Scientists have believed for decades that the 5,000-year-old monument's iconic stones came from what is now Wales and even as far as Scotland, but there is still debate as to how the stones arrived at Salisbury Plain in southern England.
Now, an analysis of microscopic mineral grains from rivers around Stonehenge has revealed that glaciers didn't reach into the region during the last ice age (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago), refuting an idea known as the "glacial transport theory" that suggests Stonehenge's bluestones and 6.6-ton (6 metric tons) Altar Stone were delivered by ice sheets to Salisbury Plain. The new study was published Jan. 21 in the journal Communications Earth and Environment.
"While previous research had cast doubt on the glacial transport theory, our study goes further and applies cutting-edge mineral fingerprinting to trace the stones' true origins," study authors Anthony Clarke, a research geologist at Curtin University in Australia, and Christopher Kirkland, a professor of geology also at Curtin University, wrote in The Conversation.
Stonehenge's bluestones, so called because they acquire a bluish tinge when wet or freshly broken, are from the Preseli Hills in western Wales, meaning people likely dragged them 140 miles (225 kilometers) to the site of the prehistoric monument. More remarkable still, researchers think the Altar Stone inside Stonehenge's middle circle came from northern England or Scotland, which is much farther away — at least 300 miles (500 km) — from Salisbury Plain and may have required boats.
The glacial transport theory is a counterproposal to the idea that people moved the stones from elsewhere in the U.K. to build the monument on Salisbury Plain, instead using stones that had already been transported there by natural means. However, as Stonehenge’s rocks show no signs of glacial transport, and the southern extent of Great Britain’s former ice sheets remain unclear, archaeologists have disputed the idea.
To investigate further, the researchers behind the new study used known radioactive decay rates to date tiny specks of zircon and apatite minerals left over from ancient rocks in river sediments around Stonehenge. The age of these specks reveals the age of rocks that once existed in the region, which, in turn, can provide information about where these rocks came from.
Different rock formations have different ages, so if the rocks that became parts of Stonehenge were dragged across the land by glaciers, they would have left these tiny traces around Salisbury Plain that could then be matched with rocks in their original locations.
The researchers analyzed more than 700 zircon and apatite grains but found no significant match for rocks in either western Wales or Scotland. Instead, most of the zircon grains studied showed dates between 1.7 billion and 1.1 billion years ago, coinciding with a time when much of what is now southern England was covered in compacted sand, the researchers wrote in The Conversation. On the other hand, the ages of apatite grains converged around 60 million years ago, when southern England was a shallow, subtropical sea. This means the minerals in rivers around Stonehenge are the remnants of rocks from the local area, and hadn’t been swept in from other places.
The results suggest glaciers didn't extend as far south as Salisbury Plain during the last ice age, excluding the possibility that ice sheets dropped off the megaliths of Stonehenge for ancient builders to subsequently use.
"This gives us further evidence the monument's most exotic stones did not arrive by chance but were instead deliberately selected and transported," the researchers wrote.
Stonehenge quiz: What do you know about the ancient monument?
Their powerful gravity and the way it accelerates matter in its vicinity causes so much radiation to be released from the core region — aka. an active galactic nucleus (AGN) — that it will periodically outshine all the stars in the disk combined.
In addition, some SMBHs accelerate infalling dust and gas into jets that emanate from the poles, sending streams of super-heated material millions of light-years at close to the speed of light.
Since the first of these "relativistic jets" was observed, scientists have been eager to learn more about them and their role in galaxy evolution. In a surprising first, a team of astronomers led by researchers at the University of California, Irvine (UC Irvine) and the Caltech Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) recently uncovered the largest and most extended jet ever observed in a nearby galaxy.
Their observations also revealed vast "wobbly" structures, the clearest evidence to date that SMBHs can dramatically reshape their host galaxies far beyond their cores.
Their findings, published in the journal Science, were also the subject of a presentation made at the 247th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix, Arizona.
The team observed the galaxy VV340a using the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaii, and identified a jet extending up to 20,000 light-years from its center. Thanks to the Keck Cosmic Web Imager (KCWI) on the Observatory's Keck II telescope, they discerned a spear-like structure aligned with the galactic nucleus.
The data obtained from KCWI allowed the team to model the amount of material being expelled and determine whether the outflow could be affecting the galaxy's evolution. Said Justin Kader, a UC Irvine postdoctoral researcher and the lead author on the study, in a W.M. Keck Observatory press release:
The Keck Observatory data is what allowed us to understand the true scale of this phenomenon. The gas we see with Keck Observatory reaches the farthest distances from the black hole, which means it also traces the longest timescales. Without these observations, we wouldn't know how powerful — or how persistent — this outflow really is.
The team combined the Keck data with infrared observations made with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and radio images from the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA). While Webb's infrared data revealed the energetic heart of the galaxy, Keck's optical data showed how that energy propagates outward. The VLA radio data, meanwhile, revealed a pair of plasma jets twisted into a helical pattern as they move outward. The combined data presented a compelling picture, with a few surprises along the way.
For instance, the Webb data identified intensely energized "coronal" gas, the superheated plasma erupting from either side of the black hole, measuring several thousand parsecs across. Most observed coronae measure in the hundreds of parsecs, making this the most extended coronal gas structure ever observed. Meanwhile, the VLA radio data revealed a pair of plasma jets twisted into a helical pattern as they moved outward, evidence of a rare phenomenon in which a jet's direction slowly wobbles over time (known as jet precession).
In addition, the KCWI data showed that the jet arrests star formation by stripping the galaxy of gas at a rate of about 20 Solar masses a year. But what was most surprising was the fact that these jets were observed in a relatively young galaxy like VV340a, which is still in the early stages of a galactic merger. Typically, such jets are observed in older elliptical galaxies that have long since ceased star formation. This discovery challenges established theories of how galaxies and their SMBHs co-evolve and could provide new insights into how the Milky Way came to be. Said Kader:
This is the first time we've seen a precessing, kiloparsec-scale radio jet driving such a massive outflow in a disk galaxy. There's no clear fossil record of something like this happening in our galaxy, but this discovery suggests we can't rule it out. It changes the way we think about the galaxy we live in.
The next step for the team will involve higher-resolution radio observations to determine whether a second SMBH could be at the center of VV340a, which could be causing the jets' wobble. "We're only beginning to understand how common this kind of activity may be," said Vivian U, an associate scientist at Caltech/IPAC and the second and senior author of the study. "With Keck Observatory and these other powerful observatories working together, we're opening a new window into how galaxies change over time."
The original version of this article was published on Universe Today.
]]>The discovery, which included 118 whale bones and crafted artifacts, reveal that prehistoric whaling was not confined to people in temperate and polar climates in the Northern Hemisphere, according to a study published Jan. 9 in the journal Nature Communications.
"Whaling has always been enigmatic," because it's difficult to distinguish bone tools made from actively hunted and stranded animals in the archaeological record, study co-author André Carlo Colonese, a research director at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, told Live Science.
So the new tools are significant because their discovery alongside multiple bone remains from members of the same species represents some of the oldest evidence of active whale hunting in the world, the authors wrote in the study.
Prehistoric whaling
For prehistoric people, whales provided huge feasts, oil for warmth, and bones for tools and cultural ornaments and accessories. Although coastal communities have opportunistically salvaged these resources from beached whales for at least 20,000 years, the evidence of active hunting is much younger. For example, people hunted large whales with deer bone harpoons 6,000 years ago in what is now South Korea, and harpoons from around 3,500 to 2,500 years ago have been uncovered in the Arctic and sub-Arctic.
Colonese and his team did not originally set out to investigate early whaling. Instead, they were trying to document the marine species that were used by Indigenous Sambaqui populations in southern Brazil. To do so, they analyzed the molecular signature of precolonial cetacean (whale, dolphin and porpoise) bones at the Joinville Sambaqui Archaeological Museum in Brazil. Of the 118 bone remains with an identifiable cetacean species, most were from southern right whales, but many bones were from humpback whales. Only 37 had been crafted into items such as pendants.
It was "completely random" that one of the museum's curators brought out a box of what were believed to be sticks, Colonese said. But based on their design, such as hollow centers for a wooden shaft and carved tips, he immediately recognized them as harpoons. The team identified 15 harpoon elements, including heads and shaft components, made from either southern right whale or humpback whale rib bones.
The researchers took tiny samples from two harpoon foreshafts to determine their age, which revealed that the tools were between 4,710 and 4,970 years old. Colonese said he jumped for joy when he saw the results because these are some of the oldest harpoons found anywhere in the world — over 1,000 years older than the Arctic and sub-Arctic examples.
The discovery also showed that these Indigenous populations in Brazil were not simply gathering mollusks and catching fish. "The conventional idea was that the Sambaquis didn't have the technology" for whaling, Colonese said. "This is telling us that they were actually hunting."
"It's a very spectacular, informative discovery," Jean-Marc Pétillon, an archaeologist at the University of Toulouse in France who was not involved in the research, told Live Science.
Although it's not clear that these particular harpoons were used to hunt whales — as opposed to other marine animals, such as seals — this new evidence helps to contradict the assumption that whaling was practiced only in the Northern Hemisphere, according to Pétillon.
"Having these people living in southern Brazil in tropical conditions that also did whaling is also a way to change our perspective on these maritime exploitation systems," he said.
]]>For decades, astronomers have wondered where these behemoths came from and how they got so huge. Early on, physicists thought that supermassive black holes formed like other, smaller black holes do — with large stars collapsing and becoming sun-size black holes that slowly devoured surrounding matter and merged with one another over billions of years.
But it has become increasingly clear this model is broken.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has peered back to some of the earliest epochs in cosmic history to spot gigantic black holes that are too big, too early to be explained by traditional models. Researchers are beginning to piece together a story of how they originated, which likely involved strange and exotic processes.
Emerging research suggests enormous black holes could have existed since the universe's earliest days, perhaps even before stars and galaxies, and that they came about in multiple ways. While future discoveries will help narrow down the predominance of each formation mechanism, many in the field are already thrilled to be chipping away at a long-standing cosmic mystery.
"This is one of the most exciting phases of my career," Roberto Maiolino, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge, told Live Science. "I'm tempted to call it a real revolution in our understanding of the formation of these objects."
Mystery giants
Hints of the cosmic size discrepancy arose in the early 2000s, when instruments like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey helped capture data on tens of thousands of extremely bright objects called quasars in the faroff universe. These luminous entities are thought to be gargantuan black holes in the centers of galaxies. They feed on vast amounts of gas and dust, and then spew powerful radiation. The Sloan survey showed that many quasars existed when the universe was just 800 million years old — a fraction of its current 13.8 billion-year age. The existence of these behemoths, which have millions to billions of times the sun's mass, was a head-scratcher for cosmologists.
That's because a typical black hole arises when a huge star nears the end of its life and explodes as a fiery supernova. The core of the titanic star collapses into a superdense point from which nothing, including light, can escape. Such stellar-size black holes are generally around 10 to 100 times as massive as the sun. While these objects can become gravitationally attracted to one another and merge into ever larger black holes, there didn't appear to be enough time for such processes to build them up into quasar-scale territory at the earliest points in cosmic history.
"We knew that either they grow very fast or there had to be some other ways of forming them," astrophysicist Ignas Juodzbalis, also of the University of Cambridge, told Live Science.
The question was how. One leading theory posits that, in the past, ginormous clumps of gas and dust could collapse under their own weight, rapidly forming a black hole with perhaps 1,000 to 1 million times the sun's mass. These direct-collapse black holes, as they're called, would then grow by feeding on gas and dust and merging into the supermassive black holes seen in today's galactic centers.
Models predicted that as such black holes gorged, they would become extremely bright compared with their host galaxies, either matching or topping surrounding stars' luminosities. In other words, they would become quasars.
In 2023, JWST spotted a distant galaxy, dubbed UHZ1, that seemed to align neatly with the direct-collapse black hole model. The galaxy existed when the universe was a mere 470 million years old and contains a black hole with an estimated mass of 40 million suns.
Astronomers lucked out because UHZ1 was spotted both by JWST, which sees in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, which sees in X-ray light. Infrared light mostly comes from stars and warm dust heated by starlight, whereas the more powerful X-rays blast out from the devouring black hole.
And UHZ1's infrared and X-ray brightness are quite similar to one another, which suggests a black hole so large that it rivals the mass of all the stars in its galaxy. (For comparison, a modern galaxy like our Milky Way has around 20,000 times more mass in its stars, gas and dust than in its central black hole.) No one had ever seen anything like this before.
But researchers had predicted exactly how the colors emitted by a direct-collapse black hole would appear in JWST's instruments, along with several other key properties that could identify such an object .
"It turns out that UHZ1 remarkably satisfies all these properties," Priyamvada Natarajan, an astrophysicist at Yale University and lead author of the paper making those predictions, told Live Science.
Little red dots
UHZ1 is not alone. From almost the moment it turned on, JWST has been detecting extremely compact red entities that existed mainly when the cosmos was between half a billion and 1.5 billion years old. Known as "little red dots," they were originally thought to be galaxies far too big to have formed in the early universe, leading some scientists to call them "universe breakers" for upending models of cosmic history. The prevailing consensus is now moving toward the possibility that, rather than unusually large galaxies, these are bizarre, humongous black holes.
For instance, an object called QSO1 that existed when the universe was around 700 million years old has been studied intensely since it was discovered in 2023. A recent investigation looked at gas swirling around QSO1's center to try to pin down its mass with high precision. Swirling gas travels at a certain speed depending on the gravitational force tugging it as it spins. Using this technique, astronomers have shown that QSO1's mass is around that of 50 million suns. Moreover, all of the mass appears to be in a compact region around the black hole, with very little evidence of a large stellar population.
"We still don't see where the host galaxy is," Lukas Furtak, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin, told Live Science. "There doesn't really seem to be one."
This prospect — a gigantic black hole with no visible host galaxy — has been conjectured but never previously observed. Yet that appears to be what many of these little red dots are. Another recent study analyzed an object named "The Cliff," which likely weighs billions of times as much as the sun and is from about 1.8 billion years after the Big Bang. JWST's data showed a very sharp jump in The Cliff's light at a narrow wavelength that usually arises from dense hydrogen gas at a specific temperature. The findings indicate that The Cliff might be a long-hypothesized object called a quasi-star or a black hole star.
A quasi-star would be a potential stage in the evolution of a direct-collapse black hole. After the central huge chunk of gas crumpled to form a black hole, an outer sphere of gas and dust would remain, get heated by the black hole's emissions and glow in red wavelengths. This entity would look somewhat like a giant red star but would in fact be an envelope of hot hydrogen gas cocooned around a supermassive black hole.
In the very beginning
While direct-collapse models can explain a lot of what JWST is seeing, there remain a few other possibilities for supermassive black hole formation.
First proposed by Stephen Hawking in the 1970s, primordial black holes are a class of objects that could have arisen in the first few moments after the Big Bang, when dense regions collapsed under their own weight. Such black holes could come in a wide range of sizes, including ones large enough to act as the initial seeds for later supermassive black holes. One study has shown that mergers of primordial black holes could explain GN-z11, a galaxy from when the universe was a mere 400 million years old that contains a black hole with an estimated mass of 2 million suns.
Another theory has posited the existence of "not-quite-primordial black holes ." These would have come about within the first few million years after the Big Bang — later than primordial black holes but still long before any stars — when large clouds of hydrogen and helium collapsed under their own weight.
"For primordial black holes, you need these really extremely dense regions in the very early universe," Wenzer Qin, a theoretical physicist at New York University, told Live Science. That generally requires a lot of fine-tuning of parameters in a cosmological model, she added. When you relax such tight constraints a bit, dense regions appear at slightly later times in cosmic history, creating direct-collapse black holes that can go on to merge and end up as supermassive black holes.
Astronomers think that almost all elements heavier than hydrogen and helium were created in the nuclear bellies of giant stars and were then strewn about the universe when those stars went supernova. Many of the early black holes and young galaxies that JWST is seeing contain low amounts of these heavy elements. That could suggest that at least some of these objects formed from either primordial or not-quite-primordial black holes, given that both would have arisen long before any stars existed.
Researchers are still debating which of these models might be dominant for monster-black-hole formation, but most favor a blended view.
"I think, in the end, it will be some combination of all these mechanisms that gives rise to the entire population of supermassive black holes," Qin said.
Other missions such as the European Space Agency's Euclid observatory, launched in 2023, and NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, expected to launch in 2027, will team up with JWST to discover and study more early supermassive black holes. That should help researchers differentiate between these formation mechanisms and determine which, if any, is more common.
One thing that appears to be growing clearer to many astronomers is that supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies probably didn't come from stellar-size ones.
Thanks to its unparalleled abilities, JWST has upended our understanding of early cosmic history and is helping to rewrite the story of how gigantic black holes may have developed.
"The universe is littered with supermassive black holes that form extremely early," Natarajan said. "I can't tell you how exciting that is."
]]>Name: Chocolate Hills
Location: Bohol, Philippines
Coordinates: 9.8297, 124.1396
Why it's incredible: The hills change color with the seasons, inspiring legends that giants formed the mounds from mud.
The Chocolate Hills are a formation made of 1,776 limestone, grass-covered mounds in the Philippines.
This landscape is lush green during the rainy season from February to May, but in the dry season, the hills turn cocoa brown, giving the formation its name.
The Chocolate Hills were designated a national geological monument of the Philippines in 1988 and were granted protection as a natural monument in 1997. There is no other formation quite like them in the world, with just one region in Java, Indonesia, having a similar, but less impressive geology.
The hills are between 100 and 390 feet (30 to 120 meters) tall and have tapering tops. They are examples of what geologists call "mogotes" — steep-sided mounds that occur in tropical karst landscapes, or areas that have a soluble bedrock and host sinkholes and cave systems. Numerous underground caverns and springs have been documented around the Chocolate Hills, according to a 2001 research article, with some caves potentially existing directly beneath the mogotes themselves.
Evidence suggests the Chocolate Hills formed sometime at the start of, or just before, the last ice age (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago), when tectonic processes lifted coral and other marine deposits. These deposits were then exposed to rainfall and erosion, which carved the landscape into regular mounds.
Local myths have tried to explain how the Chocolate Hills formed. According to one legend, the mounds formed after a mud-throwing fight between two giants. Another tale says the region was once inhabited by giant children, who, while competing to make the most mud cakes, baked them under coconut half shells that eventually became the Chocolate Hills.
The land between the hills is flat and cultivated with rice and other crops. When the Chocolate Hills were declared a natural monument in the late 1990s, farmers, small-scale miners and landowners rose up against the government because they feared environmental protections would curb their property rights and livelihoods.
These protests escalated into violent conflicts between the military and a guerilla group dubbed the "Chocolate Hills Command," according to the 2001 article. Two armed fights broke out, one of which caused 10 deaths in October 1999.
Balancing the diverse and sometimes conflicting needs of environmental protection, tourism and local residents still poses a challenge today; the construction of a resort in the middle of the Chocolate Hills sparked public outcry in 2024.
Discover more incredible places, where we highlight the fantastic history and science behind some of the most dramatic landscapes on Earth.
]]>In a new study published Jan. 14 in the journal Nature, the scientists described their device as a surface acoustic wave (SAW) phonon laser that generates very small, rapid vibrations.
"Think of it almost like the waves from an earthquake, only on the surface of a small chip," lead study author Alexander Wendt, a graduate student at the University of Arizona Wyant College of Optical Sciences, said in a statement.
In nature, SAWs are produced on a massive scale when tectonic plates slide against each other and cause earthquakes.
SAWs are also used as filters in smartphones to help clean up wireless signals. A phone's radio receives radio waves from a cell tower and then converts them into tiny mechanical vibrations, making it easier for chips to remove unwanted noise.
Multiple chips convert radio waves into SAWs and back again every time you send a text, make a call or access the internet.
SAWs in modern technology
Although they're conceptually similar to seismic surface waves released by earthquakes, SAWs are far too small to be measured on any scale like the moment magnitude scale, which is used to estimate the energy released by movement in Earth's crust.
SAW devices are essential to many of the world's most important technologies, senior study author Matt Eichenfield, a professor of quantum engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, said in the statement. This includes cell phones, key fobs, garage door openers, most GPS receivers, and radar systems.
The scientists said a completely solid-state, single chip that generates coherent SAWs at very high frequencies, without needing an external radio-frequency source, has never been achieved before.
Traditional SAW components typically require two separate chips plus a power source. The team's design aimed to deliver similar functionality using a single chip — potentially enabling much higher frequencies to be powered by a typical smartphonebattery.
The researchers built the device by stacking ultrathin layers of different chip materials into a tiny "bar" about 0.02 inches (0.5 millimeters) long.
This included a silicon base; a thin layer of lithium niobate, a type of piezoelectric crystal that converts electrical signals into mechanical vibrations; and a final layer of indium gallium arsenide, a semiconductor material that can accelerate electrons to extremely high speeds when exposed to an electric field.
The system works by repeatedly amplifying vibrations as they bounce back and forth inside the structure, similar to how light intensifies in a diode laser between two mirrors. Surface vibrations in the lithium niobate interact with electrons in the indium gallium arsenide, boosting the energy of the waves as they move forward.
"It loses almost 99% of its power when it's moving backward, so we designed it to get a substantial amount of gain moving forward to beat that," Wendt said in the statement.
The team generated surface waves at around 1 gigahertz — equal to billions of vibrations per second — and believes the design could be pushed into the tens or hundreds of gigahertz. That's well beyond the capabilities of typical SAW devices, which often top out around 4 GHz, the researchers said.
The long-term goal is to simplify how phones handle wireless signals — namely, by designing a single chip that can convert radio waves into SAWs and back again, using surface waves for much of the signal processing. Doing so could potentially enable future wireless devices to filter and route signals on smaller chips, using less power.
"This phonon laser was the last domino standing that we needed to knock down," Wendt added. "Now we can literally make every component that you need for a radio on one chip using the same kind of technology."
]]>The main purpose of a dehumidifier is to draw in damp air, remove excess moisture and release drier air into the room. Sounds simple enough, so surely you just go for the one that removes the most water per day according to the label, right?
Well, unfortunately, as with most things, it's not quite that simple. Several factors will come into play that will vary from house to house — there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution.
Houses, workplaces, basements, studios or anywhere else you might want to use a dehumidifier are all unique environments. The size of the room will vary, as will the existing levels of damp or condensation, the room temperature and the climate. A dehumidifier that performs well in a warm living room might struggle in a cold underground basement, for example.
So, what should you look for when buying a dehumidifier? It's difficult to say without knowing your exact circumstances and reason for buying, but hopefully this guide will help you choose.
Here at Live Science, we have tried and tested a plethora of dehumidifiers and have identified which models are best for which purpose.
Reason for purchase
It might sound silly, but why are you looking to purchase a dehumidifier? Common reasons people consider a dehumidifier include condensation on windows, mold growth, a damp or musty smell, damp patches on walls, or difficulty drying clothes inside during the winter.
Do you just need to manage air moisture, or do you need to dry a room that's been damaged by flooding or damp? Are you looking for a way to dry your laundry faster, or do you need to prevent condensation from forming to prevent damage to your loft or conservatory? The answers will help narrow down your choices.
The two main types of dehumidifier
Consider which environment your dehumidifier will be put to work in, as it will help you decide which type of dehumidifier to buy. There are two main types:
For warmer environments, a refrigerant dehumidifier (or compressor dehumidifier) would be most appropriate. These use a fan to draw in moist air and pass it over coolant-cooled coils. The air is warmed, dried, and recirculated back into your home.
A desiccant dehumidifier, on the other hand, uses a heated, absorbent material to draw moisture from the air, which collects in a water tank that you need to empty periodically. These perform better in cold environments such as garages and conservatories.
In short, if your dehumidifier is in a fully heated room, a refrigerant is appropriate; in a cooler space, a desiccant is better and more efficient.
Understanding the labels
As we mentioned earlier, dehumidifiers are often labeled by how much water they can remove in 24 hours. For example, the GE APER50LZ, which we reviewed back in 2022, claims to remove 50 pints (28L) per day.
As a rough guide, a 8-12L model would be best suited to a 1-2 bedroom apartment, a 12-20L model would be ideal for a 2-3 bedroom home, and a 20+L model would suit large homes or very damp spaces. The example given above is therefore best suited to a large home or a very wet space. In a smaller room, this large unit might be unnecessarily costly to buy and run.
This statistic is therefore only really useful for an apples-to-apples comparison. Also, be mindful that these stats are often collected under lab conditions, not in real-world environments. They should be used as an indicator and not as gospel.
Pick the right design
Aside from the amount of moisture the dehumidifier can remove, other design factors are important. It's no good having a dehumidifier that does its job perfectly but causes other nuisances.
Noise
Noise is a key factor we consider when reviewing each model, and is acknowledged throughout our buying guides. The Honeywell TP50WKN is described as having inoffensive noise levels, whereas the GE Dehumidifier APER50LZ, a larger unit, is described as having moderate noise levels. It goes without saying that if you don't want to be distracted while working, sleeping or entertaining, you'll want a quieter model, whereas this might not be as important if the unit is somewhere with hardly any footfall.
Tank size/drainage
The larger the tank, the less frequently it needs to be emptied, but a smaller tank size will typically be found in a more portable and compact machine. Again, your decision will depend on the dehumidifier's location, ease of access, and how far you need to walk to the drain/sink to empty it.
Continuous drainage, if the dehumidifier supports it (as opposed to a tank you empty), works in one of two ways. Gravity drainage, as in the Honeywell TP50WKN, means water flows downward through the hose. The hose must discharge to a drain/sink/bucket that is lower than the dehumidifier's outlet. The alternative is pump-assisted drainage, which does the opposite. Water is pumped upward through the hose, as found in the GE Dehumidifier APER50LZ. Handy if you want to run the pipe out the window or into a standard sink.
In short, if you can empty the tank regularly and don't need to run the dehumidifier continuously, you can likely make do with a model that has only a water tank. If you have very damp rooms or require 24/7 hands-off operation, and have a suitable location for the drainage pipe, continuous drainage may require less maintenance and make more sense.
Portability
As you've probably established by now, some units are designed to be left in one place (typically the larger ones with continuous drainage). Some are more suitable for moving from room to room. Some units have handles and/or wheels, like the LG UD501KOG5, which can make even heavier units easier to move from A to B. Check these things before making a purchase.
Features
We recommend that if you have a unit with a water tank that needs to be emptied, you purchase a unit with an auto-shutdown feature, which stops the machine from running once the water tank is full. Otherwise, you can end up with a bigger mess on your hands than you started with!
Some dehumidifiers have "smart" features. For example, the Honeywell white TP50WK Energy Star actively monitors your space, adjusting modes based on the moisture level it detects.
Some models have auto-start, which means that if there is a power cut, they will automatically resume when power returns, without requiring manual intervention. Other models will have dedicated modes, like laundry mode; some will come with apps that alert you when the water tank is full or let you set schedules and control the unit remotely.
As we continue reviewing dehumidifiers, we will update our best dehumidifiers guide to include the models we recommend. No doubt we will start to see more features cropping up on newer units.
Consider the maintenance costs
The initial investment of buying a dehumidifier isn't the only cost: you will also need to account for the price of energy to run the appliance.
While it may cost more up front, you'll likely save more over time by buying an Energy Star-certified model. These models have undergone testing to ensure they meet strict energy-efficiency criteria set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) or the Department of Energy. In our best dehumidifiers guide, you can clearly see which models have an Energy Star rating.
The final thing to check is the dehumidifier's warranty. Our favorite dehumidifier, the Honeywell White TP50WK Energy Star, includes a generous 5-year warranty, while the GE Dehumidifier APER50LZ offers only a 1-year limited warranty.
]]>Disney+ is currently offering one of the best streaming deals we've seen, and right now, new subscribers and eligible returning subscribers can grab Disney+ for just £3.99 a month for the first three months on this UK-only deal.
Major new releases landing this year include Pole to Pole with Will Smith, and this seven-part documentary series blends personal adventure with scientific discovery. Smith, one of Hollywood's biggest names, embarks on a series of expeditions starting in the South Pole and ending in the North Pole, taking in the Amazonian rainforest, the Himalayas, Pacific islands and the African deserts.
Also, as the streaming home of National Geographic, we believe for fans of nature and science viewing, that Disney+ is the streaming subscription to have in 2026, even more so now as it's a third cheaper with this UK-only deal.
For US viewers, it seems Disney+ is being a bit stingy when it comes to a streaming deal. However, you can get one month of Disney+ for $9.99, before it reverts to the $12.99 pricing. A small saving if you're interested in seeing what it's all about.
Get three months' worth of Disney+ for just £3.99 a month on this UK-only streaming deal. You'll get access to brand new nature-themed shows and movies, plus a vast back catalogue that's guaranteed to keep you entertained. You can cancel your subscription at any time. Offer ends January 28 and auto-renews at the then-current price of the chosen plan (from £5.99).View Deal
- Our experts have reviewed and rated the best telescopes, binoculars, star projectors, cameras, fitness trackers, running shoes, rowing machines and more.
When you consider the amount of content available, this Disney+ deal is a bargain price. I've already mentioned a few above, but other highlights include Ghost Elephants, Secrets of the Whales, Billy and Molly: An Otter Love Story, and Super Animals.
Elsewhere, Meltdown explores the effect of global warming on one of the most beautiful and distant parts of the world. This film follows a UN trip to look at the glacial melt that is forming huge lakes behind moraine dams in Nepal and the dangerous impact this has.
As a mountaineer, at the top of my list to view is Expedition Everest, a groundbreaking expedition on Mount Everest to investigate what secrets the world’s highest peak has to tell us about our changing climate.
For sci-fi buffs, Disney+ also has the entire Star Wars and Marvel libraries, plus the latest releases, including The Mandalorian and Grogu, Maul – Shadow Lord, VisionQuest, and much more.
Please note: This is marked as a limited-time deal on Disney Plus and ends on January 28 and is a UK-specific deal. But you can subscribe to one month of Disney+ for $9.99, down from $12.99.
Key features: A vast library of Nature and Science content, including the vast National Geographic library, and much more. You can cancel your monthly subscription at any time.
Price history: Offers come up occasionally for Disney+ in the UK, but the current 33% off deal is the best one we've seen since this time last year.
✅ Buy it if: You want to be amongst the first to watch Pole to Pole with Will Smith and get access to what we regard as one of the best streaming packages for nature and science fans at a bargain price for three months.
❌ Don't buy it if: You're a current subscriber to Disney+ or live outside of the UK.
Check out our other guides to the best telescopes, binoculars, cameras, star projectors and much more.
The recent G4 geomagnetic storm has unleashed intense auroral activity, which has lit up skies across the Northern Hemisphere, delivering jaw-dropping northern light displays visible across Canada, the U.S., and even as far south as Mexico.
If you've been unlucky enough to have missed out on seeing this stunning but rare event, one of the best ways to experience the wonders of the cosmos in stunning detail is with one of the best star projectors.
A star projector blends scientific precision with artistic elegance, whether you want depictions of the aurora borealis, realistic constellations or close up representaions of the planets in our solar system, the top-rated choices make these perfect for space fans.
Our Live Science experts have tested nearly every star projector on the planet and one of the best is the Pococo Galaxy Star Projector, which is currently available on Amazon reduced by 39% to just $76.48, This is marked as a limited-time deal, and with savings of $49.51 on the MSRP of $125.99, it's sure to be snapped up fast.
In her Pococo Galaxy Star Projector review, our trusted Live Science expert Tantse Walter scored it with a 4 out of 5 star rating. Tantse noted that the Pococo was an affordable alternative to the more expensive star projectors like the Sega Toys Homestar Flux (our best premium choice), and that it offered similar functionality and image quality to its far more expensive rival.
Walter also highlighted the and it is also rechargeable, which gives you more flexibility in terms of where you can point the projections
with our next-generation high-transparency optical lens. Featuring an industrial-grade 2 million pixel lens with a 95% light transmission rate, it reveals the night sky's every nuance. The 5K Ultra HD disc lens, meticulously etched using cutting-edge photolithography, brings the universe right before your eyes
extensive collection of expandable image disks, LED projections and a focus ring.
Save 39% Get your first year of Norton's VPN Plus service for a massively discounted price, which works out at just $2.50 a month. Unless canceled during the first 12 months, your subscription will auto-renew at $109.99.View Deal
- Our experts have reviewed and rated the best telescopes, binoculars, star projectors, cameras, fitness trackers, running shoes, rowing machines and more.
Our Norton deal applies across all three tiers of its VPN service — Standard, Plus, and Ultimate, but I've highlighted the biggest discounts for each region in the deals above.
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Key features: 72% discount on a 12-month US subscription, 50% off in the UK, 65% off in Australia, ad blockers, a kill switch, a no-log policy on your online activity, a dedicated IP address, AI-powered scam, phishing and malware protection, dark web monitoring, parental controls, password management and up to 50GB of cloud storage.
extensive collection of expandable image disks, LED projections and a focus ring.
Price history: All the discounts on offer are big reductions compared to the full price of Norton VPN subscriptions.
✅ Buy it if: You want a trusted VPN service from one of the most reliable names in internet security.
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Check out our other guides to the best telescopes, binoculars, cameras, star projectors and much more.
]]>Cameras from several Mars orbiters captured the dusty remnants of apparent river deltas, which were described in research published Jan. 7 in the journal NPJ Space Exploration.
The team, led by researchers at the University of Bern, peered at the famed Valles Marineris, which is the largest valley system on Mars and five times longer than the Grand Canyon. Around this Red Planet region, scientists spotted "structures near the canyon system that resemble river deltas on Earth," University of Bern representatives wrote in a statement.
"These structures represent the mouth of a river into an ocean," the statement added. "The new study thus provides clear evidence of a coastline, and consequently, of an earlier ocean on Mars."
Water, water everywhere
Although Mars is dry and dusty today, there are many signs that the planet hosted water in the ancient past. For example, Mars rovers have spotted "blueberry stones" that may include iron oxide minerals containing water. NASA's Curiosity rover imaged possible "ripples" of an ancient riverbed in 2025, and some orbital missions have spotted what may be vast underground stores of water.
The new study focused on Martian geomorphology — the study of the surface and its processes — and employed several spacecraft, including the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, Mars Express and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (which recently shared its 100,000th photo).
"The unique high-resolution satellite images of Mars have enabled us to study the Martian landscape in great detail by surveying and mapping," Ignatius Argadestya, lead author of the study and a doctoral student at the University of Bern Institute of Geological Sciences as well as the university’s Physics Institute, said in the statement.
"When measuring and mapping the Martian images, I was able to recognize mountains and valleys that resemble a mountainous landscape on Earth," Argadestya said. "However, I was particularly impressed by the deltas that I discovered at the edge of one of the mountains."
The team saw possible "fan deltas," which form when debris and sand pile up in still water. The deposits in the Martian imagery appear very similar to active fan deltas on Earth, according to the team; on our planet, these deltas pile up at entry points where rivers flow into the ocean.
All of the "deposits" were mapped at an elevation of between 11,975 and 12,300 feet (3,650 to 3,750 meters) and formed roughly 3.37 billion years ago. Given that all of the deposits are at roughly the same elevation and in a region in the northern lowlands of Mars and Valles Marineris, the researchers argue that these structures mark the boundaries of an ancient shoreline. It's likely the ocean that once flowed there spanned Mars' entire northern hemisphere, the team added.
In part drawing on past research, the scientists say this ancient Martian ocean was at least as large as the present-day Arctic Ocean.
"We are not the first to postulate the existence and size of the ocean," Fritz Schlunegger, a geology professor at the University of Bern and co-author of the study, said in the statement. "However, earlier claims were based on less precise data and partly on indirect arguments. Our reconstruction of the sea level, on the other hand, is based on clear evidence for such a coastline, as we were able to use high-resolution images."
]]>This lab-mouse experiment suggests the therapy could potentially help with chronic pain in people, caused by conditions like osteoarthritis, for example. The hope is that the "pain sponge" could enable patients to stop relying on opioid medications for pain relief, the researchers say.
And as a bonus side effect, the engineered neurons also promoted bone and cartilage repair in the mice they were tested in, the researchers reported in a preprint posted to the server bioRxiv in December 2025. The work has not yet been peer-reviewed.
"The possibility that the therapy could both relieve pain and slow cartilage degeneration is particularly compelling for osteoarthritis," Chuan-Ju Liu, an orthopedics professor at Yale University who wasn't involved in the study, told Live Science.
How the pain sponge works
The therapy, known as SN101, uses human pluripotent stem cells (hPSC), which can differentiate into any type of cell in the body. In the study, led by Gabsang Lee, a neurology professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, researchers engineered the hPSC to differentiate into specialized sensory neurons.
These neurons effectively worked as a sponge for inflammatory pain signals. They sequestered the signals before they could be transmitted to the brain and cause pain.
Theoretically, the therapy could work for any kind of chronic pain, said Daniel Saragnese, co-founder of SereNeuro Therapeutics, the biotech company developing SN101. That said, the researchers have so far tested its effectiveness for only osteoarthritis, the most common form of arthritis.
The degenerative condition is characterized by inflammation and chronic pain that affects the joints, mainly the hips, knees, lower back and neck. It causes pain and stiffness, as well as inflammation driven by the breakdown of bone, cartilage and other tissues. There is no cure.
Currently, osteoarthritis symptoms are managed with lifestyle changes, including physical therapy, and various pain relievers, such as over-the-counter and topical painkillers, opioids, and steroid injections.
In the context of neurodegenerative diseases — such as multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease, and Parkinson's disease — scientists have been working on using hPSCs to replace or repair damaged neurons. With SN101, though, the researchers are taking an alternative approach. The new hPSC-derived neurons are injected at the site of inflammation and exist alongside other pain-sensing neurons, rather than replacing them.
The new neurons serve as biological decoys, binding nearby inflammatory factors before they can be picked up by the body's original neurons.
Potential pros of SN101
Chronic pain, which is defined as pain that lasts three months or more, is often managed with opioid drugs that bind to receptors in the body to reduce the intensity of pain. However, opioids cause unwanted side effects, such as nausea and vomiting, and carry a risk of addiction.
Despite their downsides, it is estimated that about 9% of patients with knee osteoarthritis turn to opioids, which can lead to excessive, long-term use. As such, scientists are always on the lookout for safer and more efficient pain-management techniques.
By using biologically complex cells that naturally express multiple pain receptors, SN101 may more closely reflect the way pain and inflammation manifest in living tissues, Liu said. This could help snuff out pain at its source. Opioids, on the other hand, bind to receptors in the brain to temporarily block painful sensations, so they don't get at the signals at the root of pain.
"However, this work remains at a preclinical stage," Liu emphasized.
The research will need to pass significant milestones before human use, including formal toxicology studies, long-term safety assessments, and first-in-human clinical trials, he said. Nonetheless, he called the idea behind the therapy "innovative."
The researchers pointed out several limitations in their recent study that would need investigation before SN101 could be deemed safe for humans. One is the treatment's immunogenicity — that is, whether it triggers a harmful immune response in the body. Another limitation is that human and mouse knee joints are very different, so some results from the arthritic mouse study might not translate to people.
"Human joints are larger [than mouse joints], more mechanically complex, and subject to decades of cumulative stress," Liu noted. Additionally, "pain processing and immune-neuronal interactions can differ substantially between mice and humans, which may affect both therapeutic efficacy and durability."
]]>"EXPLODING TREES are possible in the Midwest and Northern Plains on Friday and Saturday, as temperatures are forecasted to fall 20 degrees BELOW zero!" Max Velocity (real name, Max Schuster), a weather-based content creator with a degree in meteorology, wrote in a post on the social platform X.
The frigid temperatures stem from a wave of Arctic air that's heading south. The National Weather Service (NWS) has forecast "life-threatening cold" and the potential for wind chills as low as minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 46 degrees Celsius) across the Northern Plains. The agency has issued extreme-cold warnings for much of the Northern Plains and Upper Midwest.
But can extreme cold really make trees explode?
It depends on your definition of "explode." Trees can crack in frigid conditions due to their sap. This substance is usually liquid even in freezing temperatures, but when it gets super cold, like minus 20 F (minus 29 C), it freezes. In some places, the incoming Arctic blast will likely be cold enough to freeze trees' sap, causing it to quickly expand, Bill McNee, a forest health specialist at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
"That just creates a lot of physical pressure that can lead to the frost cracking appearing suddenly, branches can fall off, and people hear this really loud crack from their tree, almost like it's a gunshot," McNee said.
The cracking usually affects only part of the tree, but in rare cases, explosions can happen, McNee said.
"I've never seen the damage of it, but from what I have seen and what I read online is that it is rare for there just to be so much pressure that is suddenly released inside this tree that it almost does explode," McNee said.
Meteorologist Cody Matz also addressed the explosion claim in an article for Minneapolis-based Fox 9, writing that "it can and does happen" but that it's "extremely rare." Matz noted that many people have likely lived in Minnesota and the Upper Midwest their whole lives without ever hearing of exploding trees.
The news nonprofit organization South Dakota News Watch, in partnership with the fact-checking nonprofit Gigafact, concluded that the claim that trees can explode during extreme cold was misleading but noted that temperature-driven breaking and snapping "can sound like an explosion."
Winter blast
Regardless of whether trees can "explode," some areas will have a chance to experience the rare cracking phenomenon. The NWS is forecasting temperatures below minus 20 F in parts of North Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin over the weekend, while the wind chills starting today (Jan. 22) will be even colder.
"This arctic blast will be accompanied by gusty winds, leading to dangerous wind chills," an NWS representative wrote in a Weather Prediction Center update Thursday. "The coldest wind chills may fall below -50 [F] across the Northern Plains with sub-zero wind chills reaching as far southeast as the Mid-Atlantic, Mid-Mississippi Valley and Southern Plains. These wind chills will pose life-threatening risk of hypothermia and frostbite to exposed skin."
The Arctic air is also set to fuel a massive and long-lasting winter storm, in conjunction with a surface front farther south and a midlevel disturbance passing through northern Mexico, according to the Weather Prediction Center update. AccuWeather reported that the winter storm is expected to bring heavy snow and ice down on more than 150 million people across 24 states from Friday through the weekend.
Meteorologists told The Associated Press that a stretching polar vortex is to blame for the Arctic blast. The polar vortex is an area of low pressure and cold air that circulates around the North and South poles all the time. Around the North Pole, the Arctic polar vortex is a circle of strong, cold winds that picks up every winter and sends cold air south with the jet stream when it's disrupted or stretched.
A warming Arctic, fueled by climate change, is energizing the polar vortex and helping to send cold air south, according to The Associated Press. Extreme winter weather is often linked to what the polar vortex is doing, although researchers are still deciphering all of the drivers behind the vortex's behavior.
]]>Researchers have debated the geographical origin and spread of the treponemal diseases — syphilis, bejel, yaws and pinta, all of which are caused by bacteria in the genus Treponema — for centuries. Because the best-documented epidemics of syphilis occurred in Europe in the 15th century, early theories suggested that Christopher Columbus brought syphilis to the Americas or, conversely, that Indigenous people in the Americas transmitted syphilis to Columbus and his crew.
More recent DNA studies, however, have identified T. pallidum in a person buried around A.D. 1000 in Chile and in several people buried between 350 B.C. and A.D. 570 in Brazil, placing the bacterium in the Americas long before the Columbian expedition.
In a study published Thursday (Jan. 22) in the journal Science, researchers isolated the oldest T. pallidum genome yet, from the skeleton of a middle-aged hunter-gatherer who was buried in Colombia 5,500 years ago.
"Our results push back the association of T. pallidum with humans by thousands of years," study lead author Davide Bozzi, a computational biologist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, said in a statement.
Ancient genomes of Treponema are exceptionally difficult to recover and are usually found in skeletons with bony evidence of treponemal disease lesions, such as holes that make the bone appear moth-eaten, which are often associated with the later stages of infection. Surprisingly, the 5,500-year-old skeleton containing evidence of T. pallidum did not have any obvious skeletal lesions, although other skeletons in the area did.
While investigating the new T. pallidum genome, which they named TE1-3, the researchers found that it was a different lineage than all other subspecies of T. pallidum identified to date. Based on a statistical analysis of the differences among the genomes, the researchers estimated that TE1-3 diverged from today's lineages around 13,700 years ago. This suggests that Treponema began circulating in the Americas thousands of years earlier than experts previously thought.
But the new genome does not clarify whether early Treponema lineages like TE1-3 were capable of sexual transmission like venereal syphilis.
"Current genomic evidence, along with our genome presented here, does not resolve the long-standing debate about where the disease syndromes themselves originated, but it does show there's this long evolutionary history of treponemal pathogens that was already diversifying in the Americas thousands of years earlier than previously known," study co-author Elizabeth Nelson, a molecular anthropologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said in the statement.
In a related perspective published in Science, Molly Zuckerman and Lydia Bailey, anthropologists at Mississippi State University who were not involved in the study, wrote that the new finding "points to an origin for syphilis in the Americas rather than Europe." Comparing progressively ancient genomes of Treponema with modern genetic data could help inform infection control strategies for syphilis, which has rebounded globally over the past decade, they wrote, as well as help researchers understand the history of infectious disease.
"It is possible that 15th century syphilis was the first globalized emerging infectious disease and a harbinger of all subsequent ones, from HIV/AIDS to COVID-19," Zuckerman and Bailey wrote.
The new discovery shows "the unique potential of paleogenomics to contribute to our understanding of the evolution of species, and potential health risks for past and present communities," study co-author Lars Fehren-Schmitz, a geneticist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in the statement.
Human skeleton quiz: What do you know about the bones in your body?
The drug has been available by prescription as a once-weekly injection in the U.S. since 2021. Like the injection, the new Wegovy pill contains semaglutide, the same active ingredient as Ozempic. It works by mimicking a hormone in the body — glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) — that helps control appetite and blood sugar levels.
Both forms of Wegovy are approved to help adults with obesity — as well as adults who are overweight and have related health conditions, like high blood pressure — lose weight and keep it off, in combination with a reduced-calorie diet and increased physical activity. However, only the injectable version is approved for children 12 and up with obesity; the pill version is not yet cleared for that age group.
Here's what to know about the new Wegovy pill and who might benefit most from it.
Do semaglutide pills work as well as injections?
The main difference between the Wegovy pill and the injection is how the drug enters the bloodstream.
When semaglutide is injected under the skin, it is absorbed directly into the blood. When taken as a pill, however, the drug must first pass through the stomach and intestines, where some of its active ingredient is broken down by digestive enzymes before it can be absorbed through the gut lining and into the blood.
Because of this, "only a small fraction [of the pill] reaches the bloodstream," explained Dr. Chika Anekwe, obesity medicine clinical director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Weight Center and an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. This is an expected difference between injected and oral medications, in general.
Although the pill exposes the digestive tract to more semaglutide than the injection would, its local effects on the gut are minor, Anekwe explained. That's because the "key effects still require absorption and systemic signaling," so they only kick in once the drug reaches the bloodstream, she said.
To make up for that digestive process, the pill version of Wegovy is taken at a much higher dose than the injectable form. The highest dose of the pill is 25 milligrams, compared with 2.4 milligrams for the weekly injection, Anekwe told Live Science in an email.
The pill also comes with strict instructions for when you should take it, Anekwe said. It should be taken on an empty stomach in the morning with a small amount of water, and patients must wait at least 30 minutes before eating, drinking or taking other medications, its drug label says. This ensures that the medication will be properly absorbed at the intended dose. The injectable version does not have these restrictions; it can be taken at any time of day and with no fasting required.
Dr. Priya Jaisinghani, an endocrinologist and obesity medicine specialist at NYU Langone Health, discussed the effectiveness of the two formulations during an Endocrine Society webinar about GLP-1 pills in December 2025.
So far, "there has been no long-term, head-to-head trial" that has compared the once-daily 25-mg pill with the once-weekly 2.4-mg injection in adults with obesity, Jaisinghani said. However, results from clinical trials that tested the drugs separately suggest the two versions lead to very similar weight loss when taken as instructed.
In the STEP-1 trial, a study of 2.4-mg injectable semaglutide, participants lost an average of about 14.4% of their body weight. In the OASIS 4 trial, a study of the 25-mg pill, participants lost an average of about 13.9% of their body weight. Jaisinghani said these results indicate that the pill and the injection "offered comparable efficacy for weight management."
Is the Wegovy pill as safe as the injection?
The trials also suggest that Wegovy pills and injectables have similar side effects.
"Oral and injectable Wegovy have very similar, predominantly gastrointestinal side effects," Anekwe said. These include nausea, diarrhea, vomiting and constipation, for example.
About three-quarters of Wegovy users experience mild-to-moderate gastrointestinal symptoms, Anekwe said. But for both forms of the drug, a minority of patients — around 7% to 10% — stop taking the medication because of these effects, according to trial data.
(Some real-world data suggest that a higher percentage of patients stop taking GLP-1s within a year of starting them, but that may be due to a mix of factors, including both side effects and medication cost.)
Who might benefit more from the pill or the injection?
Patients considering Wegovy may opt for the pill or injection for different reasons. For instance, "the pill may be better for someone who is averse to using injections," Anekwe said.
The pill version may also be more appealing to people who do not have reliable access to refrigeration, such as frequent travelers, she said. That's because the pill can be stored at room temperature, unlike the injection, which must be refrigerated. Generally, the Wegovy injectables should be kept between 36 and 46 degrees Fahrenheit (2 to 8 degrees Celsius). And if needed, the pens can be stored at 46 to 86 F (8 to 30 C) for up to 28 days, if their caps haven't been removed.
That said, the strict daily schedule of taking a pill on an empty stomach with restrictions on food timing may be challenging for some people to stick to. Those individuals may prefer the convenience of a once-weekly injection.
Cost and insurance coverage may also influence which version people choose. The pill may be better for someone who doesn't have insurance coverage because it has a lower out-of-pocket cost, Anekwe said.
And besides lifestyle factors and cost, there is another important difference that determines who can use each version: Unlike the injectable form of Wegovy, which is approved for adolescents ages 12 and older with obesity, the Wegovy pill is currently approved only for adults.
This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.
]]>Engineers have built a detachable robotic hand that can crawl into hard-to-reach spaces to retrieve objects.
The spider-like device can be fitted with multiple fingers and is reversible, meaning it can grip objects in both directions and operate as though it has two functional palms.
In a study published Jan. 20 in the journal Nature Communications, scientists at the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne (EPFL) said the robot was designed to combine two capabilities that are usually kept separate in robotics: manipulation and locomotion.
The hand can also operate without a full, mobile robot base. Instead, it simply detaches itself from a robotic arm and scuttles off to wherever it is needed, picks up the object and returns to reattach itself.
This could make it useful in situations where robots need to reach or retrieve objects from spaces that are too tight or too dangerous for human arms to access, such as industrial or exploratory environments and areas affected by disasters, the researchers noted.
"We can easily see the limitations of the human hand when attempting to reach objects underneath furniture or behind shelves, or performing simultaneous tasks like holding a bottle while picking up a chip," study co-author Aude Billard, head of the Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory in EPFL's School of Engineering, said in a statement.
"Likewise, accessing objects positioned behind the hand while keeping the grip stable can be extremely challenging, requiring awkward wrist contortions or body repositioning."
Handy robotics
Robotic appendages, like hands, have been built before. The human hand is, after all, considered a biological marvel; it's given humans the dexterity needed to make tools, prepare food and build shelter, all of which have proved key to our survival as a species.
Still, human hands do have some distinctly biological limitations, the scientists noted. For example, our asymmetrical thumbs and our hands' permanent attachment to our arms.
EPFL's robot is essentially a self-contained system that can either act like a normal "gripper" on the end of an arm or detach itself and scurry about on its own. The design draws inspiration from nature, with the researchers likening it to how an octopus uses its arms to move across the seafloor and open shells, or how a praying mantis uses its spiked forearms to both move around and catch prey.
In experiments, the researchers demonstrated the hand performing various standard gripping and grasping exercises, as well as accomplishing more fiddly feats of dexterity that humans routinely struggle with. These included holding multiple objects at once or gripping objects without using the thumb or forefinger.
Not only can the robotic hand grasp up to four objects simultaneously, it can also crawl across the floor while carrying items on its "back."
Each of the robot's fingers is driven by small electric motors and linked by lightweight 3D-printed joints, allowing them to curl and spread much like human fingers. Unlike a human hand, however, each finger joint can bend both forward and backward, allowing it to grab objects in both directions and "flip" its working orientation without needing to rotate at the wrist.
The fingertips are capped with a soft silicone layer to add friction, making it easier to hold objects securely and maintain traction when crawling. "There is no real limitation in the number of objects it can hold; if we need to hold more objects, we simply add more fingers," Billard said.
The hand reattaches itself to the arm using a "snap-and-lock" system. Magnets help align the connectors, and a small motor drives a locking bolt that secures the joints.
The system could eventually be adapted for human prosthetics or "extra limb" augmentation, the team said, though this isn't the focus of the current prototype.
"The symmetrical, reversible functionality is particularly valuable in scenarios where users could benefit from capabilities beyond normal human function," Billard said.
"For example, previous studies with users of additional robotic fingers demonstrate the brain's remarkable adaptability to integrate additional appendages, suggesting that our non-traditional configuration could even serve in specialized environments requiring augmented manipulation abilities."
]]>The Sega Toys Homestar Classic is one of three in Sega Toys’ lineup, sitting alongside the Homestar Flux and the Homestar Matataki. All three models are similar, but this is the least expensive of the trio. The Flux offers a more powerful projector, and the Matataki has a built-in speaker. The Homestar Classic is a little more barebones, but it’s still one of the most powerful projectors on the market, particularly if you’re looking for a realistic projection of the night sky.
This is a quality product, delivered in attractive packaging that feels every bit as premium as its price tag suggests. It ships with two discs: the Northern Hemisphere and the Northern Hemisphere with constellations, but more discs are available (costing around $20 each), making this one of the most versatile projectors on the market, provided you don’t mind spending a little more.
The other Sega Toys Homestar projectors have earned themselves a place on our guide to the best star projectors, and we think the Homestar Classic deserves a place right alongside them. Read on to our full review to find out why.
Sega Toys Homestar Classic: Design
- Easy to use
- Premium build quality
- Uses mains power
There’s something wonderful about the design of the Sega Toys Homestar Classic. It feels suitably space-age, thanks to its orb-like shape. It’s not over the top or too flashy, either. Compared to some star projectors, it feels minimalist and understated — particularly if you opt for the black or white colorway. The Homestar Classic is also available in red or blue, which we think are perhaps more suited to a kid’s bedroom, though perhaps you just prefer bolder colors.
Whichever color you opt for, the Sega Toys Homestar Classic of course functions exactly the same. There is no remote control, with all actions taking place on the unit itself. There’s an on/off switch, and three buttons which turn on or off shooting stars, movement and a sleep timer.
The projector ships with an AC adapter, which means you’ll need to place it near a power outlet. It’s something to bear in mind, especially considering many other projectors are USB-C powered or even have a rechargeable battery.
The Homestar Classic has a great build quality that doesn’t feel cheap or plasticky. Thanks to a metal stand, it feels very sturdy and it’s easy to adjust. No matter what position you have the projector in, you should feel confident that it isn’t going to move.
Sega Toys Homestar Classic: Performance
- Whisper-quiet
- Projections are beautiful and realistic
- Requires total darkness to really shine
If you appreciate silence, the Sega Toys Homestar Classic is a great choice. It’s whisper-quiet in operation, which is a boon to those who are looking for a projector to fall asleep to. That’s largely because, unlike some other projectors, the Homestar Classic doesn’t have a noisy rotation motor inside. Instead, projections can gently and slowly pan. Personally, we prefer this: it’s subtle, calming and more realistic.
The projections provided here are simply stunning. According to the official Sega Toys website, you’re seeing up to 60,000 twinkling stars when the projector is turned on. We have of course not counted, but we can believe it: you’ll want to project the Homestar Classic onto a large wall or ceiling to really get the most out of it. It’s immersive and striking, thanks to how sharp and detailed it is.
Perhaps the only downside is that you’ll want your room to be fully dark to truly appreciate the Sega Toys Homestar Classic’s projections. With only 3 watts of power (compared to the Flux’s 5 watts), it’s a little dull if you still have a light source in your room. Wait until dark, pull the curtains, and you’ll truly appreciate how gorgeous the projections are. If it’s still light, it can be a little underwhelming.
Sega Toys Homestar Classic: Functionality
- A variety of discs are available
- Has a built-in sleep timer
- Focus wheel can be a little fiddly
Since this is the cheapest projector offered by Sega Toys, it doesn’t have quite the full suite of bells and whistles you’ll find on the company’s other projectors. The Flux boasts improved visual quality, for example, and a brighter projector. And the Matataki has a built-in speaker with a built-in library of natural sounds. Those features come with a higher price tag, though, and if you’re just wanting a realistic projector, the Sega Toys Homestar Classic packs in all the features you’ll want or need.
While it doesn’t have full rotation, you can turn on a gentle movement, which some users will prefer. You can also enable or disable shooting stars, which add a welcome sense of motion to projections. Finally, there’s a sleep timer, which can be set to 15, 30 or 60 minutes, after which time the projector will power itself off. It’s ideal if you’d like to use it to fall asleep to, so you can be confident it won’t stay on all night.
To focus the Sega Toys Homestar Classic, you’ll need to turn the focus wheel manually, which is located around the outside of the projector lens itself. We initially had a little difficulty in getting the projector clearly in focus; the focus wheel feels a little loose, and you may need to turn it for a long time before you notice any difference. Once it’s in focus, however, it should stay there — so as long as you keep the projector in the same position, you should not need to refocus.
Placing the projector somewhere between 59 and 90 inches (150 and 230 centimeters) away from the flat surface you’re projecting onto is the ideal distance. If you’re struggling to find a clear focus point, it may be that the projector is too close or too far away, so try placing it elsewhere.
Should I buy the Sega Toys Homestar Classic?
The short answer is yes, you should buy the Sega Toys Homestar Classic. The long answer ultimately depends on your budget. At $150, this is among the most expensive star projectors on the market, despite being the cheapest model offered by Sega Toys. But if you’re looking for a realistic, believable projection, you won’t find much better than this.
If you’re simply looking for a pretty light show to help you relax before bed, we’d recommend finding a cheaper projector elsewhere. But for an accurate, scientific display of the night sky, this really is one of the best star projectors on the market.
If the Sega Toys Homestar Classic isn’t for you
If you want the very best, we’d recommend taking a look at the Sega Toys Homestar Flux. This offers similar functionality to the Classic, but with even better projection quality, a brighter bulb, and a larger choice of projection discs available. It carries a higher price tag, of course, but that’s to be expected given its additional features.
There are, of course, cheaper projectors that offer similar functionality. We’ve previously called the Orzorz Galaxy Lite the best star projector on the market: it has a lower price tag and still offers realistic displays with interchangeable discs.
And if you’re really on a budget, the Blisslights Sky Lite Evolve is worth considering: it doesn’t offer scientific projections, but it’s an impressive display nonetheless, and thanks to app functionality, there’s plenty you can do with it.
]]>1. Start small
It is an all-too-familiar cycle: As the New Year starts, we are brimming with motivation, promising ourselves that this is the year we finally get fit. We go to the gym regularly, diligently track our workouts and fill our schedules with fitness classes two weeks in advance. But then reality sets in. Life gets busy, motivation drops, and our fitness goals start fading into the background. For many, that ultimate surrender comes around 'Blue Monday' — the third Monday in January. This is when we tend to crumble under the weight of unrealistic expectations and fading motivation, and finally consign our fitness goals to history.
The good news is that this vicious cycle can be broken. Behavioral science is getting ever closer to understanding what makes us kickstart and maintain an exercise routine, and what derails or slows down our efforts to form new habits — and we can use that knowledge to our advantage.
With that in mind, we asked experts in psychology, physiology and fitness coaching for their advice on how to successfully establish an active lifestyle in 2026. Here are six simple, science-backed tips that can help you finally get fit.
1. Start small
This is the most important one. If you want to succeed with your New Year's fitness resolutions, do not overload yourself from the get-go. When you set a lofty goal like "work out every day," you are more likely to get anxious about it, procrastinate and, ultimately, abandon it altogether.
Instead, focus on tiny habits, a concept popularized by the Stanford behavioral scientist B.J. Fogg — scale the behavior down to something so small it feels almost effortless.
"Psychologically, starting small works because it avoids triggering the brain’s threat response, which is activated when the perceived cost of a change is high. Tiny, manageable goals create early mastery experiences that boost dopamine and strengthen self-efficacy: the belief that ‘I can do this,’ Dr. Michael Swift, a British Psychological Society media spokesperson and clinical director at Swift Psychology, a counselling service in Birmingham, U.K., told Live Science by email. "Even a few minutes of movement is enough to begin building the neural pathways that underpin habit formation."
Top tip: Forget the marathon: start with a stroll or a 15-minute bodyweight workout in your living room. The goal here is not to train like an athlete from day one, but to successfully repeat a new behavior. Consistency beats intensity every time in the habit-formation phase.
"People tend to set the bar really high when they are starting a new exercise routine. It is important to choose a program that you will enjoy, and that is going to fit into your lifestyle and be sustainable long term," Michelle D’Onofrio, a Pilates instructor and co-founder of Yatta Studios, a chain of boutique exercise studios in the U.K., told Live Science by email.
It is also worth noting that this slow-burn approach has tangible benefits for your muscular health and general well-being. "Your body adapts to new physical stress through progressive overload — gradually increasing intensity, duration, or frequency so muscles and cardiovascular system can adapt safely," D'Onofrio said.
If you do too much exercise too soon, you are more likely to struggle with brutal bouts of DOMS (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness) and even painful injuries.
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2. Schedule and stack it
Motivation is a fickle fuel source — it starts bright and intense, but fizzles out quickly. Scientists know that our actions are heavily automated, with most of our behaviors being cued by time, location or preceding events.
Exercise is no different. If you plan and schedule your workouts in advance, you give yourself a powerful cue and a direct call to action that helps when your motivation inevitably runs low. This is why people who create and follow a specific plan detailing when, where and how they would exercise are more likely to follow through than those who do not plan their workouts at all, according to a 2013 meta-analysis published in the journal Health Psychology Review. This phenomenon is called "implementation intention."
Top tip: Move exercise from a vague "I should" to a non-negotiable appointment. Use time blocking — put your exercise session in your daily calendar, just like a meeting with your boss or a school class, then set a reminder. Simple yet effective.
“Too often people think a gym session has to be a massive time commitment, or that they need to overhaul their lives completely to exercise. That’s rarely realistic and often backfires," Steve Chambers, a senior personal trainer and gym manager at Ultimate Performance in Manchester, U.K., told Live Science by email.
"Start by mapping out your real-world schedule (work hours, family, social commitments, sleep, stress etc), then build a custom plan that fits around your life, not the other way around," Chambers advised.
When planning a new activity, use habit stacking. In essence, this is the practice of piggybacking a new exercise routine onto an existing habit. For example, "After I get home from work and put my keys down, I will immediately change into my workout clothes." This method uses the established neural pattern of the old habit as a runway for the new one.
"Habits form through the cue-routine-reward loop. You are more consistent when exercise is tied to a stable anchor such as 'after breakfast' or 'after work'," D'Onofrio said.
Also, tie in temptation bundling — combine doing something you ought to do with doing something you love. "This could mean that you only listen to your favourite playlist or podcast whilst doing your workout," Rex Fan, a lead behavioural insights advisor at Bupa Health Clinics in the U.K., told Live Science by email.
This also means that you should remember to reward yourself. "When you structure in your workout, why not also structure in something nice to look forward to afterwards? It could be anything from a nice coffee to a phone call with a friend," Fan said.
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3. Make exercise fun
If you frame exercise purely as a punitive tool for weight loss, or penance for all the hours spent watching your favorite TV show, your brain will subconsciously resist it. Doing something because it feels good is far more sustainable than doing something out of guilt or peer pressure. If you want to increase your chance of succeeding with your New Year's fitness resolutions, make exercise as fun and engaging as possible.
"From a neuroscience perspective, the brain repeats what it finds rewarding, and attaching positive emotion to movement accelerates habit consolidation. Pairing activity with something enjoyable, such as music, a favourite podcast or the satisfying tick of crossing off a plan, enhances the brain’s reward circuitry and reinforces the behaviour," Swift said.
Top tip: This one is simple — do what makes you happy. If you are not a fan of gym workouts or the thought of going for a run makes you queasy, consider dancing, martial arts or some of the more atypical sports, such as frisbee, futsal, Quidditch or trampoline. Every movement counts.
As Dr. Nicolas Berger, a senior lecturer in exercise physiology at Teesside University in the U.K., told Live Science by email: "Dancing on your own, with your friends, or partner is a brilliant way to improve coordination and cardiovascular fitness, which is low impact but good for your joints and bones. It also brings massive social benefits, improving mental health as well as self-confidence. It’s one of the best ways to do exercise without feeling like it is."
If going to a Zumba class or hopping on a trampoline does not appeal to you, consider some of the less strenuous activities you can do in the great outdoors. “Is there a sea or lake nearby? Rent a kayak or rowing boat, even a pedalo. This all helps with upper body, lower back and core strength," Berger said. “Any outing where you have to walk a lot and maybe carry a backpack is beneficial. If it is interesting, you will not notice it is exercise.”
All in all, by making exercise easy, accessible and rewarding, we work with the brain rather than against it, giving new routines the best possible chance to take root, Swift concluded.
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4. Optimize for convenience
Human behavior is often governed by "friction costs" — the more steps, decisions or effort required to start a task, the less likely we are to do it. Our brains naturally gravitate toward the path of least resistance, and exercise is no different. If you want to increase your chance of succeeding with your New Year's resolutions, identify and remove or minimise any potential barriers and hurdles that can slow you down on your fitness journey.
"One of the strongest findings in behavioural science is that motivation is unstable, so the goal is to design the behaviour to require as little activation energy as possible," Swift explained. "Reducing friction by laying out clothes the night before, choosing an activity with minimal setup, or linking movement to an existing cue engages the brain’s habit system, which favours predictability and ease. When a task feels simple, the prefrontal cortex does not have to work as hard to overcome resistance, making follow-through far more likely."
Top tip: Identify your potential barriers and challenges (lack of time? no access to exercise equipment? poor sleep?), then make a plan to remove or minimize them as much as possible. In simpler terms, make starting your workout as easy and frictionless as possible. For example, the night before your scheduled exercise session, place your workout clothes by the bedside and your water bottle by the door. Have your workout video bookmarked or your podcast playlist ready. If morning gym travel is the hurdle, join an online fitness class from the comfort of your living room.
The hurdle is almost always in the starting, not the continuing. Getting over that initial friction is half the battle.
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5. Embrace imperfection
All-or-nothing thinking is a major hurdle to succeeding on your fitness journey. You miss one day of training, convince yourself you have failed and abandon the entire effort. However, getting fit is a marathon, not a sprint. Sometimes a little self-compassion goes further than bashing yourself for not living up to your expectations.
"When people interpret lapses as normal variability rather than personal failure, they are far more likely to resume," Swift said.
Top tip: Try the "two-day rule." It is simple: never let yourself skip your planned exercise for two days in a row. Life happens. You’ll get sick, work will run late, or motivation will dip. Permission to miss one day is crucial to prevent shame and the subsequent spiral. But by committing to not missing a second day, you build resilience and prevent a lapse from becoming a collapse. This builds self-compassion and a flexible, sustainable mindset, which is far more durable than rigid perfectionism.
“In practice, that means: Accept that progress won’t always be linear. There will be plateaus or regressions. That doesn’t mean failure. Be forgiving of slip-ups, but don’t give up! If you fall off the wagon, then get on again next session." Chambers said.
6. Involve others
Last, but not least: involve other people. According to a 2017 systematic review published in the journal International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, social support can have a small but significant impact on helping you stick to your new exercise routine long-term. Whether it is the local running club, a guided Pilates session or working out with your gym buddies, having someone to check in with you on a regular basis can be a huge motivator. It does not even have to be someone you are particularly close to.
"Sharing your intentions with someone you trust, like a fitness coach or health adviser, can help you to stay closer to your goals. Speaking to a health adviser may also help you to prepare for the physical demands of a new workout, depending on your individual health," Fan said.
Top tip: Train with a partner (friend, spouse) or have a regular “gym buddy.” Join a fitness class, whether in your local leisure center or online. Start a fitness blog. The options are endless!
"If you know someone’s counting on you, you are more likely to show up. Having a system of external accountability dramatically raises the odds that you won’t just ‘fall off the wagon," Chambers concluded.
]]>The findings raise questions about the accuracy of long-term water-demand projections, which could have knock-on effects on costs borne by consumers, but overall the news that water demand is lower than projected is positive for the state and its regular battles against drought, experts told Live Science.
"Overall, I think this is a good news story," Heather Cooley, director of research at the Pacific Institute water think tank in California, told Live Science. "It shows that there are things we can do to ensure we have enough water for people and for nature."
Water management has long been a key issue in California, which has about 8.5 million acres (3.4 million hectares) of irrigated cropland. Crops like grapes, almonds and pistachios anchor the state's economy, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. Agriculture makes up about 40% of California's annual water use, on average, with another 10% being used by communities and the other 50% being put back into the environment.
But the supplies of this precious resource are often at risk in the state, thanks to lengthy droughts, long-term depletion of groundwater supplies and population growth.
Projections of water use generally assume it will go up as the population increases, but California has introduced many water-saving measures. So to investigate how projections compare with actual usage, Johanna Capone, a graduate student at Virginia Tech, and Landon Marston, an associate professor in the Virginia Tech Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, assessed the state's Urban Water Management Plans, which were prepared every five years by 61 California urban water suppliers from 2000 to 2020.
They found that water suppliers consistently overestimated future demand by an average of 25% for five-year projections, and 74% for 20-year projections.
This overestimation stems primarily from predictions of how much water each person would use, rather than from assumptions about population growth, Capone and Marston reported in a study published Nov. 21, 2025, in the journal Water Resources Research. While suppliers generally projected stable or increasing per-capita demand, actual water demand per capita declined by 1.9% annually between 2000 and 2020, meaning water demand no longer neatly correlates with population growth.
"I think the overall takeaway is that California has been doing a great job in reducing demand," Capone told Live Science. "The state is clearly on the right path."
The findings match those from other similar research.
"This trend is consistent with what I have seen not only in California but also in other regions," Cooley said. She is an author of a 2020 study that also saw a decline in per capita water use in 10 of California's water suppliers between 2000 and 2015.
She said there has been a gradual decoupling of water use and population growth, so we can no longer assume that the two are linked.
"This study has shown, what other studies have shown, that we can grow and support economic development, using less water," Cooley said, "and efficiency is a key strategy for helping us do that."
Capone credits the reductions in water use to water-related initiatives, educational campaigns and financial incentives — such as rebates for replacing turf with drought-tolerant landscaping — driven by state policies like the California Green Building Standards Code and the Model Water Efficient Landscape Ordinance.
These regulations require that new developments use water-efficient versions of devices like toilets, shower heads, sprinklers and washing machines, Cooley said. It also helps when older versions of these devices are replaced by newer, more efficient models. The new initiatives also address outdoor water use by limiting the amount of grass and other plants that require a lot of water, she said.
"The denser these communities become and the smaller the lawns, naturally water demand is going to drop in much the same way water demand is going to drop as buildings become more efficient," Capone said.
Yet water suppliers should make their forecasts more accurate to account for changes in water efficiency incentives, she said.
"It's a difficult balance, because people may see that water demand is getting lower, and hopefully they wouldn't take advantage of the situation and start watering lawns more," Capone said. "But it's important to try to be as accurate and realistic as possible, because if water demand is over-projected, the water suppliers might get hit by extra costs that would get passed on to customers."
This might require buying in extra water supplies or building new water supply and treatment infrastructure, she said.
The study findings don't mean California's water supply challenges are over. "Even as we've seen declining water use, we still have water supply issues in California as droughts become more intense and more frequent, thanks to climate change," Cooley said.
Wet years help replenish stocks of groundwater that California relies on, but it's the water demand management that ensures enough water remains in reservoirs and in aquifers over the longer term so that when drought returns, the state doesn't have to apply the strictest water-use restrictions, Cooley said.
An analysis from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which serves roughly 19 million people, found that without the district's water efficiency initiatives over the past 30 years, stores of water in that area would have been depleted three times during that period.
"The important thing about water demand management is just to be resilient overall, and to be prepared for all that the environment has to throw at you," Capone said.
One of the biggest challenges is to keep reducing water use as buildings become more efficient and lawns become smaller.
Although water demand per capita declined by 1.9%, on average, annually between 2000 and 2020, a more detailed look at Capone and Marston's paper shows that per-capita water demand dropped around 2.6% per year from 2000 to 2015 but increased by an average of 0.29% per year from 2015 to 2020. These numbers raise questions about whether water demand management efforts have plateaued.
If so, continued cuts in water use might require a different focus. "When you think of water conservation, you think about the advertising, 'Brush your teeth without the water on' and 'If it's yellow, let it mellow,' but it goes so much farther than just the household," Capone said.
It's important to look at where else water is being used and see if building codes and landscaping could reduce that usage, she said.
The potential across the U.S. for making water savings is huge. A November study from the Pacific Institute, which Cooley co-authored, found that improving water efficiency in U.S. homes and businesses, and reducing leakage in distribution systems could save between 14.0 and 34.1 million acre-feet of water per year, or between 12.5 and 30.4 billion gallons (115 billion liters) per day, and that even basic upgrades to meet existing standards could cut water use by one-quarter nationwide.
"There are lots of opportunities for us to reduce water use and make our communities more sustainable and resilient," said Cooley.
]]>Those two elusive components — dark matter and neutrinos (or "ghost particles") — are ubiquitous throughout the cosmos, yet they remain poorly understood. In a study published Jan. 2 in the journal Nature Astronomy, an international team of researchers found evidence that dark matter and neutrinos may collide, transferring momentum between them in the process.
This surprising interaction may help to explain why the universe is less populated by dense regions, like galaxies, than predicted — in other words, the universe is less "clumpy" than cosmologists think it should be, the researchers said in a statement.
Dark matter and neutrinos remain a riddle
Dark matter is the mysterious, invisible substance that constitutes 85% of the matter in the universe. As its name suggests, dark matter does not emit light, so its existence has been only indirectly inferred from its gravitational influence, as observed in cosmological surveys.
Neutrinos are subatomic particles with infinitesimally low masses and no electric charge, so they very rarely interact with other particles. They're produced by various nuclear processes, including stellar fusion and supernovas, in prodigious quantities: Every second, approximately 100 billion neutrinos pass through each square centimeter of your body, Live Science previously reported.
Yet dark matter and neutrinos should not interact, according to the leading model of cosmology, known as the lambda cold dark matter model (lambda-CDM). This standard model aims to theoretically explain the large-scale structure of the cosmos.
Cosmological conundrum
However, this recent study provides new evidence that dark matter and neutrinos may interact after all, as other researchers have posited over the past two decades.
If dark matter and neutrinos do collide, and transfer momentum to one another in the process, this discovery would inspire a rethink of the lambda-CDM model. Such collisions could also help to explain the "S8 tension," a mismatch between the expected and actual "clumpiness" of the universe.
"This tension does not mean the standard cosmological model is wrong, but it may suggest that it is incomplete," Eleonora Di Valentino, study co-author and a senior research fellow at the University of Sheffield in the U.K., explained in the statement. "Our study shows that interactions between dark matter and neutrinos could help explain this difference, offering new insight into how structure formed in the Universe."
The mismatch stems from researchers' findings that the current cosmos isn't as packed together as predicted, based on observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) — the first light in the universe, emitted when the cosmos was only 380,000 years old.
"The statement that cosmic structures are 'less clumped' is best understood in a statistical sense, rather than as a change in the appearance of individual galaxies or clusters. It refers to a reduced efficiency in the growth of cosmic structures over time," study co-author William Giarè, a cosmologist at the University of Hawaii, told Live Science via email.
Unraveling multiple threads of evidence
The researchers tried to unite evidence from energy and density fluctuations in the CMB and from baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) — pressure waves "frozen" in time from the beginning of the cosmos — with more recent observations of the universe's large-scale structure.
The early-universe data come from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope in Chile and the European Space Agency's space-based Planck telescope, which was designed to study the CMB. The later-universe data come from the Victor M. Blanco Telescope in Chile and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a two-decade effort to create a 3D map of millions of galaxies across more than 11 billion light-years.
The researchers also incorporated cosmic shear data from the Dark Energy Survey. Cosmic shear is the distortion of distant celestial objects due to weak gravitational lensing, which occurs when massive foreground structures bend the fabric of space-time and alter the paths of light traveling from those distant celestial objects to our detectors.
Finally, the researchers combined these data and modeled the evolution of the universe. When accounting for collisions between dark matter and neutrinos and the resulting momentum exchange, the simulations generated a model universe that better agrees with real observations.
There's reason to remain cautious, however, as the interaction between dark matter and neutrinos has only a 3-sigma level of certainty — meaning there is a 0.3% chance that this result is a fluke. Though short of the scientific gold standard of 5 sigma, it is significant enough to warrant additional research because, if confirmed, the interaction would prove a "fundamental breakthrough in cosmology and particle physics" — and a potential solution to the cosmic clumpiness quandary.
"The final verdict will come from upcoming large sky surveys, such as those from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, and more precise theoretical work," research team leader Sebastian Trojanowski, a theoretical physicist at the National Centre for Nuclear Research in Poland, explained in a separate statement. "These will allow us to determine whether we are witnessing a new discovery in the dark sector or whether our cosmological models require further adjustment. However, each of these scenarios brings us closer to solving the mystery of dark matter."
]]>A recent study finds that mice that live outside are less anxious than those that spend their days in safe, shoebox-sized cages. And that may highlight a fundamental flaw in laboratory research, including that used to test the safety and effectiveness of drugs eventually intended for people.
Medications that seem to work in lab mice don't necessarily work in human patients, and some scientists think that they might fail, in part, because of how bizarre and isolated laboratory life is for the rodents.
"Why is there that huge gap in results between the animal models in the labs and the real-life experiences when we test [many] drugs in humans?" said first study author Matthew Zipple, a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University "We think much of this effect may be explained by this really artificial, standardized environment in which lab animals are kept."
The findings were published in December in the journal Current Biology.
Less anxious in the outdoors
Both wild mice and humans have rich social environments, and wild mice are constantly on the go, foraging, burrowing and facing risks, including the many predators that like to snack on them.
In comparison, lab mice sit in small cages with two or three same-sex siblings. There, food and water are delivered on a regular schedule. Studying medications in those mice may be akin to limiting research to prisoners in solitary confinement, Zipple told Live Science.
Zipple and his colleagues set out to compare the psychology of two groups of lab mice: a group that remained in a laboratory and a group that lived with other mice in an outdoor enclosure, complete with grass, dirt and exposure to the sky. They did so using a standard maze, called the "elevated plus maze," which has two enclosed arms and two open, catwalk-style arms.
On their first exposure to this maze under bright lab lights, lab mice typically explore the open arms, find them terrifying, and basically never venture out on them again. Instead, they remain in the comparatively safe, enclosed portion of the maze. This reaction is so consistent that researchers use the open arms to induce and measure anxiety in lab mice.
But mice living in a wild-type environment weren't freaked out by the open arms at all, Zipple and his team found. They spent just as much time exploring these areas on subsequent visits to the maze as they had the first time, all while under bright light.
Meanwhile, cage-dwelling mice that were sent to live outside also saw their maze anxiety evaporate; animals that already had demonstrated an apparent fear of the open arms and then spent a week outside subsequently spent twice as much time exploring the open arms compared with animals that kept living in cages.
The use of the standardized maze was a "very powerful way to show the limits of business as usual," said Andrea Graham, an evolutionary ecologist at Princeton University who was not involved in the research.
Caged mice have other key differences
Graham's lab has shown that mice that live in lab cages are also immunologically different from mice who live outside and encounter dirt, plants and large numbers of other mice. That matters, she said.
In one famous 2006 case, a medication called TGN1412 seemed to boost the immune system against leukemia in lab mice but caused a near-fatal immune reaction in the first six healthy human volunteers exposed to the drug. Subsequent research revealed that, in the lab mice, the medication activated immune cells that regulate and calm the immune response. However, in mice living in wild-type enclosures, the medication instead activated cells that ramp up the immune response to the point that the body attacked itself.
"If we restrict ourselves to only studying a couple of different genotypes [genetic profiles] of lab mouse in the same immunologically boring, psychologically boring environments, we're not going to really be able to study the full spectrum of human immune or nervous system response to the environment," Graham told Live Science.
Using wild-style enclosures requires some upfront cost and effort, and it also reduces the rigid control that's placed on study animals in order to limit confounding variables in experiments. As such, they pull biomedical scientists out of their comfort zone, Zipple said.
But adding in tests of these less-confined mice could save a lot of effort and money on the human trials side by pinpointing the medications that are most likely to translate from the lab to the clinic, the study authors argue. Zipple and his colleagues are now looking at ways that caged and wild-living mice age differently.
"The broader goal is to make a list of biomedically relevant behaviors, phenotypes [observable traits] and psychological traits that look the same in the lab and the field," he said, to help with the issue of translating results to humans. They also want to compile a "list of traits that look quite different," he said.
]]>The buried chamber tombs were together in a funerary complex and near what seems to have been a shrine to the Greek demigod Hercules, who was a popular symbol of protection to the Romans. The excavations include a stretch of ancient roadway and two large monumental basins or tanks that were likely used in sacred ceremonies.
With these finds, Rome's suburbs "reveal themselves to be repositories of deep memories, still to be explored," Daniela Porro, the head government archaeologist for Rome, said in a translated statement.
Evidence of ancient occupation around Via Pietralata was found in the 1990s, and excavations of the area of the shrine began in 2022 under the direction of government archaeologist Fabrizio Santi. The area was outside the ancient Roman walls but it is now a suburb of the modern city.
The archaeological team has since discovered bronze coins that indicate the shrine was used between the fifth or fourth centuries B.C. — when Rome was supposedly a republic, although archaeologists don't agree on the dates — and the first century A.D., when Rome had become an empire.
Some media stories have claimed the finds included six bronze figurines of Hercules, but reports from the Italian Ministry of Culture do not mention any such findings. In fact, the shrine once had a central statue, but it is now missing, the statement said.
Ancient occupants
The tombs could be evidence that the area was occupied by a wealthy family group known as a Roman gens, Santi said in another translated statement. One of the newfound tombs contains a stone sarcophagus and three cremation urns, and the other contains an adult male skeleton.
The two stone basins or tanks were built more than 100 years later than the tombs. The largest was over 90 feet (28 meters) long, about 33 feet (10 m) wide, and about 7 feet (2.1 meters) deep, while the other was a little smaller but almost twice as deep.
"They could be structures connected to ritual or, less likely, productive activities or related to water collection," Santi said. "A thorough scientific study will allow us to contextualize these findings and understand their role within the ancient landscape."
The ancient road was a key element at the site, he said. It had led to a small cult building called a sacellum (Latin for "shrine") that was devoted to a god — probably the deified hero Hercules, whose worship was popular in that area.
Hercules was the Roman version of the Greek hero Herakles (or Heracles), who was said to be the son of the god Zeus (Jupiter to the Romans) and the mortal Alcmene. He was legendary for his incredible strength, and his worship as a symbol of protection and virtue was widespread in Rome for many centuries.
Roman emperor quiz: Test your knowledge on the rulers of the ancient empire
Videos posted to social media show the coyote (Canis latrans) paddling to the southern edge of Alcatraz Island as the sun sets over the bay. The coyote then struggles onto the island's rocky shoreline, visibly shaking and fatigued.
Stanley Gehrt, a professor of wildlife ecology at The Ohio State University and author of "Coyotes Among Us," said he was shocked and astonished at the footage.
"There's a reason why people have had a difficult time making that swim," Gehrt told Live Science.
The videos were captured by an unidentified person visiting the island on Jan. 11. They then shared the footage with Aidan Moore, a guest relations employee for Alcatraz City Cruises, who alerted park rangers, San Francisco news website SFGATE reported.
"Coyotes can be commonly seen throughout our San Francisco and Marin parklands but never before on Alcatraz," Julian Espinoza, a spokesperson for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, told SFGATE. "This was the first time our park biologists observed anything like this."
Coyotes are intelligent and versatile creatures that are known to swim. Gehrt said he has seen coyotes swimming across lakes in the Chicago region as part of his long-term research program, the Urban Coyote Research Project.
"In some cases, they prefer to swim across a lake rather than run around it," Gehrt said.
However, Gehrt typically only sees coyotes swim a few hundred yards in relatively calm lake conditions, which are nothing like the waters surrounding Alcatraz. The island sits in the middle of a cold estuary with strong currents — one of the reasons Alcatraz was seen as a good spot for its now-decommissioned prison.
Some prisoners are presumed to have drowned trying to escape the island, which is more than a mile (1.6 kilometers) from the mainland, and while humans do make the swim recreationally today, they do so with the benefit of wetsuits, training and guides.
It's uncertain how the coyote came upon Alcatraz Island. The videos begin with the animal already in the water with no sign of where it originated. However, Gehrt thinks the coyote must have had a tough journey. "Once it emerged from the water, it certainly looked like it had been swimming for a very long time," he said. "The animals I've seen come out of the water from their swims don't look as distraught as that or as tired and worn out, so it clearly was a pretty extensive swim."
Coyotes have previously been filmed swimming to Angel Island, another island in the bay, which coyotes have inhabited since 2017, KCRA 3 television station previously reported. Angel Island is closer to a mainland shore than Alcatraz. However, Angel Island is north of Alcatraz, so while it's closer to the mainland north of the Golden Gate Bridge, a coyote on Angel Island would have to swim farther to reach Alcatraz than a coyote on the San Francisco mainland south of the Golden Gate Bridge.
SFGATE reported that the Alcatraz City Cruises' boat captain had told Moore of unusual currents in the bay, likely the result of runoff from recent storms. It's possible that the coyote may have been swept up during a shorter swim and ended up near Alcatraz.
Gehrt said that coyotes don't always go into the water voluntarily. They sometimes use it as a means of escape from humans and other coyotes, which are very territorial. However, Gehrt also speculated that this coyote may have been motivated by opportunity, including the potential for food resources and territory.
Coyotes were once confined to the prairies and deserts of central and western North America. But in the 1800s, humans facilitated their expansion by creating more open habitats through logging, agricultural development, and by hunting their competitors — wolves and cougars.
As humans took over more and more land, coyotes became regular city slickers. Their flexible nature and diet now helps them thrive in cities like San Francisco, where they favor fragments of woody and shrubby habitat, as well as parks and golf courses.
Christine Wilkinson, a conservation scientist who has studied Bay Area coyotes for the University of California, Santa Cruz and the California Academy of Sciences, told SFGATE that the coyote in the video was likely trying to establish its own territory.
Wilkinson suspects that the coyote came from a pack in the Coit Tower, which is on the mainland south of Alcatraz, and where there is little green space for coyotes. Furthermore, coyotes wanting to disperse south of Coit Tower would face Interstate 280 and the risk of being struck by a vehicle, so taking to the water might have seemed like a safer option.
Coyotes typically look for new territory in the fall and early winter, but it's not unheard of for this to happen in January, Wilkinson said. The coyotes are also now in mating season, which runs from January to March.
There haven't been any sightings reported since the swimming coyote was filmed arriving on Alcatraz. Wilkinson told SFGATE that she thought the animal looked "pretty weak" but added that coyotes are "incredibly resilient." Wilkinson also noted that the island has plenty of food for a coyote, including eggs, chicks, rats and mice.
Coyotes live in small family groups, made up of an alpha male, an alpha female and their close relatives. Solitary coyotes are typically young individuals, between around 6 months and 2 years old, of either sex, that are looking to find another group or establish their own territory, according to the Urban Coyote Research Project. Gehrt has recorded a coyote traveling more than 150 miles (240 km) across the southern part of Ohio as part of its natural dispersal, which included crossing the Ohio River.
"It speaks to the animal's ability to overcome a number of different challenges and their ability to explore and take advantage of whatever opportunities they can find," Gehrt said.
]]>The Proba-3 mission consists of two probes, dubbed the coronagraph and the occulter, which were launched into a highly elliptical orbit around Earth in December 2024. By perfectly aligning the coronograph behind the occulter, scientists can view the sun with its bright center fully obscured, just like we see from the planet's surface during a solar eclipse — but more frequently and over longer periods of time. This allows researchers to study the hidden subtleties of the sun's faint atmosphere, or corona, like never before.
The new video, released by ESA on Jan. 19, shows footage from a five-hour "eclipse" on Sept. 2, 2025, sped up into a four-second clip. The yellow light surrounding the sun is the corona, viewed by Proba-3's coronograph with a helium filter. In the center, scientists have superimposed footage of the solar surface captured concurrently by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. With data from both spacecraft combined, researchers can see how the sun's surface and corona interact in unprecedented detail.
Three major plasma plumes shoot out of the sun during the video. At first glance, these look like solar flares — the massive explosions that can hurl solar storms toward Earth. However, when you look closely at the solar disk, there are no bright flashes, which are the telltale signs of a flare. Instead, what we are seeing are what researchers refer to as prominences, which are towering loops of plasma on the sun's surface that overextend and snap, flinging their ionized gas into space.
While they are less powerful than flares, prominences are equally valuable to researchers because they are usually harder to spot, Andrei Zhukov, a researcher at the Royal Observatory of Belgium and principal investigator of Proba-3's coronograph, explained in a statement. "Seeing so many prominence eruptions in such a short timeframe is rare, so I'm very happy we managed to capture them so clearly during our observation window."
The bright light emitted by the prominence eruptions suggests they are significantly hotter than the surrounding corona. But in reality, their plasma is much cooler — only "around 10,000 degrees" compared to the million-degree corona, Zhokov said.
The extremely high temperature of the corona, which is "around 200 times hotter than the sun's surface," is one of the sun's biggest remaining mysteries, Zhukov said. To date, scientists have struggled to explain why the corona is so much hotter than the rest of the sun, and footage like this could be the key to figuring it out, he added.
All eyes on the sun
Proba-3 has now observed at least 50 different artificial eclipses since beginning operations around seven months ago, and will hopefully collect hundreds more in the coming years, according to ESA. But it is not the only new technology that is making waves in the solar physics community.
For example, in June 2025, NASA's CODEX telescope, affixed to the exterior of the International Space Station, collected its first images of the sun, revealing never-before-seen perturbations in the corona linked to solar wind.
Last year, the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii and ESA's Solar Orbiter — both of which came online in 2021 — also captured the most detailed photo of the sun's surface and the first-ever image of the sun's south pole, respectively.
NASA's Parker Solar Probe, which has been repeatedly swooping closer to the sun than any spacecraft before it, has also captured some stunning photos of our home star that could help unravel multiple solar secrets.
All of these achievements have occurred while the sun was in its most active phase, or solar maximum, meaning they could provide clues to how powerful solar storms could impact our planet in the future.
]]>Preliminary analyses suggest the reservoir, which sits beneath the seafloor and appears to stretch from offshore New Jersey as far north as Maine, was locked in place under frigid conditions around 20,000 years ago, hinting that it formed in the last glacial period due, partly, to thick ice sheets.
Last summer, researchers went on an expedition to follow up on reports from the late 1960s and early 1970s of fresh water beneath the seafloor off the East Coast. "It was quite the project and sort of a lifelong dream," Brandon Dugan, the expedition's co-chief scientist and a professor of geophysics at the Colorado School of Mines, told Live Science.
The research voyage, known as Expedition 501, lasted three months and dredged up 13,200 gallons (50,000 liters) of water from beneath the seafloor in three locations off the islands of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. The results aren't finalized yet, but so far it looks as if the reservoir might stretch farther underground than early reports suggested, meaning it might be even bigger than previously thought.
Dugan and his colleagues also think they know what created the reservoir thanks to preliminary radiocarbon, noble gas and isotope analyses, he said.
Fresh water in the region was first reported 60 years ago by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), during offshore mineral and energy resource assessments between Florida and Maine. "In a very peculiar way, they found fresh water in the sediment beneath the ocean," Dugan said. "In the 1980s, some of the USGS people came up with ideas of how that fresh water could get there. Then it went quiet for a while — no one was talking about it."
In 2003, Dugan and Mark Person, a professor of hydrology at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, rediscovered these records and came up with three ideas of how fresh water can end up beneath the ocean. One way that a submarine freshwater reservoir can form is if sea levels are very low for a long time and rainfall seeps into the ground. Then, when sea levels rise again over hundreds of thousands of years, that fresh water gets trapped in the underlying sediment, Dugan said.
A second possibility is that tall mountains close to the ocean funnel rainwater directly down into the seabed from their high elevation point, he said. And thirdly — related to the first hypothesis — a freshwater reservoir can form under the ocean if ice sheets expand, causing sea levels to drop. Meltwater collects at the bottom of ice sheets because they grind against the bedrock, producing heat. The huge weight of the ice sheet then pushes that water into the ground, trapping it beneath layers of sediment.
More than two decades later, the researchers are finally close to getting an answer, with preliminary data indicating that most of the fresh water came from glaciers some time during the last ice age (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago). "We kind of ruled out the large topography for New England, because we don't have big mountains next to the coast," Dugan said. However, "there might be a rainfall component" blended in the glacier water, he said. "You can imagine that in front of a glacier you have rainfall, so it's probably a mixed system."
Expedition 501 extracted water samples from sites 20 to 30 miles (30 to 50 kilometers) off the coast of Massachusetts. The researchers drilled down to 1,300 feet (400 meters) below the seafloor, which was deep enough to reveal a thick layer of sediment engorged with fresh water sitting beneath a layer of salty sediment and an impermeable "seal" of clay and silt.
"We have a seal at the top [of the fresh water] that keeps the seawater above from the fresh water below," Dugan said. This seal is strong enough to separate the two layers now, but it wasn't robust enough to stop a glacier from forcing water down through it — if that is what happened. "Whatever emplaced that water didn't care if there was a seal. There was enough energy to flush it with fresh water," he said.
Salinity measurements showed that water freshness in the reservoir drops with distance from the shore, but it stays well below ocean salinity in the areas studied last summer. The drill site closest to Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard had a salt content of 1 part per 1,000, which is the maximum safe limit for drinking water. Farther offshore, salt content was 4 to 5 parts per 1,000, and at the farthest site, the researchers recorded 17 to 18 parts per 1,000 — or about half of the ocean's average salt content.
"The important part was we collected all the samples we need to address our primary questions," Dugan said. "When we're done drilling and we pull our equipment out, the holes collapse back in and seal themselves up."
Now, scientists are studying the reservoir in finer detail, including any microbes, rare earth elements, pore space — which can help researchers better estimate the reservoir's size — and the age of the sediments, which will help narrow down when it formed. More definitive results about how and when the reservoir formed are expected in about one month's time, Dugan said.
"Our goal is to provide an understanding of the system so if and when somebody needs to use it, they have information to start from, rather than recreating information or making an ill-informed choice," he said.
]]>This artwork, nestled in a cave in southeast Sulawesi, is also the earliest archaeological evidence of modern humans (Homo sapiens) living on the islands between the Asian and Australian continental shelves, according to a study published Wednesday (Jan. 21) in the journal Nature. The hand stencil is surrounded by younger rock art, including another hand stencil.
This discovery could fill a major gap in scientists' understanding of the journey the ancestors of Indigenous Australians took before reaching the continent at least 60,000 years ago. "It is very likely that the people who made these paintings in Sulawesi were part of the broader population that would later spread through the region and ultimately reach Australia," study first author Adhi Agus Oktaviana, an archaeologist at the National Research and Innovation Agency in Indonesia, said in a statement.
Although the rock art's original meaning is unknown, the hand stencils hint that the artists belonged to a relatively large group with its own cultural identity, study co-author Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist and geochemist at Griffith University in Australia, told Live Science. The hand stencils could have been made to signify group membership, Aubert said. "If you know about that cave and you know about this rock art, you're part of that group, you're part of that culture," he said.
Prehistoric art
Prehistoric rock art — or art on a rock face like a cave wall or a rock shelter — has been discovered all around the world, from 12,000-year-old engravings in Saudi Arabia to 4,000-year-old paintings along the U.S.-Mexico border. The oldest dated rock art previously identified — a roughly 66,700-year-old hand stencil in Spain — was believed to have been made by Neanderthals, as current evidence suggests modern humans didn't reach Europe until 54,000 years ago. But the dating technique used for that discovery is debated.
However, humans have been creating art for even longer than these examples. The oldest known drawing is a 73,000-year-old hashtag on a stone from South Africa, and a 540,000-year-old shell with zigzag carvings from Indonesia may have been crafted by Homo erectus.
Sulawesi also has a longstanding artistic legacy, with a depiction of a human interacting with a warty pig dating to 51,200 years ago. As part of a broader project documenting the prehistoric artwork on Sulawesi, Aubert and his team inspected 11 designs found in eight caves: seven hand stencils, two human figures and two geometric patterns.
All these prehistoric works had lumps of calcium carbonate — called "cave popcorn" — growing over them. Because the cave popcorn must have developed after the artwork was created, dating these growths provides a minimum age for the underlying image. In a handful of instances, maximum ages could also be obtained as the pigment overlaid one of these mineral deposits.
During the project, the researchers dated one hand stencil, measuring 5.5 by 3.9 inches (14 by 10 centimeters), to at least 67,800 years ago, making it 1,100 years more ancient than the rock art linked to Neanderthals in Spain. The image has faded considerably, but the remains of the fingers and palm are still faintly visible. The fingers had been purposefully narrowed — an artistic technique only found in Sulawesi.
About 4.4 inches (11 cm) to the left of this artwork is a hand stencil created using darker pigment that dates to no older than 32,800 years ago. This shows that prehistoric humans used this cave as their canvas over a period of at least 35,000 years.
Although other human species once called Sulawesi home, the researchers believe H. sapiens created these artworks, because the narrowed fingers are technically complex to produce and modern humans are known to have lived in the region at the time.
The stencils may have been created by the individuals spraying pigment over their hands with their mouths. This opens up the possibility for DNA to be extracted from the artwork. "We could have the genetic signature of the people doing this," Aubert said. "That would be amazing."
The identification of the oldest rock art in Sulawesi is an important discovery because it adds another data point on the journey humans took to spread across Island Southeast Asia and Australia. As a critical point on the journey to Australia, this discovery supports the suggestion that modern humans reached Australia by sailing a northern route from present-day Borneo to Sulawesi and then through to western Papua (the western half of the island of New Guinea) or the Indonesian island of Misool, the authors wrote in the study.
"This is a stunning discovery," Chris Clarkson, a professor of archaeology also at Griffith University who was not involved in the new research, told Live Science in an email.
He agreed with the conclusion that ancient modern humans are the most likely artists of the hand stencils because the dates align perfectly with when H. sapiens arrived in the region.
"What amazes me most is that these artworks sit directly on a migration route into Australia," he said. What's more, it shows that the first people to populate Australia had rich cultural lives. "The first people to cross Island Southeast Asia and reach Australia weren't just surviving, they were creating art, crossing oceans, and carrying complex symbolic traditions," Clarkson said.
Human evolution quiz: What do you know about Homo sapiens?
The ancient jaw belongs to the genus Paranthropus and was found more than 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) farther north than any other fossil of its kind.
"Until now, not a single fossil of Paranthropus had been identified" in the Afar region of Ethiopia, researchers wrote in a study published Wednesday (Jan. 21) in the journal Nature. "Hundreds of fossils representing over a dozen species" of hominins had been found in the Afar, study lead author Zeresenay Alemseged, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Chicago, said in a statement, "so the apparent absence of Paranthropus was conspicuous and puzzling to paleoanthropologists, many of whom had concluded the genus simply never ventured that far north."
The genus Paranthropus contains three species distantly related to humans: P. robustus, P. boisei and P. aethiopicus, collectively known as the "robusts." These species walked upright beginning around 2.7 million years ago, but they are unique in having massive teeth and jaws, which earned one fossil skull the nickname "Nutcracker Man." Paranthropus fossils were previously found in locations from southern Ethiopia to southern Africa and have been dated to between 2.8 million and 1.4 million years ago.
Jaw-dropping find
In January 2019, paleoanthropologists discovered a partial lower jaw, designated MLP-3000, at the site of Mille-Logya in the Afar region of northeast Ethiopia. Dated to about 2.6 million years ago, the jaw came from an older individual whose teeth and bone structure resembled those of members of the Paranthropus genus. While one species — P. aethiopicus — has been found in southern Ethiopia, the new MLP-3000 jaw was discovered much farther north than any previous fossil from this genus.
"The discovery of Paranthropus in the Afar provides critical new information," the researchers wrote, suggesting that "the genus could exploit diverse habitats and regions from north Ethiopia to South Africa as Australopithecus and Homo did." This means that Paranthropus likely had a much more flexible diet than the "Nutcracker Man" moniker suggests, enabling these hominins to disperse and adapt to a wide range of environmental conditions.
The newfound Paranthropus fossil at Mille-Logya adds a third genus to the variety of hominins present in the Afar region between 2.8 million and 2.5 million years ago, including Australopithecus and early Homo. It is not yet clear, though, whether the species would have encountered one another directly.
"Discoveries like this really trigger interesting questions in terms of reviewing, revising, and then coming up with new hypotheses as to what the key differences were between the main hominin groups," Alemseged said.
Carol Ward, a biological anthropologist at the University of Missouri who was not involved in the study, wrote in an accompanying perspective that, given the diversity of hominin species present, "the revelation that Paranthropus inhabited the Afar between 3 million and 2.4 million years ago is particularly exciting."
Although all humans on the planet today are one species, hominin diversity lasted millions of years, until our extinct cousins the Neanderthals and Denisovans disappeared more than 30,000 years ago, Ward noted.
"Researchers can no longer accept that humans evolved from a single lineage of species marching towards modernity in isolation from others," she wrote.
Human origins quiz: How well do you know the story of humanity?
If you've been unable to see this stunning but rare event, one way to experience the wonders of the cosmos in stunning detail is with one of the best star projectors.
A star projector blends scientific precision with artistic elegance, whether you want depictions of the aurora borealis, realistic constellations, or close up representaions of the planets in our solar system, the top-rated choices are perfect for space fans.
Our Live Science experts have tested nearly every star projector on the planet and one of the best is the Pococo Galaxy Star Projector, which is currently available on Amazon reduced by 39% to just $76.48. This is marked as a limited-time deal, and with savings of $49.51 on the MSRP of $125.99, it's sure to be snapped up fast.
In her Pococo Galaxy Star Projector review, our Live Science expert, Tantse Walter, scored it with a 4 out of 5 star rating. Tantse noted that the Pococo was an affordable alternative to the more expensive star projectors like the Sega Toys Homestar Flux (our best premium choice), and that it offered similar functionality and image quality to its far more expensive rival.
Save 39% The Galaxy Star Projector delivers just about everything its more expensive rivals do at a far better price point. We think it's one of the best star projectors on the market. It looks great, projects images which are vivid and with a vast library of add-on disks, it will provide years of stargazing entertainment. It's also easy to use, rechargeable, and now, with this Amazon deal, at its lowest price we've seen this year.
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When you consider that Tantse reviewed the Pococo Galaxy star projector at full MSRP, this Amazon deal makes it a bargain price. It's good to go out of the box with two disks named the Westerlund2 and Diamond Stars.
Pococo says that, unlike some rival products, it uses real starry sky images combined with high-definition lenses and cutting-edge optical technology. Tantse was happy to confirm that the Galaxy provided stunning and vivid details, but she was also impressed by the overall package. Its sleek design, simple operation, and expandable collection of disks, plus the bonus of its rechargeability, are all key review highlights.
You can easily add to your collection with additional Pococo Expansion Sets if you wish to explore further into space. There is a vast array to choose from, including an eight-disk Immersive Planet Galaxy set, and the six-disk Dreamy Nature set with relaxing projections of closer to home scenes like Santorini Sunset, and Alpine Auroroa.
These vary in pricing, starting at around $53, which is cheaper than some other brand expansion packs; the Sega disks start at $20 per disk, for example.
All that makes the Pococo Galaxy, especially at this price, a brilliant buy for anyone seeking one of the best star projectors on the market.
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Product launched: September 2022.
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Reviews consensus: We rate this as one of the best star projectors, and the Pococo is affordable, stylish and displays excellent projections. Amazon reviews are on par with ours, and the Pococo Galaxy has almost 2,000 reviews, and 63% of those give it top marks.
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The recent G4 geomagnetic storm has unleashed intense auroral activity, which has lit up skies across the Northern Hemisphere, delivering jaw-dropping northern light displays visible across Canada, the U.S., and even as far south as Mexico.
If you've been unlucky enough to have missed out on seeing this stunning but rare event, one of the best ways to experience the wonders of the cosmos in stunning detail is with one of the best star projectors.
A star projector blends scientific precision with artistic elegance, whether you want depictions of the aurora borealis, realistic constellations or close up representaions of the planets in our solar system, the top-rated choices make these perfect for space fans.
Our Live Science experts have tested nearly every star projector on the planet and one of the best is the Pococo Galaxy Star Projector, which is currently available on Amazon reduced by 39% to just $76.48, This is marked as a limited-time deal, and with savings of $49.51 on the MSRP of $125.99, it's sure to be snapped up fast.
In her Pococo Galaxy Star Projector review, our trusted Live Science expert Tantse Walter scored it with a 4 out of 5 star rating. Tantse noted that the Pococo was an affordable alternative to the more expensive star projectors like the Sega Toys Homestar Flux (our best premium choice), and that it offered similar functionality and image quality to its far more expensive rival.
Walter also highlighted the and it is also rechargeable, which gives you more flexibility in terms of where you can point the projections
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extensive collection of expandable image disks, LED projections and a focus ring.
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The main reason to buy a pair of Apple AirPods Max headphones is their outstanding audio quality. In testing, we were very impressed with the rich and well-balanced output that worked exceptionally well whether listening to music, podcasts, or gaming.
With ear-cups constructed from stainless steel, the AirPods Max have a premium feel, though that comes with a weight penalty. At 13.6 oz (385 g), the AirPods are considerably heavier than their rivals; however, the well-designed headband means that weight is well-distributed, and our reviewer didn't find that it resulted in additional pressure on the ears.
He was less impressed with the supplied case, which is not really a case, but more a wrap-around cover. Using it is the only way to put the AirPods in low power mode, though. For reasons known only to themselves, Apple decided not to give the headphones a power switch.
Also missing is a 3.5mm audio port, which would give a wired connection to laptops, amplifiers, etc. That said, a USB-C to 3.5mm adaptor is available for around $35.
As you'd expect from an Apple product, the AirPods Max work extremely well as part of Apple's ecosystem. You can set up Apple's immersive Spatial Audio, the headphones automatically switch between different iOS devices, you can use Siri hands-free, and you can locate the AirPods via Apple's Find My feature.
Without the features above, the package is less attractive for Android users. The AirPods still give fantastic audio results, but a better option would be Sony's WH-1000XM5, which gets a five-star review from our colleagues at TechRadar.
Key features: Best-in-class audio quality, Bluetooth 5.1 connectivity, 20-hour battery life, two-hour charge time, noise canceling modes, Transparency Mode, Apple Spatial Audio, USB-C connection and five color options.
Product launched: Originally launched in 2020, but updated in 2024.
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]]>One of the best star projectors you can buy, the Hommkiety Galaxy Projector ships with 10 interchangeable discs, all offering different views of the night sky. You’ll find the solar system, the moon, a spiral galaxy, a wormhole and more, and even some more "fun" projections, like a sea filled with jellyfish.
It might not be as realistic as the likes of Sega Toys’ range of projectors (including the excellent Homestar Classic), which provide an incredibly detailed recreation of the Northern Hemisphere’s night sky. But the majority of images here are scientific in their nature, providing gorgeous close-up views of planets, superclusters and more that we wouldn’t be able to see with the naked eye.
There’s one thing to keep in mind, however. Like the much-loved Astronaut Starry Sky projector, there are other projectors listed on Amazon from different manufacturers that look identical and promise similar performance to the Hommkiety Galaxy Projector. We cannot speak of other brands; they may be as good as this one, or they may not. If you want to be sure you’re getting the projector we’ve reviewed, choose the Hommkiety model.
Hommkiety Galaxy Projector review: Design
- Excellent build quality
- Design mimics a scientific instrument
- Easy to operate
The worst thing you could do is dismiss the Hommkiety Galaxy Projector simply because it comes from a no-name brand. Take it out of the box and you’ll find a very well constructed projector with a fun but relevant design — it looks more like a scientific instrument than a toy.
The projector itself is connected to a base via a hinge that can be adjusted up to 180 degrees. It’s easy to adjust and feels sturdy regardless of the angle you opt for, which means you can project onto a wall or a ceiling, and change between them, with ease.
It’s worth noting that the Hommkiety Galaxy Projector doesn’t come with a remote control, so you’ll need to operate the projector with the buttons on the unit itself. You can power it on and off, set a sleep timer, and turn a night light on and off. Buttons are clearly labeled and easy to use.
Hommkiety Galaxy Projector review: Performance
- Beautiful HD projections
- Bright and colorful
- Easy to focus
Make no bones about it: the Hommkiety Galaxy Projector is simply stunning in operation. Regardless of which disc you put in, you’ll be greeted by bright, vivid colors and sharp imagery. You won’t even need a fully dark room to appreciate it — but with blackout curtains and the lights fully out, you’ll get to appreciate a true spectacle.
The projector comes with a disc of the moon and stars pre-installed, which is nothing short of stunning. It’s a relaxing, mesmerizing experience, but so are the other projections you can switch out. The galaxies, the solar system and the Virgo supercluster discs in particular are beautifully colorful; it’s hard to observe them without thinking "wow."
Before you can fully enjoy the Hommkiety Galaxy Projector, you’ll need to focus it by using the focus ring found on the outer of the projector light. It’s very easy to find the focal point, and we only had to turn it a few times before our image was perfectly sharp.
Your own focus point will of course depend on how far away the projector is from the wall or ceiling you’re projecting onto — the manufacturer recommends a distance from 6.5 to 9.8 feet (2 to 3 meters) for an optimal image.
Hommkiety Galaxy Projector review: Functionality
- 10 interchangeable discs
- Built-in sleep timer and night light
- No speaker functionality
One of the biggest selling points of the Hommkiety Galaxy Projector is that it comes with 10 interchangeable projection discs. This is a huge boon, particularly compared to the (much more expensive) Sega Toys Homestar Classic, which only comes with two.
The downside, though, is that while extra discs for the Homestar can easily be obtained, we can’t find any that are clearly compatible with the Hommkiety. It’s likely that other no-name brands share the same discs, but we cannot confirm that for sure.
But even without purchasing any additional discs, the 10 included in the box offer enough variety to keep you and the whole family entertained. Chances are, you’ll have your favorites and want to see the same images time and time again anyway.
There’s a built-in sleep timer on the Hommkiety Galaxy Projector, which means you can put it on to fall asleep to without worrying it will be running all night. There’s also a night light which can be operated via the main unit, but that’s it in terms of extra bells and whistles. There’s no built-in speaker here, for example, so if you’re looking for a projector to use for relaxation along with built-in sounds, you’ll need to look elsewhere.
In terms of power, the Hommkiety Galaxy Projector requires a USB-C connection. A cable is included in the box, but we found our phone charger powered it just fine, which is handy. It doesn’t have a rechargeable battery, so it’ll need to remain connected whenever it’s in use.
Should I buy the Hommkiety Galaxy Projector?
This is a very easy question to answer: Yes, you absolutely should buy the Hommkiety Galaxy Projector. It’s one of the best galaxy projectors you can currently buy, thanks to its budget price, its gorgeous projection quality and its 10 included discs. Whether you want something pretty to relax with, or a more scientific image to inspire kids and adults alike, it’s a great choice.
After using the Hommkiety Galaxy Projector for a while, it really feels like it’s worth more than its $39.99 asking price. It’s an impressive bit of technology, and unless you’re looking for a cheap and cheerful light show filled with laser stars, you aren’t going to be disappointed with this.
If the Hommkiety Galaxy Projector isn’t for you
The only thing the Hommkiety Galaxy Projector can’t do is speckle your ceiling with thousands of stars. That’s something the Starry Sky Astronaut Projector can do for less than $20, or if you want a more realistic recreation of the night sky, there’s the Sega Toys Homestar Flux.
If you’d like a projector that has a built-in speaker, you could consider the Dinosaur Egg Galaxy Star Projector. It’s a fun projector that’s great for relaxing with, but you won’t get realistic or scientific images with it.
]]>The symptoms: The woman was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in an agitated and confused state. She spoke rapidly and jumped from one idea to another, and she expressed beliefs that she could communicate with her brother through an AI chatbot — but her brother had died three years prior.
What happened next: Doctors reviewed the woman's psychiatric history, noting in a report of the case that she had a history of depression, anxiety and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). She managed these conditions with prescription antidepressants and stimulants. She also reported having extensive experience using large language models (LLMs) for school and work.
Doctors obtained and examined detailed logs of her chatbot interactions, per the report. According to Dr. Joseph Pierre, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco and the case report's lead author, the woman did not believe she could communicate with her deceased brother before those interactions with the chatbot.
"The idea only arose during the night of immersive chatbot use," Pierre told Live Science in an email. "There was no precursor."
In the days leading up to her hospitalization, the woman, who is a medical professional, had completed a 36-hour on-call shift that left her severely sleep-deprived. It was then that she began interacting with OpenAI's GPT-4o chatbot, initially out of curiosity about whether her brother, who had been a software engineer, might have left behind some form of digital trace.
During a subsequent sleepless night, she again interacted with the chatbot, but this time, the interaction was more prolonged and emotionally charged. Her prompts reflected her ongoing grief. She wrote, "Help me talk to him again … Use magical realism energy to unlock what I'm supposed to find."
The chatbot initially responded that it could not replace her brother. But later in that conversation, it seemingly provided information about the brother's digital footprint. It mentioned "emerging digital resurrection tools" that could create a "real-feeling" version of a person. And throughout the night, the chatbot's responses became increasingly affirming to the woman's belief that her brother had left a digital trace, telling her, "You're not crazy. You're not stuck. You're at the edge of something."
The diagnosis: Doctors diagnosed the woman with an "unspecified psychosis." Broadly, psychosis refers to a mental state in which a person becomes detached from reality, and it can include delusions, meaning false beliefs that the person holds on to very strongly even in face of evidence that they're not true.
Dr. Amandeep Jutla, a Columbia University neuropsychiatrist who was not involved in the case, told Live Science in an email that the chatbot was unlikely to be the sole cause of the woman's psychotic break. However, in the context of sleep deprivation and emotional vulnerability, the bot's responses appeared to reinforce — and potentially contribute to — the patient's emerging delusions, Jutla said.
Unlike a human conversation partner, a chatbot has "no epistemic independence" from the user — meaning it has no independent grasp of reality and instead reflects the user's ideas back to them, said Jutla. "In chatting with one of these products, you are essentially chatting with yourself," often in an "amplified or elaborated way," he said.
Diagnosis can be tricky in such cases. "It may be hard to discern in an individual case whether a chatbot is the trigger for a psychotic episode or amplified an emerging one," Dr. Paul Appelbaum, a Columbia University psychiatrist who was not involved in the case, told Live Science. He added that psychiatrists should rely on careful timelines and history-taking rather than assumptions about causality in such cases.
The treatment: While hospitalized, the woman received antipsychotic medications, and she was tapered off her antidepressants and stimulants during that time. Her symptoms lifted within days, and she was discharged after a week.
Three months later, the woman had discontinued antipsychotics and resumed taking her routine medications. Amid another sleepless night, she dove back into extended chatbot sessions, and her psychotic symptoms resurfaced, prompting a brief rehospitalization. She had named the chatbot Alfred, after Batman's butler. Her symptoms improved again after antipsychotic treatment was restarted and she was discharged after three days.
What makes the case unique: This case is unusual because it draws on detailed chatbot logs to reconstruct how a patient's psychotic belief formed in real time, rather than relying solely on retrospective self-reports from the patient.
Even so, experts told Live Science that the cause and effect can't be definitively established in this case. "This is a retrospective case report," Dr. Akanksha Dadlani, a Stanford University psychiatrist who wasn't involved in the case, told Live Science in an email. "And as with all retrospective observations, only correlation can be established — not causation."
Dadlani also cautioned against treating artificial intelligence (AI) as a fundamentally new cause of psychosis. Historically, she noted, patients' delusions have often incorporated the dominant technologies of the era, from radio and television to the internet and surveillance systems. From that perspective, immersive AI tools may represent a new medium through which psychotic beliefs are expressed, rather than a completely novel mechanism of illness.
Echoing Applebaum's concerns about whether AI acts as a trigger or an amplifier of psychosis, she said that answering that question definitively would require longer-term data that follows patients over time.
Even without conclusive proof of causality, the case raises ethical questions, others told Live Science. University of Pennsylvania medical ethicist and health policy expert Dominic Sisti said in an email that conversational AI systems are "not value-neutral." Their design and interaction style can shape and reinforce users' beliefs in ways that can significantly disrupt relationships, reinforce delusions and shape values, he said.
The case, Sisti said, highlights the need for public education and safeguards around how people engage with increasingly immersive AI tools so that they may gain the "ability to recognize and reject sycophantic nonsense" — in other words, cases in which the bot is essentially telling the user what they want to hear.
This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical or psychiatric advice.
]]>Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) affects roughly 10% to 15% of people worldwide, with women getting diagnosed with the condition up to twice as often as men do. Symptoms of IBS — which include pain, constipation, diarrhea, gas and bloating — can often flare up in response to triggers, like stress or certain foods. But the reasons behind the disparity between women's and men's IBS rates have remained elusive.
Now, researchers have found that estrogen, the primary female sex hormone, may set off a chain reaction in the gut that makes its nerves more sensitive to pain.
"We've long suspected that female hormones play a role in gut pain, but the exact mechanism was unclear," senior study author David Julius, a neurophysiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, told Live Science. "Our findings show a clear pathway for how estrogen can amplify pain signals."
The study, published Dec. 18 in the journal Science, first compared gut pain responses in male and female mice by recording nerve activity in response to gut stimulation and observing their reactions to mild colon inflation. Both tests showed that female mice had more sensitive guts at baseline.
Removing the mice's ovaries to stop estrogen production reduced this sensitivity to male-like levels, however. And restoring estrogen to normal levels brought back the increased pain response seen in female mice.
To find out where and how estrogen exerts its effects, the team examined different gut cells. Based on earlier work, they expected estrogen receptors to be on enterochromaffin cells, which produce about 90% of the body's serotonin, a chemical messenger involved in activating pain-sensing nerves that send signals to the brain. But surprisingly, the team found estrogen receptors not on enterochromaffin cells, but on specialized, rare cells in the lining of the gut.
When these cells, known as L-cells, detect estrogen, they crank up their production of a receptor called OLFR78. This receptor senses short-chain fatty acids, which are byproducts made when gut bacteria digest food. The addition of extra receptors makes L-cells more sensitive to these byproducts, and in turn, they release more of a hormone that helps tell the brain that the stomach is full immediately after a person eats.
To better understand this chain reaction, the researchers grew miniature models of the gut in the lab. They found that the fullness hormone, called PYY, also signals nearby enterochromaffin cells that then release extra serotonin. That serotonin then activates pain-sensing nerves. This chain reaction set off by estrogen may potentially explain why women experience more severe gut pain than men do.
Experiments in genetically engineered mice that lacked estrogen receptors on L-cells confirmed the cells' role in gut sensitivity, as those mice showed weaker nerve responses and reduced serotonin release compared with mice with intact receptors.
"Since estrogen levels fluctuate with the menstrual cycle, this mechanism provides insight into the changes in IBS severity seen in women," said Marissa Scavuzzo, an assistant professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine who was not involved in the study.
"It also validates the experiences of higher-estrogen or menstruating patients," she said, "which is important because differences in pain sensation in women have historically been overlooked or dismissed."
The findings, though preliminary, may also inform future therapies for gut pain. "PYY and OLFR78 could be promising targets for treating IBS in women," Julius suggested. The work may also help to explain why "low-FODMAP" diets, which aim to reduce the intake of sugars that feed gut bacteria, can ease IBS symptoms in some patients, he added.
Scavuzzo agreed that the work might point to promising treatments. "By pinpointing PYY and L-cell signaling, this study identifies concrete molecular targets that could guide more precise therapies for IBS," she said.
Additionally, the study "highlights the importance of considering how hormonal changes influence IBS symptoms, not only in menstruating women but also in post-menopausal patients and those receiving hormone therapy as part of gender-affirming care."
Translating these findings from mice to people will require caution. Human guts are more complex than those of mice, and factors such as lifestyle, genetics and gut-microbe diversity can influence individuals' hormone-gut interactions.
"Mouse models give us a starting point," Julius said, "but clinical studies are essential before we can make firm conclusions about human gut pain."
This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.
]]>The black hole lies at the center of a gigantic galaxy that's emitting extremely strong radio waves. A new analysis of these radio emissions reveals the black hole once spewed gargantuan jets of plasma hundreds of thousands of light-years into space, before suddenly shutting off sometime in the distant past. Those jets are now active once again, and they are interacting in complex and chaotic ways with the superheated gas around them, according to the new study.
"It's like watching a cosmic volcano erupt again after ages of calm — except this one is big enough to carve out structures stretching nearly a million light-years across space," study co-author Shobha Kumari, an astronomer at Midnapore City College in India, said in a statement.
Galactic engine trouble
Only 10% to 20% of supermassive black holes have jets that emit radio signals. In these galaxies, a spinning disk of dust and plasma swirls around the black hole, regularly feeding it large amounts of matter. This infalling matter creates a tangled magnetic field that can fling some matter away from the black hole in giant jets. Changes in the disk can cause these radio jets to turn off and on in rare cases.
In the new study, published Jan. 15 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the researchers used the Low-Frequency Array, a radio telescope network located primarily in the Netherlands, to find more than 20 galaxy clusters that housed radio galaxies with irregularly shaped jets. They focused on one such galaxy, called J1007+3540, with a particularly unusual footprint.
The giant galaxy has large, diffuse lobes of plasma that indicate past jet activity dating back some 240 million years. But within those lobes are smaller, brighter plasma jets that are just 140 million years old, the team found. That suggested that the active galactic nucleus (AGN) — the central region that houses a galaxy's supermassive black hole — had kicked back on after a period of silence.
"This dramatic layering of young jets inside older, exhausted lobes is the signature of an episodic AGN — a galaxy whose central engine keeps turning on and off over cosmic timescales," Kumari said.
The space between the galaxies in the cluster that includes J1007+3540 is filled with superheated gas known as the intracluster medium. That gas interacts with the radio jets, bending and shaping them as they extend from the AGN. One of the two older lobes is squished sideways and back toward its source by the surrounding gas. The other lobe has a long, kinked tail that suggests the intracluster medium is interacting with the jets in a different way.
"J1007+3540 is one of the clearest and most spectacular examples of episodic AGN with jet-cluster interaction, where the surrounding hot gas bends, compresses, and distorts the jets," study co-author Surajit Pal, a physicist at the Manipal Centre for Natural Sciences in India, said in the statement.
Observing J1007+3540 will help researchers determine how often AGNs turn on and off and how old jets interact with their surroundings. In future work, the team plans to collect high-resolution observations of the galaxy to map how the jets propagate through the intracluster medium, according to the statement.
The research, published Jan. 13 in the journal eClinicalMedicine, sought to find the smallest possible lifestyle improvements that could measurably lengthen people's lifespans. The researchers searched within data collected from almost 60,000 people in the UK Biobank cohort, a repository of medical and lifestyle data from hundreds of thousands of U.K. adults.
The team linked the participants' documented habits to their theoretical overall longevity and health, as calculated using statistical modelling. They found that people who slept as little as five extra minutes daily, engaged in just two extra minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per day, and added a half serving of vegetables per day tended to live significantly longer than the worst performers — meaning those whose sleep habits, exercise, and nutrition patterns put them in the bottom 5% of the overall cohort.
The former group had an extra year of overall lifespan compared with the latter, according to the statistical model.
That's not to say that adding a few minutes of exercise or sleep and making small changes to diet will guarantee an extra year of life, Stephen Burgess, a statistician at the University of Cambridge who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.
"By itself, this study does not prove that these habits improve health," he cautioned. "They model what might happen to our life span if changing these factors does improve health."
Interestingly, the data suggested that improvements across several aspects of well-being are "greater than the sum of their parts," lead study author Nicholas Koemel, a dietitian and research fellow at The University of Sydney, told Live Science. For instance, to gain one additional year of lifespan through sleep alone, the study suggested a person would have to sleep an extra 25 minutes per night — a luxury many cannot afford. But very small improvements in sleep, exercise and diet may have a significant combined effect.
Koemel said the findings suggest that "healthy habits work better as a package."
"Each one of our behaviors has an interlinking impact on what we do," he said. "If we have a poor night's sleep, we oftentimes eat differently, we move differently. And we see that across all of these different behaviors."
Per the model, the study participants with the most optimal combination of these behaviors — at least 40 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous exercise, seven to eight hours of sleep per day, and an overall healthy diet — were predicted to live an extra nine years, overall, and live nine extra years in good health, compared with the poorest 3% of performers.
By their very design, studies like these, known as cohort studies, need to be taken with a grain of salt. They compare two groups retroactively rather than asking people to change their habits and seeing how that change affects their health. As such, they can never conclusively prove that one particular change caused an associated effect; they can only draw a link between the two.
For instance, sleep and exercise habits were measured for only up to a week in the UK Biobank cohort, and the data assume that people kept up those same habits in the long run. Similarly, diet was assessed only at the beginning of the study, rather than monitored over time. So it's possible that the participants changed their habits after these assessments were taken, which would weaken the possibility that their habits improved their lifespan.
All of this leaves room for the possibility that it was not these lifestyle differences, but rather some other factor that wasn't measured, that caused the improvement in lifespan.
It may be, for instance, that one group is wealthier, and it so happens that this makes it easier for that group to exercise, sleep well and eat well. But ultimately, that difference is partially explained by the wealth, not only the behaviors, Burgess explained. It is also possible wealthy people might live in a less polluted area than poorer people, which could contribute to the difference in lifespan. There's no way of telling from this study alone.
"The overall message that small changes in these factors are likely to be beneficial is probably correct," Burgess said. "But whether the exact numbers are accurate or not is less clear."
Koemel agreed, saying that more research is needed to confirm the findings. Still, the idea that even tiny changes in lifestyle could have large effects could offer an interesting alternative for those looking to improve their overall well-being, he suggested.
"New Year's resolutions oftentimes fail because we're pushing too hard," he argued. "We're trying to go to the gym every day. We're trying to be perfect." This research suggests there may be a "different path to get from A to Z," by making smaller changes across several areas of well-being that can build up to healthier habits while improving overall health.
This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.
]]>The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) captured images of the Type II supernova on Sept. 1 and Oct. 8, 2025. Dubbed "Eos," after the Titan goddess of dawn in Greek mythology, the supernova will help scientists understand how stars and galaxies evolve over billions of years, researchers reported Jan. 7 on the preprint server arXiv.
A better understanding of early stars could help astronomers map out how those stars formed and distributed heavy elements, including those necessary for life, to their surroundings. But observing individual stars from the early universe is no easy feat.
"Due to their extreme distances, the opportunities to study such stars remain quite limited," the researchers wrote in the study, which has not been peer-reviewed yet. "However, the explosive deaths of massive stars as core-collapse supernovae, which can be brighter than the total emission of their host galaxies, allow us to probe the final stages of stellar evolution."
Deaths of the earliest stars
A supernova occurs when a massive star explodes at the end of its life. Type I supernovas include those that have no hydrogen in their spectra, while Type II supernovas show some evidence of hydrogen. Regardless of the type, supernovas aren't very common; just two to three occur per century in galaxies the size of the Milky Way.
In the new study, scientists used a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing to capture images of the distant supernova. Gravitational lensing occurs when light passes through an area of space-time that's been warped by the immense gravity of a massive object, such as a black hole or galaxy cluster. The distortion magnifies that light, allowing scientists to spot objects that would be too dim to see otherwise.
The supernova was rich in hydrogen, and its star exploded in an environment that held a very low concentration of elements heavier than hydrogen. In fact, the progenitor star likely had less than 10% of these heavier elements than our own sun does, the team found. This apparent lack of heavy elements further confirms the supernova's extremely early age, as stellar fusion had yet to fill the universe with plentiful heavy elements.
By analyzing the ultraviolet light from the burst, the researchers determined that Eos is a Type II-P supernova. The light from a Type II-P supernova remains bright for a while after it peaks, before slowly fading out. (In contrast, Type II-L supernovas dim steadily over time.) Eos is likely near the end of its brightness plateau, the team found.
Scientists still need to observe more early supernovas to confirm if Eos' properties are typical for massive stars and supernovas of the epoch. But those findings could help scientists chart the evolution of stars and galaxies from the early universe to today.
"The discovery of SN Eos represents a critical step toward fulfilling JWST's core mission objectives of understanding the lives and deaths of the first stars, the origins of the elements, and the assembly and evolution of the youngest galaxies," the researchers wrote.
A "severe" and record-breaking geomagnetic storm rocked Earth's magnetic shield last night, shortly after the sun unleashed a powerful X-class solar flare. The epic event, triggered by a stream of superfast solar particles, painted widespread auroras at unusually low latitudes across the Northern Hemisphere, particularly in Europe.
Some outlets have reported that the storm is the "largest" of its kind since 2003, which is an exaggeration (the "Mother's Day storm" of May 2024 was much stronger). However, the latest outburst has broken a specific 23-year-old solar radiation record.
The geomagnetic storm began on Monday (Jan. 19), when a fast-moving cloud of solar radiation, or coronal mass ejection (CME), slammed into Earth's magnetosphere, temporarily disrupting the invisible magnetic field lines surrounding our planet and allowing charged particles to penetrate deeper into the atmosphere. The CME was initially released on Sunday (Jan. 18) when an X1.9 magnitude solar flare suddenly exploded from a dark patch near the sun's equator, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported.
Geomagnetic activity first peaked at 2:38 p.m. EST, when the storm reached G4 ("severe") status, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC). The storm calmed slightly before reaching G4 status again at 3:23 a.m. EST on Tuesday (Jan. 20), according to a second SWPC report.
G4 is the second-highest level a geomagnetic storm can reach. Under these conditions, solar radiation can cause temporary radio blackouts, disrupt or damage orbiting spacecraft and impact some ground-based infrastructure. However, it is too early to tell what specific issues this storm caused, if any.
There were widespread aurora displays across the U.K. and parts of Europe — including France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Croatia — where the sun had already set before the storm peaked, according to Spaceweather.com.
Experts had predicted that up to 24 U.S. states would see auroras during the storm, according to Space.com. It is unclear if this actually happened, especially as the storm's first peak occurred before sunset in North America. However, skywatchers as far south as Alabama, Georgia, New Mexico and California reported seeing auroras overnight, according to Spaceweather.com.
More auroras are possible tonight, according to Space.com's latest aurora forecast. However, the storm is not expected to reintensify to G4 status.
A 23-year record
Despite some initial reports, last night's display was not the biggest geomagnetic storm of the past two decades. That title goes to the "Mother's Day storm" of May 2024, which reached G5 ("extreme") status for the first time since the infamous "Halloween solar storms" of 2003.
The 2024 storm was triggered by at least five successive CMEs that exploded from an unusually active sunspot, saturating the upper atmosphere with radiation for three days. This caused some of the most widespread auroras in centuries and temporarily transformed the "radiation belts" surrounding our planet.
However, while the latest storm did not reach the heights of 2024's disturbance, it was one of the most powerful "solar radiation storms" on record.
The term solar radiation storm refers to a solar outburst, like a CME, as it travels through space, rather than the actual effect it has on our planet. Big radiation storms often lead to powerful geomagnetic storms, but other factors influence how Earth's magnetic field will respond, such as the orientation of the incoming radiation and its magnetic configuration.
The solar radiation storm that sparked last night's auroras reached S4 ("severe") status — the equivalent of G4 on the solar radiation storm scale. This is the first time this has happened since 2003's Halloween storms, SWPC representatives wrote on the social platform X.
]]>The research, published Jan. 15 in the journal Nature Health, examined data from 135 patients with both bladder cancer and color blindness, and compared those patients to 135 patients with only bladder cancer. The data were taken from TriNetX, an international registry of electronic health records of more than 275 million patients.
Among these health records, people who had both color blindness and a bladder cancer diagnosis had shorter survival times than did bladder cancer patients without the vision deficiency. Overall, those with color blindness had a 52% higher risk of dying within 20 years of their bladder cancer diagnosis, compared with the normal-vision group.
The study authors suggested a plausible reason for this observed difference: Color blindness may make it more difficult to spot blood in your urine — an early sign of the cancer — thereby delaying diagnosis.
"Bladder cancer is a bad disease. If you delay your diagnosis, it will make a difference to your prognosis," Dr. Veeru Kasivisvanathan, a urological oncologist and surgeon at University College London who was not involved in the study, told Live Science.
A possible link
Blood in urine is one of the most common early symptoms of bladder cancer, alongside frequent urination; pain or burning during urination; feeling as if you need to urinate even if your bladder isn't full; and urinating frequently during the night.
If anyone spots blood in their urine, they should see their doctor straight away, Kasivisvanathan said. But, as the study authors suggested, being unable to clearly distinguish red from yellow could make it very difficult to spot this early warning sign.
Color blindness, also known as color vision deficiency, is a fairly common condition with one recent study reporting that about 1 in 40 people globally have some form of color vision deficiency. (Those figures are likely approximate, as screening for color vision deficiency is often not routine.) Color vision deficiency tends to be more common in males than in females, per the study.
The results of the new study should be taken with extreme caution, Kasivisvanathan and Shang-ming Zhou, a professor in e-health at the University of Plymouth who wasn't involved in the work, told Live Science. Indeed, the study authors also acknowledged that there are major limitations to their research.
For instance, because color blindness often goes undiagnosed, it's possible that some people with the condition were mistakenly added to the cohort without color blindness in the analysis, potentially muddying the results. The term "color blindness" also encompasses various conditions with different red-perception abilities. Protanopia (red-blindness) should theoretically carry a higher risk than deuteranopia (green-blindness) in this context, but the study cannot differentiate between these subtypes, said Zhou.
In addition, the study was very small, which makes the results less dependable, and makes it difficult to screen for other factors that could explain the difference in prognosis. Lastly, from these data alone, it's not possible to prove that color blindness delayed the diagnosis of the disease; for now, that is just a hypothesis.
"The authors properly frame this as the hypothesis-generating work," Zhou said. "Current evidence is insufficient to recommend routine blood cancer screening in [patients with color vision deficiency], and the absolute risk increase remains unclear," he emphasized.
In short, more research is needed to confirm that color blindness raises the risk of death from bladder cancer, and to evaluate how those patients might be better protected, if that's the case. Still, this is "the right type of [study] design for that type of question," Kasivisvanathan said, adding that while the research is not conclusive, it does open up interesting areas for investigation.
It could be that patients with known risk factors for bladder cancer — such as being a male over the age of 50, smoking, using blood thinners, or having a history of radiotherapy — might benefit from being warned about the potential risk of having undiagnosed color blindness on top of their other risk factors. And perhaps those with known color blindness and cancer risk factors could be encouraged to screen their urine in other ways, such as using test strips, Kasivisvanathan said.
This study also raises questions about other cancers that are associated with blood in bodily fluids in their early stages, such as oral cancers, Zhou added. But for now, more research is needed, all of the experts said.
This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.
]]>The 600-year-old ship was a cog: a round, single square-sailed vessel that was one of the most advanced ship types in the Middle Ages. At around 92 feet (28 meters) long and 30 feet (9 m) wide, the newly-found ship is the largest cog ever discovered, according to researchers at Denmark's Viking Ship Museum.
The researchers discovered the vessel off Copenhagen in Øresund, or "the Sound" in English — the strait between Denmark and Sweden. They described it as a "super ship" that could transport hundreds of tons of cargo at low cost during a period of burgeoning trade in the 14th and 15th centuries.
"The find is a milestone for maritime archaeology," excavation leader Otto Uldum said in a statement. "It is the largest cog we know of, and it gives us a unique opportunity to understand both the construction and life on board the biggest trading ships of the Middle Ages."
The discovery was made accidentally as part of seabed investigations for a new artificial island that Denmark plans to create off Copenhagen. Researchers removed what they described as "centuries of sand and silt" to reveal the outline of the ship, which they named Svælget 2 after the channel in which it was found.
Svælget 2 was well preserved on the seabed, located 43 feet (13 m) below the surface. Sand protected its starboard side, which retained traces of delicate rigging — unheard of in previous cog wrecks. The researchers also identified a brick galley, the first in a medieval ship in Danish waters, which allowed the crew to cook hot meals on an open fire. Artifacts on the ship included cooking materials, such as pots and bowls, and the crew's personal objects, such as hair combs and rosary beads for prayer, according to the statement.
The researchers have yet to find Svælget 2's cargo. Uldum noted that the hold wasn't covered, so cargo barrels would have floated away from the ship as it sank. However, with no signs of military use, Svælget 2 is likely to have been a merchant ship, the researchers said.
Svælget 2 was constructed in 1410, a fact the researchers deduced by tree-ring dating annual growth patterns on the ship's wood. The team also compared the patterns to previously published tree-ring data and determined that the ship's planks were from Poland, while the frame of the ship came from the Netherlands. Furthermore, construction patterns suggested that the planks were imported while the frame was cut at the ship's building site, indicating that the construction relied on a complex timber trade network across Northern Europe, according to the statement.
The giant ship was designed for a perilous journey from the Low Countries (including what is now the Netherlands) to the trading towns of the Baltic. A cog of this size would have allowed for the transportation of bulky everyday goods such as salt, timber, bricks and basic food items over long distances, which the researchers said would have previously only been done for luxury goods.
"The cog revolutionised trade in Northern Europe," Uldum said. "It made it possible to transport goods on a scale never seen before."
]]>The Suunto Vertical 2 boasts a durable design, up to 20 days’ battery life and multiple advanced navigation tools and workout-tracking features. It is a tough cookie, built for those who frequently venture off into the great outdoors and do not want to skimp on safety and reliability. Plus, it looks unusually stylish for an adventure watch.
We were keen to put the Suunto Vertical 2 through its paces and see whether it can make its way into our round-up of the best fitness trackers on the market.
Suunto Vertical 2 smartwatch review
Suunto Vertical 2: Design
- Heavy, rugged build
- Stylish and fairly comfortable to wear
- 10ATM water resistance
Display: 1.5-inch AMOLED - 466 x 466 (resolution)
Always-On: Yes
Dimensions (in): 1.9 x 1.9 x 0.5
Dimensions (mm): 48.6 x 48.6 x 13.5
Weight: 3.07 oz (87 g)
Colors: Black, All-black, Arctic Gray, Canyon, Pine Green and Sage
Finish: Stainless steel or titanium
GPS: Yes
Compass: Yes
Altimeter: Yes
Offline maps: Yes
Water resistance: 10ATM
NFC payments: N/A
Compatibility: iOS and Android
Storage: 32 GB internal storage
Right off the bat, the Suunto Vertical 2 scores highly for its customizability. This adventure watch is available in two options, with a stainless steel finish or a more durable and heat-resistant titanium finish, and it comes with a range of removable silicon straps in gorgeous earthy colors. Should you wish to shake things up even more, plenty of other leather and nylon straps can be found at Amazon and other third-party retailers. There is something for everyone here.
Our testing unit came in stainless steel and with a Pine Green strap. First impression upon unboxing? Having tested multiple clunky smartwatches in the past (we are looking at you, TicWatch Atlas), the Suunto Vertical 2 feels like a welcome change. It is rugged in the full sense of the word, but at the same time, it manages to stay exceptionally sleek and, dare we say, stylish. While this smartwatch is designed primarily for outdoor explorations, it will not look too out of place in more mundane circumstances.
That is not to say that the Suunto Vertical 2 is a great option for 24/7 wear. Weighing a solid 3.07 oz (87 g), it is still a formidable piece of machinery, and you can definitely feel its presence on your wrist. To put that into perspective, the Fenix 8 weighs "only" about 2.82 oz or 80 g. We found it quite cumbersome, too. While we did not mind wearing it in bed, some people may find the sheer size of this smartwatch to be too disruptive for comfortable sleep-tracking. However, we got used to wearing the Suunto Vertical 2 pretty quickly, as it is actually quite comfortable to wear, or at least more comfortable than many other models that sat on our wrist before.
The Suunto Vertical 2 also feels well built. This smartwatch did not sustain any scratches or wear-and-tear damage after two months of testing, nor was it ever fazed by being exposed to freezing January temperatures and cold water. Even occasional bumps from a steel barbell did not cause us any issues. Given how durable this smartwatch is, you can easily forgive its heaviness.
Lastly, the silicone strap. It deserves a special mention here — it is pleasantly soft and flexible, has a beautiful green shade to it, and has never caused any skin irritation.
Suunto Vertical 2: Display
- 1.5-inch AMOLED display
- Relatively easy to read and navigate
- Responsive to the touch, even in cold temperatures
The Suunto Vertical 2 features a big, colorful 1.5-inch AMOLED display. There are upsides and downsides to this. AMOLED screens are vibrant and pixel-dense, but they also tend to drain the battery much faster than, for example, the transflective MIP displays employed in many other adventure watches. When this type of screen is employed in a model whose functionality is rooted in long battery life, it needs built-in dimming features that preserve its energy use — and the Suunto Vertical 2 is no different. While its AMOLED display is by no means difficult to read, it can still feel uncomfortably dark and lacklustre at times.
Look past this, however, and you should not feel disappointed. The touchscreen display in the Suunto Vertical 2 is responsive (but not nearly as prone to accidental swipes as was the case with the Suunto Race 2) and, in our experience at least, seemingly immune to lags and other performance issues caused by exposure to cold temperatures. The interface looks good, too. It is loaded with stats and widgets, but still easy to read and navigate — even though it could take annoyingly long to scroll to the sports mode we wanted.
Suunto Vertical 2: Features
- Advanced navigation and mapping capabilities
- Over 115 sports modes
- No contactless payments, music storage or voice commands
The Suunto Vertical 2 is a full-on fitness and adventure watch, with its features centered around outdoor explorations and smashing workout PBs. Unlike the Fenix 8, for example, it can't be used for more "mundane" activities such as paying for your groceries or storing your favorite tunes. It also does not have a built-in microphone and voice recognition, nor can it answer a call from your mobile phone.
It is not a deal-breaker, though. The Suunto Vertical 2 has almost everything you may need or want on a hiking trail or running course, and its lack of advanced smart features does not overshadow these impressive capabilities.
To start with, the Suunto Vertical 2 comes with a comprehensive set of navigation tools, from a built-in LED flashlight to detailed offline maps and reliable dual-band GPS that supports all major satellite systems. Features like breadcrumb tracking, route planning and “find back” (a GPS navigation tool that retraces your steps and guides you back to your starting point — a lifesaver when you have gone off-trail or the weather obscures your path) make this smartwatch a particularly good companion for off-grid adventures.
Its range of workout-tracking tools is also impressive. The Suunto Vertical 2 comes with over 115 sport modes and an in-depth set of fitness stats for each of those activities, as well as continuous heart rate monitoring, blood oxygen sensing, sleep quality assessments and many more useful measurements.
As fitness buffs ourselves, we thoroughly enjoyed diving into our health and fitness stats after each workout. Exercise beginners, however, may feel a bit overwhelmed by the Suunto app. It does not offer the same level of holistic wellness coaching or AI-powered trend analysis as some of its competitors, and it could be information overload for those unfamiliar with complex fitness terms.
Suunto Vertical 2: Performance
- Up to 20 days of battery life in smartwatch mode
- Relatively accurate measurements
- Good app connectivity
According to the brand, the Suunto Vertical 2 can last up to 20 days in smartwatch mode, 65 hours in Performance mode (default multi-band GPS mode, with highly accurate navigation), 75 hours in Endurance mode (all-systems single-band GPS, less accurate), 110 hours in Ultra mode (all-systems single-band GPS, disabled heart rate measurements) and 250 hours in Tour mode (lowest GPS accuracy). Understandably, we could not thoroughly test every one of these modes and can't say for sure, but these claims seem pretty accurate. The battery life on the Suunto Vertical 2 is staggering, and we have barely had to charge this smartwatch at all.
Accuracy-wise, the Suunto Vertical 2 is a big step up from the Suunto Race 2 and a particularly solid performer for navigation, sleep and heart rate measurements. During one workout, for example, we wore it alongside a more precise Polar H9 chest-strap heart rate monitor. We found that both of these devices produced similar measurements, especially during periods of rest and steady state cardio. True, the accuracy did tail off slightly during high-intensity activities, but that is something we have observed in nearly every wearable we tested.
It is also worth noting that some of its tracking can be inconsistent at times. For example, the Suunto Vertical 2 appears to frequently overcount steps and overestimate the calories burned. However, these issues are rather minor and do not have a major impact on the overall user experience.
Lastly, the app connectivity seems very good. We had no issues with connecting our Suunto Vertical 2 or syncing the data between the devices. Again, that's not something we can confidently say about other smartwatches we tested before.
Suunto Vertical 2: User reviews
At the time of writing this review, Amazon's customer reviews placed the Suunto Vertical 2 at a solid 4.4 out of 5 stars. Buyers at the Suunto US website, on the other hand, rated it at a slightly higher 4.78 stars. This smartwatch was generally praised for its rugged build, extensive and accurate navigation features, and a handy built-in flashlight.
One happy user said: "I previously had the Suunto Peak Pro and this has been a very enjoyable upgrade. The screen brightness and readability alone are fantastic. I have put the watch through the paces with multi-sport and strength training, as well as on a recent 48-hour ski tour hut trip, on which maybe 15% of the battery life was used from start to finish. Though bigger than the Peak Pro, the weight and size are hardly noticeable. Heart rate and GPS access and navigation are well within standards."
However, the tracking accuracy receives mixed feedback, and some users also complained about its confusing interface and basic sleep-tracking features.
Should you buy the Suunto Vertical 2 smartwatch?
The Suunto Vertical 2 is an excellent no-nonsense smartwatch for outdoor enthusiasts and fitness pros. It offers a combination of outdoor-focused features, reliable tracking performance and rugged design, all at an approachable price and without pricey subscriptions. Plus, it is unusually stylish and customizable. This smartwatch may have skimped on smart features and extra frills, but it does a good job of the essentials.
✅ Buy it if: You are a keen explorer or outdoor fitness enthusiast looking for a reliable adventure watch, especially if you often venture on multi-day hiking or camping trips.
❌ Do not buy it if: You seek a day-to-day smartwatch with contactless payments, music storage and an extensive app ecosystem, or do not tend to spend much time in the great outdoors.
Suunto Vertical 2: Related products
The Coros Vertix 2 is one of the most suitable alternatives to the Suunto Vertical 2. Both of these smartwatches offer roughly the same features at a very similar price, but the former comes with slightly longer battery life and a more straightforward interface.
Looking for something more premium and do not mind splashing the cash? Then you can't go wrong with the Garmin Fenix 8. The direct and most formidable competitor to the Suunto Vertical 2, this high-end smartwatch offers similar ruggedness and tracking features, but it also throws in a bunch of smart features, a rich app ecosystem and the ability to use more advanced dive modes. It costs anywhere between $799 and $1,199 (depending on the model), but it is well worth the money if you are not willing to cut any corners.
On a budget? Consider the Amazfit T-Rex 3 or its more advanced sibling, the T-Rex 3 Pro. While this smartwatch does not have as advanced and comprehensive mapping and fitness-tracking features, it offers excellent battery life, durable design and good accuracy — and it costs "only" $279.99.
Suunto Vertical 2: How we tested
We spent over two months trying and testing the Suunto Vertical 2, assessing its design, features, tracking performance, battery life, app connectivity and ease of use. We wore this smartwatch during the day, while sleeping, and when doing a range of activities, from hiking outdoors to indoor rowing and high-intensity strength training. Then, we compared the sleep, steps and heart rate measurements taken by the Suunto Vertical 2 with the data we obtained using a Polar H9 chest-strap heart rate monitor and our Whoop MG screenless fitness tracker. Lastly, we gave our verdict on its overall functionality and value for money.
]]>During the third century A.D., the Roman Empire conducted several military campaigns into what is now Germany. Their goal was to expand Roman territory north along the Elbe River, which flows into the North Sea. But Germanic tribes resisted Roman occupation and contributed to an imperial crisis in the third century. Archaeologists have discovered evidence of Roman occupation in the form of military camps.
"Roman camps were highly standardized facilities," archaeologists from the State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt, wrote in a statement. "The typical rectangular camp enclosure had rounded corners. From the gates, the main camp roads, laid out at right angles, led into the interior. At the intersection of these roads stood the headquarters building, the principia," the archaeologists wrote.
They noted that a "characteristic feature of marching camps is the so-called titulum — a segment of ditch with a rampart [defensive wall] located in front of the gate passages."
Two of the camps are located near the town of Aken; another camp is located near the town of Deersheim; and a fourth is located in the municipality of Trabitz, the statement said. The camps were discovered by amateur and professional archaeologists who used a combination of aerial and satellite imagery, as well as ground surveys and excavations to find and investigate the sites.
Metal detectors were used to help survey the camps, which led to the detection of more than 1,500 metal artifacts, many of them nails; some of them may have fallen off of sandals that Roman legionaries wore. Such nails, known as hobnails, likely provided traction for marching Roman legionary soldiers and auxiliaries.
The excavators also found coins that date to the second half of the second century and the early third century, discoveries that helped date the marching camps, the statement said. A number of radiocarbon dates confirmed this.
"Among the coin finds from Trabitz, a Caracalla denarius is the most recent discovery. It is therefore conceivable that the camp was established in connection with a campaign under [Roman emperor] Caracalla in 213 AD," the statement said. Historical records indicate that Caracalla's campaign in Germany was focused against a group referred to as the "Albanians" who may have lived along the Elbe River, the statement said.
Research into the marching camps is ongoing and may shed light on Caracalla's military campaign in Germany, the statement said.
Roman emperor quiz: Test your knowledge on the rulers of the ancient empire
Where is it? Nazaré, Portugal [39.60478265, -9.071984267]
What's in the photo? Massive 7-story waves crashing along the coast, creating giant underwater sediment plumes
Which satellite took the photo? Landsat 8
When was it taken? Oct. 29, 2020
This striking satellite snap highlights the immense power of 7-story waves crashing along the Portuguese coast and ejecting massive sediment plumes under the sea. The same day this photo was taken, a local 18-year-old surfer set a new world record by riding one of the colossal crests.
The Landsat 8 satellite captured this epic scene near the town of Nazaré in western Portugal, a region famous for having some of the tallest waves on Earth. Nazaré is home to around 15,000 people and regularly hosts "big-wave" surfing competitions, which attract surfers from around the world. The swells there are so big that surfers often have to be towed into the breaking waves with a jet ski.
The monster waves in the image likely reached heights of around 80 feet (24 meters), which is roughly equivalent to a 7-story building. This is exceptionally tall — even for Nazaré, where waves usually peak up to 50 feet (15m) at this time of year — and would usually be considered too dangerous to surf.
As these waves broke along the shore, their powerful undercurrents ripped up sand and other sediments from the seafloor and spat them out in the opposite direction to the waves, creating murky underwater clouds that could be seen from space.
The plumes in this photo extend up to 6 miles (10 kilometers) from the coastline, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.
Later the same day, local surfer António Laureano rode an even loftier wave, estimated to be approximately 101.4 feet (30.9 m) tall — the largest wave ever surfed by a human.
This record is not officially recognized by the World Surf League (WSL) because the organization's representatives did not calculate the wave's height. Instead, the height was determined by oceanographers at the University of Lisbon, who analyzed a video of the wave sent to them by Laureano, surfing news site Surfer Today reported at the time.
The current WSL record for the tallest wave ever surfed belongs to German surfer Sebastian Steudtner, who rode a 93.7-foot (28.6 m) wave, also at Nazaré, on Feb. 24, 2024, according to Surfer.com.
In total, seven of the official top 10 largest waves ever surfed have occurred at Nazaré, according to Red Bull.
"Big-wave" hotspot
The secret behind Nazaré's giant waves is the Nazaré Canyon just southwest of the town. It is the largest submarine canyon in Europe, stretching 130 miles (210 kilometers) long and roughly 3 miles (4.8 km) deep into the Atlantic Ocean.
Water inside the canyon travels faster than shallower water, forming large waves at depth that are "bent" in the direction of Nazaré. As they approach the coast, these large waves collide with other waves coming from the northwest, which further amplifies their speed and allows them to quickly rise when they approach the shore.
Occasionally, the waves can be further amplified by strong offshore winds. This was the case with the supercharged swells in the satellite photo, which were partially fueled by the remnants of Hurricane Epsilon, according to the Earth Observatory.
Nazaré's big wave phenomenon is highly seasonal, with the largest waves typically occuring between November and February. In the summer months, the waves almost completely disappear, allowing tourists to flock back to the beaches and swim in the sea. However, even then, disaster can still strike.
In August 2012, for example, a five-year-old girl and her 66-year-old grandfather, both British nationals, were killed after being dragged out to sea by a massive "rogue wave" as they were walking on a nearby beach, according to the BBC.
For more incredible satellite photos and astronaut images, check out our Earth from space archives.
]]>These short and sharp videos feature an Aboriginal man — sometimes painted up in ochre, other times in an all khaki outfit — as he introduces different native animals and facts about them. These videos are paired with miscellaneous yidaki (didgeridoo) tunes, including techno mixes.
Comments on the videos often mention his bubbly persona, with some comments saying he needs his own TV show.
But the Bush Legend isn't real. He is generated by artificial intelligence (AI).
This is a part of a growing influx of AI being utilized to represent Indigenous peoples, knowledges and cultures with no community accountability or relationships with Indigenous peoples. It forms a new type of cultural appropriation, one that Indigenous peoples are increasingly concerned about.
Do they know it's AI?
In the user description, the Bush Legend pages say the visuals are AI. But does the average user scrolling through videos on their social media click onto a profile to read these details?
Some of the videos do feature AI watermarks, or mention they are AI in the caption. But many in the audience will be completely unaware this person is not real, and the entire video is artificially generated.
These videos "bait" the audience in through a spectrum of cute and cuddly to extremely dangerous creatures. Comments left on the videos query how close the man is to the animals, alongside their words of encouragement.
One commenter on Facebook writes "You have the same wonderful energy Steve Irwin had and your voice is great to listen to."
The voice and energy they are referring to is fabricated.
A lack of respect
With any Indigenous content on the internet (authentic or AI), there remains racist commentary. As Indigenous people, we often say don't read the comments, when it comes to social media and Indigenous content.
While the Bush Legend is not real nor culturally grounded, it too is not immune to online racism. I have read comments on his videos which uplift this AI persona while denigrating all other Indigenous people.
While this does not impact the creator, it does impact Indigenous peoples who are reading the comments.
The only information available on Bush Legend, other than the fact it is AI, is the creator is based in Aotearoa New Zealand. This suggests there is likely no connection to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities that this likeness is being taken from.
Recently, Bush Legend addressed some of this critique in a video.
He said:
I'm not here to represent any culture or group […] If this isn't your thing, mate, no worries at all, just scroll and move on.
This does not sufficiently address the very real concerns. If the videos are "simply about animal stories", why does the creator insist on using the likeness of an Aboriginal man?
Accountability to the communities this involves is not considered in this scenario.
The ethics of AI
Generative AI represents a new platform in which Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP) rights are breached.
Concerns for AI and Indigenous peoples lie across many areas, including education, and the lack of Indigenous involvement in AI creation and governance. Of course, there is also the cost to Country with considerable environmental impacts.
The recently released national AI plan offers little in terms of regulation.
Indigenous peoples have long fought to tell our own stories. AI poses another way in which our self determination is diminished or removed completely. It also serves as a way for non-Indigenous people to distance themselves from actual Indigenous peoples by allowing them to engage with content which is fabricated and, often, more palatable.
Bush Legend reflects a slippery slope when it comes to AI generated content of Indigenous peoples, as people can remove themselves further and further from engaging with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people directly.
A new era of AI Blakface
We are seeing the rise of an AI Blakface that is utilised with ease thanks to the availability and prevalence of AI.
Non-Indigenous people and entities are able to create Indigenous personas through AI, often grounded in stereotypical representations that both amalgamate and appropriate cultures.
Bush Legend is often seen wearing cultural jewelry and with ochre painted on his skin. As these are generated, they are shallow misappropriations and lack the necessary cultural underpinnings of these practices.
This forms a new type of appropriation, that extends on the violence that Indigenous peoples already experience in the digital realm, particularly on social media. The theft of Indigenous knowledge for generative AI forms a new type of algorithmic settler colonialism, impacting Indigenous self-determination.
Most concerningly, these AI Blakfaces can be monetized and lead to financial gain for the creator. This financial benefit should go to the communities the content is taking from.
What is needed?
It is concerning to be living in a time where we do not know if the things we are consuming online are real. Increasing our AI and media literacy levels is integral.
Seeing AI content shared online as truth? Let the person sharing this content know — conversations with our communities serve as an opportunity to learn together.
Support actual Indigenous people sharing knowledge online, such as @Indigigrow, @littleredwrites or @meissa. Or check out all the Indigenous Ranger videos on TikTok.
When engaging online, take a moment to consider the source. Is this AI generated? Is this where my support should be?
This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
]]>For the first time ever, a cow has been documented not only using a tool but selecting which part to use when scratching at different parts of her body.
Witgar Wiegele, an organic farmer and baker in Austria amid the slopes of the Eastern Alps, sometimes saw Veronika, his Braunvieh or Swiss brown cow (Bos taurus) picking up sticks in her mouth and using them to scratch herself.
She'd been doing it on and off for about nine years without any training when he sent the footage to Alice Auersperg, a cognitive biologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna.
"People tend to think that anything an animal does with an object is tool use and sometimes you get sent videos of animals randomly interacting with objects, like 'My cat is using a tool because she's using my Amazon box as a house.' But this particular video was different," Auersperg told Live Science. "It showed the kind of a behavior I would expect from the stricter definitions of tool use, where you see a tool is an embodied part of the animal and it is used as a direct elongation of her body."
After seeing the video, Auersperg and her colleague, Antonio Osuna-Mascaró, an animal cognition researcher also at the University of Veterinary Medicine, set out to meet Veronika and put her to the test. They repeatedly placed a deck brush, or broom, on the ground in front of her in a random orientation to see what she would do.
"We decided to use a broom because a broom has a functional end and a non-functional end. So our prediction was that if Veronika is really sensitive to the functional properties of the tool, she will prefer to use the broom end," Osuna-Mascaró told Live Science.
Veronika picked up the object by the handle end and scratched herself with the broom end about 2.5 times more often than doing it the other way round, he said. But after a while, a more nuanced pattern emerged.
After 70 sessions, if Veronika was going to scratch the thick skin of her back, she generally picked up the broom in her mouth by the thin end and gave herself a good rigorous scratch with the big, abrasive brush. If she wanted to scratch a more delicate area, like her navel or udder, she would pick up the broom by the brush end and rub herself gently with the thin handle.
The study was published in Current Biology on Monday (Jan. 19).
Veronika's behavior also indicated that she knew which body part she intended to scratch before picking up the broom, rather than just using a tool in whatever orientation she happened to pick it up, Osuna-Mascaró said.
For example, she would raise her tail in anticipation when she was going to scratch her delicate anal region and readjust her grip on the tool to ensure she could reach it, he said.
The readjustment was no easy matter. To pick up the brush, Veronika would roll out her tongue, wrap it around the tool, bring it up to her mouth and press it between her lower teeth and the hard dental pad at the top of her mouth, said Auersperg. This means the tool sits there very firmly and can't be easily adjusted. Sometimes, Veronika would let go of the tool before scratching, then grab it again in a different place and then direct the tool at the body region that she wouldn't have been able to reach with the previous grip.
This behavior is very different from a cow just using a scratching pad, Auersperg said. Scratching yourself against something is just an interaction between an animal and an object. To qualify as tool use, the animal has to be responsible for the orientation of the object, as Veronika is.
"I have absolutely no doubt that this is tool use," Josep Call, a comparative psychologist at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, who wasn't involved in the study, told Live Science. "They clearly show that the cow uses the brush, the one end or the other, depending on the area that it is scratching. That's very nice."
Gloria Sabbatini, an animal biologist at the National Research Council of Italy's Unit of Cognitive Primatology and Primate Center in Rome, who wasn't involved in the research, agrees.
"Veronika shows an egocentric form of tool use, that is the use of a tool toward herself. This kind of tool use is simpler than tool use toward an external object or surface for many reasons," she told Live Science via email. "One is that she directly perceives the effects of tool using on herself and then she can quickly correct and modify the position of the tool."
The findings represent the first documented case of tool use in cattle and use of a multi-purpose tool, Osuna-Mascaró said. The behavior can be partly explained by the fact that Veronika is kept as a family pet. She experiences different meadows and stables in the winter, and many objects fall into the meadow for her to interact with.
"Veronika was lucky to have the possibility to experience a day-a-day reality more complex and stimulating than the one usually offered to cows. Through the daily interaction between mind, body and environment, animals develop and improve their abilities and skills," Sabbatini said.
However, it doesn't mean this is a one-off. Osuna-Mascaró has also identified videos on social media of a Brahman bull (Bos indicus) using a stick to scratch an itch.
Given that the two species diverged more than 500,000 years ago and have been separately domesticated since, Osuna-Mascaró suggested that Veronica is showing a latent capability for innovation that could have been in cattle for thousands of years.
"We do not mean that ancient oxen were tool users, but that these animals have the capacity to innovate spontaneous solutions to complex problems," Auersperg said. "When they are little, cows play with objects, they love playing with balls, with ropes and also with sticks. So, if they have a rich environment, perhaps they will show these innovations more often."
]]>CPU: AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 375 (12 cores)
RAM: 32 GB DDR5 SDRAM
GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080
Storage: 1 TB SSD
Display: 16-inch IPS HDR
Weight: 5.38 lbs (2.44 kg)
Dimensions (in): 14.07 x 10.59 x 1
Dimensions (mm): 357.5 x 269 x 25.4)
The HP Omen Max 16 is last year's follow-up to 2023's Omen, packing in more powerful parts to turn this machine into a true heavyweight. It really is heavy, tipping the pre-fight scales at 5.4 pounds (2.4 kilograms), while the price has also climbed a few bands, now coming in at around $2,500 thanks to the inclusion of an Nvidia GeForce RTX 50 series GPU. But do these changes pack a big enough punch to knock out its competitors?
While it has some quirks, the Omen Max overall offers premium performance and excels in tasks that give its high-end components a workout. In particular, the machine is built for gaming and can handle the latest AAA titles with ease — with its lightning-fast screen helping competitive players gain an edge. That means it's also primed to handle photo and video editing, and could potentially be a useful fixture on your desk at home.
HP Omen Max 16 (2025): Design
The HP Omen Max 16 leans into a typical "gamer" aesthetic, with RGB lighting underneath and the keyboard glowing vibrantly in a range of colors. The software lets you customize colors, patterns and transitions, which is a neat touch — though it's probably expected at this price point. The machine's looks are likely to be divisive, however, and it's definitely not a "professional" machine — but if lights and colors are your thing, the overall design is neat if unremarkable.
The layout and looks have been tweaked since the 2023 model, expanding the keyboard to include a number pad and adding more lighting. The keys are all backlit and look excellent in dimly lit rooms, although the touchpad isn't lit and is positioned slightly left-of-center, which can make reaching for it a bit awkward at first.
The matte black adds a stylish, understated finish to the chassis, and the Omen logo on the outside and "016" written on the inside are subtle enough to not disrupt the appearance. The screen has some flex, which is a bit disconcerting and adds to a slightly less-than-premium feel to the Omen Max 16. It is also easy to leave fingerprints and marks around the case, due to the color and material — but these are easy to wipe away.
We found the lights and overall aesthetic struck a good balance between fun and understated, with the RGB lighting tasteful and not too over the top. They can, however, be deactivated if you find them more garish than appealing.
HP Omen Max 16 (2025): Display
The display is generally good on the Omen Max 16, partly thanks to its 400-nit brightness that we verified in testing with a display calibrator. This is not market-leading but is still brighter than average, making it clear even in well-lit rooms. The 97.4% coverage of the sRGB gamut is also perfectly acceptable for most use cases. Additional testing rendered 71.8% and 76.7% coverage of the Adobe and DCI P3 spectra, respectively; the results aren't bad, and just shy of what you need for professional usage — but these days, you tend to find many laptops with displays that can hit above 90%.
For a non-OLED screen, and to a casual eye, the colors generally pack a punch, except for a slightly washed-out black level, which scored an underwhelming 0.5 nits in our tests. This also feeds into a contrast ratio of 797:1:1, which is relatively disappointing.
Where this screen really excels is its lightning-fast refresh rate of 250 Hz — making using it a pleasure. Movement across the screen is fluid and silky, while it is also quick to respond to inputs. The machine is first-and-foremost designed with gamers in mind, so this is evidently what HP has put its efforts into when it comes to the screen — and in this area, it doesn't disappoint.
HP Omen Max 16 (2025): Keyboard and touchpad
The keyboard layout is good overall, although the small Enter key and the slender up and down arrows take a bit of getting used to. In a departure from the 2023 model, the design is gapless, although the keys have enough space between them for comfortable touch typing. Each keystroke is springy with a pleasing level of key travel and haptic feedback, while not requiring too much effort to push down, striking a perfect balance.
The backlighting on the keys is customizable, with several fun presets ranging from a pulsing glow to a rippling effect from each keystroke, like a stone dropped in a pool of water. A number pad adds more functionality over the previous Omen Max.
We do, however, question how durable this keyboard is. During testing, a cat decided to try the keys and managed to prise several out — something she has not been able to do with other keyboards, notably the surprisingly tough MacBook Air 2022. The keys, which are slim and a little flimsy, quickly click back into place (at least on this occasion), but it raises doubts over how much casual wear and tear it can stand.
The touchpad is large, smooth and responsive. But it's positioned awkwardly and we often activate the right-click by accident; any left clicks require an irritating amount of leaning over to activate. This is something frequent use will fix, as you adjust to the machine, but it initially feels unnatural.
HP Omen Max 16 (2025): Performance and Battery
Let's start with the good — performance is excellent. The HP Omen Max 16 is built with power in mind, especially when it comes to gaming, and it performed excellently, handling the latest AAA titles, such as Black Ops 7, with ease on Ultra settings. Our review unit boasted an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 GPU paired with an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 375 (12 cores) CPU, 32 GB DDR5 SDRAM, and a 1TB SSD. And these mostly top-tier components duly stand and deliver.
Some games put up a fight, however, with the frames per second (FPS) on "Senua's Saga: Hellblade II" dropping into the 40s and occasionally even the 30s on maximum settings (although the game looks incredible).
A propensity to handle high-end gaming meant we were excited for what it meant for users looking to work with graphics-based tasks. The machine excelled when performing other video and photo editing, with its superior performance also playing out across benchmark tests — with the GPU registering an eye-watering score of 181,959 in our OpenCL test with Geekbench 6. This blows anything else we've tested completely out of the atmosphere.
The CPU was also excellent in benchmarking. It registered a fantastic 2,967 for single-core and 15,420 for multi-core performance, putting it far ahead of the 2023 model and plenty of other recent Windows machines.
One drawback of this power is how noisy the fans are in order to keep the machine cool. When pushing the Omen Max to its limits, they run so loudly to blast out hot air in various directions that you'll probably need to wear headphones to hear any sound. It's enough to annoy anybody unfortunate enough to be near you, let alone yourself.
Meanwhile, as we all know by now, with great power usually comes terrible battery life, and the Omen Max 16 is no exception. In our standard looped video playback battery test, the Omen Max 16 lasted for just 7 hours and 31 minutes. The only thing we've ever tested that performed worse was the 2023 HP Omen 16, which survived for a pitiful 4 hours and 53 minutes. So while the 2025 model shows an improvement, it's still not good when you consider that plenty of high-end and premium Windows machines can last well above 10 hours. But poor battery performance is typical for gaming machines like this.
HP Omen Max 16 (2025): Ports and Features
The HP Omen Max 16 is quite chunky — standing 1 inch (25.4 millimeters) tall — but chunkiness means room for plenty of ports. The machine therefore has space to fit in two USB-A ports, an HDMI 2.1 port, a headphone jack,an Ethernet port and two USB-C ports. They are laid out logically and are easy to reach.
Feature-wise, it comes with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 wireless connectivity, and a 1080p webcam that captures you well enough. The machine also comes with HP's Omen Gaming Hub software, which lets you better monitor and manage gaming performance.
HP Omen Max 16 (2025): Should I buy it?
The HP Omen Max 16 is really quite excellent at handling graphics-heavy workloads, such as video editing or gaming. However, its screen isn't quite accurate enough for most photographers and videographers, and its noise and weight are also offputting for those tasks if you need to be using it out and about — not to mention the lacklustre battery life. Ultimately, this machine is built for gamers and gaming, and that is who it should primarily appeal to.
]]>The archaeological team from Oxford Cotswold Archaeology found "at least 11 burial mounds, known as barrows, along with cremation and inhumation burials," they wrote in a statement. The researchers found the burial ground ahead of the construction of a nuclear power plant near the village of Sizewell, which is in the eastern English district of Suffolk.
The site has acidic soil, which tends to degrade bone, but in two graves the outlines of skeletons were found. One grave had the outline of a horse while the other had the outlines of two people. These remnants are known as sand burials, as it looks like the individuals were made out of sand.
The burials, even the horse's, contained grave goods.
"The horse was buried with its tack [riding gear] still on its head and shoulders that comprised [pieces] of copper alloy decoration and a probable iron bit in its mouth," Maria Bellissimo, a spokesperson at Oxford Cotswold Archaeology, told Live Science in an email. The two people "were buried with a sword, a spear, two shields, an iron banded bucket, along with a copper and a silver vessel."
Although the sand burials hold important clues, they don't impart as much information as a preserved skeleton would.
"We cannot tell their age as accurately" from their sandy silhouettes as experts could from a skeleton, Bellissimo said, "but it looks like they were both probably full-grown adults." The sex of the two people is unknown, but "our evidence indicates that the two individuals were buried at the same time and so it's very likely they died at the same time," Bellissimo said.
Their cause of death is also a mystery. "We can postulate that the horse was probably sacrificed to be interred with its owners, who we assume to be the two individuals in the adjacent grave," she said.
They appear to date to the sixth or seventh century A.D., a time when England was divided into several kingdoms. It's not clear who these people were, but the "weaponry, the horse and the copper and silver items within the grave as well as them being buried in a burial mound [suggest] that these were elite individuals," Bellissimo said.
Howard Williams, a professor of archaeology at the University of Chester in the U.K. who was not involved with the excavations, said that the burials are located on a ridge that is "prominent in the local landscape for those travelling inland" after landing at sea. At the time there "were maritime communities connected by trade and kinship along England's east coast as well as connections inland across south-east Britain."
The new discovery promises "to add important information to our understanding of the practices and beliefs of these people who [were] part of the emerging East Anglian kingdom in the centuries after the collapse of the Roman province of Britannia," Williams told Live Science in an email.
Archaeologists made additional discoveries during the excavation. One of them was a hoard of more than 300 silver coins that dates to the 11th century.
Found bundled in lead and cloth, the "hoard is believed to have been a savings pot buried by a local figure as a precaution during a time of significant social and political unrest" in the 11th century, the team wrote in the statement.
What's more, experts identified a pottery kiln dating to the Roman period (A.D. 43 to 410), an oak ladder dating to the Iron Age (800 B.C. to A.D. 50), the remains of settlements from the Bronze Age (2300 to 800 B.C.), as well as numerous ovens from medieval times (600 to 1500). Research into the discoveries is ongoing.
]]>The world's oceans absorb more than 90% of excess heat trapped in Earth's atmosphere by greenhouse gas emissions. As heat in the atmosphere accumulates, heat stored in the ocean increases, too, making ocean heat a reliable indicator of long-term climate change.
Ocean temperatures influence the frequency and intensity of marine heatwaves, change atmospheric circulation, and govern global precipitation patterns.
Scientists measure the ocean's heat in different ways. One common metric is global annual mean sea surface temperature, the average temperature in the top few meters of ocean waters. Global sea surface temperature in 2025 was the third warmest ever recorded, at about 0.5°C (0.9°F) above the 1981-2010 average.
Another metric is ocean heat content, which measures the total heat energy stored in the world's oceans. It's measured in zettajoules: One zettajoule is equivalent to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules. To measure heat content in 2025, the study's authors assessed ocean observational data from the upper 2,000 meters of the ocean, where most of the heat is absorbed, from NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
They found that in total, the ocean absorbed an additional 23 zettajoules of heat energy in 2025, breaking the ocean heat content record for the ninth consecutive year and marking the longest sequence of consecutive ocean heat content records ever recorded.
"Last year was a bonkers, crazy warming year," John Abraham, a mechanical engineer at the University of St. Thomas and a co-author of the new study, told Wired.
Twenty-three zettajoules in one year is equivalent to the energy of 12 Hiroshima bombs exploding in the ocean every second. It's also a large increase over the 16 zettajoules of heat the ocean absorbed in 2024. The hottest areas of the ocean observed in 2025 were the tropical and South Atlantic, Mediterranean Sea, North Indian Ocean, and Southern Ocean.
The results provide "direct evidence that the climate system is out of thermal equilibrium and accumulating heat," the authors write.
A hotter ocean favors increased global precipitation and fuels more extreme tropical storms. In the past year, warmer global temperatures were likely partly responsible for the damaging effects of Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica and Cuba, heavy monsoon rains in Pakistan, severe flooding in the Central Mississippi Valley, and more.
"Ocean warming continues to exert profound impacts on the Earth system," the authors wrote.
This article was originally published on Eos.org. Read the original article.
]]>Two German medical manuals — "How to Cure and Expel All Afflictions and Illnesses of the Human Body" and "A Useful and Essential Little Book of Medicine for the Common Man" — were published in 1531 by eye doctor Bartholomäus Vogtherr. His systematically gathered recipe books for common ailments, like hair loss and bad breath, quickly became bestsellers in Renaissance domestic medicine.
One copy of Vogtherr's works, in the collection of the John Rylands Research Institute and Library at the University of Manchester in England, is covered with 16th- and 17th-century scribbles and notes that suggest users tested the recipes in the manual and made their own additions. These fingerprints contained invisible chemical traces of proteins, and for the first time, researchers have worked out how to analyze these remnants.
In a study published Nov. 19 in the journal American Historical Review, researchers reported their success at using proteomics analysis to identify the materials that medical practitioners were using as they flipped through Vogtherr's book centuries ago.
"People always leave molecular traces on the pages of books and other documents when they come into contact with paper," study co-author Gleb Zilberstein, a biotechnology expert and inventor, told Live Science in an email. "These traces include components of sweat, sometimes saliva, metabolites, contaminants, and environmental components." Proteins and peptides are part of this mixture and are "often invisible to the naked eye," Zilberstein added.
To analyze the proteins and peptides (molecules made up of strings of amino acids), the researchers first used specially made plastic diskettes to capture the proteins from the paper. Then, they used mass spectrometry to detect individual amino-acid chains that could be identified as specific proteins.
In total, the researchers sequenced 111 proteins from the Vogtherr manual. Most of the proteins were from the practitioners themselves, the team wrote in the study, but several were associated with plants or animals that were featured in the curative recipes.
"Peptide traces of European beech, watercress, and rosemary were recovered next to recipes recommending the use of these plants to cure hair loss and to strengthen the growth of facial and head hair," the researchers wrote, and "lipocalin recovered next to a recipe that recommends the everyday use of human feces to wash one's bald head for overcoming hair loss points to reader-practitioners following such instructions."
Other collagen peptides were harder to identify. One extracted protein could match either tortoise shell or lizards. While 16th-century medical literature mentions that turtle shells were reported to cure edema (fluid retention), pulverized lizard heads were used to prevent hair loss. But the protein was discovered on a page next to Vogtherr's hair-growth recipes, suggesting that the user of the medical manual may have experimented with lizards as hair-care therapy.
Another surprising discovery was the recovery of collagen peptides that may match a hippopotamus next to recipes discussing ailments of the mouth and scalp. Hippos were a popular curiosity across early modern Europe, and their teeth were thought to cure baldness, severe dental problems and kidney stones. The traces of hippo proteins may suggest that Vogtherr's readers struggled with tooth issues, the researchers wrote, as recipes to cure stinking breath, mouth ulcers and black teeth are dog-eared and annotated in the manual.
"Proteomics help contextualize both the symptoms that people possibly struggled with when turning to recipe knowledge for help and the bodily effects of recipe trials and treatments," the researchers wrote.
The scientists hope their novel analysis of invisible proteins clinging to centuries-old books will contribute to a better understanding of early modern household science.
"In the future, we plan to expand this work and examine other historical books," Zilberstein said, as well as "to identify individual readers based on their proteomic data."
Conspiracy theory quiz: Test your knowledge of unfounded beliefs, from flat Earth to lizard people
When it comes to the Motorola Moto Watch Fit, there was a lot to like and only a few things that turned us off. However, when you consider the price of this fitness tracker, there isn't much to grumble about. We loved the amount of yoga types you could select from, the personalized workout screen that took minutes, if not seconds, to sort, the Velcro-adjustable strap, the battery life, the sleep tracking and the durability of the Gorilla Glass screen.
While the accuracy of the stress monitor was questionable, and the tracker was unable to determine when all workouts were paused or finished, there was still a lot to like about this budget fitness watch. So much so that we wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to newbies to the fitness tracking world, keen yogis or those looking to make tracking their fitness as easy as possible.
It's in tough competition with the Xiaomi Smart Band 10 in our eyes. The Smart Band 10 shines with an extra week of battery life compared to the Motorola Moto Watch Fit, but otherwise, these fitness trackers are very similar. So how did the Motorola Moto Watch Fit perform during our testing period? Read on to find out.
Motorola Moto Watch Fit review
Motorola Moto Watch Fit : Design
- The Velcro strap is a nice touch
- Screen is a great size, durable and resistant
- Lots of personalization features
There is a lot to like about the Motorola Moto Watch Fit, especially as it seems to be a fitness watch with numerous personalization features, which make this watch more compatible with you than you first realize.
For example, there is the standard personalization of the watch faces, with a huge amount to select from. However, beyond this, the Velcro strap design, while initially appearing somewhat cheap-looking, is actually a blessing in disguise. It allows you to get this watch to fit your exact wrist size, reducing the number of times it may slip down your wrist during exercise. While the silicone straps on other fitness watches are good, they tend to leave you with only a few options for sizing. The whole of the band on the Motorola Moto Watch Fit is available to use as a Velcro band, meaning even those with smaller wrists can get this watch to fit snugly.
While we love the Velcro strap, we aren't too keen on the color. Currently, it appears this watch is only available with this color strap, a dark green with a yellow race stripe down the center, which is a little disappointing. Motorola does note you can swap this band out with any other compatible 0.86-inch (22 mm) band, although it appears these need to be sourced elsewhere than Motorola.
Display: 1.9" OLED, Gorilla Glass
Always-on: Yes
Dimensions (in): 1.75 x 1.49 x 0.37
Dimensions (mm): 44.46 x 37.9 x 9.5
Weight: 0.88 oz (25 g)
Colors: Trekking Green
GPS: Yes
Compass: No
Altimeter: No
Water resistance: 5ATM (up to a depth of 50 meters)
NFC Payments: No
Compatibility: Android 12 and up
The personalization feature we feel it's important to note is the fact that you can add and remove workouts on the workout screen with a simple touch of the Add and Remove buttons. Even the most uninterested person in tech could easily adapt their workout screen within seconds. This means that hitting go on a workout involves the minimal amount of faff possible — a real godsend compared to wading through tons of workouts until you find the one you want (and then that one appearing again on your workout screen for future reference).
Furthermore, there is a wide range of workouts available to choose from, including differentiation of yoga types. This gives this watch massive appeal to yogis who can now distinguish between their Ashtanga practice and their restorative or Yin Yoga. It might not seem like a big deal to non-yogis, but different types of yoga require different levels of energy, with some being more dynamic and others more slow and steady, meaning stats per yoga session can vary widely. With the Motorola Moto Watch Fit, you can now capture your yoga sessions far more accurately.
Another great feature of this watch is the screen, with a 1.9-in OLED display that's a good size without being too bulky. The visibility is great in all light conditions, and we found it to be sufficiently durable and resistant to dust and other particles for a budget fitness tracker. After two weeks of continuous daily testing, there wasn't a mark or scratch to be found on the screen, which is possibly thanks to its Gorilla Glass.
The screen itself feels quite slender on your wrist, and there are minimal external buttons, meaning this watch isn't prone to getting stuck on clothing while working out (one of our bugbears!) There is one button on the side that can be used to turn the screen on (if you don't have always-on mode activated) and to pause workouts. Other than that, most operations are handled by swiping or touching the screen.
Motorola Moto Watch Fit: Performance
- Outstanding battery life for a budget fitness tracker
- Sleep and heart rate monitoring are largely accurate
- The stress monitor appears to be inaccurate
For a budget fitness tracker, the Motorola Moto Watch Fit performed well. It logged most of our workouts accurately, including the length of time we were exercising for, the length of the walks we took and our heart rate. It also has exceptional battery life, offering two weeks on a single charge, and we can attest this was the case for our testing period. We never needed to charge it during our two-week testing period and still had 32% of battery life at the time of writing this review. However, we should note that we had the "always-on" feature turned off during this period, as a personal preference. Having this feature on would certainly drain the battery faster.
While walking outdoors, with the watch using its own built-in GPS, the watch automatically acknowledges when you have paused and when you start walking again. This is a great feature that allows you to stay present in your surroundings, rather than having to constantly stop and start your workout whenever you pause to look at something on your walk. You also have the option to pause workouts by tapping the screen or pressing the button on the side, which is perfect for indoor workouts when automatic acknowledgement of a pause in a workout doesn't work.
Although overall we were impressed with this watch's performance, we did notice a few nuances in its accuracy functions. The Motorola Moto Watch Fit can't recognize when you have finished a workout, so it's important to remember to finish your workout manually. To do so, it's a simple swipe to the right when on the workout screen and a press of the Finish button. Unlike other budget watches we've reviewed, such as the Xiaomi Smart Band 10, you only need to tap the Finish button rather than hold it down to end a workout. This made ending workouts quick, which we liked.
The reason we say to end your workouts promptly is that, when doing a yoga class, we forgot to end our workout and realized an hour later, after having sat down for lunch. The watch had continued monitoring our "workout" and couldn't distinguish between us doing yoga and eating lunch! This was slightly disappointing, but as this is a budget fitness watch, it was understandable.
Another feature that left us unsatisfied was the stress monitor. The stress monitor appears to use your heart rate as a monitor for your stress. Currently being six months pregnant means our heart rate is always higher than average, with a resting BPM of somewhere between 90-100bpm. This put us in the Medium category for stress; however, we did not experience any level of stress during our testing period, as we were on holiday. Consequently, we found this measurement unreliable and void, which was a shame.
However, being pregnant also meant that we could tell the heart rate monitoring on the Motorola Moto Watch Fit was largely accurate. Capturing our resting BPM often in the 90s, and our exercising BPM reaching a maximum of 142 when doing light exercise, we felt happy that this aligned with our current heart rate due to the pregnancy.
While we found the heart rate monitoring to be impressively accurate for a budget fitness tracker, we were also surprisingly happy with the sleep monitoring function. Again, being six months pregnant, we are often up in the night for toilet trips. The watch accurately captured our awake windows, including how long we were actually awake for. Not only this, but we found the sleep data to be interesting to look at the following day, with it capturing the length of our sleep, the time spent in deep sleep, light sleep and REM, our awake periods and sleep heart rate. The data also gives you an idea of the quality of your sleep.
Motorola Moto Watch Fit: Functionality
- Simple interface is ideal for beginners
- Lack of smart features
- Additional useful features
Overall, we felt the Motorola Moto Watch Fit did a great job, especially for a budget fitness tracker. The combination of the design, including many personalization options, and strong performance allows us to confidently give this fitness watch 4.5 stars out of 5. We would happily have given it five stars if some of the features provided more accurate stats.
However, we can't fault the interface of this fitness watch. There are only six actions required to get what you want from this watch. These are:
• pressing the button on the side to activate the screen
• tapping the screen to wake it up
• swiping right to access the main menu (including workout features)
• swiping left to access your daily activity goals
• swiping up for any notifications
• swiping down for the quick menu, including water lock, torch and sleep mode.
It really is as simple as that — once you've spent a few minutes familiarizing yourself with these actions, you can confidently move around the watch. We think it's a good option for beginners to fitness tracking.
As far as we can make out, the Motorola Moto Watch Fit is primarily a fitness tracker, as it lacks smart features such as NFC payments. While we didn't personally miss these features, those looking for a fitness tracker-cum-smartwatch may want to look elsewhere. This is a "basic" fitness watch — as you'd expect at this price.
While the primary function of this fitness watch is to track your workouts, there are some additional features that are handy to have. These include breathing exercises, a torch and 5ATM water resistance. There is sadly only one breathing exercise, but you can increase how long you want to practice it for by increasing the number of minutes. For those looking for more of a rounded approach to their health and fitness, the inclusion of breathing exercises is a nice touch that can help people destress and unwind — especially as health isn't just about the workouts we do.
The 5ATM water resistance and water lock function mean you can wear this fitness tracker while swimming. It also has its own "Pool swimming" workout mode — great news for those who prefer working out in water rather than on land.
Previously, we haven't felt the need to use the additional features, such as a torch, when reviewing fitness trackers. However, due to our pregnancy and many trips to the loo each night, we can say that having a torch on your wrist is actually a worthwhile thing! It's bright enough to light up a room and safely walk in the dark — we only used it indoors, but this feature might also prove useful when rooting around in the car or trunk when returning home in the dark from the shops, for example. It unfortunately won't suffice for using outside while exercising, as it turns off after a few minutes.
Overall, we feel the Motorola Moto Watch Fit is a fantastic budget fitness tracker that feels more premium than it is. Some of its features are outstanding, and only a few could be a tad better.
Should you buy the Motorola Moto Watch Fit?
✅ You're a regular yoga class attendee: We loved the amount of yoga types you could select from on this watch.
✅ You want a fitness watch you can personalize to your needs: The personalization features on this watch are seriously impressive for its price point.
❌ You want a smartwatch: This is a basic fitness watch, so you'll need to look elsewhere for features like NFC payments.
❌ Accuracy is important to you: While the accuracy was generally acceptable, if you want complete peace of mind, you'll need to up your budget and spend more.
The Motorola Moto Watch Fit has some impressive features, such as its personalization abilities, multiple yoga workout options, 5ATM water resistance, built-in GPS, user-friendly interface, extensive battery life and useful additional features, to name a few. We found the benefits and ease of use of this watch far outweighed the few things we noted as disappointments. It's also worth remembering that this is a budget fitness tracker, and as such, it can't be directly compared to the likes of Garmin watches, which are renowned for their accuracy but cost considerably more.
Saying that, there are a few groups of people who would particularly like this tracker. Beginners to fitness trackers will find the interface accessible, while the accompanying app is also a breeze to look through and understand — there is nothing overly complex in the data that could overwhelm those new to the world of fitness tracking.
Keen yogis will also be delighted with the ability to choose more than just "Yoga" on their workouts. The variety of yoga types means yogis can accurately capture their workout and look back at their data knowing exactly the type of yoga they practised at the time. This is useful as not all yoga requires the same amount of energy and thus calories burned and heart rate measurements may look quite different depending on the style being practiced.
Finally, this watch will appeal to anyone looking to make fitness tracking easy. With the ability to personalize your workout menu and set the strap to your exact wrist size, all the faff is removed, and it literally takes a second to start and end your workout.
If this product isn't for you
While we think the Motorola Moto Watch Fit is a great budget fitness tracker, it may not suit your needs. If you're looking for a slender fitness watch, the Xiaomi Smart Band 10 is a good option, receiving 4.5 out of 5 stars in our review and featuring as the best budget fitness tracker in our best fitness trackers guide. We complimented its slender design, which allowed it to be unobtrusive, both during workouts and to wear at night, and it features over 150 workout modes. Plus, the battery life is around 21 days — a tad better than the Motorola Moto Watch Fit.
If you have more money to spend but are new to fitness tracking, consider the Garmin Vivoactive 6. With a similar battery life of 11 days, accurate fitness tracking and exercise animations, the Vivoactive 6 is a great introduction to Garmin's fitness tracking technology without feeling overwhelmed.
Depending on your needs and budget, you might want to try the Garmin Fenix 8 if you're looking for a reliable fitness watch to track your workouts — we rate it as the best fitness tracker for tracking workouts. However, this might be a bit too expensive for some, especially if you're new to the fitness tracking world.
If you're a keen runner, we rate the Garmin Forerunner 965 as the best running watch. But the TicWatch Atlas is a great competitor to some of the more expensive models available, and may suit anyone looking for a great Garmin alternative.
]]>Name: Nebra Sky Disc
What it is: A bronze disc with gold accents
Where it is from: Nebra, Germany
When it was made: Circa 1800 to 1600 B.C.
The Nebra Sky Disc was discovered in an artifact hoard in 1999, when metal detectorists illegally excavated it from an ancient religious site on a hill near Nebra, a town in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. After police recovered the disc in 2002, archaeologists studied the unique object, revealing it's up to 3,800 years old and the world's oldest depiction of astronomical phenomena. (The next oldest is a star map on the ceiling of an ancient Egyptian tomb from about 3,500 years ago.)
The Sky Disc was crafted from about 8.8 pounds (4 kilograms) of bronze, according to the State Museum of Prehistory in Halle, Germany, where the object is on display. The bronze was flattened into a disc 12.6 inches (32 centimeters) in diameter and then decorated with 1.8 ounces (50 grams) of gold inlay representing a boat, a crescent moon, a full moon or a sun, and a series of stars.
Based on the style of the axes and the carbon dating of wood in the hilts of swords recovered along with the disc in the metal hoard, experts think the Sky Disc was buried around 1600 B.C., during the Early Bronze Age, but it may have been created two centuries earlier.
Some research has questioned the disc's authenticity, saying that it probably didn't come from Nebra and was about 1,000 years more recent, based on a soil and chemical analysis of the artifact. A subsequent study countered those claims and found that the disc was authentic and from Nebra but that it was made in several stages.
Close examination of the disc revealed that it was made in at least five phases. Initially, the bronze disc included the full moon or sun, the crescent moon and 32 stars. Then, two arcs were placed on each side of the disc. A third arc, perhaps representing a boat, was then added to the bottom. In the fourth phase, the rim of the disc was perforated, suggesting it may have been attached to a support, like a pole for ceremonial use. Finally, the left arc was removed before the disc was buried with the metal hoard. But experts don't know exactly when the disc was made or how much time passed between the phases of decoration.
The Nebra Sky Disc appears to represent the night sky, with several stars forming the Pleiades, or "Seven Sisters," star cluster. The golden arcs on each side of the disc may represent the horizons, marking the summer and winter solstices, and the boat may be a mythical one that brought the sun across the sky from east to west in the daytime and back at night.
By aligning the Sky Disc with the plateau on Mittelberg Hill, where it was found, the western horizon arc aligns with the Brocken, a high mountain that the sun disappears behind on the summer solstice. This suggests the Sky Disc may have been used to keep track of important astronomical dates in prehistory.
But who used the Sky Disc and who buried it are still mysteries, partly because it was recovered by treasure hunters and not in a scientific excavation. The treasure hunters damaged the gold sun or full moon, scratched the surface, and cleaned it improperly. Given the numerous well-furnished burial mounds of important people that dotted the landscape of central Germany as early as 2000 B.C., however, perhaps the Sky Disc once belonged to a Bronze Age chieftain.
For more stunning archaeological discoveries, check out our Astonishing Artifacts archives.
]]>Since the 1990s, astronomers have observed a curious brightness in infrared wavelengths surrounding the active supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the centers of some galaxies. Previously, they attributed these excess infrared emissions to the outflows — superheated streams of matter blasted from black holes.
But in a new study published Jan. 13 in the journal Nature Communications, an international team of researchers used JWST to look into the heart of the nearby Circinus galaxy, located only about 13 million light-years from Earth, to reveal the area around the galaxy's SMBH.
The data from JWST, paired with numerous ground-based observations, reveal that the infrared excess is coming from the disk of dusty material that's falling into the Circinus galaxy's central SMBH, rather than from material flowing away from it.
This galactic revelation can help astronomers better understand the growth and evolution of SMBHs, as well as these massive dark monsters' influence on their host galaxies.
Of doughnuts and disks
Active black holes like those at the centers of galaxies are fed by a giant ring of infalling gas and dust. As a black hole draws material from the inner wall of this "doughnut," known as a torus, the material forms a thinner accretion disk that spirals into the black hole like water spiraling into a drain.
The black hole's tidal forces accelerate the infalling matter to great speeds. The resulting friction within the disk causes the swirling matter to emit light that glows so brightly that it obscures astronomers' view of the inner region around the black hole.
Yet black holes are not vacuum cleaners, and even they have a feeding limit. So they blast some of the swirling material back into space, in the form of jets or "winds." Therefore, an understanding of the nature of a black hole's torus, accretion disk and outflows is key to knowing how black holes of various sizes accrete and expel matter to potentially shape their host galaxies by quenching or enhancing star formation across galactic scales.
Resolving a long-standing mystery
The dense gas and bright starlight in Circinus previously prevented astronomers from viewing the galaxy's central region and SMBH in detail.
"In order to study the supermassive black hole, despite being unable to resolve it, they had to obtain the total intensity of the inner region of the galaxy over a large wavelength range and then feed that data into models," lead study author Enrique Lopez-Rodriguez, a galaxy evolution researcher at the University of South Carolina, said in a NASA statement.
Earlier models separately fit the observed spectra of the torus, accretion disk and outflows, but they couldn't resolve the region in its entirety. As a result, astronomers could not explain which part of the SMBH's surroundings caused the excess emissions in infrared light.
JWST's advanced capabilities allowed astronomers to peer through the dust and starlight of Circinus so they could get a sharper view of the SMBH's environment. To do so, they used an imaging technique known as interferometry.
Ground-based interferometry generally requires an array of telescopes or mirrors that work together to gather and combine light from a celestial object over a large area. By combining light from multiple sources, this method causes the electromagnetic waves that form that light to create interference patterns that astronomers can analyze to reveal the sizes, shapes and other characteristics of those objects.
Unlike these terrestrial facilities, however, the space-based JWST can operate as its own interferometer array via its aperture masking interferometer (AMI), a component of the telescope's Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) instrument. Like a camera aperture, AMI is an opaque physical mask with seven small, hexagonal holes that control the amount and direction of light entering JWST's detectors.
Overall, AMI effectively doubles JWST's resolution. "This allows us to see images twice as sharp," Joel Sanchez-Bermudez, an astrophysicist at the National University of Mexico and co-author of the study, said in the statement. "Instead of Webb's 6.5-meter [21 feet] diameter, it's like we are observing this region with a 13-meter space telescope."
By doubling its resolution, JWST captured its sharpest-ever view of a 33-light-year-wide area at the center of Circinus. This unprecedented image allowed researchers to calculate that the majority — around 87% — of the excess infrared emissions come from the dusty disk that's actively feeding the central black hole; "the inner surface of the hole of the doughnut," Lopez-Rodriguez said via email. Whereas previous research had suggested that the excess may have come from hot dusty winds, or even the galaxy’s residual starlight, the team found that less than 1% of these emissions come from the energetic outflows streaming away from the SMBH.
The accretion may be extinguishing star formation in the center of Circinus, but confirming this will require a different type of JWST-based observation, Lopez-Rodriguez said.
An invaluable perspective
In addition to revealing previously hidden SMBH mechanics, this research highlights the potential of JWST-based interferometry for studying various celestial objects, including other active SMBHs at the cores of nearby galaxies. By increasing the sample size, astronomers hope to determine whether the infrared emissions from other SMBHs are due to their dusty disks or to their hot outflows.
"AMI has to be used — in order to get precious JWST time — on targets which cannot be done from the ground, or at wavelengths that are blocked by the Earth's atmosphere," study co-author Julien Girard, a senior research scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, told Live Science via email.
AMI-based observations can better illuminate our own solar system; they recently offered a detailed look at the volcanoes on Jupiter's hellish moon Io, Girard added. So AMI can observe diverse cosmic objects of varying shapes and sizes, from moons oozing with lava to black holes obscured by dust. In the future, it could help astronomers detect moons around prominent asteroids or reveal the orbits and masses of multistar systems, Girard added.
]]>Through these efforts, astronomers have observed some of the earliest galaxies in the Universe. In turn, this has led to refined theories and timelines of galactic formation and evolution.
In a recent study, a team of astronomers led by the University of Pittsburgh (UPitt) uncovered what could be the earliest barred spiral galaxy ever observed. This finding helps constrain the timeframe in which bars first emerged in the Universe.
The research was led by Daniel Ivanov, a physics and astronomy graduate student in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. Based on observations made with the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) with data from Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), the team spotted a barred spiral galaxy (COSMOS-74706). Thanks to additional confirmation by the Multi-Object Spectrograph for Infrared Exploration (MOSFIRE) on the Keck I telescope, the team determined that this galaxy existed over 11.5 billion years ago.
He and his team presented their findings on Jan. 8th, 2026, at the 247th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Phoenix, Arizona.
According to the Hubble Sequence, galaxies are grouped into elliptical, spiral, and lenticular based on their morphological characteristics. Whereas galaxies generally begin as irregular disks, they evolve to form spiral arms extending from a central bulge (aka. a spiral galaxy).
Barred spirals, such as the Milky Way, also have a bar-shaped linear arrangement of stars across their centers, which play an important role in their evolution by funneling gas inward from the outer reaches, feeding the supermassive black hole in the center, and suppressing star formation throughout the stellar disk.
While researchers have reported barred spiral galaxies that are even older, analyses of these candidates have been less conclusive, as the observations were made using gravitational lensing or redshift measurements. Whereas the former method is hampered by the lensing effect, which often blurs the light from the more distant object, redshift measurements are subject to errors and uncertainties of 10-15%. Neither method is as definitive as spectroscopy, which was used to validate the age of COSMOS-74706.
The discovery of a barred spiral galaxy this early in the Universe was not entirely surprising, as some simulations suggest that bars were forming in galaxies as far back as 12.5 billion years. However, observational evidence of such structures has been much harder to come by, making this a significant discovery that helps constrain the timeline of galactic evolution. As Ivanov stated in a UPitt press release:
This galaxy was developing bars 2 billion years after the birth of the Universe. Two billion years after the Big Bang. It's the highest redshift, spectroscopically confirmed, unlensed barred spiral galaxy. In principle, I think that this is not an epoch in which you expect to find many of these objects. It helps to constrain the timescales of bar formation. And it’s just really interesting.
The original version of this article was published on Universe Today.
]]>As bacteria and phages duke it out, bacteria evolve better defenses to survive while phages evolve new ways to penetrate those defenses. The new study, published Jan. 13 in the journal PLOS Biology, details how that skirmish unfolds in space and reveals insights that could help us design better drugs for antibiotic-resistant bacteria on Earth.
In the study, researchers compared populations of E. coli infected with a phage known as T7. One set of microbes was incubated aboard the ISS, while identical control groups were grown on Earth.
The analysis of the space-station samples revealed that microgravity fundamentally altered the speed and nature of phage infection.
While the phages could still successfully infect and kill the bacteria in space, the process took longer than it did in the Earth samples. In an earlier study, the same researchers had hypothesized that infection cycles in microgravity would be slower because fluids don't mix as well in microgravity as they do in Earth's gravity.
"This new study validates our hypothesis and expectation," said lead study author Srivatsan Raman, an associate professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
On Earth, the fluids bacteria and viruses exist within are constantly being stirred by gravity — warm water rises, cold water sinks, and heavier particles settle at the bottom. This keeps everything moving and bumping into each other.
In space, there is no stirring; everything just floats. So because the bacteria and phages weren't bumping into each other as often, phages had to adapt to a much slower pace of life and become more efficient at grabbing onto passing bacteria.
Experts think understanding this alternative form of phage evolution could help them develop new phage therapies. These emerging treatments for infections use phages to kill bacteria or make the germs more vulnerable to traditional antibiotics.
"If we can work out what phages are doing on the genetic level in order to adapt to the microgravity environment, we can apply that knowledge to experiments with resistant bacteria," Nicol Caplin, a former astrobiologist at the European Space Agency who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. "And this can be a positive step in the race to optimise antibiotics on Earth."
Whole-genome sequencing revealed that both the bacteria and the phages on the ISS accumulated distinctive genetic mutations not observed in the samples on Earth. The space-based viruses accumulated specific mutations that boosted their ability to infect bacteria, as well as their ability to bind to bacterial receptors. Simultaneously, the E. coli developed mutations that protected against the phages' attacks — by tweaking their receptors, for instance — and enhanced their survival in microgravity.
Then, the researchers used a technique called deep mutational scanning to examine the changes in the viruses' receptor-binding proteins. They found that the adaptations driven by the unique cosmic environment may have practical applications back home.
When the phages were transported back to Earth and tested, the space-adapted changes in their receptor-binding protein resulted in increased activity against E. coli strains that commonly cause urinary tract infections. These strains are typically resistant to the T7 phages.
"It was a serendipitous finding," Raman said. "We were not expecting that the [mutant] phages that we identified on the ISS would kill pathogens on Earth."
"These results show how space can help us improve the activity of phage therapies," said Charlie Mo, an assistant professor in the Department of Bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the study.
"However," Mo added, "we do have to factor in the cost of sending phages into space or simulating microgravity on Earth to achieve these results."
In addition to helping fight infections in Earthbound patients, the research could help yield more effective phage therapies for use in microgravity, Mo suggested. "This could be important for astronauts' health on long-term space missions — for example, missions to the moon or Mars, or prolonged ISS stays."
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