range of infrared wavelengths than any telescope before it. Infrared emissions are crucial to the hunt for life, because those wavelengths are best at encoding information about the types of molecules that are absorbing or reemitting starlight in a planet's atmosphere.

For JWST to detect hints of an exoplanet's atmosphere, scientists must wait for a transit — the moment when a planet swoops in front of its home star, forcing that star's light to shine through the planet's atmosphere as seen from our perspective on Earth. In the case of K2-18b, for example, that happens once every 33 days.

"The planet passes in front of the star, and it backlights the atmosphere," Meadows said. "It's like a little halo around the planet."

That "halo" contains important clues about an alien world. As starlight streams through the planet's atmosphere, airborne molecules either absorb or reemit different wavelengths of light, changing what JWST sees when observing at those wavelengths. The unique signature of light compiled from these different wavelengths, called a spectrum, can reveal which molecules are in the atmosphere. This information, in turn, allows scientists to infer the planet's size, surface conditions, geography — and chances of supporting life.

For example, Meadows said, if JWST captures the spectrum of a planet that reveals high levels of methane and carbon dioxide absorption in its atmosphere, it could indicate a habitable world akin to Earth in the Archean eon (roughly 4 billion to 2.5 billion years ago), when primitive microbes were breaking down CO2 and spewing vast quantities of methane.

Proving those conditions exist on a planet trillions of miles away is the hard part.

The devil in the data

After making a promising biosignature detection, the challenge then becomes proving that it can't be explained by a geological process, such as volcanism. Then, scientists must demonstrate that their detection meets statistical significance — a rigorous undertaking that requires many repeat observations of the planet and verification from independent researchers using their own data models.

"Webb data is very complex," René Doyon, a professor at the University of Montreal and principal investigator of JWST's Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) instrument, told Live Science. "People have been publishing results that are not always consistent. Depending on who reduced the data, you get a different answer."

It's here that early studies of K2-18b have fallen under scrutiny. Despite the tentative detection of DMS reported in two studies by a team of University of Cambridge-led researchers, outside experts have so far been unable to verify the result when looking at the same observations with different data models. Furthermore, the DMS detection only reached the three-sigma level of statistical significance, falling far short of the required five-sigma level. (A three-sigma level is around a 3 in 1000 chance of being a fluke, while a five-sigma value means a result has a probability of 1 in 3.5 million of being a fluke).

Nikku Madhusudhan, a professor of astrophysics at Cambridge and lead author of the two DMS studies, said this is no reason to ignore K2-18b as a candidate for a habitable world "teeming with microbial life."

"We have initial feelers for what we are seeing, but we could be wrong," Madhusudhan told Live Science. "So let's be open to being wrong and get more data. Only then can we confirm what we're seeing."

Schwieterman thinks it was "premature" to announce the detection of DMS on K2-18b, given the questionable statistical significance. However, he agrees that DMS is a promising signature of life that JWST should continue hunting for on other potentially habitable ocean worlds.

"The question we want to ask is, how common are global biospheres in the universe?" Schwieterman said. If there's complex life out there, including intelligent life, then "a big part of that question is, how common are the biospheres from which those more complex forms of life would originate?"

Hitting a "bull's-eye"

Even if life doesn't ultimately materialize on K2-18b, the distant planet is just one of many being targeted by JWST's keen infrared eye.

The telescope's search list includes some of the usual suspects, such as the TRAPPIST-1 system — the single most-studied star system beyond our own. The system contains seven rocky planets, at least three of which may be in the star's habitable "Goldilocks" zone. So far, though, JWST has found no hints of an atmosphere around any of those planets, possibly indicating that the host star showers its satellites with too much ultraviolet radiation to allow atmospheres to survive, Zieba said.

Doyon favors studying a world called LHS 1140 b, located 50 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cetus. Doyon and team's observations with JWST reveal that the exoplanet, once thought to be a rocky "super-Earth" six times as massive as our planet, is a much bigger oddball — or, perhaps, an eyeball.

"It may be a bull's-eye planet," Doyon said, describing a mostly ice-coated planet with a single blue "iris" of liquid water pointed toward its home star.

Using JWST data from two transits of LHS 1140 b, Doyon and colleagues reestimated the mass and radius of the planet and found "it cannot be explained as a rocky planet — it must have something between 10% and 20% of its mass in water," Doyon said. "It's a potential waterworld, and it's right in the habitable zone."

According to Doyon, LHS 1140 b doesn't resemble Earth so much as it resembles our solar system's icy moons Europa and Enceladus, both of which are suspected to harbor subsurface oceans that could support life. But unlike those moons, this planet is so close to its home star that some of its ice may have sublimated into gas, forming an atmosphere. It's even possible that the sun-facing side of the planet (which, like Earth's moon, is tidally locked) could heat up enough for the ice to melt there, revealing a liquid-water ocean beneath a cloudy sky. As such, this warm, blue "iris" could host life.

Doyon thinks this is one the likeliest known exoplanets to harbor an atmosphere.

"If I had to bet a beer on whether it has an atmosphere, it probably has one," he said.

Pushed to the limits

Sadly, Doyon's beer will likely have to wait.

Although Doyon and his colleagues detected "hints" of a nitrogen-rich atmosphere around LHS 1140 b, he said it will take about a dozen more transits to prove whether there are other molecules indicative of an Earth-like atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide. Because LHS 1140 b becomes visible from Earth only four times a year, scientists would have to observe every possible transit for years to come before making any firm conclusions. It's a schedule that "really pushes JWST to its limits," Doyon added.

This underscores one of the telescope's biggest limitations: time.

In 2024, researchers around the world requested a total of more than 78,000 hours of JWST observation time — about nine times more than is available, according to the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which manages JWST proposals each year. Of the more than 2,300 submissions, only 274 proposals were ultimately accepted, with exoplanet habitability research accounting for a small percentage.

That discrepancy is likely to widen with the passage of the Trump administration's proposed budget for 2026, which includes a nearly 50% cut to NASA's science budget, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. If approved by Congress, the cuts would amount to a roughly 25% to 35% reduction in JWST operations, Neill Reid, multimission project scientist at STScI, said in July at the 246th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Anchorage, Alaska.

Finding the unforgettable

In the end, JWST may not uncover a smoking gun in the search for extraterrestrial life. But even if it doesn't, it will likely help scientists determine where to search next. Future telescopes will build on JWST's revelations, helping to fill in the missing gaps.

One major gap is oxygen. While the gas makes up about 21% of Earth's atmosphere and is a potent biosignature, "JWST can't do oxygen," Meadows said.

Multiple studies — including one co-authored by Meadows, in which researchers modeled what JWST would see if it studied Earth's atmosphere — have found that the telescope is simply not sensitive enough to detect oxygen. That poses a clear challenge to detecting Earth-like atmospheres.

Forthcoming telescopes could help account for that. For example, the Extremely Large Telescope — a powerful optical/near-infrared telescope being constructed in Chile that could see first light in 2029 — will be more sensitive to oxygen and water in planetary atmospheres than JWST is, Meadows said. It will also be able to peer all the way down to the surfaces of rocky planets — closer to where life and its byproducts are more likely to be, unlike the high upper atmospheres that are JWST's domain.

Further down the line, NASA's recently announced Habitable Worlds Observatory will take a census of planets around sunlike stars close to our solar neighborhood. Parsing visible, infrared and ultraviolet light signatures, the powerful observatory could potentially confirm atmospheres around dozens of Earth-like worlds. Currently, however, there is no planned launch date.

With JWST expected to remain operational at least into the 2030s, its era of discovery is just beginning. Will it find alien life? Maybe, maybe not. But in its first years, it's already leading scientists closer to that first tantalizing glimpse of evidence than any telescope has before.

And once that evidence is found — even if it's on a distant exoplanet that no human or probe will ever lay eyes on — there's no going back. Finding evidence of even one other inhabited planet would imply that there could be countless others out there, raising big questions about the prevalence of life in the universe, and where humans fit into it. The discovery of an alien world would change how we view the cosmos, as well as ourselves.

"Once we find a credible hint of evidence for life on an exoplanet … I don't think we're ever going to forget about that planet," Schwieterman said. "It's going to be both a scientific and cultural touchstone. Kids are going to learn about it in school."

Our question is, how much do you know about some of the greatest athletic achievements of all time? This quiz will help you find out whether your knowledge of sports records is up to scratch.

Below, you will find 10 questions related to different aspects of human strength and endurance. Let's see if you can name the fastest 100-meter dash, the longest breath hold underwater or the highest jump ever recorded. We know it is a lot of numbers and stats to go through but hints are available if you click the yellow button!

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The nurse shark (Ginglymostoma cirratum) had a mysterious condition called xanthism, or xanthochroism, which increases yellow pigmentation in the skin. Researchers have recorded xanthism in several animals, but this is the first definitive case of a nurse shark with the trait. The shark also appears to have albinism, making it even more unusual.

Sports fishers discovered the shark by chance off the east coast of Costa Rica in 2024. Garvin Watson, owner of the Parismina Domus Dei hotel in the village of Parismina, reeled in the shark, which was around 6.6 feet (2 meters) long and swimming 120 feet (37 m) below the surface.

"We could not believe what we had in front of our eyes," Watson told Live Science in an email.

"That orange shark shining with the sunlight was something out of the ordinary," he said. "We did not know that it was going to be a discovery worldwide, recognized by all the biologists of the world."

The fishers photographed the shark, then removed the hook from its mouth and released it back into the Caribbean Sea. Researchers described the event and its significance in a new study published Aug. 1 in the journal Marine Biodiversity.

Related: Do sharks make noises? An accidental discovery might just answer that question

Scientists have documented xanthism in a variety of species, including frogs, birds and fish. While some animals are normally yellow and orange, these colors are more prominent in xanthic individuals of these species.

Nurse sharks are typically yellow to gray-brown. There have been occasional reports of unusual coloring in this species, including albinism — characterized by a complete lack of melanin pigmentation in the skin and iris — and potential xanthism, but a xanthic nurse shark had never been scientifically documented before now, according to the study.

"We were very surprised and excited when we saw the [xanthism] in the photos," study lead author Marioxis Macías-Cuyare, a doctoral candidate in biological oceanography at the Federal University of Rio Grande in Brazil, told Live Science in an email.

The researchers spoke with Watson and studied photos of the shark. They noted that the shark lacked the black irises typically seen in shark eyes, and concluded that it was likely albino as well as xanthic. A 2018 study documented this combined condition, known as albino-xanthochromism, in a ray species (Raja montagui) found in the Irish Sea.

Researchers are still studying the causes of abnormal pigmentation in sharks. Such conditions are typically associated with genetics, but factors such as environmental stress, elevated temperatures and hormonal imbalances may also contribute to different colors, according to the study.

Macías-Cuyare said that xanthism is usually genetic, but more research was needed to understand the conditions influencing the shark's anomalous pigmentation.

The shark's survival is also curious. Animals evolve to be specific colors to better survive in their environments, so being bright orange when the species isn't meant to be would normally be a hindrance. In this case, the shark has made it to adulthood and doesn't appear to have been held back by its unusual color.

"Many factors influence this, such as the environment, but everything remains speculative until the variables that could influence this genetic condition are tested," Macías-Cuyare said.

The device, which has so far been tested in rabbits, would be particularly useful for fixing irregularly shaped fractures during surgery, the researchers say.

"To my knowledge, there are virtually no previous examples of applying the technology directly as a bone substitute," study co-author Jung Seung Lee, a biomedical engineer at Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea, told Live Science in an email. "This makes the approach quite unique and sets it apart from conventional methods."

Typically, large fractures or other defects in bones require bone grafting and the use of a metal fastener, such as a pin or plate, to support the broken bone as it heals. But because the shape of these implants is not specific to a given patient's fracture, this can result in poor alignment and compromised stability of the bone.

Previous studies have shown that 3D printing bespoke bone grafts for individual patients can be done, but these required considerable time and effort to make, preventing them from being used on the fly during surgery.

Now, in a study published Friday (Sept. 5) in the journal Device, Lee and colleagues detailed their new method of 3D printing a bone substitute directly onto a fracture using a glue gun. In the research, they successfully tested the technology on rabbits with leg fractures.

Related: Injectable goo could fix joints without surgery, early study suggests

Basic 3D printing commonly uses a flexible, plastic thread, which is heated and then formed into the desired shape. But Lee and colleagues created a filament composed of two materials: polycaprolactone (PCL), which has been used in previous studies to create biodegradable bone scaffolds, and hydroxyapatite (HA), a mineral form of calcium important for bone structure. They also incorporated two antibiotics into the filament to help prevent infection; these drugs diffuse slowly out of the filament over several weeks.

Using a glue gun modified to extrude the calcium-based filament at a low temperature, the researchers created small shapes that cooled to body temperature within 40 seconds. They were then able to print 3D bone grafts directly onto fractures and defects during surgeries on the lab rabbits.

"This highlights a significant advantage in terms of reducing operative time and improving procedural efficiency under real surgical conditions," Lee said in a statement.

The researchers tested their 3D-printed bone grafts on New Zealand white rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus). They braced the fractures with metal plates and screws, and then filled the rabbits' bone defects with either their special bone-like filament or with traditional bone cement and followed the rabbits' progress over 12 weeks.

The rabbits with the new fracture treatment had better outcomes, including better bone tissue formation and denser bone growth over the three months, compared to the rabbits given traditional treatment. By the end of the study period, the experimental bone material had degraded by about 10%, they noted.

"We have confirmed the therapeutic potential of this technology using a rabbit model," Lee told Live Science, noting that further studies in larger animal models are needed before the technology can be used on humans. Nonetheless, Lee said, "we believe this approach has the potential to be used more widely in future trauma surgery."

Hurricane Kiko rapidly intensified from a tropical storm on Monday (Sept. 1) to a Category 4 hurricane on Wednesday (Sept. 3), according to The Weather Channel. The storm is moving westward and currently tracking across a region of warm water and low wind shear roughly 1,300 miles (2,100 kilometers) southeast of Hawaii, meaning it could strengthen in the next few hours, forecasters said.

The latest National Hurricane Center (NHC) forecast suggests Hurricane Kiko is heading for Hawaii and may reach the islands by Tuesday or Wednesday next week (Sept. 9 or 10). Kiko is whipping up winds of up to 145 mph (230 km/h), according to a CNN video — but meteorologists predict that these gusts will weaken over the weekend to the levels of a tropical storm or low-category hurricane.

Kiko is "yet another example of a hurricane undergoing rapid intensification amongst extremely warm waters," Brandon Miller, a senior meteorologist and supervising weather producer for CNN, said in the video. However, it's highly unlikely that the storm will remain as powerful as it is now through Sept. 9 or 10, Miller said, because it has to pass through a patch of relatively cold water and trade winds first.

Hurricane Kiko will likely hit the cool, windy patch on Sunday (Sept. 7), which will reduce some of the storm’s intensity, according to The Weather Channel. Pockets of dry air hovering to the east of Hawaii will further slow the storm and Kiko will also be forced to cross wind shear that will cut the ground from under its feet.

It's possible that Hurricane Kiko will miss Hawaii entirely, as the storm is expected to gain latitude through early next week. A "cone of uncertainty" shared by the NHC — which sums up the different paths that Hurricane Kiko might follow in the shape of an elongated, sideways teardrop — shows that Kiko's center track could move north of Hawaii, which would avert some of the storm's worst impacts on the archipelago.

Related: 'Now is the time': Hurricane category 6 could be introduced under new storm severity scale

But hurricanes don't have to make landfall to bring bad weather. "Don't let your guard down, Hawaiians," Miller said. "Kiko could still bring impacts to the island, such as flooding rainfall and gusty winds."

Swells caused by the storm could reach Hawaiian shores toward the end of the weekend, generating potentially life-threatening surf and rip currents, The Weather Channel warned. Many of the Hawaiian Islands also still sit within the NHC's uncertainty cone.

The distance between Kiko's center track and Hawaii's individual islands will determine how severe the impacts on those islands will be, according to The Weather Channel.

Residents should therefore check updates regularly and stay informed, forecasters said.

The Canon RF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM was hailed as the world's first medium telephoto macro lens upon its release, and it arrived with serious intent. Designed for close-up specialists, product photography and even portrait work, this lens blends precision with creativity.

With its 1.4:1 magnification ratio, image stabilization and a unique Spherical Aberration control ring to adjust the bokeh, it offers more than just standard macro capabilities and stands out against many of the very best macro lenses. As part of Canon's L-series, it also promises pro-level build quality and optical performance.

Whether you're shooting tiny insects, intricate textures or stylized portraits, this lens is designed to deliver pin-sharp results and smooth, dreamy backgrounds. It comes at a premium price tag, but we think it's worth every cent and is an essential for every macro Canon shooter.

Canon RF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM review

Design & build

• Well-built and solid
• Weather-sealed
• Although it's large, we didn't find it too heavy

The Canon RF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM has a clean, modern design that fits right in with their premium L-series lineup. It’s solidly built, and although it weighs 25.8 oz (730 g), we didn’t find it overly heavy to shoot with, and found that it feels well-balanced on most full-frame Canon mirrorless bodies. The matte black finish, red ring and smooth contours give it that classic Canon pro look. (However, we did notice its proneness to fingermarks.)

The lens doesn’t extend when focusing, which is great for macro work. Plus, it’s weather-sealed, so you won’t have to worry about any rain or dust getting in. It features a Spherical Control (SA) ring, which we’ll get to later, as well as the usual suspects: an image stabilization on/off switch, an AF/MF switch and a focus limit switch. Design-wise, we have no complaints — it’s cleverly designed with enough switches and rings to make it feel special without going over the top.

Image quality

• Outstanding image quality
• Bright, true-to-life color rendering
• Basically no optical defects

The image quality of the Canon RF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM is nothing short of astounding. It delivers stunning resolution, even wide open at f/2.8, where the images are crisp from edge to edge. It handles fine details superbly for macro photography, where every texture and surface matters — this lens captures everything with clinical precision.

We shot a whole range of different macro subjects with this lens, from insects to flowers and plant details, berries and close-up views of a variety of crystals to get as much detail and color variation as possible on real-life subjects.

Chromatic aberration is well controlled, with basically no color fringing even in high contrast images. In addition, there's hardly any vignetting or distortion, which is incredible for a macro lens — we hardly had to make any corrections in post.

The color rendering is true to life and well-balanced, with good contrast straight out of the camera. Thanks to the nine-blade aperture and f/2.8 maximum aperture, the bokeh is smooth and not too distracting.

The 100mm focal length and f/2.8 aperture are also a recipe for beautiful portraits, especially with the spherical aberration control (more on that below) to adjust the bokeh. We didn’t have enough time with this lens to shoot portraits, but given the overall quality of the shots we did get, we can confidently say that this lens will excel in almost any given style you’d want to use it for.

Functionality

• Spherical aberration ring to control bokeh
• 1.4:1 magnification ratio trumps the competition
• Autofocus is fast and accurate

One of the more attractive features of this lens that stands out against the competition is the Spherical Aberration (SA) ring. This ring controls the intensity of the bokeh, and is a surprisingly cool feature for both macro and portrait photography. When the SA ring is set to its standard position, you'll get standard bokeh. Push it towards the minus and your background will become softer and blurrier. Push it to the other end and it becomes much harsher, giving a busier effect to your bokeh.

There's a slight amount of focus breathing when you adjust the SA ring from one side to another, so if you're set up on a tripod, then you'll need to adjust your distance between the camera and the subject. We loved experimenting with this, and we appreciated that there is a lock button if you want to keep it as standard without accidentally knocking it.

Another standout feature is the magnification ratio. Although some macro lenses can produce 2:1 or even 5:1 ratios, most macro lenses only offer 1:1 true macro. This Canon lens, however, offers a magnification ratio of 1.4:1, meaning your subjects appear 1.4x larger on the sensor than they are in real life. Couple this with a fantastic working distance of around 3.7 inches (94 mm), and that makes for some seriously great macro shots.

While getting that close to a subject is great, we did find ourselves having to remove the lens hood at times due to the hood causing a shadow on our subject. It also means that there's a greater chance of scaring your subject away, which did happen numerous times for us. The lens is also image-stabilized, which is helpful for composing your shot at such high magnifications.

Verdict

Overall, we loved this lens and think it's a standout for any macro photographer needing sharp, detailed close-ups with beautiful bokeh. It's ideal for dedicated macro shooters, but would be a hefty investment for beginners or anyone who shoots macro on a casual basis. That said, it doubles as a stunning portrait lens, so it does give good bang for your buck and you won't regret buying it.

As impressive as this lens is, it won't be suitable for everyone. If you shoot astro or wide-angle landscapes, the focal length will be too long. It could work for detailed moon or deep-space images with a star tracker, but there are other similar lenses with a wider aperture that would be better suited to astrophotography. You could shoot general wildlife photography with it in a pinch, but its fixed 100mm focal length is typically quite short for a wildlife lens, so you'd need to be quite close to your subject.

If the Canon RF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM isn't for you

How we tested the Canon RF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM

We tested the Canon RF 100mm F2.8L IS USM lens over the course of 10 days, shooting a variety of subjects around the house and in our garden. We used in-camera focus peaking to help nail the manual focus when shooting moving subjects at increased magnification, and we shot at multiple magnification ratios to test the whole range.

We photographed insects, flowers, plants, fine textures and crystals. While using the lens, we switched the image stabilization off and back on to evaluate the difference it made. We used the lens for periods of up to an hour at a time to test the comfort levels of its size and weight.

If you're looking to make the most of the long nights with some brand new astronomy binoculars, these Celestron SkyMaster 25x70 are now the cheapest they've been all year. Now selling for $82 (when you add the coupon) at Amazon, this deal is incredibly worthwhile if you've always wanted to get a closer look at the stars but don't want to shell out too much on your first pair.

The 25x magnification is fantastic for views of Jupiter and its moons, detailed observations of the moon and getting a better view of star clusters, the Andromeda Galaxy and the Orion nebula without having to invest in a telescope. Binoculars on the whole are a great option for beginners who want to dip their toes into the world of astronomy, as they are usually less expensive, have an easier setup and much less technical knowledge involved than telescopes, and these 25x70s are an ideal starting point. We wouldn't recommend them as much for wildlife observation due to their size and the lack of ED glass, but a pair of 12x56 or 10x42 binoculars would give the best of both worlds while keeping things lightweight.

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In this deal, you'll get a tripod adapter, lens caps, rain guard, carrying case, neck strap, lens cloth and instructions included, giving you everything you need to get started — apart from a tripod. Due to the strong magnification and their large size and weight, they'll need to be mounted on a tripod to prevent shaky views. The soft rubber eyecups are comfortable to use, although the 13mm eye relief might be a little short if you wear glasses all the time. They are water-resistant, although they aren't nitrogen-purged, so they may be prone to fogging up when moving between warm and cold environments — this is one of the sacrifices of budget binoculars.

We tested the 15x70 variant earlier in the year and absolutely loved them, so if you want a pair more dedicated to astronomy, this Celestron 25x70 deal isn't one to be missed. We love Celestron as a brand and trust them to consistently deliver high-quality optics for stargazing, be that binoculars or telescopes.

Key features: 25x magnification, 70mm objective lens diameter, 2.7-degree angular field of view, 13mm eye relief, multi-coated lenses, BaK-4 prisms, 52 oz (1,474 g).

Price history: The base price of $92.69 matches the lowest price this year so far, but the $10 coupon cuts the price down even more.

Price comparison: Amazon: $82.69 | Walmart: $139.95 | BHPhoto: $92.69

Reviews consensus: An excellent entry-level pair of astronomy binoculars with powerful magnification and large objective lenses to drink in the faint starlight.

✅ Buy it if: You want a tool to stargaze without investing in the cost of setup of a telescope.

❌ Don't buy it if: You want a lightweight pair of binoculars for handheld stargazing. In this case, a pair of 10x42s will be perfect.

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

The Narusawa Ice Cave is a lava tube that is brimming with icicles and ice pillars at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan.

Lava tubes are natural tunnels that form beneath solidified lava flows after a volcanic eruption. Lava hardens faster in the top layers of a lava flow, where the molten rock comes into contact with cool air, than in the middle layers, where it stays red hot and fluid. As a result, when a volcano stops erupting, the core of a lava flow drains away while the outside hardens, leaving an empty conduit, or cave.

The Narusawa Ice Cave is one of several caves that formed during a violent eruption of Mount Fuji in A.D. 864. The eruption took place on the northeast side of the volcano, with lava spewing from a new vent called Mount Nagao rather than from Mount Fuji's central summit crater.

The eruption lasted 10 days and created the large lava plain that's now covered by the Aokigahara Forest, a dense woodland also known as the "Sea of Trees." The blast also split a lake in half, carving out two of the five Fuji volcanic lakes.

The ice cave is one of the three largest caves in this area, along with Fugaku Wind Cave and Lake Sai Bat Cave (also called Lake Saiko Bat Cave). Narusawa Ice Cave is 490 feet (150 meters) long and up to 12 feet (3.6 m) high, according to Wind Cave & Ice Cave, the company that manages and offers tours of the cave. The average temperature in the cave is only slightly above 37 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius) due its particular geology, meaning that any moisture is likely to freeze, especially in the winter.

Water that drips from the ceiling of the cave forms stalactites and stalagmites that meet in the middle during the coldest months. The best time to visit Narusawa Ice Cave is in winter or early spring, when these ice pillars can reach up to 1.6 feet (0.5 m) thick and 10 feet (3 m) tall, according to Wind Cave & Ice Cave.

Related: See what would happen to Tokyo if Mount Fuji erupted 'without any warning' in new AI-generated video

The cave is a tourist attraction, but historically, it was used to keep seeds and silkworm cocoons cool. People carved rectangular blocks out of the ice pillars, which they then stacked to create an icebox or refrigerator of sorts, according to Wind Cave & Ice Cave.

"To prevent growth of the cocoons and to preserve the quality of seeds and promote budding, they were stored in a refrigerated environment," the company states on its website.

The cave also holds the remains of ancient trees, which were knocked down by lava flows during the A.D. 864 eruption, pictures on the website show.

The Narusawa Ice Cave sits just half a mile (800 m) east of Fugaku Wind Cave, which extends much deeper belowground, boasts impressive lava formations and houses unusual moss colonies, according to the Japan National Tourism Organization. There is no echo in the wind cave because the walls of pure basaltic rock absorb sound — and unlike in the ice cave, there isn't any frozen water for sound waves to bounce off of.

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

But the AI being used today is not the AI of the future. Scientists are increasingly convinced we are on an express train to building artificial general intelligence (AGI) — an advanced type of AI that can reason like humans, perform better than us in different domains, and even improve its own code and make itself more powerful.

Experts call this moment the singularity. Some scientists say it could happen as early as next year, but most agree there's a strong chance that we will build AGI by 2040.

But what then? Birthing an AI that's smarter than humans may bring countless benefits — including rapidly doing new science and making fresh discoveries. But an AI that can build increasingly powerful versions of itself may also not be such great news if its interests do not align with humanity's. That's where artificial super intelligence (ASI) comes into play — and the potential risks associated with pursuing something far more capable than us.

AI development, as experts have told Live Science, is entering "an unprecedented regime". So, should we stop it before it becomes powerful enough to potentially snuff us out at the snap of its fingers? Let us know in the poll below, and be sure to tell us why you voted the way you did in the comments section.

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Gout is a type of arthritis that causes sudden, severe pain and swelling in the joints. It happens when there is too much uric acid in the blood, which can form sharp crystals in the joints, triggering painful inflammation. The painful attacks can come on quickly and may last for days or weeks.

While there are several drugs that have been developed to manage elevated uric acid levels, many have either seen limited success or significant drawbacks, including side effects like harmful immune responses.

But in a study published July 18 in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers developed a potential new method of reducing uric acid: They restored the function of a gene humans lost millions of years ago with the help of CRISPR gene editing.

"Human cells still know what to do with that protein" made by the lost gene, study co-author Eric Gaucher, a geneticist at Georgia State University, told Live Science. A postdoctoral scholar in Gaucher's lab, Lais de Lima Balico, was the second co-author on the study.

"Medications used to treat gout … are very effective when taken consistently, but adherence rates to these medications are among the lowest of any chronic disease," Dr. Chen Xie, a rheumatologist at UCLA who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. "A gene editing-based treatment to lower uric acid could be a medication-free, curative therapy that could bypass a lot of practical treatment issues we currently face."

So far, the researchers have explored the idea only in lab studies with human cells, but they say their results suggest that a gene therapy could someday be a viable option for patients with gout.

While gout is a fairly common condition that affects 1 in 25 people worldwide, it is very rare in mammals other than primates. This is because other animals have an active gene for an enzyme called uricase, which breaks down uric acid in the blood and thereby prevents the formation of crystals. However, due to a number of mutations picked up over our evolutionary history, the uricase enzyme in humans cannot process uric acid. Some researchers believe this happened because increased levels of uric acid can also turn fruit sugar into fat, helping primates survive winters and grow bigger brains.

Related: US baby receives first-ever customized CRISPR treatment for genetic disease

Researchers had previously identified which ancient genes may have been responsible for producing uricase by inferring ancestral genes. This means figuring out what the genes of ancient organisms looked like by studying the DNA of living species today. Scientists compare the genes of different animals or people, use computer programs to build family trees, and then make educated guesses about what the original, ancient gene sequences were. Once they have a good idea of what those old genes looked like, they can recreate and "resurrect" the ancient proteins that the genes encode in the lab and possibly open the door to new therapies.

In the new study, researchers used CRISPR gene editing to insert the ancient uricase gene into the genomes of human liver spheroids. Spheroids are 3D blobs of lab-grown tissues that mimic complex, full-size organs found in the body. The insertion of the ancient gene resulted in a drop in uric acid, as well as a reduction in fat buildup related to fruit sugars.

There are existing gout therapies that use uricase to manage high levels of uric acid; for example, the treatment Krystexxa involves injections of uricase proteins made using a combination of pig and baboon gene sequences. However, these protein-based therapeutics often elicit strong immune responses and require clinical monitoring due to the risk of anaphylactic shock.

By contrast, a gene therapy that restores the original, ancient human gene sequence could enable the body's own cells to produce uricase. In theory, the immune reactions could be minimized because much of the uricase protein sequence is already recognized and accepted by the human body.

But the researchers have a long way to go before such a gene therapy could be used in human patients. For next steps, they are transitioning from liver spheroids to lab mice, and they're using nanoparticle delivery systems that introduce CRISPR gene-editing components directly into liver cells.

Such a gene therapy has the potential to transform gout treatment by providing a long-lasting and possibly safer alternative to current therapies, the researchers say. Gene-editing therapies like this, however, are still in early stages of development.

The researchers hope that this approach — of taking and adapting ancient genes for modern therapies — could be more broadly applied in the future.

"My ultimate goal is to be able to wed molecular evolution and clinical medicine," Gaucher said. "Ideally we can use ancient proteins or ancient enzymes to develop therapeutics to help modern society."

Editor's note: This story was updated on Sept. 5, 2025, to add a comment from Dr. Chen Xie.

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

The Kunlun system, northeast of Papua New Guinea, is made up of 20 large craters, the largest of which is around 5,900 feet (1,800 meters) wide and 430 feet (130 m) deep. These craters are clustered together in what the researchers called a "pipe swarm," and they release copious amounts of hydrogen, which may feed the life that thrives throughout the system.

Kunlun is similar to an Atlantic hydrothermal field known as the Lost City, which is located on the Atlantis Massif underwater mountain range. However, Kunlun has several features that make it unique, including its extraordinary size. Kunlun covers an area of about 4 square miles (11 square kilometers), making it hundreds of times larger than the Lost City, according to the study published Aug. 8 in the journal Science Advances.

The Kunlun system offers scientists a new window into deep-sea serpentinization, which is the process by which seawater chemically reacts with mantle rocks beneath the seafloor to create serpentine minerals (a group of minerals known for their greenish color) and release hydrogen.

Researchers think they can study the potential links between these hydrogen emissions and the emergence of life at Kunlun. The system is thought to have hydrogen-rich fluids that are similar to early Earth's chemical environment, according to a statement released by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

"What's particularly intriguing is its ecological potential," study co-author Weidong Sun, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Oceanology, said in the statement. "We observed diverse deep-sea life thriving here — shrimp, squat lobsters, anemones, and tubeworms — species that may depend on hydrogen-fueled chemosynthesis."

Related: 'Dragon' and 'tree of life' hydrothermal vents discovered in Arctic region scientists thought was geologically dead

Sunlight doesn't reach the deep ocean, so life at the seafloor can't use photosynthesis — the process by which plants, algae and certain bacteria closer to the surface convert sunlight into energy. Some life in the deep ocean therefore relies on chemosynthesis, which involves using chemicals like hydrogen as an energy source to make food.

A separate Chinese-led research team recently used a crewed submersible to film chemosynthesis-based communities at the bottom of the northwest Pacific, at depths of around 31,000 feet (9,500 m). Such communities are rarely documented, with the vast majority of the ocean floor unexplored and unstudied.

In the new study, researchers used the same submersible to map Kunlun and explore four of its largest craters. By measuring the hydrogen concentrations in Kunlun's hydrothermal fluids, the researchers estimated that the field produced more than 5% of the world's non-living submarine hydrogen output — not bad for just one system.

The team proposed that the pipe swarm they documented formed in stages. First, hydrogen accumulated beneath the surface and burst out in major explosions. Fractures then formed along the edges and bottom of the resulting structures, triggering further intense eruptions of hydrogen-rich hydrothermal fluids. These fractures would then slowly become blocked by forming minerals, enabling hydrogen to accumulate again and potentially fuel additional smaller-scale explosions.

Kunlun is different from the more common volcano-powered hydrothermal seafloor systems found at plate boundaries. These systems often feature chimney-like structures, such as black smokers, that are extremely hot, running at about 750 degrees Fahrenheit (400 degrees Celsius). The serpentinization systems like Kunlun and the Lost City are cooler, with temperatures below 194 F (90 C).

Kunlun is not only bigger than the Lost City, it's also in a more unusual location. The Lost City is close to a mid-ocean ridge, which form along diverging plate boundaries and expose mantle rock, while Kunlun is in the interior of its plate, far from any ridge.

"The Kunlun system stands out for its exceptionally high hydrogen flux, scale, and unique geological setting," Sun said. "It shows that serpentinization-driven hydrogen generation can occur far from mid-ocean ridges, challenging long-held assumptions."

Usually, such planet-forming disks contain water, but "water is so scarce in this system that it's barely detectable — a dramatic contrast to what we typically observe," Jenny Frediani, a doctoral student in the Department of Astronomy at Stockholm University and lead author of the research, said in a statement.

The findings, published Aug. 29 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, challenge current ideas about planetary formation.

The science team still isn't sure what's going on at the star in NGC 6357, which is located 8,000 light-years from Earth, Frediani told Live Science in an email. However, further investigation into this system could help us understand more about the formation of Earth-like planets.

"These are the most common environments for the formation of stars and planets, and they also likely resemble the environment in which our own solar system formed," Frediani told Live Science.

Oddball star

Typically, newborn stars are swaddled in gas clouds. They create disks of material from which planets and other objects, like comets or asteroids, may eventually form.

Previous models have suggested that, as these disks evolve, bits of rocky material rich in water ice move from the outer and colder edges of the planet-forming disk to the warmer center. As the pebbles move in toward the young stars, temperatures on the surface of the rocks rise and make the ices sublimate. JWST can then spot this sublimation through the signature of water vapor.

But when JWST examined this star, known as XUE 10, it spotted a surprise: the signature of carbon dioxide.

There are two theories that could explain the weird environment, Frediani explained.

One possibility is a strong source of ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the newborn star or from some massive nearby stars. "Both can emit enough UV radiation to significantly deplete the water reservoir in a disk early on," she said.

Another reason may be due to dust grains in the region. Instead of having a lot of water coating the grains, perhaps the dust is replete with carbon dioxide "due to particular local environmental conditions around the young star," she said.

If this were the case, water vapor would accrete on to the star, but "a relatively large amount of CO2 [carbon dioxide] vapor will remain visible in the disk before it is eventually accreted as well," Frediani explained.

JWST is located at a gravitationally stable spot in space known as a Lagrange point, where it is far from interfering light from Earth or other celestial bodies. That remote location, paired with JWST's powerful mirrors, makes the telescope the only one sensitive enough to capture details about how planet-forming disks form in distant and massive star-forming regions, Frediani said.

Frediani is part of the eXtreme Ultraviolet Environments collaboration, which examines how intense radiation fields affect the chemistry of disks around planet-forming stars. For now, JWST remains the consortium's best bet for follow-ups of this strange system, but some upcoming ground observatories and upgrades will help, Frediani said.

For example, the long-running European Southern Observatory-led Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in the Chilean desert is being upgraded, with hopes to have the changes operational by the 2030s.

The Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade, as the work is termed, will "allow us to image the cold gas and dust reservoirs in the outer regions of disks, located in distant star-forming regions," Frediani said. This upgrade should allow researchers to see the root causes of phenomena such as disk truncation (or shrinking) happening due to strong external irradiation.

Another complementary ground observatory will be the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), a 130-foot (39 meters) ESO observatory that's under construction in Chile. When it's completed around 2027, the ELT will be the largest of the next-generation ground-based optical and near-infrared telescopes, according to the ESO.

"The ELT will be powerful enough to resolve the fine structure of these irradiated disks, revealing, for example, substructures that may be linked to forming planets in the disk," Frediani said.

The finding is the first direct evidence of the use of bears in the gladiatorial arena and attests to the barbarism of animal spectacles in the Roman Empire.

"We cannot say with certainty whether the bear died directly in the arena, but the evidence suggests the trauma occurred during spectacles and the subsequent infection likely contributed significantly to its death," study lead author Nemanja Marković, a senior research associate at the Institute of Archaeology in Belgrade, told Live Science in an email.

In a study published Monday (Sept. 1) in the journal Antiquity, Marković and colleagues detailed their analysis of the fragmented skull of a brown bear (Ursus arctos) excavated in 2016 near the amphitheater at Viminacium, a Roman frontier military base in present-day Serbia.

The amphitheater at Viminacium was built in the second century A.D. Oval-shaped with high walls, it could seat about 7,000 people. Archaeologists recovered the bear skull near the entrance to the amphitheater, along with a number of other animal bones, including those of a leopard, the researchers noted in the study.

"Previous research suggests animals killed in the arena were butchered nearby, their meat distributed, and bones discarded close to the amphitheatre — not buried in a formal animal graveyard," Marković said.

Bears forced to participate in these ancient spectacles had a variety of roles. They could be made to fight "venatores," gladiators who specialized in hunting; to brawl with other animals; to execute convicts; or to give trained performances.

Related: Lion mauled gladiator to death 1,800 years ago in Roman Britain, controversial study suggests

The researchers' analysis of the brown bear skull revealed just how brutal these spectacles were for the animals.

Using ancient DNA analysis, the researchers determined that the bear was male and was from the local area, and his teeth suggested he was about 6 years old when he died. Carbon dating of animal bones from the area where the bear was found gave a date range of A.D. 240 to 350, a time when the Viminacium amphitheater was regularly hosting gladiatorial games.

A large lesion on the front of the bear's skull showed signs of healing but also signs of infection, suggesting he was struggling with the injury at death. This traumatic injury could have been inflicted by a "venator" equipped with a spear, the researchers wrote in the study.

The animal's jaws also showed evidence of infection, and the researchers identified abnormal wear on his canine teeth. Captive bears are known to chew on the bars of their cages, the researchers noted, which can lead to the kinds of dental and jaw problems seen in this ancient bear.

"This bear was likely kept in captivity for years, not just weeks," Marković said, in which case he would have featured repeatedly in Roman spectacles at Viminacium.

Although historical records mention the use of brown bears in gladiatorial spectacles, "this study provides the first direct osteological evidence for the participation of brown bears in Roman spectacles," the researchers concluded, and offers a glimpse into the use and treatment of animals in the Roman Empire.

Roman emperor quiz: Test your knowledge on the rulers of the ancient empire

The project, involving a dozen labs and data from over 600,000 individual mouse brain cells, covered areas representing over 95% of the brain. Findings from the research, published in two papers in the journal Nature, suggest that decision-making involves far more of the brain than previously thought.

The mammoth project was led by the International Brain Laboratory (IBL), a collaboration of experimental and theoretical neuroscientists from across Europe and the U.S. These scientists were united by a familiar, nagging feeling.

"We had a problem with the way science was done," said Matteo Carandini, a neuroscientist at University College London and a core member of the IBL.

In previous studies of the brain, many separate labs set out to answer big questions about the organ, exploring how brain activity relates to behavior, for instance. However, each lab studied this question in different mice's brains, and performed slightly different behavioral tasks with each set of rodents. Once you added in uncertainties around how each research group defined distinct regions within the brain, these inconsistencies muddied the results.

"We wouldn't know whether we actually agree or disagree, because so many things were different," Carandini told Live Science.

Related: Most detailed human brain map ever contains 3,300 cell types

So the IBL came together to design a single, robust, standardized experiment on a scale that no individual lab could tackle alone. They then paired this megatest with precision brain measuring tools and preset analysis methods to make the results as reproducible as possible. The aim of the experiment would be to overcome an enduring obstacle in the field.

"One of the longest-standing challenges in neuroscience is to decipher how variation in neural systems — both structural and functional — maps onto variation in behavior," Federico Turkheimer, a neuroscientist at King's College London who was not involved in the study, said in a statement to the U.K. Science Media Centre.

This project ultimately included 139 mice, spread across 12 labs around the world, that were implanted with brain-recording devices called Neuropixels probes. The probes can record up to 1,000 individual neurons simultaneously. The researchers tested the mice with a simple behavioral task that each of the dozen labs could reliably replicate: Researchers placed mice in front of a screen, and a black-and-white striped marker would flash either on the right or left. If the mice moved a small wheel in the same direction as the flash, they received a reward.

Based on what you'd read in a neuroscience textbook, said Carandini, you'd expect the brain activity that occurred during the experiment to follow a linear path. First, cells in the visual cortex that recognize images would fire up, followed by neurons in a different part of the brain, such as the prefrontal cortex, known to be involved in abstract decisions. This information might then be combined with additional activity that represented the mouse's prior experiences — in other words, memories — before being sent to motor regions of the brain that control muscle responses.

The researchers' findings supported some of this chain reaction; the visual cortex was the first thing to activate, for example. Yet other findings clashed with the team's expectations.

"We found decision signals and signals related to the prior information in way more brain regions than we might have thought," Carandini said. Taken together, the activity across nearly all of the brain regions studied could be used to deduce whether or not the mouse had received a reward.

In some of the experimental trials, the researchers made the on-screen marker incredibly faint, so the mice essentially had to guess which way to move the wheel. The second Nature paper focused on how the mice used prior expectations — based on where the marker had been in previous tests — to inform their guess. The brain activity that flashed up when the mice guessed in these tasks was also far more widely distributed in the brain than the team anticipated it would be.

The IBL modeled its approach to understanding the brain on similar initiatives, such as the particle physics experiments conducted at CERN or the Human Genome Project's work to understand our DNA. To describe the project's impact, Carandini reaches for yet another field: astronomy.

He noted that the earliest astronomers could look up at the night sky and see every star, but in very poor detail. With the advent of the telescope, individual celestial bodies could be explored. Previous work in neuroscience, he said, was "as if somebody had pointed a telescope only to one galaxy, and then different astronomers had pointed their telescopes at different galaxies, and said, 'My galaxy does this!' or 'No, my galaxy does that!" The new project, he explained, was like being able to view all the features of the night sky at once and up close.

Such work has only been possible with recent technological advances and improved collaboration across labs, but Carandini hopes that it can now be used to address other big questions about the brain. The current paper's findings are only correlational, so it is currently not possible to say whether the observed brain activity directly causes a decision to be made or is only associated with the process.

"I think that's the next frontier," he said, "is to add causality to the study."

The mighty Molekule Air Pro is now 21% off, bringing its price down by a solid $215, while its smaller and less powerful sibling Air Mini+ is 17% off, saving you a neat $60. We spotted the same deal at Amazon and a couple of other retailers just yesterday, but it has already sold out. Do not dwell too long on this offer from Macy's, as we do not expect it to last long, either.

During our Molekule Air Pro review, we were particularly impressed by its ability to remove smoke. Every air purifier we test is subjected to smoke tests, where we burn 10 matches, then run the machine for 15 and 30 minutes on its auto setting. After just 15 minutes, the Molekule Air Pro removed a whopping 99.9% airborne particles. After 30 minutes, the air quality was better than when we started. Indeed, it is one of the most powerful appliances we have ever tested, which is why we gave it a strong 4/5 rating and a spot in our guide to the best air purifiers.

Robust air quality monitoring is another aspect in which Molekule tends to outshine the competitors. While most air purifiers use simple color-coded air-quality indicators, the Air Pro and Air Mini will tell you exactly how much pollution is in the air, breaking it down into volatile organic compounds (VOCs), carbon dioxide (CO2), relative humidity and three separate categories of particulate matter (PM1.0, PM2.5, and PM10). The Molekule app will then track the air quality over time, allowing you to identify any significant spikes and drops in the levels of specific air pollutants.

The Molekule Air Pro is both a real powerhouse of an air purifier and an ultra-robust air quality sensor — and right now, you can knock $215 off its original price.

Key features: PECO-HEPA Tri-Power Filter, FDA clearance, 2 auto modes, 6 fan speeds, app and voice control, comprehensive air quality readings

Product launched: September 2020

Price history: For the better part of this year, the price of Molekule Air Pro fluctuated between $899.99 and $1,014.99. The price of the Air Mini+ model, on the other hand, sat mostly at $359.99, occasionally dropping to as low as $299.99. Today's offer from Macy's brings their prices down to $799.44 and $299.99, respectively.

Price comparison: Molekule: $1,014.99 & $339.99| Walmart: $849.99 & $359.99 | Target: $1,014.99 & $359.99

Reviews consensus: The Molekule Air Pro universally impressed the reviewers with its exceptional air-cleaning performance, ultra-sleek design and handy smart features. Many testers also praised its robust air quality monitoring, portability and ease of use. However, none of the reviewers gave this air purifier a full five stars, citing its sky-high price, expensive filter replacements and noisiness at high fan speeds.

Homes & Gardens: ★★★★ | Live Science: ★★★★ | Tom's Guide ★★★★ | TechRadar: ★★★★

Featured in guides: Best air purifiers

✅ Buy it if: You want a stylish and ultra-powerful air purifier that offers an array of smart features and detailed air quality readings.

❌ Don't buy it if: You want something that is whisper-quiet and less 'techy'.

Check out our other guides to the best air purifiers, air purifiers for allergies, the best telescopes, microscopes for students, binoculars, rowing machines, electric toothbrushes and more.

The currents are those that form the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which loops around the Atlantic Ocean like a giant conveyor belt, bringing heat to the Northern Hemisphere before traveling south again along the seabed. Depending on how much carbon humans emit in the next few decades, the AMOC could reach a tipping point and start to collapse as early as 2055, with dramatic consequences for several regions, researchers found.

This scary prediction, based on a scenario where carbon emissions double between now and 2050, is considered unlikely — but the outcome of a much more likely scenario where emissions hover around current levels for the next 25 years isn't much better, according to the study. Even if we keep global warming this century to 4.8 degrees Fahrenheit (2.7 degrees Celsius) above preindustrial levels — a "middle of the road" scenario, according to the latest U.N. climate report — the AMOC will start to collapse in 2063, the results suggest.

"The chance of tipping is much larger than previously thought," Sybren Drijfhout, a professor of physical oceanography at the University of Southampton in the U.K. and Utrecht University in the Netherlands, told Live Science in an email. Overall, the chance of the AMOC collapsing this century is about 50-50, Drijfhout, who was not involved in the new research but recently led a similar study published in the journal Environment Research Letters, estimates.

In the study, Drijfhout and colleagues ran the latest climate models for a period extending beyond 2100 and found that high-emission scenarios, or those that cause around 8 F (4.4 C) of warming above preindustrial levels by the end of this century, always led to an AMOC collapse. Scenarios that aligned with the aim of the Paris Agreement to keep warming ideally below 2.7 F (1.5 C) also triggered a collapse in two of the models, suggesting a breakdown is more likely than scientists previously thought, he said.

The new modeling study, published Aug. 24 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, tested 25 climate models and found an indicator that helped researchers determine when the AMOC might reach a tipping point. Unlike the parameters commonly used to monitor the AMOC indirectly, such as sea surface temperature, this new indicator is governed by the dynamics of Atlantic ocean circulation, study lead author René van Westen, a postdoctoral researcher in climate physics at Utrecht University, told Live Science in an email.

Related: 'We don't really consider it low probability anymore': Collapse of key Atlantic current could have catastrophic impacts, says oceanographer Stefan Rahmstorf

Van Westen and colleagues previously showed that the Atlantic's flow of fresh water at 34 degrees south, the latitude along the tip of South Africa, is a good marker of the AMOC's stability and can warn scientists of an impending collapse. This marker works for slowly changing environmental conditions, but it's less useful for identifying AMOC trends under a rapidly warming climate, van Westen said.

"Therefore, we were aiming to develop a new indicator that also works under climate change," he said.

A new marker for AMOC strength

To gauge when tipping points will be reached, the new study looked at the mass of water that sinks to the ocean floor in the North Atlantic.

Right now, surface water loses heat to the atmosphere when it reaches the cold North Atlantic. This surface water becomes so frigid, salty and dense that it sinks to the bottom of the ocean, forming currents that travel along the ocean floor to the Southern Hemisphere. The process of cold, dense water sinking is called deep water formation, and it is the engine that drives the AMOC. Deep water formation can be measured through changes in seawater density or by extrapolating ocean data in climate models.

"When this quantity reduces to zero, it means that the surface has become too light and no sinking takes place," which is essentially the moment when the AMOC starts to collapse, van Westen said.

Deep water formation is already declining due to both warming air temperatures in the North Atlantic and Arctic ice melt. Warm air means that surface water can't lose enough heat to sink, while ice melt is diluting the salt concentration of the water and thereby decreasing its density.

The researchers identified one component of deep water formation, the surface buoyancy flux, which was a "shortcut" for estimating deep water formation across the North Atlantic, van Westen said. The surface buoyancy flux is a parameter that combines changes in heat and salinity at the ocean surface to understand how these impact the water's density. Heat and salinity can be monitored directly using instruments or satellites, but the study examined existing heat and salinity data in simulations of sea surface dynamics, with the surface buoyancy flux standing out in different models and experiments as a clear marker of the AMOC's strength.

"The advantage of [the surface buoyancy flux] is that it can be calculated in many climate models," van Westen said.

The surface buoyancy flux was constant until 2020, van Westen said, meaning there were hardly any changes in the AMOC before then — a conclusion that is bolstered by research published in January.

Since 2020, however, the surface buoyancy flux has increased, suggesting the AMOC is weakening. The models showed that high-emission paths could trigger an earlier collapse of the AMOC than "middle of the road" emission paths could, so it is urgent to curb fossil fuel use, according to the study.

"An AMOC collapse scenario can possibly be prevented when following a low emission scenario," van Westen said, but this would require reaching net-zero carbon emissions around 2050.

A "serious climate wake-up call"

An AMOC collapse in the 2060s is plausible and "very worrying," Drijfhout said, but the uncertainties are too large to pinpoint precise years when the AMOC will collapse under different emission paths.

The consequences would be dramatic and global, but Europe would be hit particularly hard, Drijfhout said. An AMOC collapse would bring much colder temperatures to Northwestern Europe, as well as a decrease in precipitation that may lead to agricultural losses of about 30%, he said. The winters in Europe would be much harsher, with more storms and flooding along the Atlantic coast resulting from a redistribution of water around the ocean as the AMOC slows.

"Even larger sea level rise can be expected at the American east coasts" due to this redistribution, Drijfhout said. And places that don't border the Atlantic could also be impacted, such as monsoon regions in Asia and Africa, he said.

Wopke Hoekstra, the European commissioner for climate, net zero and clean growth, described the findings as a "serious climate wake-up call" in a social media post. "This new study says that the Gulf Stream could collapse in our lifetime," he warned.

However, the effects won't be felt immediately after the AMOC starts to collapse, according to the study. The authors estimate that it would take more than 100 years for the AMOC to weaken significantly and for new weather patterns to emerge.

But Drijfhout thinks the collapse could happen over just 50 years. The AMOC is like a campfire with a dwindling amount of fuel, he said. "If we stop throwing new wooden blocks on the fire, the fire does not immediately die, but it keeps smouldering for some time," Drijfhout said. "For the AMOC this 'smouldering time' is [about] 50 years."

Known as A23a, the "megaberg" has been rapidly disintegrating since becoming trapped in a current flowing counterclockwise around South Georgia Island in the South Atlantic Ocean, Andrew Meijers, a polar oceanographer with the BAS, told CNN.

A23a was swept up by the current in May after spending several months grounded on the continental shelf just off South Georgia Island. "It has been following the strong current jet known as the Southern Antarctic Circumpolar Current Front (SACCF)," Meijers said, adding that the iceberg will likely end up traveling away from the island in a northeast direction before breaking up completely.

Dubbed the "queen of icebergs," A23a broke off Antarctica's Filchner-Ronne ice shelf (which borders the Weddell Sea) in 1986. The giant berg immediately ran aground, remaining stuck to the seabed in the Weddell Sea for more than 30 years. It was crowned the biggest iceberg in the world and has only briefly been surpassed by others over the years, including iceberg A68 between 2017 and 2020 and iceberg A76 in 2021.

A23a finally made a move in 2020, probably because the ice that anchored it to the seabed melted away. But the iceberg quickly became trapped again, this time in a spinning vortex called a Taylor column, caused by an underwater mountain. It managed to free itself in December 2024 and was reported in January to be barreling toward South Georgia Island.

In January, A23a weighed almost 1.1 trillion tons (1 trillion metric tons) and measured 1,418 square miles (3,672 square kilometers), CNN reported. Now, the megaberg is not so mega anymore, measuring 656 square miles (1,700 square km), or about one-fifth of its size just eight months ago.

Related: 'We didn't expect to find such a beautiful, thriving ecosystem': Hidden world of life discovered beneath Antarctic iceberg

"The iceberg is rapidly breaking up, and shedding very large chunks, themselves designated large icebergs by the US national ice center that tracks these," Meijers said.

A68 and A76 also began disintegrating when they drifted close to South Georgia, suggesting the SACCF is to blame for breaking up the icebergs — although A23a remained intact for longer than either A68 or A76 did in the current's wake, Meijers said.

A23a has relinquished its title of the biggest iceberg in the world to iceberg D15a, which is currently located near Australia's Davis research station in Antarctica. D15a measures around 1,160 square miles (3,000 square km) and appears to be staying in place, Meijers said.

For now, A23a is the second-largest iceberg in the world, but it will quickly drop down the ranks as it continues to fall apart over the coming weeks, he said. Eventually, fragments of A23a will become so small that scientists will stop monitoring them, with the onset of southern spring likely to contribute to their melting into mini bergs, Meijers added.

Large icebergs could end up in the waters off South Georgia Island more frequently in the future due to climate change, a BAS spokesperson told CNN. There isn't enough data at the moment to say whether more megabergs are forming or will form as a result of global warming, but the number of icebergs calving from Antarctica is increasing, Meijers said.

Antarctica is extremely vulnerable to warming and scientists are already seeing dramatic changes in the frozen continent's natural cycles.

In the dark, your camera can’t rely on auto mode to do the work for you, so you’ll need to take full control. Get it right, and you’ll capture the scene as you imagined it, with all its depth and detail intact.

Manual mode

First things first, set your camera to Manual (M) mode. This hands you the control over the shutter speed, aperture and ISO instead of letting the camera take a guess in the darkness. Understanding the exposure triangle is important here, as you can’t rely on any of the camera’s auto modes for astrophotography. Knowing how to balance your settings will give you the best chance at getting the correct exposure.

You can, however, leave your white balance on auto for now, as you can tweak it later during editing. Set your drive mode to single shot or use the timer if you don’t have a remote shutter release — this will eliminate any slight movements from pressing the shutter button. This is also a good time to turn off your image stabilization.

Shooting in RAW

Then, make sure you’re shooting in RAW. RAW files capture far more detail, color and dynamic range than JPEG, giving you room to make more adjustments later in editing. RAW also makes advanced techniques, like image stacking, much more effective. JPEGS might look fine at a first glance, but they squash a lot of the precious data and lock in settings you might want to change later. Shooting RAW is like keeping all the original ingredients for a recipe, whereas JPEG is like using a packet mix.

Aperture

Aperture is an easy one. As the light is scarce, the rule of thumb is to set your aperture as wide open as possible — f/2.8, f/1.8 or even f/1.4 in some cases. This lets more starlight in, giving you brighter images without having to crank the ISO too high. Prime lenses are preferred for astrophotography, as they typically have a wider maximum aperture than zoom lenses. We’d recommend not going higher than f/2.8, if possible.

That said, some lenses actually perform best one or two stops above their widest possible aperture. Once you get more confident with your settings, take a few test shots at different apertures to compare them to find the lens' sweet spot. Often, stopping down the aperture a touch will eliminate vignetting and some slight coma in the corners of the image.

Manual focus

Why focus now? Getting your focus nailed now means you can fine-tune the exposure afterwards without having to touch the lens again. If you waited until after you set your shutter speed and ISO, you’d risk having to redo those adjustments if you changed the aperture later. It's not the end of the world, but it'll save you a little time.

On most cameras, autofocus doesn't know what to do in the dark, so you need to use manual on the lens as well as the camera. If the screen is too dark, your shutter speed and ISO might still have the same settings from a previous shoot. Just temporarily set a slower shutter speed and/or raise the ISO so the stars appear on your LCD screen. This is only to help you see what you’re focusing on; you’ll adjust these for your actual exposure in a moment.

Use the switch on the lens barrel to select manual focus (MF) and find the brightest star you can. Once you can see a star clearly, slowly turn the focus ring until the star becomes the smallest, sharpest point of light. The infinity mark gives you a good idea of where the right focus point is, but don’t trust it entirely. Some lenses have a focus lock button to prevent any accidental knocks that could ruin the focus, so lock the focus to ensure your stars stay sharp.

Shutter speed

Once your focus is set, you can set your shutter speed. Although the stars look still to the naked eye, the Earth’s rotation will cause the stars to turn into little streaks if your shutter speed is too slow.

To work out the best shutter speed, divide 500 by your focal length (in full frame terms) and you’ll get the maximum number of seconds you can use before the stars start to trail. Once you’ve set the shutter speed, take a test shot and zoom in to ensure the stars aren’t trailing, and reduce the shutter speed if necessary.

ISO

Think of ISO as a light amplifier. After you’ve dialled in your other settings, turn up your ISO until your shots show a bright enough sky without looking overexposed. On most modern full-frame cameras, this will be somewhere between the 1,600 to 6,400 range. This will also be dependent on how much ambient light there is from surrounding areas like cities and towns, as well as the light from the moon.

If your ISO is too low, the sky will look dull and murky, but if it’s too high, it’ll be too noisy. We recommend finding the ‘sweet spot’ of your camera before you even head out on your shoot, so you’ll have a good idea of where your camera performs best. To do this, take a set of test shots in the dark — even in your backyard — with different ISO values and compare them on your computer to see which looks best.

"Venice is a city full of mysteries, but one has been solved: the 'Lion' of St. Mark is Chinese, and he walked the Silk Road," study co-author Massimo Vidale, an archaeologist at the University of Padua, said in a statement.

In the study, published Thursday (Sept. 4) in the journal Antiquity, Vidale and colleagues identified the source of the bronze used to create the iconic lion, which became an official symbol of Venice in the early 1260s but whose exact origins are murky.

The researchers examined a series of nine samples from different parts of the lion and used mass spectrometry to identify the ratios of lead isotopes in the metal. Metal alloys like bronze — which is a mixture of copper and tin — contain small amounts of lead, the researchers wrote in the study, and the variations in lead atoms can indicate the geological source of the copper.

By comparing the lead isotope ratios from the Venetian lion to worldwide reference databases, the researchers narrowed down the origin of the bronze to the Lower Chang (Yangtze) River in what is now China. This area of East China has large-scale deposits of several important ores, including iron, copper, zinc and gold. These deposits were used for other artifacts; for instance, a previous study by another research group showed that an artifact from the Shang dynasty (1600 to 1050 B.C.) has the same lead isotope signal as the Venetian lion.

The revelation that the bronze originated in China may help to explain some of the odd stylistic choices in the Venice lion, the researchers suggested; it does not look like other medieval lions of the 11th to 14th centuries found in Europe.

Related: Medieval knight 'Lancelot' and his stunning stone tomb found under ice cream shop in Poland

But the Venice lion does bear some similarities to Chinese art of the Tang dynasty (A.D. 618 to 907) — particularly "zhènmùshòu," or "tomb guardians," according to the study. These monumental statues often depicted hybrid creatures with lion-like muzzles and manes, pointed ears, horns and raised wings. The Venice lion has several of these features, as well as metal "scars" where one or two horns may have been removed.

One possible explanation for the Venice lion, the researchers suggested, rests with the Venetian merchants Niccolò and Maffeo Polo, the father and uncle of Marco Polo. In the 13th century, the brothers traversed the Silk Road and set up trading posts, eventually reaching the city known today as Beijing and spending four years in the court of Kublai Khan. Perhaps the Polos encountered a "tomb guardian" statue there that fit their notion of what a lion looked like, the researchers proposed.

In the 13th century, when the Republic of Venice controlled eastern trade routes, its symbol was a winged lion resting on water with the gospel of St. Mark, the patron saint of Venice, under its paws. This imagery, which also appeared on the Republic's flag, symbolized Venice's dominance over the seas.

"In the general effort to spread the [Venetian] Republic's new powerful symbol, the Polos may have had the somewhat brazen idea of readapting the sculpture into a plausible (when viewed from afar) Winged Lion," the researchers wrote. The merchant brothers may have shipped the statue back to Venice in pieces, trusting a local metalworker to refit it into the symbol now associated with St. Mark.

"Of course, this is only one possible scenario based on the intersection of historical and archaeometallurgical data," the researchers wrote. "The word now goes back to the historians."

Galaxy mergers play a key role in galaxy formation in the early universe. While not commonly seen, merging systems do occur, typically involving two galaxies. However, the newly identified merger, nicknamed JWST's Quintet, contains at least five galaxies and 17 galaxy clumps.

"Finding such a system with five physically linked galaxies is exceptionally rare, both in current simulations and in observations," said study lead author Weida Hu, a postdoctoral researcher at Texas A&M University. "The probability of detecting even one [multiple-galaxy merger] is quite low, which raises the possibility that we may have been 'lucky' in identifying this system so early," Hu told Live Science in an email.

These galaxies are called emission-line galaxies as they have prominent signatures in their light, particularly those emitted by hydrogen and oxygen, which are telltale signs of new stars forming.

The power of two

The research, published Aug. 15 in the journal Nature Astronomy, used a combination of JWST and Hubble data.

JWST's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam)hinted at a large halo of gas around the group of galaxies, which meant that the five galaxies are not independent but are instead physically connected and embedded in the same system, Hu explained.

Related: James Webb telescope images reveal there's something strange with interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS

While some of these galaxies were previously detected using Hubble, "only JWST data tell us that the five galaxies have the same redshift and are interacting with each other," Hu added. (Redshift is a measure of cosmic distance, with higher redshifts corresponding to more distant, ancient objects. Redshift occurs as the light emitted by distant objects stretches into longer, redder wavelengths while crossing the expanding universe.)

Hu suggested that there could be other faint or hidden galaxies linked to JWST's Quintet that have not yet been detected. But discovering these galaxies may require advanced multi-wavelength observations.

Early universe mergers involving more than two galaxies are extremely rare, said Christopher Conselice, a professor of extragalactic astronomy at the University of Manchester who was not involved in the study.

"If you look at all galaxies, then 20-30% of them will be in a merger. This will be just two galaxies. The fraction of these multiple merger systems will be much, much lower, and we don't have stats on it quite yet, but certainly lower than 1%," Conselice told Live Science.

The team found that the two main galaxies in the system appear to be separated by a distance of 43,300 light-years, and the most distant pair among all the galaxies in the system appear to be 60,700 light-years apart. (For comparison, our Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light-years end to end.)

"The fact that the galaxies are spatially close together is the indication that they probably will merge," Conselice said. "There is some room for interpretation regarding whether some objects might be parts of the same galaxy," he added.

The distant cousin

This system is similar to its local universe counterpart, Stephan’s Quintet, which is a merger of four galaxies, with a fifth galaxy that appears in the same part of the sky but isn't merging.

"A striking similarity is the presence of a bridge of material connecting two galaxies in JWST's Quintet — a feature also seen in Stephan’s Quintet, indicative of tidal tails produced by the galaxy interaction,” Hu said. "However, the star formation rate of JWST's Quintet is much higher."

While all the galaxies in Stephan’s Quintet are much older systems in the nearby universe, and therefore are less active, the galaxies in JWST's Quintet are rich in gas and are vigorously forming new stars at a rate higher than expected for that period.

JWST's Quintet, with at least five galaxies and 17 galaxy clumps, has a total stellar mass of 10 billion suns. The study suggests that the high mass and star formation rate indicate that the galaxies in the merger may evolve into a massive quiescent galaxy, occurring approximately 1 billion to 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. Quiescent galaxies are those that stop forming new stars. Previous JWST studies have detected several of them in the early universe, which raised questions about how galaxies could become "dead" so early in the universe.

Conselice said that the future of merging galaxies is a big question. They might end up as star-forming galaxies but with less activity, or they could just become "dead" or passive over time. The future of the system will also depend on whether the galaxies host actively feeding black holes, which may nudge the system to extinguish star formation very quickly.

If the merging galaxies turn into a dead system, JWST's Quintet could potentially explain how massive quiescent galaxies can form rapidly through the merger of smaller, starbursting galaxies in the early universe.

Hu noted that JWST's NIRCam images show clear details of shapes and structures of the objects, but they do not offer precise information like the intensity of spectral lines. Without these spectroscopic details, it's hard to accurately measure properties such as metallicity, motion and dynamics of the system, or the nature of the gas inside these galaxies and clumps.

If more systems like JWST's Quintet are found in future JWST surveys, researchers can study how often these merging groups of galaxies appear, their nature, and examine the conditions in which they form. This will enable researchers to verify whether these systems belong to a rare class that the current standard model of the universe predicts, or if they suggest new mechanisms in action.

During the event, which will last about five hours, the full Corn Moon will move through Earth's shadow in space. It will gradually be engulfed by that shadow, taking on a copper-reddish color — hence the name "blood moon" — for 82 minutes, making it the longest total lunar eclipse since 2022.

Unlike a total solar eclipse, which can be seen only from within a narrow path of totality, a total lunar eclipse is visible from anywhere on Earth's night side. Unfortunately for North America, it's on the day side during this eclipse.

Despite that, this will be a highly visible eclipse: The total and partial phases will be observable by 5.8 billion people — about 71% of the world's population. Among the first cities to experience totality will be Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, Australia; Tokyo; and Seoul. The last will include Moscow; Ankara, Turkey; and Bucharest, Romania, with an eclipsed moon seen at moonrise from Western Europe.

Lunar eclipses are visible to the naked eye, and no special equipment is necessary. However, to zoom in on details of the lunar surface and really watch Earth's shadow creep by, a good backyard telescope or a pair of stargazing binoculars will work wonders.

The last time a total lunar eclipse was visible from North America was a 65-minute eclipse on March 14, 2025, and the next one will be a 58-minute event on March 2-3, 2026, according to Time and Date.

Related: How to photograph the moon: Tips on camera gear, settings and composition

The Sept. 7-8 lunar eclipse will last a total of 5 hours, 27 minutes. The event begins at 11:28 a.m. EDT (15:28 UTC) on Sept. 7, with the full moon moving through Earth's outer shadow, the penumbra, during which it will lose much of its brightness. As it begins to enter Earth's darker inner shadow, the umbra, at 12:26 p.m. (16:26 UTC), a curved projection of Earth's shadow will be seen gradually engulfing the moon.

Once the moon is fully inside the umbra, at 1:30 p.m. EDT (17:30 UTC), it will appear copper-red for 82 minutes, until 2:52 p.m. EDT (18:52 UTC). The spectacle will then go into reverse as the moon gradually exits the umbra and then the penumbra, before ending at 4:55 p.m. (20:55 UTC), according to EarthSky.

Livestreams of the total lunar eclipse will be provided from Cyprus by Time and Date and from Italy by The Virtual Telescope Project.

A small population of orcas (Orcinus orca), or killer whales, has developed a penchant for damaging boats off the Iberian Peninsula in southwestern Europe in recent years. Researchers are still studying this behavior, but they think the orcas are likely being playful rather than aggressive.

On Aug. 21, orcas tore the rudder off a German sailboat in the Vigo estuary in Galicia, Spanish newspaper Faro de Vigo reported. The orcas then continued to play with the sailboat, which they rammed as it was towed to safety.

The Pontevedra Civil Guard, a Spanish law enforcement agency, shared a video of the sailboat rescue on the social platform X and wrote that the orcas had attacked several sailboats. It's unclear exactly how many boats were targeted prior to this post, but there have also been incidents since.

For instance, on Saturday (Aug. 30), Faro de Vigo reported that orcas destroyed a traditional wooden sailing ship's rudder off O Grove within the Arousa estuary and opened a leak in another sailboat off Ons within the Pontevedra estuary.

Valentín Otero, the owner of the ship targeted in O Grove, told Faro de Vigo that he heard two blows against his vessel before he spotted a pair of orcas. Otero and his crew reported that there was a larger orca measuring about 23 feet (7 meters) long accompanied by a smaller orca swimming alongside it.

"The truth is we were very frightened; in fact we completely freaked out when we realized the orcas were hitting the boat," Otero said in a translated statement.

Related: Watch a pod of orcas pretending to drown one of their own in macabre training session

The Iberian orcas are a critically endangered orca subpopulation thought to have fewer than 40 individuals. The group has been attacking boats off the coast of Spain and Portugal since 2020. While some initial reports suggested that Iberian orcas could be carrying out revenge against the ships, this has been dismissed by many orca experts.

The encounters often involve young orcas going straight for the rudders on the underside of sailing boats. Scientists have suggested that the orcas are likely just bored teenagers with more free time since Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus) populations — their favorite prey in the region — recovered, meaning they need to spend less time hunting.

Orca behavior is diverse and complex. Researchers have observed the species engaging in intricate social rituals, from gently nibbling on each other's tongues to tumbling alongside each other as if they're in an aquatic mosh pit. Different orca populations also have their own dialects, similar to human language, and can develop their own unique "fads," such as swimming around with dead salmon on their heads.

There's no reason to suspect that the Iberian orcas are targeting the people aboard the boats. Orcas are fierce predators that are known to hunt a variety of different prey, from tuna to seals, sharks and even whales. However, each population has a particular diet, and none of them involves eating humans. There's only a handful of documented cases of wild orcas attacking humans, and all of these reported incidents come with significant caveats, such as an orca likely mistaking a person for a seal.

The symptoms: The patient had a prior diagnosis of osteoarthritis of the knee — a degenerative joint condition that causes pain and stiffness. She had previously sought medical attention, and was treated with painkillers and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs for the condition. She had also previously received steroid injections directly into her knees, but her pain remained.

She then started to get bad stomach pain from the medications, so she had stopped them altogether.

What happened next: The woman decided to seek alternative treatments to ease her joint pain and began having weekly acupuncture. She increased the frequency to multiple times a week when the pain was particularly bad.

She later went to the hospital because her knees were very sore. X-rays of her left knee revealed that the shinbone in the inner part of the joint had thickened and hardened. There were also bony growths, called spurs, on the inner portions of the shinbone and thigh bone by the knee joint.

The doctors also saw hundreds of flecks on the X-ray around the knee joint, which turned out to be tiny gold threads.

The diagnosis: The doctors learned that the threads had been inserted as part of the woman's acupuncture treatments. These short, sterile golden threads were purposefully left in the tissue to provide continued stimulation.

The treatment: The doctors did not report whether the gold threads were removed from the patient, but in previous cases, the threads have been left in place.

Leaving the threads in place is not risk-free, as it has led to cysts forming in past cases.

What makes the case unique: Gold-thread acupuncture is commonly used to treat both osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis in Asia, the doctors wrote in a report of her case. However, there is no evidence the practice works, and some cases suggest it can indirectly worsen arthritis by keeping people from getting appropriate, timely treatment.

For instance, in another case, a 58-year-old South Korean woman had received gold-thread acupuncture in an attempt to ease rheumatoid arthritis pain in her wrists. The patient's condition had gotten particularly severe by the time she sought medical attention, and the doctors in that case believed her disease had progressed so far because she had not taken anti-rheumatoid medications early enough and had instead relied on the alternative medicine approach.

Also, the threads can migrate within the body, and fragments can damage neighboring tissue. For example, gold threads inserted into a 75-year-old South Korean woman's back migrated to her lower right leg over a 10-year period, causing cellulitis — a deep skin infection.

In their report of the knee case, the doctors noted that gold threads inserted during acupuncture can make it challenging to read X-rays.

Others have warned that these embedded gold strands stop people from being able to have MRIs because of the risk of the metal moving and damaging an artery.

As such, doctors have noted that health care providers should be aware of the potential risk factors associated with gold-thread acupuncture. However, the fact that they are easy to identify on X-rays ensures that their location can be tracked over time if necessary.

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

Macro requires a different way of thinking about focus, depth of field and lighting, but you don’t need to venture far to get a great shot. With the right lens and a bit of patience, even a windowsill or backyard can provide a whole range of subjects ready for their close-up.

Getting started with gear

You don’t need loads of kit to start macro photography, but knowing your options is a good place to start. You’ll need an interchangeable-lens camera and a macro lens, ideally, although there are alternatives if you can’t afford a macro lens straight away.

A dedicated macro lens is the obvious choice if you can invest in one. True macro lenses can capture subjects at life-size (referred to as 1:1 ratio), with some macro lenses capable of 2:1 or even 5:1. Shorter lenses, around 50mm, work well for indoor setups or small inanimate objects, while longer lenses, around 100mm or more, let you keep more distance from living subjects like insects, so you won’t scare them off by getting too close.

But if a dedicated macro lens is a little out of reach at first, there are other options. You can use macro filters that screw onto the front of your lens to magnify your image, or use extension tubes to reduce the minimum focusing distance of your existing lens. Alternatively, the most affordable option would be to reverse-mount your existing lens using a cheap reversing ring. When the lens is reversed, it magnifies what it sees, which is beneficial for macro photography.

Macro techniques

Shooting at a higher magnification throws the photography rules you already know up to 11. The first thing you’ll notice when shooting macro is how tricky focusing becomes. The camera’s autofocus really struggles when you’re working just a few centimeters away from your subject, so most macro photographers switch to manual focus.

Using live view on your rear LCD screen and utilizing focus peaking (if your camera has it) makes fine-tuning your focus a lot easier. When you’re focusing on a tiny subject that could fly away at any second, try gently moving the camera back and forth to fine-tune the focus without having to re-adjust your grip on the camera.

Depth of field is another big adjustment. At close distances, even narrow apertures only give you a sliver of the image that’s in focus. For example, f/16 on a macro lens could produce a similar look to f/2.8 on a standard lens — yet another reason why nailing the focus is vital. Similar to wildlife photography, getting the subject’s eye sharp and in focus is the most important thing, even if the rest of their body is out of focus. Then, as your skills and experience progress, you can experiment with focus stacking to get the entire subject sharp.

Lighting also matters more than you might think. The narrow apertures required for macro don’t let in much light, but shooting in bright light isn’t always the answer. Bright light will produce harsh shadows, some of which may be caused by you if you’re shooting between the sun and your subject. In addition, when leaning over live subjects, casting a shadow across them can scare them off as they fear predation. To get even lighting on your subject, or if you’re shooting indoors, a flash with a diffuser (even a white piece of paper to bounce the light) will produce soft, even lighting across your image.

Finding your subject

The great thing about macro photography is that you don’t need to book a trip to Africa for an expensive safari or spend hours in the cold waiting for the sky to cooperate. Insects, flowers and interesting textures are everywhere once you start looking for them — your backyard or local park can keep you busy for hours.

When you’re photographing insects and other small creatures, timing makes a big difference. Many insects are ectothermic, meaning they rely on external heat sources to regulate their body temperature. As a result, they tend to be less active, and therefore easier to photograph, early in the morning when they haven’t yet warmed up from the sun. Although morning is generally better as the temperature has cooled overnight, you can still photograph butterflies and other invertebrates in the early evening once the sun starts to set.

Plants and flowers are great for practicing, and they won’t run away. If you have a flash, make an indoor setup with some cut flowers to refine your technique without worrying about the weather or wind, as any tiny breezes will be magnified outside.

Some photographers still resort to unethical methods of photographing insects, like chilling or freezing them to slow them down or kill them altogether, just for a shot. While it might make subjects easier to photograph, not only does it harm them, but it also undermines the spirit of observing and photographing nature. Ethical macro photography relies on patience and respect for your subject.

By combining whole-body movements with visual perception, the robot, called "ANYmal," learned to adapt the way it moved to reach the shuttlecock and successfully return it over the net, thanks to artificial intelligence (AI).

This shows that four-legged robots can be built as opponents in "complex and dynamic sports scenarios," the researchers wrote in a study published May 28 in the journal Science Robotics.

ANYmal is a four-legged, dog-like robot that weighs 110 pounds (50 kilograms) and stands about 1.5 feet (0.5 meters) tall. Having four legs allows ANYmal and similar quadruped robots to travel across challenging terrain and move up and down obstacles.

Researchers have previously added arms to these dog-like machines and taught them how to fetch particular objects or open doors by grabbing the handle. But coordinating limb control and visual perception in a dynamic environment remains a challenge in robotics.

Related: Watch a 'robot dog' scramble through a basic parkour course with the help of AI

"Sports is a good application for this kind of research because you can gradually increase the competitiveness or difficulty," study co-author Yuntao Ma, a robotics researcher previously at ETH Zürich and now with the startup Light Robotics, told Live Science.

Teaching a new dog new tricks

In this research, Ma and his team attached a dynamic arm holding a badminton racket at a 45-degree angle onto the standard ANYmal robot.

With the addition of the arm, the robot stood 5 feet, 3 inches (1.6 m) tall and had 18 joints: three on each of the four legs, and six on the arm. The researchers designed a complex built-in system that controlled the arm and leg movements.

The team also added a stereo camera, which had two lenses stacked on top of each other, just to the right of center on the front of the robot's body. The two lenses allowed it to process visual information about the incoming shuttlecocks in real time and work out where they were heading.

The robot was then taught to become a badminton player through reinforcement learning. With this type of machine learning, the robot explored its environment and used trial and error to learn to spot and track the shuttlecock, navigate toward it and swing the racket.

To do this, the researchers first created a simulated environment consisting of a badminton court, with the robot's virtual counterpart standing in the center. Virtual shuttlecocks were served from near the center of the opponent's half of the court, and the robot was tasked with tracking its position and estimating its flight trajectory.

Then, the researchers created a strict training regimen to teach ANYmal how to strike the shuttlecocks, with a virtual coach rewarding the robot for a variety of characteristics, including the position of the racket, the angle of the racket's head, and the speed of the swing. Importantly, the swing rewards were time-based to incentivize accurate and timely hits.

The shuttlecock could land anywhere across the court, so the robot was also rewarded if it moved efficiently across the court and if it didn't speed up unnecessarily. ANYmal's goal was to maximize how much it was rewarded across all of the trials.

Based on 50 million trials of this simulation training, the researchers created a neural network that could control the movement of all 18 joints to travel toward and hit the shuttlecock.

A fast learner

After the simulations, the scientists transferred the neural network into the robot, and ANYmal was put through its paces in the real world.

Here, the robot was trained to find and track a bright-orange shuttlecock served by another machine, which enabled the researchers to control the speed, angles and landing locations of the shuttlecocks. ANYmal had to scuttle across the court to hit the shuttlecock at a speed that would return it over the net and to the center of the court.

The researchers found that, following extensive training, the robot could track shuttlecocks and accurately return them with swing speeds of up to approximately 39 feet per second (12 meters per second) — roughly half the swing speed of an average human amateur badminton player, the researchers noted.

ANYmal also adjusted its movement patterns based on how far it had to travel to the shuttlecock and how long it had to reach it. The robot did not need to travel when the shuttlecock was due to land only a couple of feet (half a meter) away, but at about 5 feet (1.5 m), ANYmal scrambled to reach the shuttlecock by moving all four legs. At about 7 feet (2.2 m) away, the robot galloped over to the shuttlecock, producing a period of elevation that extended the arm's reach by 3 feet (1 m) in the direction of the target.

"Controlling the robot to look at the shuttleclock is not so trivial," Ma said. If the robot is looking at the shuttlecock, it can't move very fast. But if it doesn't look, it won't know where it needs to go. "This trade-off has to happen in a somewhat intelligent way," he said.

Ma was surprised by how well the robot figured out how to move all 18 joints in a coordinated way. It's a particularly challenging task because the motor at each joint learns independently, but the final movement requires them to work in tandem.

The team also found that the robot spontaneously started to move back to the center of the court after each hit, akin to how human players prepare for incoming shuttlecocks.

However, the researchers noted that the robot did not consider the opponent's movements, which is an important way human players predict shuttlecock trajectories. Including human pose estimates would help to improve ANYmal's performance, the team said in the study. They could also add a neck joint to allow the robot to monitor the shuttlecock for more time, Ma noted.

He thinks this research will ultimately have applications beyond sports. For example, it could support debris removal during disaster relief efforts, he said, as the robot would be able to balance the dynamic visual perception with agile motion.

In a new study, published Aug. 28 in the journal Science, researchers analyzed "Marsquake" data collected by NASA's InSight lander, which monitored tremors beneath the Martian surface from 2018 until 2022, when it met an untimely demise from dust blocking its solar panels. By looking at how these Marsquakes vibrated through the Red Planet's unmoving mantle, the team discovered several never-before-seen blobs that were much denser than the surrounding material.

The researchers have identified dozens of potential structures, measuring up to 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) across, at various depths within Mars' mantle, which is made of 960 miles (1,550 km) of solid rock that can reach temperatures as high as 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit (1,500 degrees Celsius).

"We've never seen the inside of a planet in such fine detail and clarity before," study lead author Constantinos Charalambous, a planetary scientist at Imperial College London, said in a NASA statement. "What we're seeing is a mantle studded with ancient fragments."

Based on the hidden objects' size and depth, the researchers think the structures were made when objects slammed into Mars up to 4.5 billion years ago, during the early days of the solar system. Some of the objects were likely protoplanets — giant rocks that were capable of growing into full-size planets if they had remained undisturbed, the researchers wrote.

Related: 32 things on Mars that look like they shouldn't be there

The researchers first noticed the buried structures when they found that some of the Marsquake signals took longer to pass through parts of the mantle than others. By tracing back these signals, they identified regions with higher densities than the surrounding rock, suggesting that those sections did not originate there.

Mars is a single-plate planet, meaning that its crust remains fully intact, unlike Earth's, which is divided into tectonic plates. As pieces of Earth's crust subduct through plate boundaries, they sink into the mantle, which causes the molten rock within our planet to rise and fall via convection. But on Mars, this does not happen, which means its mantle is fixed in place and does not fully melt.

The newly discovered blobs are further proof that Mars' interior is much less active than Earth's.

"Their survival to this day tells us Mars' mantle has evolved sluggishly over billions of years," Charalambous said. "On Earth, features like these may well have been largely erased."

Because Mars has no tectonic activity, Marsquakes are instead triggered by landslides, cracking rocks or meteoroid impacts, which frequently pepper the planet's surface. These tremors have also been used to detect other hidden objects beneath the Red Planet's surface, including a giant underground ocean discovered using InSight data last year.

In total, InSight captured data on 1,319 Marsquakes during its roughly four-year-long mission. However, scientists were still surprised that they could map the planet's insides in such great detail.

"We knew Mars was a time capsule bearing records of its early formation, but we didn't anticipate just how clearly we'd be able to see with InSight," study co-author Tom Pike, a space exploration engineer at Imperial College London, said in the statement.

"The figure is depicting a late tenth-century king," Peter Pentz, an archaeologist at the National Museum of Denmark, told Live Science. The piece dates to the reign of one of the most famous Viking kings, Harald Bluetooth (circa A.D. 958 to 986); and it was found within his realm, which included parts of southern Norway and Sweden.

But although it is from the right time and place, Pentz is careful not to claim that it depicts Harald Bluetooth himself. "I don't say that this is a portrait of Harald," he said in an email.

Harald was the son of the early Danish king Gorm "the Old" and was nicknamed "Bluetooth" because he may have had a discolored tooth, although the actual reason is unknown. His nickname is now used for a networking standard that unites different digital devices, just as he united parts of Scandinavia during his reign.

One of the figure's most notable features is its intricate hairstyle — a middle part with a side wave that left the ears visible, and the hair cropped short at the back. It also has a large mustache, sideburns, and a long and braided goatee, according to a statement from the museum.

Most art from the Viking Age (A.D. 793 to 1066) featured intricate designs based on fantastical animals, like dragons, and the figure is one of the few known human depictions from that time, Pentz said.

"He is extremely detailed and he is so very expressive, displaying a mischievous — or even malicious — facial expression," Pentz said.

Related: Viking Age burial of chieftain with 'enormous power' found in Denmark — and he may have served Harald Bluetooth

Forgotten figurine

The figurine is just over 1 inch (3 centimeters) tall and carved from walrus ivory.

It was one of the first objects ever cataloged by the museum, in 1798, after it was discovered during excavations in the Viken region of southern Norway, a few miles west of Oslo. But it was placed in storage and forgotten until Pentz rediscovered it more than 200 years later.

"When I came across him in one of our storage rooms a few years ago, I was really surprised — he just sat there, looking directly at me, and I had never before seen such a Viking, not in the many years I've been at the museum," Pentz said in the statement.

Pentz determined that the figurine is the "king" piece from a game of Hnefatafl — sometimes called "Viking chess" — which was popular in Northern Europe before it was displaced by actual chess (which may have come from India or Iran) after the 12th century.

Several button-shaped game pieces made of bone were also found during the excavations, Pentz said. (No "board" was found, but a Hnefatafl board might have been carved on stone.)

Fashionable hair

The figurine is badly damaged, but its facial features and strange haircut are still clearly visible. Pentz suggested that such a hairstyle must have been fashionable among the elite during the Viking Age.

"It is exceptional that we have such a vivid depiction of a Viking," he said in the statement. "This is a miniature bust and as close as we will ever get to a portrait of a Viking."

The term "Viking" is an exonym (meaning something like "pirate") first used by the English to describe Norse raiders along their coasts.

But only the Norse who lived near their own coasts may have engaged in such raids over the summer, so Norse people farther inland — including farmers, traders and artisans — should not be considered Vikings, archaeologist Neil Price wrote in his book "Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings" (Basic Books, 2020).

The Norse culture seems to have branched off from the Germanic culture as early as the fourth century, but archaeologists consider the "Viking Age" to have started with the raid on Lindisfarne in England in 793 and ended with the defeat of a Viking army at Stamford Bridge in England in 1066, just a few weeks before the Norman Conquest.

Viking quiz: How much do you know about these seaborne raiders, traders and explorers?