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This week, we've taken one tantalizing step closer to finding out if there really was life on Mars, after NASA's Perseverance rover uncovered the highest concentration of organic molecules on the Red Planet to date.The data comes from mudstones in Jezero crater, which once hosted a deep lake. Last year, researchers described a piece of rock with patterns resembling those left by microorganisms on Earth as one of the clearest signs yet of past Martian microbes.Now, scientists have confirmed the widespread presence of complex carbon-based molecules in this area of the crater, which they suggest indicate the presence of fossilized microbes.Going even further back in history, new observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed how early galaxies lived fast and died young, offering a possible preview of our own galaxy's death. Elsewhere in space, JWST captured the formation of a distant star, 1,280 light-years away in the constellation Orion, while the Euclid space telescope snapped the most detailed photo of the Milky Way ever taken.Weird human cousin gets even weirder'A weird result from an already weird hominin': Archaeologists discover all Homo naledi skeletons found in South African cave are femaleThe largest (left) and the smallest (right) skulls of Homo naledi found in the Rising Star cave system in South Africa. All specimens of H. naledi have been shown to be female. (Image credit: Rising Star Program)Homo naledi surprised scientists once again this week. Found in a South African cave in 2013, the small-brained, two-legged relative to modern humans is thought to have lived around 300,000 years ago. Since its initial discovery, the enigmatic hominin has shocked scientists with a string of baffling revelations. In 2023, researchers found evidence that H. naledi may have used fire in the cave. This early hominin may also have buried its dead. Now, archaeologists have analyzed genetic material in the enamel of nearly two dozen skeletons at the site and found that they are all female."The bottom line is this is a weird result from an already weird hominin," Elizabeth Sawchuk, curator of human evolution at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.Discover more archaeology news —Hanging lamp in the form of a sandaled right foot: A 1,600-year-old bronze lamp with multilayered Christian symbolism—Early Homo sapiens may have lived in rainforests, new clues suggest — and it could overturn our understanding of human evolution—Some of the last surviving Neanderthals were remarkably diverse ‪—‬ suggesting inbreeding didn't doom themLife's Little MysteriesHow did the Romans build such straight roads? The remarkably straight Stane Street in southern England was built by the Romans. (Image credit: Tim Stocker Photography via Getty Images)The Romans are known for their transport systems that enabled travel and trade across their enormous empire. Many of these centuries-old streets had a reputation for being extremely straight. Nowadays, building straight roads requires advanced surveying using GPS networks and lasers, as well as careful engineering to flatten the terrain. So how did the Romans do it about 2,000 years before these things were invented?—If you enjoyed this, sign up for our Life's Little Mysteries newsletterWater might be 2 liquidsWater might secretly be a mix of 2 different liquids, scientists sayAn illustration of a water molecule. New research adds credence to a controversial theory that water actually switches between two chemical structures. (Image credit: Yaroslav Kushta via Getty Images)Most of us discount water as the most basic of beverages, but if you look at it at a molecular level, water is actually rather exciting. Think about it: While most liquids are denser in their solid form, water ice floats. That's weird. Water also resists temperature changes better than similar liquids do, and its viscosity decreases under certain pressures. Some scientists have hypothesized that these weird behaviors come about because water consists of not one, but two liquids ‪—‬ a dense one and a less-dense one that constantly switch places. Now, with the help of AI, we have proof of this weirdness. Discover more weird news —We've spent decades looking for the wrong type of alien radio signals, new paper claims — and there's an easy way to fix it—'Weirdos of the sperm whale world' appear to be evolving 2 different dialects, audio recordings suggest—China's Einstein Probe detected a mysterious cosmic explosion — and scientists have no idea what caused itAlso in science news this week—The US just approved bemotrizinol, a sunscreen ingredient long used in Asia and Europe. Here's how it works.—'You can't patch your way out of it': Cheap AI worm can spread between devices without human guidance — but how did scientists create it?—Water shortages could prevent the US from mining more lithium, deepening reliance on foreign imports—Diagnostic dilemma: After taking a medicine for years, a man suddenly had weird changes in his taste that made food disgustingScience Spotlight'If there's any country that will do it, it's China': Why is China diverting some of the world's mightiest rivers thousands of miles?People in China's northern megacities have 74 times less fresh water than the average American — so the Chinese government has built the world's largest water diversion project. (Image credit: Xinmei Liu for Live Science)People in China's northern megacities have 74 times less fresh water availability than the average American. But China boasts some of the largest rivers in Asia that flow farther south, along with massive water reserves in glaciers in the west. To address this imbalance, the Chinese government has built the world's largest water diversion project, ferrying water from the Yangtze River in the country's center and south over thousands of miles through a complex system of canals, pipes, dams, reservoirs and pumps. And yet, this is still not enough to satisfy the water needs of the country's thirsty North. Now, China is expanding these routes and planning a third, western route for the project, which will be the most dangerous and ambitious route yet. Beyond diverting the country's rivers, China is also building the world's largest dam in an earthquake-prone region in Tibet and has invested heavily in creating a permanent "sky river" to help solve the country's water crisis. Something for the weekendIf you're looking for things to keep you busy over the weekend, here are some of the best news analyses, crosswords, interviews, opinion pieces and quizzes published this week.—9 of the best technology conspiracy theories [Countdown]— AI companies don't want to be legally responsible for their chatbots. US courts should make them. [Opinion]—Live Science crossword puzzle #49: 'Short' tempered French emperor — 13 across [Crossword]— Ancient empires quiz: Can you match these lands to the historical powers that ruled them? [Quiz]—60 million stars: Euclid space telescope snaps the most detailed photo of the Milky Way ever taken [Skywatching]Science in picturesNASA satellite captures wave of warm water hundreds of miles long that signals a devastatingly strong El NiñoA wave of warm water and higher-than-usual sea surfaces (red) stretches across the Pacific, a few days before El Niño was declared. (Image credit: Data for the map were acquired by the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite and processed by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin)New satellite imagery shows a wave of warm water stretching across the Pacific Ocean in a dramatic illustration of the newly declared El Niño. The image shows a red wave as it streaks across the equator and piles up around the west coast of South America.Ocean patterns like this are known as Kelvin waves. They occur when winds in the Pacific Ocean near the equator temporarily reverse and blow from west to east. This enables warm water to gradually build up in the east,preventing cold waters from rising below.The wave was spotted by NASA's Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite, which measures ocean temperatures through radar scans of changes in sea surface height, caused by heat's expansionary effects upon water. The satellite has already observed several other Kelvin waves this year in anticipation of El Niño.Follow Live Science on social mediaWant more science news? Follow our Live Science WhatsApp Channel for the latest discoveries as they happen. It's the best way to get our expert reporting on the go, but if you don't use WhatsApp we're also on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Flipboard, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky and LinkedIn.

A photograph of Earth glowing in deep space, the moon's cratered horizon stretching across its foreground, caught many people's eyes in April 2026. Astronauts captured the image while aboard NASA's Artemis II mission, and like the famous Apollo 8 "Earthrise" image, the picture felt instantly real and inspiring for many.But when almost anyone can fabricate a visually similar image in seconds from a text prompt using artificial intelligence, how do people decide which image is real?The proliferation of AI-generated science images in public spaces is not simply a misinformation problem. As a researcher who studies visual science communication and public trust, I believe it also contributes to a crisis of trust in science in the age of AI, and the tools scientists have long relied on to establish visual credibility are losing their grip.AI-generated images infiltrate scienceAI tools are already changing how scientific visuals are created, shared and publicized.Researchers use them to generate illustrations, create synthetic data, edit lab images and produce materials for education and public outreach.While AI can help scientists communicate complicated ideas more creatively and efficiently, these same tools blur the lines between illustration, enhancement and fabrication.In 2024, two papers were retracted after publishing AI-generated figures posessing biologically impossible structures. In April 2026, the New England Journal of Medicine retracted a paper after discovering that a clinical image had been manipulated with AI. These are just cases that came to mass public attention and are likely just the tip of the iceberg. Researchers have warned that AI-generated visuals pose growing threats in fields that depend heavily on visual evidence, such as materials science.NEJM Images in Clincal Medicine from last week retracted due to AI image manipulation. Look at the numbers on the ruler🤦🏻‍♂️https://t.co/lafNw15Kao pic.twitter.com/c66u5ZX8PkMay 2, 2026Academic publishers are beginning to adopt AI-detection tools. However, systems designed to detect fake images will almost always lag behind systems designed to create them. Many detectors can identify only image patterns they were trained to recognize. As new AI models emerge, developers must constantly obtain new data and retrain detectors to catch up.The biggest concern are realistic-looking visuals that subtly distort scientific details while remaining believable enough to pass initial review.Trust in scientific imagesFor decades, scientific images carried authority partly because they were difficult to produce. Creating microscope images, climate graphs and space photographs required expensive equipment, institutional resources and specialized expertise. Most people assumed such images represented true observations because very few people could make them.Research in science communication, including my own, suggests that people judge scientific visuals using a few mental shortcuts. Does the image look technically sophisticated? Does it come from a trusted institution? Does it match what I already believe? Generative AI is undermining all three of these heuristics, or mental shortcuts.Today, anyone can create a polished, scientific-looking image from a text prompt. Images are also detached from their original source when circulating online. When visual quality and institutional attribution become unreliable cues for judging the credibility of science images, people tend to fall back on something else: their own prior beliefs.This image of the Earth taken from the Artemis II mission in April 2026 is very much real. Does everyone believe it? (Image credit: NASA)As a result, authentic scientific images that challenge someone's existing beliefs can now be dismissed as AI-generated, whereas fabricated images that confirm them are easily accepted as evidence. AI, in this way, may amplify motivated reasoning — that is, people's tendency to accept what they already agree with and question what they do not.This shift matters because visuals have long served as evidence for scientific claims. Nonexpert audiences rely on images not only to see what scientists have discovered but also to develop an emotional connection and perceive credibility in the science being presented.If audiences stop trusting visual evidence altogether, science loses one of its most powerful tools for public communication.Transparency, not restrictionAI tools offer real benefits for researchers communicating their work to diverse audiences. The challenge is using these tools without quietly transferring AI's credibility deficit onto the science the images are meant to convey.One practical path forward is for researchers to treat image provenance — where an image came from and how it was created — with the same seriousness they already apply to data provenance.Scientists routinely disclose funding resources, study methodologies and conflicts of interest. Similar standards may now be necessary for scientific images. Was AI used to generate or modify this image? Is it a direct observation, a simulation or an illustration? What exactly does the image represent, and how was it verified? Can it be replicated by other researchers?My colleagues and I found that people's familiarity with AI significantly shapes how they judge the credibility of AI-generated visuals. Those familiar with AI tools were more likely to view AI disclosure as a sign of transparency, and some rated clearly labeled AI-generated content as more credible than unlabeled content.Transparency gives audiences the necessary context to evaluate what they are seeing, but it may not resolve every dispute about how images are made. Responsible use of AI-generated scientific images will require honesty, adherence to professional norms and the collective development of evidence-based standards across fields.Why authentic images remain powerfulThe original Apollo 8 "Earthrise" photograph of 1968 carries significant emotional impact. So do the Artemis II images of 2026.What makes them meaningful is not simply their beauty. It is their traceable connection to scientific reality. When people look at these photographs of planets, they also know there are astronauts, physical cameras, documented missions and verifiable observations behind the images. In this sense, authenticity is a documented relationship between an image and the world.In the age of generative AI, scientific institutions can no longer assume audiences will automatically trust their visuals. Trust now depends on transparency, documentation and clear communication about how visual evidence is produced.Without guidelines and standards, science risks entering a world where every image can be questioned and no image carries inherent credibility.This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Ancient Roman transportation engineers built a vast network of roads that stretched across Europe, North Africa and parts of the Middle East. This complex road system was a key to travel and trade in the Roman Empire, and many of the centuries-old streets had a reputation for being extremely straight, although not all of them were. For instance, Via Appia (Appian Way), which connected Rome to the port of Brundisium in southern Italy, was more than 300 miles (500 kilometers) long, and sizable parts of it were straight. Another Roman road, Stane Street in southern England, was built to connect London to Chichester. Much of the road, which stretches roughly 57 miles (92 km), is straight. The Middle East also had straight Roman roads, including a coastal avenue from Antioch, Turkey, to what is now Gaza.A recent mapping project was able to map about 186,400 miles (300,000 km) of roads and more are probably undiscovered. But how did the Romans avoid unnecessary twists and turns to ensure straight streets? The answer may lie in three surveying instruments the Romans used. Surveying roadsIn some instances, the Romans built on top of older roads that existed before they conquered an area. Their "road network incorporated older roads from a broad range of different societies and polities," Marion Kruse, an associate professor of classics at the University of Cincinnati, told Live Science in an email.But when the Romans built new roads, they used a few different tools to help plan them. "Three instruments were used consistently by Roman road builders: the dioptra, the groma, and the chorobatus [or chorobates]," Adriana Panaite, a researcher at the Vasile Pârvan Institute of Archaeology in Romania who has studied Roman roads extensively, told Live Science in an email.Sign up for our newsletter(Image credit: Marilyn Perkins / Future)Sign up for our weekly Life's Little Mysteries newsletter to get the latest mysteries before they appear online.While the dioptra is known from ancient texts, no example of it has ever been found in an archaeological dig, according to M.J.T. Lewis, who was a historian at the University of Hull in the U.K. In his book "Surveying Instruments of Greece and Rome" (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Lewis noted that the design of the dioptra varied considerably. The different designs tended to include a stand and a disc-shaped base with a tube-shaped sighting instrument attached. An ancient surveyor could look through the tube and see a distant object without extraneous light interfering, allowing for a better view.The chorobatus was used to measure horizontal planes. Around 20 feet (6 meters) long, the chorobatus was a beam of wood on legs and looked like a small table, Lewis wrote. It likely had small weights hanging from it to show that the beam was level. No ancient example of the chorobatus has survived, and the exact design and way it was used are unclear. Ancient texts indicate that it acted as a builder's level that could help set up level points and determine elevations.But the most important tool Roman surveyors used was the groma, Joseph Lewis, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge who has conducted extensive research on Roman roads, told Live Science in an email. The "groma was the principal tool of the mensor ‪—‬ the land surveyor ‪—‬ when planning long, straight alignments," he noted. "These alignments were then often used when constructing roads across gentle terrain."A cross section of a Roman road. (Image credit: DEA PICTURE LIBRARY via Getty Images)The groma, also called a gruma or croma, consisted of a vertical pole with a horizontal X-shaped cross on top and four small weights hanging down from strings at the ends of the crossbeams, Lewis said. The groma was most useful for establishing right angles.Multiple Roman surveyors could use the weights on their poles to ensure any road they were building was going in the right direction. "A surveyor at one end will direct other surveyors to move their poles until they are in line with one another," Lewis explained. "Once the direction had been established, Roman surveyors observed the landscape and adjusted the course of a road to accommodate/avoid obstacles such as steep sections which would have posed difficulties for wheeled vehicles, locations to ford rivers, or to connect pre-existing settlements."However, the techniques used to build roads throughout the Roman Empire probably varied somewhat, meaning experts "should be cautious about assuming that there was a single 'Roman' technique for road building," Kruse said. He noted that the Roman Empire covered a vast area and lasted for a long period of time. "It seems safe to assume that practices varied across time and space," Kruse explained.Not all roads were straightOne reason for the variation in Roman roads was likely the diversity of the laborers who built them. "In all likelihood, road-building work was done by a mix of soldiers, slaves ‪—‬ especially prisoners ‪—‬ and free locals called upon to help as part of a 'corvee' obligation imposed by their local community on Rome's instructions," Richard Talbert, a professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told Live Science in an email. But paid laborers were probably used for some skilled tasks, such as building bridges, Talbert said.While Roman roads have a reputation for being precisely laid out and straight, not all of them were. Related mysteriesWhat happened to the Minoan civilization?What if Antony and Cleopatra had defeated Octavian?Were there female gladiators in ancient Rome?"It is commonly mentioned that Roman roads were exceptionally straight. This is partially true: The Romans had engineers and a large labor force that in some cases managed to modify the landscape to enable straight roads," Tom Brughmans, a classical archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark who is part of a team that helped create an updated map of the Roman road system, told Live Science in an email."We believe that the Romans preferred relatively straight roads in places where there was very little friction offered by the topography," such as flatland areas, Brughmans said. But in areas with more difficult terrain, such as mountainous regions, the roads would often not run straight. Brughmans said he expects "future research will show that, in general, [Roman roads] are less straight than modern roads, given the need for motorized vehicles to avoid sharp turns when driving at speed." From Augustus to Nero, see how much you know about ancient Rome's famous leaders with our Roman emperor quiz!

It takes a dozen or so hours for the mushroom to kick in. Then, the hallucinations are unlike any others known to science. On this trip, there are none of the heightened colors, breathing or pulsing objects, nor geometrical patterns typically reported by users of psychedelic substances. In fact, the hundreds of people who enter clinics in China's Yunnan province during each year's summer mushroom season tend to report their vision as being clear and largely unaltered.Aside from one major exception: nearly all users see visions of hundreds to thousands of highly-rendered miniature people, dressed in bright colors like elves, gnomes, clowns or other fairy-like figures. The hallucinated sprites wriggle under doors, dive off spoons into soup bowls and make lewd and mischievous gestures, among other strange behaviors. These visions are reported by 90% of those who consume a single species of bolete mushroom, called Lanmaoa asiatica, in its raw or undercooked form. Yet despite decades of anecdotal reports, the fantastical claims were dismissed by western scientists as a form of "mushroom madness" — until Colin Domnauer, an undergraduate student taking an optional university module on funguses, caught wind of the reports.Domnauer, now a doctoral student at the University of Utah, made finding and analyzing the mushroom the purpose of his PhD, a goal that took him to China and the northern Philippines on the trail of a hallucinogenic compound that is likely completely unknown to science.Live Science sat down with Domnauer to discuss L. asiatica, the bizarre revelations it could hold for how we perceive reality, and the barely-discovered fungal universe that surrounds us. Here's what he had to say.Ben Turner: Let's start by introducing this mushroom. What is Lanmaoa asiatica?Colin Domnauer is a doctoral student studying ethnobiology at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah whose search for an underdocumented psychedelic mushroom is revealing a completely new hallucinogenic compound. (Image credit: Colin Domnauer)Colin Domnauer: Lanmaoa asiatica is a species of mushroom from Yunnan, China. It was described to science only 10 years ago in 2015, so it's a relatively newly discovered species, but it was actually being sold in the markets in Yunnan for decades before scientists realized it was its own species.Through the work I've been doing, we've come to the conclusion that this species is responsible for really strange reports of hallucinations that people are getting after eating wild mushrooms in China, and elsewhere in the world as well.It's a species that grows with pine trees. It has a symbiotic relationship called a mycorrhizal relationship and so, for that reason, it's something that can't be cultivated artificially. And it's still only found in its wild habitats, so it's difficult to distribute in that sense. But it's still relatively common and popular in the places that it is found.BT: The mushroom is growing in notoriety because of the uniquely bizarre hallucinations it's reported to cause. Let’s say I ingest a significant dose of raw or undercooked L. asiatica right now, what's my next week gonna look like?CD: Alright, so we don't know exactly the amount of mushroom that's required to get this effect, because in all these cultures they're eating it accidentally, or they're eating it just as food, but they're not intentionally pursuing the psychoactive effects. These effects are seen as an accidental side effect of eating too much, or if they're not cooked enough.But if you do have a substantial amount, what we do know is that after about 12 to 24 hours you're going to start getting Lilliputian hallucinations, which is a clinically defined syndrome that's characterized by seeing little people or animals all around your environment.And these aren't like some vague hallucinations, these are like three-dimensionally-rendered, highly-detailed figures inhabiting your exterior world. And they're also interacting with objects in the real world — like crawling up chairs and tables or crawling under doorways, people say. So there's a very strange and specific type of reality-grounded, projected hallucination. Even to this day science doesn't understand what's going on in the brain to cause this, or how to treat it, and this mushroom is the only thing that we currently know of to reliably produce this effect.In southwestern China's Yunnan province, Lanmaoa asiatica is prized for its umami-rich flavor. (Image credit: Colin Domnauer)BT: Okay, so immediately there's a lot I want to ask you. Firstly, these tiny people are pretty reliably reported, right?CD: At first scientists dismissed it as a folk tale or something, because it sounds so impossible, but this is actually something that affects hundreds of people every year in Yunnan, China, and there's many hospital reports of people getting affected in this way. In fact, one study looked at about 400 cases in a year of people who were affected by this mushroom, and 90% of them said that they had these Lilliputian hallucinations. It's a very hallmark symptom of this mushroom.BT: From the case reports we have hundreds to thousands of clearly-rendered, often brightly-colored, gnome or fairy-like little people clambering about and crawling under things. What else are they doing? Are they talking to the people having the hallucinations, is there much interaction going on?CD: That's something that's not as commonly reported, but it has been mentioned in a handful of cases, both in China and in other cultures where this phenomenon has been noted.The little people are said to typically like teasing, playing with or harassing the person seeing them, so there is some level of interaction there. They're typically viewed to be amusing, mischievous, that sort of attitude. They're not usually seen as threatening, although in a few cases people felt that way.BT: Are there any other clinically-reported effects on the mind and body?CD: Yeah, there are. The Lilliputian hallucinations are the most striking symptom, but there's other things as well. About 50% of people reported having some gastrointestinal upset after eating this mushroom. It's not clear exactly the severity of that, because this was just a statistic that was noted in these papers, and it's also not clear if it was caused by this mushroom specifically or other things they were eating in the meal. So these aren't really robust studies in that sense, they're just collecting data of people who happen to get these effects. And then another key thing that a lot of people note is that they seem to be typically weakened, more tired and delirious, so this could give us a hint as to the mechanisms that this unknown compound is working through. So it sounds quite different from the known psychedelic compounds.And it's not only because of that. This is actually something I forgot to mention, but these hallucinations can last several days long. So it's not something that is experienced over a few hours like other compounds.BT: If people are hallucinating thousands of miniature people taunting them for several days, are there any injuries or fatalities linked to cases? Or is it just unpleasant and irritating, but harmless?CD: Yeah, that's something I really was curious about, because it sounded like it must be quite harmful if it's something that's sticking around in the body for several days and having these strong effects.But interestingly, all those hundreds of hospital reports reported zero deaths or fatalities. They also reported no abnormalities in vital organ function, so it seems to be physiologically safe. But then, at the same time, we don't know if that's because those people were admitted to the hospital and they were getting proper treatment, or if we only have the records of people that were committed to the hospital, so it might be a skewed sample.BT: You mentioned that this mushroom is found in China's Yunnan province. And you personally also identified it in the northern Philippines too. I was wondering how widespread and integrated into the cultures of these regions it is. How widely known is it? Is it treated as a mischief of little significance, or has it been integrated into any religious practices? CD: In all these places, the mushroom is viewed as a very prized edible. It tastes very good and has a great flavor, but it's never been integrated into any spiritual or religious practices for the psychoactive effects. The psychoactive effects are like an accidental side effect of a food, and they're viewed as sort of an amusing side effect of that. They're not something that they intentionally pursue, but it's also not something that they feel fearful of and avoid. Everyone knows that this mushroom has this property and can make you see little people, but they'll continue to eat it anyway, because they're just not afraid of that effect. But they're also not pursuing it, if that makes sense. It's sort of a middle ground viewpoint they have.Yunnan province is known as the wild mushroom capital of China, with the Mushuihua wild mushroom trading center selling over 200 species of edible funguses. (Image credit: Colin Domnauer)BT: And that's so strange. I mean you're a scientist, I'm a science journalist, to me this thing is so fundamentally bizarre that I struggle to understand how it has flown under the radar for so long. It was only scientifically described 10 years ago, and even then without much mention of the psychoactive properties. Why are we only just talking about this now?CD: The first reports of psychoactive boletes actually go back to the 1930s to 1960s in Papua New Guinea. That's actually a time before we even knew about psilocybin mushrooms, and yet psilocybin mushrooms have exploded in the last century to become globally popular.But this mushroom went the opposite way and faded into obscurity. And I think the reason for that is twofold. One, the scientists who were initially studying this mushroom in Papua New Guinea were unable to isolate any psychoactive compounds and couldn't determine the species responsible for the effects. And secondly, because these symptoms sounded so bizarre and fantasy-like — seeing little people — I think this biased them toward believing that it wasn't possible.In fact, they concluded that this whole phenomenon of "mushroom madness" was all just a social act, a myth, or a way for the people to behave in ways they ordinarily wouldn't. But they concluded the mushrooms were just like a scapegoat, they weren't actually physiologically active, it was just an excuse to do these things. It sounded so impossible, and we just couldn't figure out the chemistry of these mushrooms. But since that time, over the last two years, we've had more reports coming from other cultures — from China, and now from the Philippines. That's multiple independent cultures reporting the same specific type of hallucination. And what I was able to show was that they were due to the same mushroom, verified by DNA sequencing. It wasn't just random attribution, it was the same species. That, to me, confirms that there's an underlying physical cause of this.BT: How did you first hear about L. asiatica?CD: I first heard about this when I was an undergraduate student taking an elective course about mushrooms, and the teacher briefly mentioned one paper writing about these mushrooms in China that have this effect.It was written sort of as an anecdotal story. The mycologist was traveling in Yunnan, and the local people told him: "Oh, these mushrooms will make you see little people if you don't cook them." But in that paper he was unable to identify the mushrooms, and he shared his story and said this is something that needs more attention. I tried to look more into it after hearing about that, and I found that, amazingly, no-one was studying it. It had gone just unnoticed or dismissed for decades. This sounded so weird and groundbreaking to me that, even if it had a small chance of being true, it was something worth pursuing and I needed to know everything I could about it. So that's when I decided to do a whole PhD research project to try to answer that question.BT: So what did you do next?CD: My first task was to go to China, because that's where it was most popular and most well known. And, upon getting there, it was immediately obvious that the local people knew much more about it than we scientists did. It was actually a very well-known and common phenomenon. Everyone there was very open and welcoming and happy to talk about everything they knew about this mushroom with me. So I learned a lot just speaking with the local people who were selling this mushroom.I just asked them: "Which ones will make you see little people?" they pointed to them, and I collected them. After getting back to my lab here in Utah, I was able to sequence the mushrooms to determine their identity, and it turns out they were all this one species, so that was a first big hint.There weren't even any known psychoactive compounds, so it seemed like this must be some new hallucinogenic compound waiting to be discovered, because there's nothing that matches anything in our database.Colin DomnauerBT: There must have been a moment when you went from hearing about this as a tall tale to realising it was the real deal. What was that like?CD: Going into my whole PhD was sort've a wild goose chase — a long shot. We didn't even know if this was real, and even when I made this trip to China, as I was traveling there I asked myself: "Am I even going to find anything? Is this going to be a whole waste of time?"But it was immediately obvious that it was incredibly well known. As soon as I started talking with the locals and mentioning this mushroom, their faces lit up, and they started sharing amazing stories. It wasn't some obscure, lesser-known myth. It was a big part of their mushroom knowledge and practices, and that just built up over the days as I was in China, and talked to more people, and just confirmed how integral and well known this psychoactive mushroom is to them. It felt like it was too popular to be dismissed as a folk tale.The real smoking gun then came a few years later when I heard some remarkably similar reports of mushrooms causing Lilliputian hallucinations in a completely different part of the world in the northern Philippines.That really got my attention. I wanted to know if this is the same species as the one in China, or something completely different? But no-one had ever sequenced or studied the mushrooms in those regions, we just didn't know what it was. So I traveled there, went into the forest and on the last day was able to finally find the mushroom that the local people said was the one that made you see little people. At first when I collected it I couldn't tell if it was the same as the one in China.When I got the DNA sequencing back it was like one of the most exciting moments of my whole research. It was actually the same species as the one in China, which was completely unexpected, because that species, L. asiatica, was thought to only be found in China. Now we have a whole new record in a country that has independently discovered the same specific psychoactive properties belonging to it.Domnauer's discovery of L. asiatica in the northern Philippines came on the final day of strenuous fieldwork in the region. (Image credit: Colin Domnauer)BT: Skipping forward to the more recent research that you've published this month, what have you found out about the pharmacology behind the mushroom's psychoactive properties?CD: Just this month I was finally able to publish research that sequenced the whole genomes of not just L. asiatica, but actually all of the species in this group. I did that because I wanted to understand what psychoactive chemicals might be causing this effect and if it’s something that's found more widely in the mushroom kingdom, or only in this one species; so I needed to understand the whole evolutionary relationships and history of the group.By sequencing the whole genome, we could look for genes within it that we know are responsible for synthesizing psychoactive compounds. For example, we know the genes that are needed to make psilocybin, and we looked for those genes and they were notably absent. We then confirmed this by looking at a chemical extract of the mushroom and screening all the compounds within it, finding again that there was no psilocybin.There weren't even any known psychoactive compounds, so it seemed like this must be some new hallucinogenic compound waiting to be discovered, because there's nothing that matches anything in our database.BT: What work are you doing now to isolate the psychoactive compound?CD: It can be a long and painstaking process to go from a complicated organism that has hundreds of molecules in it to one causing a single effect. We've been screening the chemical extracts, in mice, for example. We give them an extract of this mushroom, and we also give them an extract of a placebo or a blank control and we watch how their behavior changes. With L. asiatica, they behave strikingly differently than in the control, so that shows that there is a bioactive effect going on.We then take an extract and split it into like 20 fractions, with each fraction containing a different subset of the mushroom’s chemicals. Then we test each of those 20 in the mice, and we see, okay, 19 of these have no effect, and then one of them does have an effect. That way we can narrow down the chemical responsible.There's also other more complicated methods that we're pursuing. But still to this day we haven't definitively found the actual chemical responsible.BT: Do you at least have a few candidates?CD: I'll say this: We’ve narrowed down whatever is causing the activity in mice to a few candidates, but we don't know if the thing that's causing activity in mice is the same thing causing hallucinations in humans.Mushrooms can have a variety of different bioactive effects, and there's going to be more testing needed to confirm that it actually has the specific hallucinogenic property. It could all just be a red herring that we're chasing, and so that's one of the reasons why it takes a long time to definitively determine an active biochemical.BT: I know you’re approaching this from the mycology side, but the same visions being consistently reported between cases implies one or more regions of the brain responsible for seeing little people. What work has been done on the neuroscience behind Lilliputian hallucinations? Has anyone identified the regions of the brain it's hitting?CD: I mean, that's a great question. As far as I know there's really nothing known about the parts of the brain that are being activated. Lilliputian hallucinations have been documented for over 100 years from causes outside of mushrooms — people get them sometimes during alcohol withdrawals or certain neurological conditions associated with old age, like dementia or Charles Bonnet syndrome.But in all those cases, psychiatrists and neurologists don't really have a treatment for those people because they don't know how it works in the brain. If you don't understand the mechanisms involved, you can't treat it, so it remains a mystery to this day. Hopefully more neuroscientists can use this mushroom to study it, because that's one of the reasons it's remained mysterious. We didn't have a tool that could produce these effects reliably. It was all random, inconsistent occurrences. But now, hopefully, this mushroom can provide a tool that can reliably produce these effects and give us insights into the brain and body mechanisms causing these Lilliputian hallucinations. BT: DMT, LSD, magic mushrooms — most psychedelics usually hit serotonin receptors, yet weirdly there's no sign of that here. Is there any possibility it's doing something upstream with the same effect?CD: I would say we're not sure, but I'll say that there are very unique effects of these symptoms — that they take 12 to 24 hours to kick in, and then can last several days — that are unlike any known receptor interaction classical psychedelics work through. So it might be something more complicated going on in the body than just a single receptor being activated. BT: Have you spoken to anyone who has suspicions of what parts of the brain might be involved?CD: I haven't. However, I'll say that the very striking visual hallucinations of something being completely integrated with the real world environment around you can be a great tool to understand the mechanisms of perception, and how we perceive reality in the absence of this drug. I mean, this is... I don't know of anything else like this that can produce these very realistic hallucinations integrated with the real world. So, hopefully, it can give us insight into how we perceive reality normally.BT: With other psychedelics, people report seeing real objects altered or patterns appearing that aren't there. But the source of all that is a warped version of stuff you're already seeing. Here, your visual field is unaltered, except, of course, that there are hundreds of mischievous tiny people fooling about in it.CD: It's really different, yeah. Like you said, either the objects that are normally there are changed in some way, or people go to a different world in their minds, behind closed eyelids. But to see, with your eyes open, the world as it normally appears with the addition of very realistically-rendered people, that others don't perceive, is really striking. BT: So there have been scant reports of similar hallucinations occurring elsewhere. Papua New Guinea is a strong case, right? Does that mean that L. asiatica is also there, or could there be another mushroom that's kind of having effects? CD: That's one of the most exciting questions that I'm interested in. It still remains a big question mark. What mushroom in Papua New Guinea is causing these effects? There's no records of Lasiatica even occurring in Papua New Guinea, but it could be that mycologists just haven't documented it there. Mycology is still a very young discipline, and there's a lot of parts of the world where we still don't even know the mushrooms that exist there. Or it could be a completely different mushroom, which would be exciting for its own reason — it would show that whatever compound is causing this is perhaps more widespread, and it's not just found in one species. More research needs to be done, for sure.The cultural use and consumption of these wild mushrooms in Papua New Guinea has faded since the 1960s, when they were prevalent and reported. There's been no cases of this "mushroom madness" for decades. The reasons could be twofold, either the local people have lost that tradition and practice, or the forests have also been deforested. It's still a big question mark as to what's going on in Papua New Guinea.Some of the earliest 20th century reports of Liliputian hallucinations came from the Western Highlands province of Papua New Guinea. (Image credit: Maria Cristina di Palma/VWPics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)BT: DMT, LSD, magic mushrooms — most psychedelics usually hit serotonin receptors, yet weirdly there's no sign of that here. Is there any possibility it's doing something upstream with the same effect?CD: I would say we're not sure, but I'll say that there are very unique effects of these symptoms — that they take 12 to 24 hours to kick in, and then can last several days — that are unlike any known receptor interaction classical psychedelics work through. So it might be something more complicated going on in the body than just a single receptor being activated. BT: Have you spoken to anyone who has suspicions of what parts of the brain might be involved?CD: I haven't. However, I'll say that the very striking visual hallucinations of something being completely integrated with the real world environment around you can be a great tool to understand the mechanisms of perception, and how we perceive reality in the absence of this drug. I mean, this is... I don't know of anything else like this that can produce these very realistic hallucinations integrated with the real world. So, hopefully, it can give us insight into how we perceive reality normally.BT: With other psychedelics, people report seeing real objects altered or patterns appearing that aren't there. But the source of all that is a warped version of stuff you're already seeing. Here, your visual field is unaltered, except, of course, that there are hundreds of mischievous tiny people fooling about in it.CD: It's really different, yeah. Like you said, either the objects that are normally there are changed in some way, or people go to a different world in their minds, behind closed eyelids. But to see, with your eyes open, the world as it normally appears with the addition of very realistically-rendered people, that others don't perceive, is really striking. BT: So there have been scant reports of similar hallucinations occurring elsewhere. Papua New Guinea is a strong case, right? Does that mean that L. asiatica is also there, or could there be another mushroom that's kind of having effects? CD: That's one of the most exciting questions that I'm interested in. It still remains a big question mark. What mushroom in Papua New Guinea is causing these effects? There's no records of Lasiatica even occurring in Papua New Guinea, but it could be that mycologists just haven't documented it there. Mycology is still a very young discipline, and there's a lot of parts of the world where we still don't even know the mushrooms that exist there. Or it could be a completely different mushroom, which would be exciting for its own reason — it would show that whatever compound is causing this is perhaps more widespread, and it's not just found in one species. More research needs to be done, for sure.The cultural use and consumption of these wild mushrooms in Papua New Guinea has faded since the 1960s, when they were prevalent and reported. There's been no cases of this "mushroom madness" for decades. The reasons could be twofold, either the local people have lost that tradition and practice, or the forests have also been deforested. It's still a big question mark as to what's going on in Papua New Guinea.RELATED STORIESPsychedelics may rewire the brain to treat PTSD. Scientists are finally beginning to understand how.College student discovers psychedelic fungus that eluded LSD inventor'I was floored by the data': Psilocybin shows anti-aging properties in early studyBT: Finally, I can’t get to the end of this interview and not ask you. Have you eaten raw or undercooked L. asiatica? Have you seen the tiny people?CD: Of course I’ve been tempted to. But I haven't actually eaten it raw intentionally for two reasons. One, the effects last several days, and also apparently cause a delirium that might not be so pleasant. So, it's a pretty serious undertaking, I'd say.Then secondly, we also just don't know anything about the dose of the mushroom that causes the effects, because people are just eating this in a meal, and then in some cases they get these psychoactive effects. We don't know how much is required, so there'd be a lot of careful experimentation of consuming raw mushrooms and then increasing the amount. That would take, I think, a lot of time and mushrooms to go through.I'm certainly super curious, and that’s why I'm studying this in the first place. But there's already hundreds of reports out there, I don't feel like I need to prove anything. Personally, at this point, I just don't feel like it's not worth the commitment to be having these hallucinations for several days.Editor's note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Empires have shaped human history, often growing from a single city or cultural group into territories spanning continents.Some empires rose through conquest, and others grew through trade or shrewd alliances. Their borders, captured in maps described by historians or revealed by long-forgotten burials and artifacts, show just how far their influences once reached.Whether you’re a casual history fan or a devoted scholar of the ancient to modern world, this quiz offers a chance to test your knowledge of bygone empires and the lands they once ruled. Remember to log in to put your name on the leaderboard; hints are available if you click the yellow button! More science quizzes—Ancient Egypt quiz: Test your smarts about pyramids, hieroglyphs and King Tut—Roman emperor quiz: Test your knowledge of the rulers of the ancient empire—First Americans quiz: How much do you know about the first people to reach the Americas?

China's top-secret space plane just released another unknown object over Earth, raising concerns about exactly what the mysterious vehicle is up to. The clandestine spacecraft has now deployed at least nine payloads around our planet since 2022 — and we don't know what any of them really are. The Shenlong, or "divine dragon," space plane is a reusable, robotic spacecraft that China has repeatedly launched into low Earth orbit (LEO) on board vertical rockets, before reentering the atmosphere for a horizontal runway landing — similar to the iconic spacecraft from NASA's now-defunct Space Shuttle program. The space plane has never been photographed by otuisde nations, so we have no clear idea what it looks like or how large it is. Officials from China's space sector have yet to reveal any meaningful information about its design or purpose.Shenlong first launched into space on a two-day mission in September 2020, before completing an eight-month stint in LEO between August 2022 and May 2023, and a nine-month spaceflight between December 2023 and September 2024. It released its first payload shortly after the launch of its second mission and deployed seven more objects during its third mission, six of which were ejected simultaneously. The space plane's fourth and ongoing mission began on Feb. 7 when it launched atop a Long March 2F rocket that lifted off from China's Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. And to date, there has been no news of its current activities.American space exploration company LeoLabs was the first to detect the new object after it was deployed by the Shenlong space plane. (Image credit: LeoLabs)But on June 22, the private space surveillance firm LeoLabs, which specializes in tracking spacecraft in LEO, detected "an unknown object in the vicinity [of the spaceplane]," according to a post on X. The mystery payload was initially picked up by one of the company's radars in New Zealand and did not match any other object in the company's catalog.Later on the same day, LeoLabs representatives added in an update to the post that, following additional observations from across the company's radar network, they had "independently cataloged this object and assessed with high confidence that it was released from the Chinese space plane."On June 23, Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and satellite tracking expert at Durham University in the U.K. and previously with the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, confirmed in another X post that the new object originated from Shenlong and was being tracked by the U.S. Space Force. McDowell also speculated that it could be a "cubesat" — a small, often box-like satellite frequently deployed as a secondary payload alongside larger spacecraft. However, as with the previously released objects, it is unclear what its purpose might be.Shenlong likely shares some key design aspects with the U.S. Space Force's X-37B space plane. (Image credit: U.S. Space Force)Space News previously reported that Shenlong's primary goal might be to conduct rendezvous and proximity operations with other spacecraft and that its payloads may be targets for it to practise flyby maneuvers in orbit. RELATED STORIESA secretive Chinese probe has just arrived at one of Earth's 'quasi-moons' and will soon attempt a first-of-its-kind landingGiant 'white streak' appears over multiple US states as Chinese rocket dumps experimental fuel in spaceCharred piece of secretive Chinese rocket found still smoldering in the Australian outbackOthers have speculated that the mystery objects could be covert surveillance satellites or possess anti-satellite weaponry, according to Gizmodo. However, to date, there have been no reports of any spacecraft being sabotaged by the space plane or its payloads.Shenlong has now spent nearly 700 cumulative days in LEO. During that time, amateur photographers snapped some blurry shots of light reflecting off the mysterious space plane. The most intriguing image, captured in August 2024, revealed a bright appendage extending from the main spacecraft. This was most likely a solar array, experts speculated, which is unsurprising considering that most spacecraft are at least partially powered by sunlight. China is not the only country with a secretive space plane. The U.S. also has its own version, the X-37B, whose two operational models have collectively spent more than 4,200 days in LEO since 2010. However, American officials have been much more forthcoming in revealing information about their space plane's design, mission parameters and research goals.

Who is responsible for AI's output? Artificial intelligence (AI) companies like OpenAI maintain that they are not. In fact, their terms and conditions in 2023 stated that responsibility lies solely with the user. A German court disagrees. On June 9, a Munich court (subject to appeal) ruled that Google can be liable for false claims produced by its AI summaries, drawing a sharp line between ordinary search results and machine-generated assertions. In other words, AI companies must be held legally responsible for the output that is created by their systems and pushed to users. The court's logic was simple but profound: Search results point outward to sources, while AI summaries speak in Google's own voice. That distinction matters because it goes to the heart of what kind of speech deserves protection — and what kind is subject to legal scrutiny. The U.S. should follow the German court's lead. In the absence of such provisions, the entire burden of discerning truth from falsehood falls on the reader. In the U.S., the First Amendment is intended to protect the right to speak, argue, persuade and offend. But freedom of speech is not free of caveats. It does not allow people to incite others to commit crimes, to threaten or to defame, for example. And if speech causes material harm, speakers can be held liable for those harms. When a company chooses to put a synthetic answer engine between users and the web, it is no longer merely hosting speech; it is producing an amalgamation of complex mathematical expressions that, outputted as text, resemble human speech. AI companies want this text to enjoy the same protections user-generated text has, while simultaneously dodging all the responsibility associated with being a speaker. The roots of this dilemma go back to the 1990s, when the advent of online forums and social media created a new problem. Unlike traditional publishers, forum hosts needed to provide a platform for their users' voices, without being liable for what their users were saying. This problem was addressed with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, enacted in 1996. Section 230 was a bipartisan amendment written to preserve the internet as a space where ordinary people could speak (or post) without the forum host becoming liable for every third-party post. That broad immunity reflected a democratic judgment: If the law made platforms responsible for all user content, many would censor aggressively or stop hosting speech altogether. This would limit free speech. Section 230 was meant to protect the ecosystem of human expression. In this sense, hosts of online spaces can be seen as providing a public square where speech occurs. Free speech is a human right — it protects people as speakers and listeners in a democratic public sphere. The lawmakers who passed Section 230 three decades ago could not have foreseen a world populated by chatbot-generated text. As such text increasingly leads to real-world harms, lawsuits are proliferating and tech companies are deploying a number of often-contradictory legal strategies to avoid culpability. In some cases, they are arguing that AI-generated text is not speech, but rather simply a tool, and that companies are therefore protected as "carriers," not "publishers" by Section 230's protection of a public forum for free expression. But the companies deploy this argument only when it suits them. In other cases, they are increasingly reaching for free-speech language to defend AI-generated text because free-speech protections provide broad legal immunity. For example, in a Florida wrongful-death lawsuit against Open AI (maker of ChatGPT), a plaintiff has alleged that the company’s chatbot pushed a 14-year-old to take his own life. OpenAI argued that the chatbot was protected by the First Amendment, though the judge dismissed that defense and allowed the case to proceed. Neither of these arguments is convincing. AI companies are not merely providers of a public forum, as the words produced by their AI summaries and chatbots are generated by the company's products. Similarly dubious is the claim that bots should be seen as equal participants in a public square. This is a category error. Free speech is a human right — it protects people as speakers and listeners in a democratic public sphere. Bots do not vote, deliberate, dissent, worship or participate in civic life. They generate text, but they do not possess a moral and political standing. Bots have no skin in the game. What, then, justifies constitutional protection in the first place? Extending the strongest speech protections to machines would not defend liberty; it would confuse "botput" with free expression. It would, in actuality, extend the strongest free-speech protection to companies. But that requires a separate line of argumentation that ought to be agreed upon by society. Open AI, the maker of ChatGPT, argued the chatbot has First Amendment protections. (Image credit: Jaque Silva/NurPhoto via Getty Images)The Munich court's limited and nuanced way of governing "botput" provides a clear way forward.Given its history with Nazism, Germany does not enshrine free speech quite the way the U.S. does. But the German court's arguments still provide a useful template for a future U.S. ruling.The Munich court held that if a system simply points users to sources, it resembles traditional search and should continue to enjoy broad protection afforded to aggregators. If it synthesizes claims, imitates the tone of authority, and offers a single authoritative answer generated by an AI, it should carry corresponding duties of care that entail liability for the company. The need for such safeguards is only growing. AI-generated summaries can be copied instantly, scaled globally, and repeated across interfaces until a falsehood becomes regarded as "truth." That is not a hypothetical concern; it is already happening. Related storiesAI chatbots are turbocharging violence against women and girls: We urgently need to regulate themAI chatbots oversimplify scientific studies and gloss over critical details — the newest models are especially guiltyAI for breakup texts? How 'sycophantic' chatbots are messing with our ability to handle difficult social situations.Moreover, it is important to remember that the original intention of Section 230 was to insulate platforms from liability for third-party posts, not their own text. This is not an anti-innovation argument. AI can be helpful, efficient and genuinely transformative. The law should encourage useful tools while insisting that the companies deploying them remain responsible for the foreseeable harms of their products. We need clearer rules that keep the internet free for people while preventing machines from laundering falsehood into authority. The German ruling points toward that future. The sooner U.S. law and policy follow, the better chance we have of preserving our shared reality and a healthy democracy. Opinion on Live Science gives you insight on the most important issues in science that affect you and the world around you today, written by experts and leading scientists in their field.

With the aid of AI, scientists have identified a potential new antibiotic to treat gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted bacterial infection that's increasingly resistant to drugs. The newfound antibiotic has shown promise in lab experiments involving a "vagina on a chip," researchers report in a new study."There's an urgent need to address antibiotic resistance in gonorrhea, and discovering new antibiotics is one of the key strategies," Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a clinical professor at the University of Southern California who was not involved with the work, told Live Science. "It's exciting to see the application of AI in this area of public health."Every year, over half a million people in the United States catch gonorrhea, which causes symptoms such as pain and fluid discharge. In severe cases, untreated gonorrhea can lead to infertility. If it's acquired during pregnancy, the infection can pose risks of miscarriage and early birth, and if it's passed to babies, it can potentially cause sepsis or newborn blindness if left untreated.Gonorrhea bacteria, called Neisseria gonorrhoeae, often carry mutations that confer resistance to one or more antibiotics, limiting treatment options. The widely used antibiotic ceftriaxone remains the go-to drug, but resistance to this drug is soaring globally. For now, only 0.1% of cases in the U.S. are resistant, but rates are as high as 10% in some Chinese provinces and 27% in Hanoi, Vietnam.Scientists are searching for novel antibiotics to tackle resistant bugs. To pinpoint new drugs, they typically screen large libraries of compounds to find ones that kill the bacteria. However, these experiments are slow and don't keep up with the pace at which new resistant strains are emerging.So, in a study published June 17 in the journal Science Translational Medicine, researchers instead harnessed AI to expeditiously wade through a bevy of antibiotic candidates. They trained the AI models to spot potential antibiotics by studying patterns in the chemical properties of 1,755 clinically approved drugs that either do or don't treat drug-susceptible gonorrhea.Next, they ran their trained models on a different set of approximately 6 million compounds, finding 213 possible hits. They whittled down that list by process of elimination, first by excluding compounds that were too similar to existing drugs in modeling experiments. Those drugs might not have worked against drug-resistant superbugs. Next, through lab experiments, they removed compounds that weren't potent enough against gonorrhea or were too toxic to human cells.One of the most promising compounds that emerged was called MP20, which the researchers then put to the test.Scientists often use laboratory mice to study new drugs, but it's difficult to establish a gonorrhea infection in mice. That's because the bacteria are so adapted to humans, study co-author Dr. Melis Anahtar, a physician scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital, told Live Science. (She is listed as an co-inventor on a provisional patent for MP20.)It can be difficult to establish a gonorrhea infection in mice. (Image credit: dra_schwartz via Getty Images)Additionally, "there is a large push, especially in the U.S. administration, to move away from animals and to use more human-organ-mimicking systems" to test new drugs, she added. (Many scientists are developing such laboratory models of the human body for drug testing, but those models aren't necessarily ready to replace animal testing yet.)For this study, the researchers tested MP20 using a vagina-on-a-chip model. This small device contains a layer of cells that mimics the lining of the vagina and a layer of fibroblast cells, which are found deeper in the tissue. These layers are connected to a nutrient-filled flow channel that mimics the bloodstream.The researchers added gonorrhea bacteria to the chip's first layer, mimicking how the bug is sexually transmitted. Then, they administered MP20 through the flow channel, mimicking body-wide administration of the drug, to see if the antibiotic could cross through these different tissues and reach the bacteria."It could actually get through all those epithelial barriers and accumulate at a concentration that was sufficient to kill the gonorrhea," Anahtar said. MP20 worked just as well as the existing drug ceftriaxone; no bacteria were detected at all after treatment with either drug.Related storiesAntibiotic found hiding in plain sight could treat dangerous infections, early study findsMetal compounds identified as potential new antibiotics, thanks to robots doing 'click chemistry'AI could identify the next superbug-fighting drugMore experiments are needed before MP20 could potentially reach the clinic and help patients. "You need to demonstrate these chemical compounds are safe and are not going to have any human liver toxicity, kidney toxicity or severe side effects," Klausner said.He noted that an antibiotic's effectiveness depends on the anatomical site infected by the bug. So the researchers will need to assess how effectively their compounds, if delivered via the bloodstream, can reach the penis, rectum, throat and vagina to treat gonorrhea at any of those sites. Anahtar thinks AI models will prove pivotal in the quest for new drugs, especially now that chemists can prepare a wider array of compounds than ever before. "In 2012, I think there were a million compounds that you could just buy from commercial vendors, and now it's more than 70 billion," she said. She aims to grow and improve her models to test even more compounds at once.This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.

Nearly 70,000 years ago, modern humans created stunning rock art in an unexpected place: the tropical Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The finding, announced in January, made headlines for being the oldest known rock art in the world. But the discovery's location also highlighted another surprising finding: that members of our species, Homo sapiens, were thriving in the tropics tens of thousands of years ago. Researchers have long thought that early humans didn't live in tropical rainforests, as these places haven't yielded human fossils and are teeming with dangerous life, including venomous animals, poisonous plants and parasites that would deter early populations. But that perspective has been changing over the past few decades. Sulawesi's ancient rock art is one of several clues that modern humans may have lived in tropical rainforests for hundreds of thousands of years. That would mean modern humans could have been living in these hot, wet regions since soon after the emergence of our species in Africa around 300,000 years ago. Understanding how, when and where modern humans inhabited rainforests — and how that shaped our evolution — "may give us an insight into something about what it means to be uniquely human," Patrick Roberts, an archaeologist and anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and author of the book "Jungle: How Tropical Forests Shaped World History" (Penguin, 2022), told Live Science. From one origin story to manyConventional wisdom held that modern humans emerged from one parent population in an East African savanna and did not encounter rainforests until around 12,000 years ago, after agriculture emerged to support survival in these climes. The lack of H. sapiens fossils from Africa's tropics appeared to support this view. Then, in 2017, scientists identified the oldest modern-human fossils — except they weren't in East Africa, but rather in Jebel Irhoud, Morocco. The following year, Eleanor Scerri, an archaeological scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany, and her colleagues reviewed archaeological evidence, including the Jebel Irhoud fossils, and integrated it with genetic data from present-day populations. The evidence pointed toward H. sapiens originating from many subdivided populations across Africa. These populations periodically met and exchanged genes and ideas, but they also spent long periods apart, adapting to different ecosystems and evolving diverse traits. In this new understanding, the earliest members of our species may have evolved not just in the grassy savanna but in tropical rainforests, too. "One of the implications of the model is, if it's not one place and it's many places, then maybe it's not one ecosystem," Scerri told Live Science. "Maybe it's many ecosystems."Tropical rainforests were long considered too challenging for early members of our species to have lived in. (Image credit: Richard McManus via Getty Images)Because rainforests come with their own set of environmental pressures, people who lived there may have evolved traits to handle those challenges. When different early human populations came together, tropical rainforest dwellers would have contributed different gene variants than populations from open savannas. The ability to adapt to a variety of environments, including rainforests, may have come in handy later, when H. sapiens spread out of Africa and into tropical Southeast Asia, including places like Sulawesi. But establishing what these traits were would first require evidence that humans lived in rainforests close to the dawn of our species. Rainforests are terrible for fossil huntersUnfortunately, the highly acidic soil in rainforests degrades organic material like bones. This makes evidence of ancient humans, such as fossils, or human activities, like bone arrows or potential woven fiber baskets, exceptionally rare in rainforests. Even in the few instances this evidence is found, the conditions make it hard to date and contextualize it. Archaeologists often date early human fossils by measuring radioactive isotopes (versions of elements), such as carbon-14, in distinct, undisturbed layers of sediments — broken-down rocks and minerals that form via erosion and weathering. The more sediment layers there are, the longer the period of history that can be traced. But weather conditions in West and Central Africa's rainforests have left few long sediment sequences. The lack of long sediment sequences also significantly reduces the odds of finding fossils at all, said Antonio Rosas, a paleobiologist at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Spain who has been searching unsuccessfully for such fossils in Equatorial Guinean rainforests since 2014. "To be honest, I think I gave up the possibility of finding fossils properly," Rosas said. Written in stoneAs a result, many researchers studying early H. sapiens evolution have focused on a material that does preserve: stone. In Africa, stone tools reveal humans were in coastal tropical forests in what is now Kenya roughly 78,000 years ago, the tropical rainforests of what is now Equatorial Guinea from around 45,000 years ago, and the rainforests of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo around 18,000 years ago. Then, in 2025, researchers revealed that stone tools previously found in a tropical rainforest in the Ivory Coast in the 1980s were 150,000 years old. Because the area was also a tropical rainforest 150,000 years ago, this is evidence that our species inhabited rainforests "much earlier than previously thought," study first author Eslem Ben Arous, a geochronologist and archaeologist at the National Research Center on Human Evolution in Spain, told Live Science in an email. Stone tools like this one, excavated in the Ivory Coast, reveal that humans were present at the rainforest site roughly 150,000 years ago. (Image credit: Jimbob Blinkhorn, MPG)The antiquity of these quartz tools — which were a mix of flakes and heavy-duty picks and choppers — show that early H. sapiens were capable of designing technology to survive in dense tropical forests. Dense forests weren't a barrier for early humans at that time, Ben Arous said. Direct evidenceAlthough stone tools show ancient people were venturing into forests for food or living there part time, they don't prove humans lived there year-round. To do that, researchers still need fossils.By analyzing the isotopes of elements found in human tooth enamel, researchers can reveal whether our distant relatives actually lived in rainforests. That's because closed, dense canopy rainforests have low levels of sunlight and high carbon dioxide, and the ratio of isotopes of elements in a person's teeth can reveal if they spent a lot of time in those conditions as a child. Currently, zinc isotopes in two 46,000- to 63,000-year-old human teeth found in Tam Pà Ling cave in Laos are the oldest evidence of humans eating foods mainly from a tropical rainforest. Similar evidence is currently lacking from African rainforests. But the ability to adapt to many different environments, including rainforests, and the capacity to develop highly specialized traits for such environments is "what's unique about our species," Roberts said. Identifying adaptationsEarly members of our species would have required certain adaptations to live in rainforests. So what were they? Without preserved DNA or fossils, anthropologists guess by looking at contemporary populations living in the tropics. Many modern-day rainforest inhabitants are small, because it may help them cool off more easily, reduce their caloric needs, and make it easier to move in dense rainforests. An analysis published in 2019 also found key differences in genes related to immunity and development in African rainforest hunter-gatherers compared with neighboring farmers. For example, the gene PITX1 — which codes for proteins crucial for limb development — is one of several genes that contributes to small stature and shows strong signs of positive selection in Gabonese hunger-gatherer populations.There is evidence in multiple rainforest dwelling populations, including in those Gabon hunter-gatherers, of selection against specific pathogens. Although early H. sapiens living in rainforests likely faced similar pressures, we don't have any evidence that similar adaptations evolved in these ancient members of our species. Ancient DNA may be the keyBut some scientists hope to someday find evidence of these adaptations in ancient DNA. DNA preservation was historically considered impossible in hot and humid environments, but that assumption "turns out to be only partially true," Miklós Bálint, a functional environmental genomicist at the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre in Germany, said in a statement. Researchers can find ancient DNA lurking in the environment by analyzing sediment cores from tropical lakes. (Image credit: Annett Junginger)Bálint and his colleagues recently reviewed ancient environmental DNA (aeDNA) recovered from tropical environments. They found 113 studies reported aeDNA in tropical and subtropical habitats between 1998 and 2025, including 1 million-year-old aeDNA extracted from a lake in Indonesia. This DNA came mainly from nearby plants, not from ancient humans. But because people leave "millions of DNA traces" in their environment during their lifetime, human DNA should also be present and retrievable, Bálint said in the statement. "Obtaining DNA data will be a truly fundamental breakthrough in tropical forest research," Ben Arous said. For example, these genetic remnants peppered throughout the environment could reveal how humans changed the ecosystem, how they moved and interbred, and which diseases and parasites ancient people faced. RELATED STORIESScientists claim 'Lucy' may not be our direct ancestor after all, stoking fierce debateThe 'hobbits' may have died out when drought forced them to compete with modern humans, new research suggestsStunning rock art site reveals that humans settled the Colombian Amazon 13,000 years agoThe new discoveries point to the need for more archaeological research in rainforest environments, Scerri said. Current efforts in Benin appear "really, really promising," Scerri said, and she and her team are also working on projects in Guinea, Ghana and Senegal, which are also yielding clues to ancient human habitation. "We're making some incredible finds," she said."There is enough evidence now to justify investigating areas that used to be well off the human origins map, considered to be very far from the main stage of human evolution," Scerri said. The question now is how much further back in time people were living in rainforests and using their resources. "We consider ourselves to really be scratching the surface," Scerri said. Human evolution quiz: What do you know about Homo sapiens?

QUICK FACTSName: Socotra ArchipelagoLocation: Northwest Indian Ocean, off the coasts of Yemen and SomaliaCoordinates: 12.48, 53.85Why it's incredible: It is a biodiversity hotspot that hosts hundreds of species found nowhere else on Earth.The Socotra Archipelago is a cluster of four islands and two rocky islets belonging to Yemen. It is nicknamed the "Galápagos of the Indian Ocean" due to its staggering biodiversity, which includes hundreds of species that aren't found anywhere else in the world.Located about 250 miles (400 kilometers) south of the Arabian Peninsula and 140 miles (220 km) east of the Horn of Africa, the Socotra Archipelago is home to around 60,000 people. As of 2023, visitors could reach it only via a weekly flight from Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, that had to be booked through WhatsApp and was often canceled without reason.The archipelago has one main island, Socotra, which makes up 95% of the landmass, along with three smaller islands and two islets. The main island hosts snow-white sand dunes, a central mountain range, and limestone plateaus peppered with drought-resistant cucumber trees (Dendrosicyos socotranus) and umbrella-shaped dragon's blood trees (Dracaena cinnabari) that do not exist elsewhere on Earth. The dragon's blood tree gets its name from its crimson resin, which is used for natural medicine and as a pigment.The bottle tree (Adenium obesum socotranum; left image) and the cucumber tree (Dendrosicyos socotranus; right image)from the Socotar Archipelago aren't found anywhere else in the world. (Image credit: Jeremy Woodhouse (left) and zanskar (right) via Getty Images))Socotra was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008, thanks to its unique plants and animals, which have evolved in isolation for at least 15 million years. Socotra is a leftover fragment from when Arabia and Africa pulled apart around 30 million years ago. The split opened the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, which connects the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea.MORE INCREDIBLE PLACESAoshima: Japan's tiny 'Cat Island' where felines hugely outnumber humansLençóis Maranhenses: Brazil's dune-filled expanse that sits at the intersection of 3 biomesAvenue of the Baobabs: Madagascar's natural monument with dozens of 'mother of the forest' treesMore than one-third of Socotra's plants, 90% of its reptiles and 95% of its land snail species are found exclusively in the archipelago, according to UNESCO. The marine life in Socotra is also incredibly diverse; it includes sea turtles, whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) and more than 250 species of reef-building corals.The archipelago is tricky to get to, and pirates sometimes hijack vessels in the surrounding seas. Due to Yemen's ongoing civil war, many governments, including the U.S., advise against all travel to the country, including Socotra, citing threats of terrorism, unrest, crime, health risks, kidnapping and landmines.Discover more incredible places, where we highlight the fantastic history and science behind some of the most dramatic landscapes on Earth.

Most workplaces have a strange relationship with leadership. We say we want leaders who can cultivate trust, autonomy, and initiative, but often reward those who do the opposite, pursuing visibility, control, and constant intervention while ensuring everyone knows any win happened because of them. That can feel like true leadership. It may even work for a while. The team moves, the metrics improve, and the leader gets praised, but then something goes wrong. Team members begin working for the leader’s approval rather than from their own strengths. Decisions wait for permission. Initiative shrinks. The team becomes organized around a cult of personality instead of a shared purpose. Laozi saw this problem more than 2,000 years ago. In chapter 17 of the Dao De Jing, the Chinese philosopher gives one of the most compact leadership theories ever written. “The best ruler,” as translated by Yi Wu, is the one “the people merely know” exists. Below that is the ruler people “love and praise,” then the ruler people “fear,” and finally the one they “despise.” The ranking can be surprising. For Laozi, the leader people love and praise is not the one to imitate, as that leader is only second-best. The preeminent leader is the one whose presence is so subtle, whose interference is so light, and whose trust is so complete that when the work is done, the people do not feel dependent on him. When the best ruler has achieved merit and completed his work, the people say, “We did it ourselves.” The lowest forms of leadership are easy to recognize. The leader people despise is the petty tyrant, the self-protector, the person whose authority makes the room smaller. People may obey, but they do not commit. They learn to hide information, avoid risk, and survive rather than serve a purpose. The leader people fear may be more competent, but the emotional structure is still coercive, and people only perform because they are being watched. Fear can produce short-term compliance, but also unease, tension, and stress. Workplaces suffused with such emotions ultimately diminish people’s best qualities, silently killing the very qualities most organizations say they want to foster, such as creativity, honesty, ownership, and trust. Then comes the leader people love and praise. Most modern workplaces would probably stop here and call this the ideal. The beloved leader inspires. The charismatic leader motivates. The visible leader gives the team someone to rally around. There is nothing wrong with that exactly, and love and praise are far better than fear and resentment. But Laozi recognizes the limitations of this style. If the group depends too much on the leader’s presence, approval, energy, or charisma, then the leader has become the center of the work. The team may be happy, but it remains dependent. The highest leader works differently. He does not dominate through fear or bind people through admiration. His influence is real, but it does not announce itself. He listens for what wants to emerge, removes what blocks it, and gives just enough direction for people to find their own way to success. That is why, when the work is complete, the people can say, “We did it ourselves.” Not because the leader did nothing, but because he did not need to make the achievement orbit around him. This is a deeper form of influence and connects to one of the deepest patterns in the Dao De Jing: acting without effort, accomplishing without claiming, bringing something to completion without turning it into an extension of the ego. For instance, in chapter 2, Laozi emphasizes that the sage acts through “non-action,” teaches without relying on words, produces without possessing, and achieves without dwelling on it. Chapter 9 puts the point with striking simplicity: “After achieving merit, retire.” This is not a false humility. It is a disciplined refusal to waste energy on self-importance. And that may be one of the hardest lessons for leaders to learn. Today’s workplaces are built around visible credit: We track performance, reward initiative, celebrate ownership, and expect leaders to narrate their wins. None of that is inherently wrong, but Laozi warns against the moment when leadership starts feeding on the achievements it helped make possible. There is an efficiency here that modern organizations often miss. Overbearing leadership wastes energy, as does self-aggrandizing leadership and constantly reminding people who deserves credit. It pulls attention away from the work and toward the leader’s image. Laozi’s alternative is cleaner. Help the work ripen. Help people find their timing, confidence, and strength. Remove what blocks the movement. Add only what is needed. Then, when the work is accomplished, let it take flight on its own. Because of this, the best leadership touches on something fundamental: It helps people act from a place that feels natural, grounded, and deeply their own, rather than one distorted by force, vanity, or fear. The point is not to erase personality. Every person brings their own history, temperament, skill, and circumstance to the work. Good leaders do not flatten those differences. They allow them to find their right expression. But beneath those differences is a shared human capacity for clarity, responsiveness, and meaningful action. For a modern leader, this becomes a simple test. After a success, does the energy go back into the work, the team, the lesson, the next movement; or does it get trapped in performance, credit, and self-display? After a failure, is there an opportunity to look at things in a new way, or is the leader too busy shifting the blame toward others? It’s not that Laozi-style leaders are indifferent to results. Quite the opposite: They care enough not to suffocate them. They know that the deepest success is not merely that the task got done, but that the people involved became more capable, more confident, and more attuned to the work itself. They don’t have to vanish into the background either, but they do have to be mindful of what their presence does. Rather than quietly bending the work back toward their image, a leader’s presence should clarify, strengthen, and draw people out. This kind of leadership may not produce the most quotable speeches or the loudest personal brand, but within a team, its effects are obvious. People speak more honestly, they take cleaner initiative, and they do not wait to be rescued or controlled. They are trusted, and because they are trusted, they often become more trustworthy. Work built around fear collapses when the fear is removed. Work built around charisma fades when the charismatic figure leaves. But work rooted in people’s own strength can continue after the leader steps away. Such leaders let their influence become part of the work itself. They act, but do not cling. They accomplish, but do not hover. They help bring the work into being, then let it breathe. For Laozi, that is not a failure of leadership. It is leadership at its highest form. When that happens, people can honestly say, “We did it ourselves.” This article Laozi’s 4 types of leaders, and why the best one is barely noticed is featured on Big Think.

Growing water scarcity could hamper the expansion of lithium mining in the U.S., deepening its reliance on foreign imports over the coming decades, a new study finds.Lithium is used in electric-vehicle and energy-storage batteries due to its high energy density and low weight compared with other minerals, but mining it requires a huge amount of water. Currently, the U.S. has only one active lithium mine, in Nevada, and with demand for the metal projected to explode over the next few years, the government and private companies are planning to open at least 115 new mines across the country, according to the study.However, most of the proposed mines that are in advanced stages of development overlap with water-stressed areas, specifically in the western U.S. In the new study, published May 28 in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, scientists found that if lithium mines start operating in these regions, they will compete for water not only with households, agriculture and industry, but also with one another and with other proposed mineral mines."Future water availability under climate change may constrain whether new lithium mines will have sufficient water to operate," study senior author Jennifer Dunn, a professor of chemical and biological engineering and the director of the Center for Engineering Sustainability and Resilience at Northwestern University in Illinois, told Live Science in an email.The U.S. imports more than 50% of its lithium, mostly from Chile and Argentina. Policymakers and corporations want to reduce this dependence, but even with the existing Nevada mine and the 22 proposed mines that are the closest to coming online, the U.S. won't have enough lithium to meet domestic demand, Dunn said."Every mine produces a different amount of lithium — depending on its deposit type, lithium grade, and final product — so we are unable to determine how many mines exactly would be needed," she said. "Our analysis estimated that if all 22 advanced [stage] proposed mines and the sole operating mine continued operation into 2050, 0.14 [to] 0.25 million metric tons [0.15 to 0.28 million tons] of lithium content in products could be produced per year."This range falls short of the 0.83 million to 1.9 million tons (0.75 million to 1.7 million metric tons) of lithium per year that other researchers previously estimated the U.S. would need to cover its own demand.However, the water demand to produce more lithium would be astronomical. That's because lithium is typically extracted from brines and rocks known as pegmatites, which require large-scale evaporation and aggressive processing with fresh water, respectively.To find out if the U.S. would have enough water to support additional lithium mines under intensifying climate change, the researchers calculated the future water use of the 23 lithium mines most likely to be active in 2050, using data from mining companies. Then, they layered this projected water use on top of projected water uses from other sectors, such as agriculture and manufacturing, under four modeled socioeconomic-climate scenarios between 2040 and 2060.The researchers found that the available water supply will, in most cases, be insufficient to support new lithium mines. The starkest example was Southern California's Salton Sea, which contains roughly 4.5 million tons (4.1 million metric tons) of lithium. The Salton Sea is fed by the Colorado River and showed the least water available to support lithium mining and other water demands, owing to the river's dwindling flow.Southern California's Salton Sea has been shrinking for decades, partly because inflow from the Colorado River has declined. A deposit of geothermal brine beneath the sea area is believed to hold one of the planet’s largest reserves of lithium. (Image credit: Mario Tama via Getty Images)Lithium deposits in the U.S. are clustered in Nevada, Arizona and California. These are also some of the most arid and water-stressed states. Although the study found an increase in rainfall under a high emissions, "business as usual" climate scenario, these regions likely won't have enough water to support other activities, let alone additional lithium mining, Dunn said.There were four exceptions in the study, including lithium-rich sites in North Carolina and Arkansas, which may have enough water to support future mines. However, there are other concerns related to lithium mining."Many of the lithium deposits in the United States reside near federally-recognized Indigenous and Tribal reservations, and the mines could violate Indigenous rights," Dunn said. "Lithium mining could also disturb sensitive ecosystems and biodiversity. And, like many other mineral mines, pollution, soil erosion, and water contamination are concerns."Together, the findings highlight a catch-22 in the quest to source lithium: Lithium is essential to support a green energy transition and curb climate change, but shrinking water availability due to global warming is making it harder to extract lithium.RELATED STORIESScientists just discovered an enormous lithium reservoir under PennsylvaniaDays numbered for 'risky' lithium-ion batteries, scientists say, after fast-charging breakthrough in sodium-ion alternativeSalar de Uyuni: The world's largest salt desert and lithium reservoir surrounded by volcanoesThe study did not explore potential improvements to water-use efficiency that could reduce the pressure on some water resources and increase the availability for activities such as lithium mining. Nor did the researchers include water exchanges known as interbasin transfers (IBTs) in their analysis, due to the lack of studies about these transfers under climate change."IBTs could help supply water to arid or water-stressed regions," Dunn said.Still, there is likely an upper limit on how much water can be allocated to lithium mining in a warming world, according to the study. This means the U.S. will probably continue to partially rely on foreign supply chains for lithium and other critical minerals.

Researchers have created a new chip that turns one of quantum computing's biggest frailties into a programmable feature. They say this first-of-its-kind experiment could carry implications for developing error-corrected, fault-tolerant quantum computers in the future.Unlike digital bits in a classical computer, which are represented as either "on" or "off," a quantum bit (qubit) has a much higher failure rate — roughly 1 in 1,000, compared with 1 in 1 billion for digital bits. That's because quantum computers are susceptible to "noise" — interference that's often cited as the biggest barrier preventing quantum computers from being more capable than the fastest supercomputers.As engineers develop quantum systems that are large enough in scale to perform useful functions, the amount of noise generally increases. Scientists can combat this noise using various error-correction techniques. But despite recent progress in this field, the challenge of developing a truly fault-tolerant quantum computer remains.That's because noise comes from various sources, many of which scientists have no control over. These include unpredictable disturbances in Earth's magnetic field, nearby radiation from Wi-Fi routers and other electronic devices, cosmic rays from space, and even neighboring qubits. This unpredictability has made it difficult to study this noise.But researchers have now devised an experiment that turns the error-correction paradigm on its head. Instead of trying to rid a quantum system of noise, they have created a chip that lets them introduce errors at will so they can examine noise and signal loss in a controlled environment. In the new study, published May 9 in the journal Nature Communications, the researchers described how this quantum computing chip uses photons captured from laser pulses as qubits. It also has what the researchers called a "side channel" that photons can be diverted to so the team could imitate the losses that occur under normal operating conditions and study them in detail."In many quantum experiments, anything that does not fit the ideal textbook picture is simply treated as loss and ignored," Govind Krishna, first author of the study and a doctoral student at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, said in a statement. "The chip enables us to simulate those non‑ideal processes in a controlled way."(Image credit: David Callahan CC by 0)The chip can be programmed to imitate errors in multiple ways, thus making it possible to simulate specific types of loss due to noise. The researchers can essentially modulate the amount of noise the system simulates in order to generate conditions for practical study. They do this by adjusting the number of photons that get sidetracked and the degree of quantum superposition, in which qubits share information over space and time through a process called quantum entanglement."The chip works a bit like a programmable railway junction for quantum light," Krishna explained. "By changing the control signals, we can decide whether the photons mostly stay on the main track, are mostly diverted to the loss channel, or end up in superpositions that depend on their quantum interference." This means the noise itself becomes an asset that scientists can use to further improve quantum computing systems, rather than trying to eliminate it.Related storiesMicrosoft breakthrough could reduce errors in quantum computers by 1,000 timesQuantum internet inches closer thanks to new chip — it helps beam quantum signals over real-world fiber-optic cablesScientists trained an AI model using an IBM quantum computer — and it answered questions correctly that the base model couldn'tAccording to the study, the novel chip design can model errors in any type of quantum system — even a non-photonic system, like a superconducting qubit-based quantum computer or one designed with neutral atom qubits. The scientists ultimately want to give researchers more tools to study how noise infiltrates and accumulates in quantum circuits. This could, in theory, lead to a greater understanding of how to perform more effective error-correction techniques in future systems, especially as those systems scale and interact with their environment even more. "Understanding how quantum systems behave under this messiness is crucial if we want our experiments to say something about nature as it really is, not just idealized setups," Krishna said.