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A wild widow spider behavior involving a backflip into death during sex has a simple genetic explanation, new research finds.

Male redback spiders ( Latrodectus hasselti ) — Australia's version of black widows — flip into females' fangs while mating in order to make sex last longer. They also constrict their abdomens — a maneuver that seems to help them survive the experience of being eaten alive long enough to finish transferring their sperm. Then, they break off their sperm-transferring organs, known as pedipalps, into the females like a cork on a bottle, which prevents other males from inseminating them.

Intriguingly, a close New Zealand cousin of the redback, the katipō ( Latrodectus katipo ), doesn't do any of this. ‪There are no backflips and no cannibalism — just a respectful courtship dance and a polite parting of ways afterward. That difference offered researchers an opportunity to understand the genetics of the more gymnastic mating behavior.

"What makes this system so intriguing is the fact that we are dealing with two species here, which are very closely related," Kardelen Özgün Uludağ , a doctoral student of behavioral biology at the University of Hamburg in Germany, told Live Science in an email. These two species may have separated less than 100,000 years ago, but they still show entirely different behavior and observable traits. "This is very uncommon in animals," she said.

To figure out the genetic basis of this behavioral schism, Uludağ and her colleagues first exposed katipō females to redback males so that they would mate. The two are closely related enough to yield hybrid offspring. The researchers then crossbred hybrid females with either male redbacks or male katipō spiders. This led to mixed-genetic males. (The researchers couldn't mate katipō males with redback females in the first place because redback females will eat katipōs instead of mating with them.)

The researchers took these hybrid males and paired them with katipō females so they could watch their mating behavior without any of them getting eaten. Then, they tracked how often the hybrid males backflipped and/or constricted their abdomens at the (presumably baffled) noncannibalistic females.

To their surprise, the researchers found that the behaviors did not have close genetic links. Hybrid males combined backflips and life-extending abdominal constrictions only about half the time, otherwise doing just one or the other. The researchers also saw patterns of inheritance that suggested that the somersaulting was linked to the spiders' sex chromosome — the X chromosome. Male and female spiders both have two X chromosomes, but females' X chromosomes carry two full sets of chromosomes, while males' carry only one. What's more, the somersaulting behavior had a surprisingly simple dominant-recessive pattern of being passed to offspring.

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The abdominal constriction, on the other hand, was a more complex genetic trait, the researchers reported Wednesday (Aug. 12) in the journal Biology Letters . That behavior may be controlled by multiple genes or strongly influenced by female behavior, the researchers concluded.

Although widow spiders are famed for eating their mates, only a couple of black widow species really do. The Australian redback is one, and the U.S.-based Southern black widow ( Latrodectus mactans ) is another.

The researchers would like to get to the bottom of what drives this behavior. "It would be nice to investigate more species of the genus Latrodectus to allow comparative studies," Uludağ said.

What do you know about spiders? Test your smarts with our spider quiz!

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The largest 2D map of the universe just dropped, and it’s a stunner. Compiled from more than a decade of observations, the new map charts 4 billion stars, galaxies, black holes, asteroids and other objects of interest throughout the cosmos.

The map reveals about three-quarters of the night sky in high resolution, spanning both visible and near-infrared light wavelengths and charting the areas of the universe not blocked by dust or gas. The map is so big, in fact, that it’s impossible to reproduce as a single image here; instead, astronomers invite you to explore their vision of the universe using the free Legacy Survey Sky Browser webpage .

It took 13 years and three ground-based sky surveys, using telescopes from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the University of Arizona to gather the information for the map. The results are available for other scientific investigators to use and will likely help other telescopes to search the cosmos.

"Astronomers and citizen scientists can combine the map with their own observations to better understand our universe," NSF officials from NOIRLab said in a statement Aug. 10.

"Researchers can search for rare phenomena like gravitational lenses, observe fleeting events like supernovae, and investigate two of physics' biggest mysteries: dark matter, the invisible substance that accounts for most of the mass in our universe, and dark energy, the force driving our universe's accelerating expansion," the statement added.

The spiral galaxy Messier 96, another stunning detail captured in the new map of the cosmos. (Image credit: DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys/LBNL/DOE & KPNO/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA) Related stories

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Past versions of the map have generated at least 1,800 science papers, according to the statement. The latest map is expected to inform newer observing projects, such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope . Additionally, these maps laid the groundwork for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey, which is creating a 3D map of the cosmos by measuring the light of celestial objects to figure out their distances.

DESI's first five-year survey wrapped up in April, and the early results suggest dark energy may be getting weaker with time. As physicists grapple with the implications, including how the universe may end, more data from DESI is coming shortly, with improved results from the first five years expected next year. DESI's work will continue into 2028, so even more is to come.

The three telescopes behind the map are The Dark Energy Camera, mounted on the NSF’s Victor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope in Chile, the NSF Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, and the UA Bok 2.3-meter Telescope, also at Kitt Peak. The observations were supplemented by years of data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite mission.

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Tens of thousands of years ago, Neanderthals mated with modern humans and passed along a gene variant that enables us to pack on more muscle, a new study finds.

Researchers found that this specific Neanderthal gene, a variant of the growth hormone receptor gene, causes cells to respond strongly to growth hormone. The Neanderthal version of the gene creates a growth hormone receptor with two amino acid changes and one deletion, compared with the typical receptor in most modern humans. The researchers think it entered the modern human gene pool through interbreeding, probably about 47,000 years ago .

"The most noticeable characteristic would likely be greater muscle mass, around 270 grams [9.5 ounces] per copy of the variant," study co-author Hugo Zeberg , a geneticist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, told Live Science in an email. "A person who inherited two copies, one from each parent, could therefore have more than half a kilogram [1.2 pounds] of additional muscle mass."

The study, published Aug. 5 in the journal Cell , found that almost all Neanderthals had this gene variant, but only about 10% of modern humans do. Certain modern human groups were more likely to have it, with the variant showing up in about 1% of modern people with European ancestry, and up to 25% of those with Southern Asian or Southeast Asian ancestry. It does not seem to appear in people of African ancestry, possibly because the interbreeding happened in Eurasia.

Growing cells

Human growth hormone is produced naturally by most people in the brain's pituitary gland, and it stimulates growth in children and adolescents. Some people have too much or too little human growth hormone , but most of these cases can be medically treated for it . The pituitary gland is also essential in adults for producing hormones that have several roles, including regulating metabolism, stimulating ovulation in ovaries, and stimulating testosterone production in testicles.

In the study, the researchers studied 10 samples of Neanderthal DNA and two samples of Denisovan DNA from archaeological sites in Europe, the Balkans, Siberia and Asia. (The Denisovans were closely related to the Neanderthals.)

They compared their results to modern biobanks that store more than 1.1 million human genomes and related physical data, to understand the effects of the gene variant.

The researchers next tweaked cells in the laboratory to express the regular and Neanderthal variants of the gene, and found that the Neanderthal cells multiplied about 40% more often than regular cells when flushed with growth hormone. Despite this, the Neanderthal gene variant doesn't always make people look bulkier, the researchers found. Instead, the differences are more subtle: for example, people who have this gene variant would have higher levels of a key signaling protein in response to growth hormone, the researchers wrote.

The team also found that people with the gene variant might have slightly shorter tooth roots and small differences in their jaw shape — features that are seen in Neanderthals, who went extinct around 40,000 years ago .

Neanderthals went extinct around 40,000 years ago, but passed along key genetic features to modern humans. (Image credit: gorodenkoff via Getty Images) Growing Neanderthals

Neanderthals were, in general, stockier than modern humans. But Zeberg thinks their enhanced response to growth hormone does not fully explain why Neanderthals were generally more robust and "thick-set" than modern humans.

"It cannot explain the Neanderthal body type on its own," he said. "Neanderthal robustness was almost certainly shaped by many genes, as well as by development, lifestyle, and environmental factors. Our results provide one possible piece of a much larger puzzle."

The placenta produces a particular form of growth hormone for a fetus, which differs from the form of growth hormone produced by the pituitary gland. However, it seems the Neanderthal variant doesn't respond to growth hormone from the placenta. As a result, Neanderthal babies were the same size at birth as modern human babies but grew faster after that , Zeberg said.

In the study's sample of modern humans, the team noticed that children aged 11 or younger with the gene variant didn't show the effect; rather, only older individuals did. This suggests that the gene variant's differences might not emerge until puberty, strengthening the idea that it responds only to growth hormone produced by the pituitary gland and not by the placenta, the researchers said.

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"Growth hormone is also particularly important during puberty, when its levels rise substantially," Zeberg said. "The effect of the variant is therefore likely to be especially important during puberty and later development, rather than before birth."

Kornelius Kupczik , a paleoanthropologist at the University of Chile in Santiago who was not involved in the study, told Live Science that it was notable to see such a high prevalence of the Neanderthal gene variant in people of South Asian and Southeast Asian ancestry, when it was relatively rare among Europeans.

This suggests that early human migrations may have been more complicated than had been assumed — a "curious" challenge that required further investigation. "I guess that's something we still have to find out," he said.

How much do you know about our closest relatives? Find out with our Neanderthal quiz!

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Scientists have developed a new type of artificial intelligence (AI) chip that mimics the human brain's aptitude for instinctive motor responses.

Modeled after the cerebellum , the part of the brain that helps coordinate balance and fine muscle control, the chip is designed to ignore routine information and respond only to unexpected events.

In simulated tests using electrocardiogram (ECG) data, the device flagged irregular heartbeats (arrhythmias) within one-fifth of a heartbeat and with 98% accuracy, according to the researchers — and did so twice as fast as conventional AI systems. The team published their findings July 10 in the journal Nature Communications .

The device could pave the way for highly responsive, low-power AI systems capable of spotting and reacting to unusual events without relying on the massive computing resources of data centers — from always-on health monitors to self-driving cars and autonomous robots.

A new approach to neuromorphic computing

Computer architecture inspired by the human brain is known as neuromorphic computing . Many researchers consider it key to developing more advanced and efficient AI systems, because it more closely mimics how neurons fire in the human brain .

Rather than processing all incoming information with equal intensity, the brain's biological circuits prioritize important signals and filter out routine background noise, helping it conserve energy.

Most neuromorphic approaches focus on the cerebrum, the largest part of the human brain and the central "thought center." In the new study, the scientists instead focused on the cerebellum, a smaller brain region responsible for coordination and instinctive motor skills — things we do without much conscious thought.

Neural circuits in the cerebellum contain competing excitatory and inhibitory signals that normally balance each other out. When something unexpected happens, the balance shifts and alerts the brain that it needs to react.

This makes the cerebellum a prime, untapped candidate for neuromorphic AI systems, said study co-author Mark Hersam , a professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University.

"The cerebellum is excellent at ignoring the expected and reserving its resources for reacting to the unexpected," Hersam said in a statement . "That approach ultimately translates into lower energy consumption."

A map of the human brain, including the cerebellum. (Image credit: grayjay/Shutterstock) Merging memory and compute

While current AI is exceptionally good at recognizing patterns, it spends enormous amounts of computing power continuously analyzing streams of data.

One of the constraints is the hardware itself. Processing information involves shuttling data back and forth between separate memory and processing components, resulting in a delay known as the von Neumann bottleneck .

This new device integrates memory and processing into a single component called a memtransistor (a portmanteau of "memory" and " transistor "), enabling it to move data much more quickly and efficiently.

The memtransistor is made from an atomically thin semiconductor called molybdenum disulfide, which forms a channel between two electrodes . One electrode makes direct contact with the semiconductor, while the other sits partly above it, separated by a thin insulating layer.

This asymmetry changes how electricity flows through the device, allowing it to switch between "excitatory" and "inhibitory" modes when the direction of the voltage is reversed, the researchers explained in the study.

The "output layer" of spiking neural networks

The device is designed to form the core of the output layer of a larger spiking neural network (SSN), Hersam explained in an email to Live Science.

SNNs are a type of neural network that processes information as a series of electrical spikes, mimicking how signals pass between neurons . For the study, the researchers measured how individual memtransistors responded to repeated electrical pulses, then used the results to simulate a network comprising multiple devices that could distinguish normal ECG patterns from arrhythmias.

They then fed the same ECG data into the cerebellum-inspired memtransistor network and a standard transformer model — the AI architecture that underpins large language models (LLMs) — and compared how quickly and efficiently each detected an arrhythmia. The cerebellum-inspired system was more than twice as fast and required around 10,000 times fewer computer calculations, according to the team.

Hersam said the results should translate into faster, more energy-efficient hardware, though he added that real-world performance would depend on the speed and size of the devices.

"We have not scaled memtransistors to the level of commercial Si [silicon] chips, but in principle, 2D materials and memtransistors can be scaled to comparable sizes and operating speeds," he told Live Science.

More efficient AI at the edge

Hersam said the new device was particularly suited to scenarios where quick inference was needed using minimal power. "One example could be edge computing, or in cases where access to the cloud is not available or is not desired due to the sensitivity of the data," he added.

A huge potential benefit of the technology is that it could slash AI's reliance on data centers. According to the International Energy Agency, global data center electricity demand could reach around 945 terawatt-hours by 2030 — slightly more than the entire electricity consumption of Japan — largely driven by AI. One terawatt-hour is equal to 1 trillion watt-hours — enough electricity to power a 60-watt lightbulb continuously for 1.9 million years.

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A hypothetical future memtransistor-based network could enable robots, autonomous vehicles and cybersecurity systems to run continuously at low power by processing data locally and reacting only when they detect an unexpected, potentially hazardous event, the researchers said.

"The current AI deployed in cybersecurity and autonomous vehicles uses the massive computing power of data centers or an in-house facility of GPUs and CPUs," Hersam told Live Science. "In contrast, our approach promises low energy/power consumption by simplifying the net number of operations needed… [This] is not an incremental performance improvement, but a fundamentally different way of detecting anomalies."

The next stage of research will focus on mimicking the cerebellum's ability to adapt to predictability ‪—‬ specifically, how the human brain stops treating events as unique or unexpected when they're encountered multiple times.

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

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Sperm whales make the loudest communication sound of any animal on Earth, researchers find — but they aren't sure why.

In a new study, researchers investigated the mysterious, low-frequency clangs made by male sperm whales and found that they were louder than any known sperm whale communication signal, with the potential to be heard by other whales around 43 miles (70 kilometers) away.

They are very loud and metallic sounds that almost sound "like a jail door slamming," which is "why they are also called clangs," study first author Simone Videsen and co-author Peter Teglberg Madsen , biologists at the Center for Active Sensing with Sound at Aarhus University in Denmark, told Live Science in an email. "You feel small as a human when you hear them, as they are clearly made by something bigger than you," they said.

Sperm whales ( Physeter macrocephalus ) are the largest toothed predators, growing up to around 59 feet (18 meters) long. They dive deep into the ocean to hunt giant squid ( Architeuthis dux ) and other prey that dwell as low as 1.9 miles (3 km) below the ocean surface.

The distinctive clangs, first reported in the 1980s , are the loudest communication signal that sperm whales make, although they can produce even louder echolocation clicks to locate prey during hunts. The clangs are unusual because they are made only by males and represent an extreme form of communication that scientists still can't fully explain.

In the latest study, the researchers used hydrophones (underwater microphones) off the Seychelles to measure the sound level of the clangs. They also studied the rhythm of the signals in recordings collected in other locations, including off Sri Lanka, Norway and Scotland.

The recordings revealed that the whales kept up a slow, low-frequency rhythm, unlike the short, rhythmic clicks that both males and females make for typical social communication or the clicks used in echolocation. In fact, the rhythm was so slow that males left a gap of 5 to 10 seconds between each clang. That might not sound that impressive ‪—‬ but as far as we know, whales can't count to 10 , so they are using another means to keep up this rhythm. According to the study, the whales might be relying on the echoes of the clangs bouncing off the seafloor.

Sperm whales can produce these record-breaking acoustics thanks to their ginormous noses — the largest of any animal — that dominate their massive heads, which make up about one-third of their body length. To make the clangs, male whales use their "phonic lips" ‪—‬ structures in their noses that snap together.

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"They make [these noises] by forcing pressurized air through so-called phonic lips in their giant sound producing nose," Videsen and Madsen said.

The researchers proposed a few possible explanations for why the whales might be making the long-range clangs. For example, the males might be using the sounds to attract mates or scare off other males.

However, the communication may exist for another, unknown reason. In future studies, the researchers hope to learn more about this mysterious form of communication by playing recordings of the clangs underwater and seeing how nearby sperm whales respond.

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QUICK FACTS

Where is it? Ol Doinyo Lengai, Tanzania [ -2.7734503796, 35.91519798 ]

What's in the photo? The lava-stained slopes and ash cone of a highly active volcano

Who took the photo? An unnamed astronaut on board the International Space Station

When was it taken? Oct. 6, 2020

This dramatic astronaut photo shows a highly active stratovolcano in Tanzania that was recently adorned with a striking white "crown" of ash. The explosive volcano produces a rare type of lava that is unusually cool, uniquely colored and the fastest-flowing on Earth.

The volcano is officially named Ol Doinyo Lengai and stands up to 9,718 feet (2,692 meters) above the grassy plains of the Arusha region of northern Tanzania. The local Maasai people call the towering peak the "Mountain of God," because they believe it is the residence of the supreme creator god Ngai (also known as Engai or Enkai), according to the book " Sacred Mountains of the World " (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Ol Doinyo Lengai is one of Africa's most active volcanoes; it has been erupting on and off for the past 15,000 years. It alternates between effusive eruptions, where lava seeps out of its vents, and sporadic explosive outbursts, which can drastically alter its appearance. Its most recent eruption, which is effusive, has been going on since April 2017, according to the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program .

The sacred mountain produces a rare type of lava that consists of natrocarbonatite rock, which is rich in sodium, potassium and calcium carbonate but low in silica. As a result, it is much cooler than most other lava, dipping to temperatures below 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit (600 degrees Celsius). It also has an unusually low viscosity, which makes it "some of the fastest-flowing lava in the world," according to NASA's Earth Observatory .

When it solidifies, this unusually runny lava turns surprisingly pale, due to chemical reactions with rainwater and moisture in the air. In this image, you can see several lightly colored rivers of rock snaking down the volcano's flank. The youngest of these lava flows was created during an eruption in 1998.

For most of the past century, Ol Doinyo Lengai's summit consisted of a bowl-like depression that gradually filled with lava. But between 2007 and 2008, a series of major explosive eruptions birthed a 330-foot-tall (100 m) ash cone that now looms over the summit's center.

This explosive event has transformed the volcano's appearance when viewed from space, additional photos from the Earth Observatory show. In the featured image, a dark spot of fresh lava can be seen in the center of the cone, making it look like a crown.

Lake Natron, near Ol Doinyo Lengai, hosts large flamingo populations. (Image credit: TONY KARUMBA/AFP via Getty Images) Ol Doinyo Lengai is located in the East African Rift System, a roughly 2,000-mile long (3,500 kilometers) area surrounding a divergent fault line where the African Plate is splitting into the Somali and Nubian plates .

This region has been tectonically active for more than 25 million years and has created some of the continent's most interesting topographic features, including Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya, which are located on each side of Ol Doinyo Lengai, according to the Earth Observatory.

The godly mountain is around 10 miles (16 km) south of Lake Natron , a red salt lake that's famed for its large flamingo populations. The geographical features are often photographed alongside one another.

See more Earth from space

Green vortex in 'cryptodepression' lake

A 2020 astronaut photo shows a massive, milky-green vortex in Lake Skadar, which lies on the border between Montenegro and Albania.

Gold glitters around 'lake of souls'

A 2015 satellite photo shows a series of golden tendrils surrounding Ghana's Lake Bosumtwi, which is considered sacred to the local Asante people.

Trio of colorful lakes straddles states

A 2020 astronaut photo shows three uniquely colored lakes — Tahoe, Walker and Mono — straddling contrasting biomes on either side of the California-Nevada border.

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently approved the first mRNA vaccine for seasonal influenza , bringing a bumpy approval process to a close.

The shot's approval appears to contradict the federal government's generally unfavorable view of mRNA vaccines. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) terminated half a billion dollars in funding for mRNA vaccine development, impacting 22 projects. A key vaccine advisory committee was remade to include people who have been vocally opposed to mRNA vaccines . Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has falsely called the mRNA-based COVID-19 shots the " deadliest vaccines ever made " and incorrectly claimed that mRNA vaccines don't work well against upper-respiratory viral infections .

Does the approval of a new mRNA vaccine signal a shift in this sentiment? Not necessarily, experts told Live Science.

"I don't read this as a shift in the administration's stance on mRNA," Jeff Coller , a distinguished professor of RNA biology and therapeutics at Johns Hopkins University, said in an email. Coller is also a co-founder of the Alliance for mRNA Medicines , an international association aimed at advancing mRNA technology, and he advises several RNA companies.

The approval does suggest, however, that the FDA's approval process isn't completely compromised by anti-mRNA sentiment, Coller said.

"What the approval does signal, and I think this is the more useful story: the statutory machinery still works when it is allowed to run," Coller said. "For companies and investors deciding whether to keep building in this space in the United States, that matters more than any statement from HHS."

A "tortured" approval process

The new flu vaccine, called mFlusiva, was made by Moderna. The company filed for the shot's approval in February, but initially, the FDA denied Moderna's request to have its materials reviewed.

Reporting by STAT News later found that career FDA scientists had planned to do the review but they had been overruled by Dr. Vinay Prasad , then director of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research ( CBER ). (Live Science has contacted the FDA for comment.)

"It's been a little tortured," Dr. Paul Offit , director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, said of the approval process. In April 2024, before starting its final trial of the vaccine, Moderna ran its plans past the FDA, and the FDA confirmed in writing that the trial's design was acceptable. But when Moderna filed for approval using data from the trial, "Vinai Prasad, who had just been put in place at CBER … said no," Offit told Live Science.

"That didn't last long, nor did he last long, after that," Offit added. The denial was reversed within the month , and Prasad left the FDA in April .

"That refusal was reversed fifteen days later," Coller said. "Nothing about the evidence changed in those fifteen days." What changed were the choices made by FDA leadership, he said.

Once allowed to do so, the FDA's vaccine advisory committee, called the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), met to discuss the shot's safety and effectiveness. The group voted unanimously to recommend approving the vaccine for adults ages 50 and up. The FDA then followed this advice, making the approval official.

"They're experts in the field," Offit said of the VRBPAC members. He personally sat on the committee from 2017-2025. "It's a pleasure to go to those meetings because, you know, it's the way it's supposed to work," he said.

Unlike the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), VRBPAC has not seen a major overhaul in its membership since Kennedy's appointment, though it does have a number of open vacancies . However, its remaining members have ample expertise in infectious diseases, immunology, global health and genetics .

mRNA-based vaccines can be made more quickly than conventional flu vaccines can, and trials suggest that the newly approved shot offers more protection, too. (Image credit: Catherine Falls Commercial via Getty Images) Next step for the new mRNA flu vaccine

Now that mFlusiva is FDA approved, the data must be reviewed by the CDC, which issues recommendations about how the vaccine should be given and to whom. Normally, a vaccine advisory committee would review the data first and then give the CDC guidance, but it's unclear how that might look in this case, Offit said.

That's because ACIP is in the midst of a lawsuit , which recently prompted a federal judge to put a freeze on several of the committee's recent changes . Those changes include the appointment of new committee members by Kennedy and a major revision of the childhood immunization schedule. While the litigation plays out, the committee could still issue new vaccine guidance if it appoints enough new members to compensate for the ones who are currently in limbo — but that hasn't happened yet.

The CDC could issue its own recommendations for mFlusiva without ACIP's help, Offit noted. It's within the agency's power to do so. But will that happen?

"I don't know," Offit said. "Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has ultimate say, and he's a science denialist and an anti-vaccine activist. So I don't know." Offit predicts that Kennedy "will do nothing to encourage vaccination, period, independent of what the vaccine technology is."

The shot is now licensed, thanks to the FDA approval, and that means it could be used without bespoke CDC recommendations, Offit said. But a lack of CDC recommendations may undermine insurance coverage for and access to the vaccines .

It would be useful to have an mRNA vaccine option available this upcoming flu season, Offit said, in part because trials suggest that the shot is more protective than existing options, especially for adults 50 to 64. There's also strong evidence that that's true for adults over 64, but for that age group, more data will be collected in the coming season to see how well mFlusiva stacks up against existing high-dose flu shots for older adults. Offit expects those upcoming results will likely be positive and back up the existing evidence, which involved measuring antibody levels in older adults given either vaccine.

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Other strengths of mRNA-based flu vaccines are that they can be produced in about half the time that existing flu shots are made and they can be better tailored to match the targeted flu strains, Offit noted.

In the 2025-2026 flu season, there were at least 390,000 hospitalizations and 24,000 deaths from flu in the U.S. Flu shots are the best way to prevent severe illness and death from influenza.

Looking to the future of mRNA vaccines in the U.S., mFlusiva's approval suggests that vaccine regulatory bodies still have the means and will to review mRNA vaccine trials and approve new products, as Coller said. However, this stand-alone approval doesn't necessarily mark a sea change in the federal government's sentiment toward the technology, he noted.

"An approval is a legal determination on one application. It tells you the data met the standard, which everyone involved in reviewing it already knew," he said. "A genuine shift would look like the 22 canceled mRNA contracts being restored, or a retraction of the claim that these vaccines fail against respiratory viruses. As far as I know, neither has happened."

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

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Archaeologists excavating near the ancient town of Aspendos in Turkey have discovered the grave of a person who may have been a pro athlete over two millennia ago.

"Coins with depictions of wrestlers and other artifacts found in the tomb indicate that the person buried here may have been involved in sports, perhaps even a wrestler," Mehmet Nuri Ersoy , Turkey's minister of culture and tourism, said in a translated statement Monday (Aug. 10).

The archaeologists found the skeleton and artifacts in a box-style sarcophagus made of stone slabs while digging in one of the cemeteries outside Aspendos. The tomb likely dates to between 475 and 300 B.C., during the city's Classical period, according to the statement.

Aspendos was a Greco-Roman city in southwest Turkey, roughly 10 miles (16 kilometers) inland from the Mediterranean Sea. The city was founded by Greek colonists in the fifth century B.C. and quickly rose to prominence as a trading center for salt, olive oil, wood and horses. Aspendos had a large Greek gymnasium as well as a large stadium that was erected in the second century A.D. and could hold up to 8,000 spectators who watched footraces, javelin contests and wrestling.

The ancient sport of wrestling is linked to Aspendos primarily through the city's coinage. Aspendos minted its own silver coins with the image of two naked wrestlers on one side.

A recently excavated grave reveals a human skeleton and silver coins depicting wrestlers from the ancient city of Aspendos in Turkey. (Image credit: Alamy) These coins, called staters, were minted for well over a century, which suggests wrestling held civic significance for Aspendos, Oğuz Tekin , an archaeologist at Koç University in Turkey, suggested in a 2000 study .

Although wrestler-type Aspendos coins were discovered in the newly excavated grave, it is unclear whether the deceased was a wrestler.

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"There will need to be much more analysis before a positive identification of the body as a wrestler can be determined," Sarah E. Bond , a historian at the University of Iowa who was not involved in the discovery, told Live Science. For example, signs of a broken and healed nose could indicate the person was an athlete.

"Coins alone cannot indicate this was a Classical era Greek wrestler," Bond said, because "these coins were numerous and used as payment by the entire populace, not by wrestlers alone."

The grave is part of the ongoing excavation of a newly discovered cemetery at Aspendos, according to Ersoy. "With every new find in Aspendos, we will continue to complete the missing pages of our history, protect our cultural heritage through scientific studies, and carry it into the future," he said in the statement.

See if you know what these mysterious artifacts are with our archaeological fragments quiz!

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In parts of West Africa, getting sick used to mean navigating a maze of barriers — distance, cost, time spent away from work — before ever seeing a health worker. Muso set out to change that.

Working hand-in-hand with governments, they built a model where professional community health workers bring care directly to patients’ doors within 24 hours, at no cost. And because these health workers are from the communities they serve, trust in the new process is already built in; they’re not strangers showing up at the door. In addition to the community health worker program, a big part of Muso’s work includes upgrading primary care clinics — through rehabilitating infrastructure and training clinic staff — to better accommodate patient referrals when home care is too complex.

The impact has been historic, resulting in an over 90% drop in infant mortality rates in Mali alone. Today, governments across the region are funding and scaling the model themselves, bringing it to over 12M people and growing.

This video The community healthcare model transforming lives across West Africa is featured on Big Think .

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The Berlin gold hat was made around 3,000 years ago from a single sheet of gold and accentuated with motifs that represent a calendar. (Image credit: Alamy) QUICK FACTS

Name: Berlin gold hat

What it is: A tall, conical hat

Where it is from: Likely southern Germany

When it was made: Circa 1000 to 800 B.C.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Egyptian Relief

Mummy Mask

Elamite Helmet

Can you put together last week's Astonishing Artifact ?

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The Sun is so much more than a shining ball of energetic plasma.

This incredible still image from the National Science Foundation’s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) is the highest-resolution image of the Sun’s surface (i.e., photosphere) ever acquired. The image is taken at a wavelength of 416 nanometers, and showcases several features known to arise in fluid flow, such as the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability.

Credit : NSF/NSO/AURA/MPS

Its fluid surface is ocean-like: with plasma currents flowing, cooling, and colliding.

This animation shows the growth of complex, turbulent, vortex-rich structure from an initially small set of imperfections between two flowing fluids interacting while moving at different speeds: the classic scenario of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. This particular form of turbulence is thought to be at play in the famed Vincent Van Gogh painting “The Starry Night.”

Credit : Empetrisor/Wikimedia Commons

In physics, whenever two fluids flow past or through each other, instabilities arise.

This image of a portion of the planet Jupiter, taken by NASA’s Juno mission’s JunoCam, showcases multiple layers of Jupiter’s atmosphere passing by one another at different speeds, with many turbulent features arising, including from the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability where the white and red swirling features appear.

Credit : NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstad/Sean Doran

Shear forces create turbulent fluid flows, eddy currents, and vortices.

Incredibly, this image shows the phenomenon of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability in a ring of a pure antimatter plasma. As antiprotons are held in a particle trap, electric and magnetic fields keep them quasi-stable, but cannot stop Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities from creating vortices and causing the antiparticles to annihilate when they encounter the matter-containing apparatuses surrounding them.

Credit : Rcaravit/Wikimedia Commons

The underlying mechanism — the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability — arises in ocean waves,

A simulated video of waves created in a methane ocean on Titan (left) versus terrestrial waves generated in Earth’s water oceans (right). The flowing fluid of air (top) against the moving fluid of water (bottom) at different speeds creates ripples and waves on the liquid’s surface through the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability mechanism.

Credit : Massachusetts Institute of Technology

terrestrial clouds ,

These wave-like clouds, seen forming over Mount Duval in New South Wales, Australia, are an example of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability occurring in Earth’s atmosphere: where two fluids or gases, moving at different speeds, grow small initial instabilities into large, chaotic, turbulent vortices.

Credit : GRAHAMUK/English language Wikipedia

and in the atmospheres of gas giant worlds.

Over a period of 8 months, the largest storm in the Solar System raged, encircling the entire gas giant world of Saturn. The storm itself was large enough that it was capable of fitting as many as 10-to-12 Earths inside. Cassini, although it wasn’t expecting this to occur, was equipped with instrument technology that was more than sufficient to discover and study this unprecedented feature, where the differing speeds of the flowing fluids in Saturn’s atmosphere create myriad features associated with the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability.

Credit : NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

These long-predicted instabilities have previously been detected within solar outflows .

This view of the Sun showcases Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities and related features arising in the Sun’s atmosphere, due to outflows of material, in 2010 as observed with NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.

Credit : NASA/L. Ofman & B.J. Thompson, Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2011

However, simulations predict such instabilities should arise within the Sun itself.

This still from a high-resolution simulation of the Sun’s photosphere showcase a region where two fluid currents on the photosphere flow against one another, creating instabilities, vortices, and other detailed figures. The simulation is visualized at a wavelength of 416 nanometers: to match the observing capabilities of the DKIST observatory.

Credit : NSF/NSO/AURA/HAO

If true, they’d help explain the high observed temperature of the Sun’s outer corona.

This image, of the Sun’s inner corona and prominences on the Sun, was taken during the April 20, 2023 total solar eclipse. Exquisite views of what’s occurring just off of the Sun’s disk are best captured during a total solar eclipse. While the solar corona is many times hotter, in terms of temperature, than the Sun’s photosphere, a complete understanding of the energy transport that leads to those high temperature properties remains elusive.

Credit : Phil Hart

They’d also provide a mechanism for building and transporting magnetic energy across the Sun.

Solar coronal loops, such as those observed by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) satellite here in 2014, follow the path of the magnetic field on the Sun. When these loops ‘break’ in just the right way, they can emit coronal mass ejections, which have the potential to impact Earth. With the ground-based power of DKIST, we can gain information about the Sun’s magnetic field, as well as the transport of energy, on the solar photosphere itself.

Credit : NASA/SDO

Only DKIST — the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope — has sufficient resolution to find out.

This photograph shows the flagship heliophysics facility, built and managed by the National Science Foundation, known as the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, or DKIST. After completing construction in 2020 and commissioning in 2022, it has given us our highest-resolution views of the Sun’s photosphere ever since.

Credit : NSF/NSO/AURA

Since its 2020-2022 commissioning , it reveals the smallest-scale features ever seen on the solar photosphere.

While we’re used to seeing the disk of the Sun as a uniform surface with only the occasional sunspot, DKIST is capable of resolving the millions of individual convective cells across the Sun’s photosphere, as well as individual, changing details within those cells over time.

Credit : NSF/NSO/AURA/MPS

Its time-lapse imagery and videos showcase small-scale, dynamically changing swirls .

This animation showcases DKIST’s actual views of the Sun at its maximum resolution (top), with blown up, zoomed-in views of three different regions in the lower panels. The deformed boundaries of magnetic elements and the ultra-fine scale stripes, as well as the vortices in motion, are all associated with the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability mechanism.

Credit : NSF/NSO/AURA/MPS

The deformed, changing boundaries of magnetic elements within the Sun are apparent.

A close-up view from the Inouye Solar Telescope image highlighting a region of the solar photosphere. The enlarged inset reveals the fine-scale magnetic structures and dark striations associated with the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability at a scale of tens of kilometers. The animated switchover shows the size of the Hawaiian islands, where DKIST (the observing telescope) is located on the summit of Maui, for comparison.

Credit : NSF/NSO/AURA/MPS

The ultra-fine scale stripes, at those boundaries, also arise from Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities.

This high-resolution simulation of two fluids moving at different speeds, interacting, across the surface of the Sun generates many classic features associated with the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. The match between these state-of-the-art simulations and DKIST’s observations of the solar photosphere are a striking confirmation of the theory.

Credit : NSF/NSO/AURA/MPS

These views match exquisitely with physics-based simulations.

A side-by-side comparison of a real observation from the Inouye Solar Telescope (top left) and a synthetic image generated by state-of-the-art, physics-based computer simulations (top right). The blown up details in both cases (bottom left and bottom center) shows remarkable agreement, indicating the role of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability in the photosphere of the Sun. The simulated magnetic field map (bottom right) confirms the deformation of the magnetic elements from a physics perspective.

Credit : NSF/NSO/AURA/HAO

DKIST’s scientific importance, as Earth’s only ground-based flagship heliophysics observatory, cannot be overstated.

This still image of a small region of the Sun’s photosphere, along with three zoomed-in closeups, clearly show a variety of features associated with classic Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities. This provides a potential mechanism for explaining the Sun’s magnetism and its intensely hot corona: the strongest such evidence to date of such a theoretical connection.

Credit : NSF/NSO/AURA/MPS

Mostly Mute Monday tells an astronomical story in images, visuals, and no more than 200 words.

This article We caught an ocean of plasma waves “breaking” on the Sun is featured on Big Think .

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This article was originally published by Yale Environment 360 .

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shallow groundwater storage in February 2003 and February 2025, as compared to the average from 1948 to 2012. (Image credit: NASA / Adapted by Yale Environment 360) How much rain the Sahel gets depends on the West African monsoon, a wet wind that sweeps north from the Gulf of Guinea between June and September, and on how far the monsoon penetrates into the interior. Whether it reaches the 15th parallel north of the equator or stalls at the 10th parallel make the difference between a good year and a failed harvest, say hydrologists.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The streets of the Keurs Massar area in Dakar are flooded on Sept. 7, 2020 after a monsoon in Senegal. (Image credit: SEYLLOU via Getty Images) The effects of these mega-storms are especially challenging in a region more used to disasters caused by the absence of rain. Niger, one of the world’s 10 poorest countries, saw tens of thousands die from famine during the late 20th century droughts. Now, it sees more deaths from floods than droughts. Fierce storms during the 2024 monsoon season inundated the capital, Niamey, and in rural areas washed away more than 150,000 mud-brick homes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dead trees in an arm of Lake Chad near Kiskawa, Chad, that was recently flooded. (Image credit: JORIS BOLOMEY via Getty Images) An amplifying factor is the drought-driven crusting of soils, which has increased runoff by around 50 percent in the central Sahel in recent decades. Analysis by Christophe Peugeot, a hydrologist at the HydroSciences laboratory at the University of Montpellier in France, found that the droughts "have permanently transformed the region's soils… fueling today's floods."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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quick facts

What it is: Saguaro, a lower-redshift spiral galaxy

Where it is: About 10 billion light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major

When it was shared: July 29, 2026.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Knowable Magazine Knowable Magazine Knowable Magazine Knowable Magazine Knowable Magazine Energy-hungry bots

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t give up on search

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

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

Smaller models use less energy

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

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

Using small, specialized models for particular tasks consumes a fraction of the energy guzzled by large, all-purpose models, with similar if even slightly better accuracy. (Image credit: Knowable Magazine) The shift away from larger models resulted in a 90 percent decrease in energy use overall, making this the most powerful single energy-saving strategy Drobnjak tested in her study. As Gupta puts it, “You don’t need to use a trillion-parameter model for editing an email.”

Less chatty chatbots

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

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

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

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

Keeping chatbot prompts short can conserve some energy, but asking chatbots to keep their responses brief amounts to much bigger savings. (Image credit: Knowable Magazine) Go low-res and batch video

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you're in the path of totality

A map of the path of totality (red) for the Aug. 12 solar eclipse. (Image credit: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio) If you're fortunate enough to be inside the 180-mile-wide (290 kilometers) path of totality — the path of the dark shadow of the moon — in eastern Greenland, western Iceland or northeastern Spain, you'll experience the moon completely covering the sun for up to 2 minutes, 18 seconds. The sky will darken to twilight, bright stars and planets may appear in the daytime sky, and the sun's spectacular corona (its wispy outer atmosphere) will become visible. Here’s a handy guide to all the gear you’ll need to get the most out of totality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you're in North America

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A deep partial eclipse will be visible in many locations throughout Europe, with a smaller eclipse visible in North America. (Image credit: GAGAN NAYAR via Getty Images) If you're elsewhere in Europe and North Africa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With age, the lining of the uterus typically becomes less receptive to implantation, lowering the chance of pregnancy. (Image credit: BSIP / Contributor vis Getty Images) "One finding that surprised us was that overall microbial diversity did not change markedly across the different age groups," study co-author Dr. Rong Li , deputy director of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Peking University Third Hospital in Beijing, said in a statement . "Instead, the major differences involved particular bacterial species."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Going out with a bang

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The power of encryption

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

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

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

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

Thomas Espitau, head of research at PQShield

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

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

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

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

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

Building defensive measures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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