Giant Sloths the Size of Elephants Once Walked Along the Ground. Here’s How the Massive Animals Evolved and Declined Researchers analyzed fossils and DNA to get a big-picture view of sloth evolution and determine what drove their immense size variation Researchers revealed that differences in sloth habitats drove the wide variation in size seen in extinct species. Diego Barletta Today, sloths are slow-moving, tree-dwelling creatures that live in Central and South America and can grow up to 2.5 feet long. Thousands of years ago, however, some sloths walked along the ground, weighed around 8,000 pounds and were as big as Asian elephants. Some of these now-extinct species were “like grizzly bears, but five times larger,” as Rachel Narducci, collection manager of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, says in a statement. In a study published last week in the journal Science, Narducci and her colleagues studied ancient and modern sloth DNA along with more than 400 sloth fossils to shed light on the shocking differences in their ancient sizes—from the elephant-sized Megatherium ground sloth to its 14-pound relatives living in trees. While it’s clear that tree-dwelling lifestyles necessitate small bodies, scientists weren’t sure why ground sloths specifically demonstrated such vast size diversity. To investigate this, the team used their genetic and fossil analyses to reconstruct a sloth tree of life that reaches back to the animals’ emergence more than 35 million years ago. They integrated data on sloths’ habitats, diets and mobility that had been gathered in previous research. With a computer model, they processed this information, which ultimately indicated that sloths’ size diversity was mostly driven by their habitats and climates. “When we look at what comes out in the literature, a lot of it is description of individual finds, or new taxa,” Greg McDonald, a retired regional paleontologist with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management who was not involved with the study, tells Science News’ Carolyn Gramling. The new work is “more holistic in terms of looking at a long-term pattern. Often, we don’t get a chance to step back and get the big picture of what’s going on.” The big picture suggests that since the emergence of the oldest known sloths—ground animals around the size of a Great Dane—the creatures evolved into and out of tree living a number of times. Around 14 million to 16 million years ago, however, a time of global warming called the Mid-Miocene Climatic Optimum pushed sloths to become smaller, which is a known way for animals to respond to heat stress. Warmer temperatures might have also seen more rain, which would have created more forest habitats ideal for tree-dwelling sloths. Around a million years later, however, ground sloths grew bigger as the planet’s temperature cooled. “Gigantism is more closely associated with cold and dry climates,” Daniel Casali, a co-author of the paper and a researcher of mammalian evolution at the University of São Paulo, tells New Scientist’s Jake Buehler. A larger body mass would have helped the animals traverse environments with few resources more efficiently, Narducci says in the statement. In fact, these large ground sloths spread out across diverse habitats and thrived in different regions. The aquatic sloth Thalassocnus even evolved marine adaptations similar to manatees. Ground sloths achieved their greatest size during the last ice age—right before starting to disappear around 15,000 years ago. Given that humans arrived in North America around the same time (though recent research indicates they may have arrived as far back as 20,000 years ago), some scientists say humans are the obvious cause of the sloths’ demise. While tree-dwelling sloths were out of reach to our ancestors, the large and slow ground animals would have made easy targets. Even still, two species of tree sloths in the Caribbean disappeared around 4,500 years ago—also shortly after humans first arrived in the region, according to the statement. While the study joins a host of research indicating that humans drove various large Ice Age animals to extinction, “in science, we need several lines of evidence to reinforce our hypotheses, especially in unresolved and highly debated issues such as the extinction of megafauna,” says Thaís Rabito Pansani, a paleontologist from the University of New Mexico who did not participate in the study, to New Scientist. The International Union for Conservation of Nature currently recognizes seven—following a recent species discovery—and three are endangered. As such, “one take-home message is that we need to act now to avoid a total extinction of the group,” says lead author Alberto Boscaini, a vertebrate paleontologist from the University of Buenos Aires, to the BBC’s Helen Briggs. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

A Young Cooper’s Hawk Learned to Use a Crosswalk Signal to Launch Surprise Attacks on Other Birds Researcher Vladimir Dinets watched the bird repeatedly sneak behind a row of cars to ambush its unsuspecting prey Cooper's hawks are skilled hunters that feast on small and medium-sized birds. Pixabay Vladimir Dinets was driving his daughter to school one morning when a flash of movement caught his eye. He watched as a young Cooper’s hawk darted out of a tree, soared low to the ground along a line of cars and dove into a nearby front yard. Dinets is a zoologist at the University of Tennessee who specializes in animal behavior and intelligence, so the scene naturally piqued his curiosity. But when he watched the exact same scenario play out a few days later, Dinets realized something scientifically interesting might be going on. He decided to investigate. The bird seemed to understand that, whenever a human pushed the pedestrian crossing signal, a long line of cars would back up down the street. The savvy creature then used the vehicles as cover to launch a sneak attack on a group of unsuspecting birds gathered in a nearby home’s front yard. Dinets details the hawk’s clever behavior in a new paper published Thursday in the journal Frontiers in Ethology. “When I figured out what was going on, I was really impressed. I didn’t expect that,” Dinets tells the Guardian’s Nicola Davis. “On the other hand, every time I study some animal species it proves smarter than I expect.” Dinets observed the hawk for 12 total hours over the course of 18 weekday mornings in a neighborhood in West Orange, New Jersey, during the winter of 2021 to 2022. He watched as the bird attempted six attacks on the prey flock, but because of where Dinets was positioned, he couldn’t see how many of the hunts were successful. On one occasion, however, he did see the hawk fly away with a sparrow gripped in its talons, and on another, he saw the hawk eating a mourning dove on the ground. After the first two attacks, Dinets gleaned a clear picture of what was happening. First, someone would push the pedestrian crossing signal, which would activate a loud, rhythmic clicking sound designed to let individuals with visual impairments know it was safe to cross the street. The noise also seemed to serve as a cue for the hawk, which would fly into a nearby tree and perch on a low branch. As cars began stopping behind the crosswalk, the hawk seemed to bide its time. Once the queue got long enough—usually about ten cars—the bird sprang into action, swooping down and flying just a few feet above the sidewalk along the line of vehicles. Then, once it reached a certain house, it would make a hard, 90-degree turn and veer into the yard across the street, where prey birds were feeding on the ground. That house, as Dinets learned, was occupied by a family that liked to eat dinner outdoors. The next morning, their leftover crumbs would attract sparrows, doves and starlings—birds that Cooper’s hawks like to hunt and eat. “The hawk understood the connection between the [pedestrian crossing] sound and the eventual car queue length,” Dinets writes in a guest editorial for Frontiers in Ethology. “The bird also had to have a good mental map of the place, because when the car queue reached its tree, the raptor could no longer see the place where its prey was and had to get there by memory.” The bird waited in a tree by house 11 until the line of cars got long enough, then it launched its attack by flying toward house one and cutting across the street to the front yard of house two. Dinets, Vladimir, Frontiers in Ethology, 2025 Dinets was impressed by the bird’s ability to master a human environment for its own benefit. The ambush tactics were even more impressive, given the hawk’s likely unfamiliarity with the neighborhood, he adds. “Cooper’s hawks rarely nest in cities in our area but are common winter visitors,” he writes. “So, the bird I was watching was almost certainly a migrant, having moved to the city just a few weeks earlier. And it had already figured out how to use traffic signals and patterns.” The bird had also learned this behavior at a young age, at a time when other Cooper’s hawks “are just not good at hunting yet,” says Janet Ng, a wildlife biologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada who was not involved with the research, to the Atlantic’s Katherine J. Wu. Though adult Cooper’s hawks are skilled predators, Ng notes that young members of the species sometimes die of starvation if they can’t secure enough food. Other birds have also been observed taking advantage of human environments. Urban crows, for instance, have been spotted dropping nuts into traffic, letting cars do the hard work of cracking open the tough shells so they can reach the tasty morsels inside. Pigeons will sometimes wait for humans to turn on drinking fountains so they can get a sip of water. And Swainson’s hawks have been known to follow behind tractors and other farm equipment to nab insects and rodents that get flushed out. But cities are particularly difficult environments for birds of prey, Dinets notes. They must “avoid windows, cars, utility wire and countless other dangers while catching something to eat every day,” he writes in the editorial. Scientists have more often studied intelligence in other birds, such as parrots and crows, rather than in raptors. But that’s starting to change, as papers like this one start to call more attention to raptor intelligence. “My observations show that Cooper’s hawks manage to survive and thrive there, at least in part, by being very smart,” Dinets writes. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

South Korea’s Female Free Divers May Have Evolved to Thrive Underwater, Study Finds The Haenyeo, a group of skilled divers on Jeju Island, plunge beneath the ocean’s surface without any breathing equipment, thanks to a combination of their training and genetics Lillian Ali - Staff Contributor May 23, 2025 4:50 p.m. A group of female South Korean free divers on Jeju Island, known as the Haenyeo, exit the water after catching marine snails in November 2015. Chung Sung-Jun / Getty Images On Jeju Island, 50 miles south of the Korean peninsula, senior women regularly dive up to 60 feet beneath the ocean’s surface. They collect sea urchins, sea snails called abalone and other food—and they do it all without breathing equipment. These divers are known as the Haenyeo, or “women of the sea.” Trained from a young age, they plunge into cold ocean water year-round, throughout their lives. “They dive throughout their whole pregnancy,” Diana Aguilar-Gómez, a geneticist at the University of California, Los Angeles, tells NPR’s Ari Daniel. She describes stories of women diving until shortly before giving birth, then returning to the water just days later. Today, however, the practice is dwindling, and the current average age of the Haenyeo is about 70 years old. Many of the divers consider themselves to be the last of their kind. Aguilar-Gómez and her colleagues wanted to know how the Haenyeo built their remarkable underwater resilience—and whether evolution, rather than just training, played a role in their abilities. The scientists found a variety of genetic and adaptive traits among the Haenyeo and published their work this month in the journal Cell Reports. The research team compared 30 Haenyeo divers to 30 older non-diving women on Jeju Island, as well as to 31 older South Korean women from off the island. To keep all participants safe, they decided to conduct only “simulated dives,” where participants hold their breath and submerge their faces in a bowl of cold water. This triggers the mammalian dive reflex: The heart slows down, and the body diverts blood to the most important areas, like the brain. “Your body says, ‘Ok, there’s not a lot of oxygen coming, let’s keep it in the organs that need it the most,’” study co-author Melissa Ann Ilardo, a geneticist at the University of Utah, tells Deutsche Welle’s Matthew Ward Agius. The Haenyeo prepare for a dive. Hans Hillewaert / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Comparing the Haenyeo to other women, researchers found that the trained divers’ heart rates fell about 50 percent more than those who weren’t divers. In an extreme case, one Haenyeo woman’s heart rate dropped by 40 beats per minute in just 15 seconds. The lowered heart rate is not genetic, though. Scientists think that any human, if they had the lifetime of training the Haenyeo do, would adapt similarly. “We know that it’s because of training, because it’s something that we only saw in the Haenyeo,” Ilardo tells CNN’s Katie Hunt. To look for genetic differences, researchers took saliva samples from the different groups. They found that women from Jeju, whether or not they were divers, had similar genes. Compared to non-islanders, though, researchers saw two key differences. One has to do with cold tolerance—the Haenyeo are known for diving in frigid conditions, with surface water temperatures during their dives reaching 50 degrees Fahrenheit or colder. Ilardo tells NPR about a time she saw the Haenyeo diving in snowy weather: “They said as long as there’s not a risk that they’re going to be blown away to sea, then they still go out in the water, no matter how cold it is.” The people from Jeju Island were more likely to carry a genetic variant that may make them more resistant to hypothermia—in previous research, it has been linked to the ability to tolerate cold temperatures and pain. Jeju Island, known for its female free divers, seen from above. Robert Simmons / NASA The second difference relates to blood pressure—women from Jeju were more than four times more likely than women not from the island to have a gene variant related to lower blood pressure. Everyone’s blood pressure increases when they dive, Ilardo tells CNN. But Jeju residents’ blood pressure increases less. This resistance to heightened blood pressure could help the Haenyeo dive while pregnant, since high blood pressure can be very dangerous during pregnancy. The Haenyeo’s unique adaptations could hold the key to treating chronic diseases, particularly those related to high blood pressure. Gaining a better understanding of the gene tied to lower blood pressure could help scientists develop medications to protect people who are at risk of stroke or blood pressure complications, the researchers say. Ben Trumble, an anthropologist at Arizona State University who was not involved in the study, tells theWashington Post’s Mark Johnson that this new research could give insight into how to treat cardiovascular disease. “By working with populations like those Dr. Ilardo is working with, who aren’t sedentary office dwellers, we can gain some insights into how natural selection has helped us adapt and survive many problems that humans have faced throughout history,” Trumble says. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Cool Finds He Went Out to Catch Fish in Lake Michigan—and Discovered a 102-Year-Old Shipwreck Instead Angler Christopher Thuss stumbled upon the scuttled tugboat “J.C. Ames,” which was located just nine feet below the surface off the coast of Manitowoc, Wisconsin The wreckage is submerged under nine feet of water in Lake Michigan. Wisconsin Historical Society On a typical Tuesday evening, Christopher Thuss was fishing on Lake Michigan off the coast of Manitowoc, Wisconsin, when something strange popped up on his sonar screen. It turned out to be a 102-year-old shipwreck. “I didn't know exactly what I was looking at at first,” Thuss tells WGBA-TV’s Preston Stober. “I turned over [in] that direction and the whole ship was right there.” On May 13, Thuss inadvertently discovered the J.C. Ames, a 160-foot tugboat that had been scuttled—purposefully sank—in 1923. It’s situated just nine feet below the water’s surface, according to an announcement from the Wisconsin Historical Society. Tamara Thomsen, a maritime archaeologist with the Wisconsin Historical Society, and Brendon Baillod, president of the Wisconsin Underwater Archaeology Association, worked together to confirm the vessel’s identity. “These kinds of discoveries are always so exciting because it allows a piece of lost history to resurface,” Thomsen says in the announcement. “It sat there for over a hundred years and then came back on our radar completely by chance.” The ship was built in 1881 for the lumber trade and was originally named the J.C. Perrett. Wisconsin Historical Society Since it’s mostly devoid of quagga mussels—an invasive, bivalve mollusk known to attach itself to sunken artifacts—historians think it was only recently exposed, reports Todd Richmond of the Associated Press. Storms that swept through the area over the winter may have disturbed the sand enough to reveal the wreckage. For Thuss, the discovery was extra special because of his family legacy. His step-grandmother was nicknamed “Shipwreck Suzze” because she discovered so many shipwrecks, including three in three days in 2015. After he found the J.C. Ames, Thuss’s first phone call was to his father, who relayed the news to “Shipwreck Suzze” herself. “It's pretty unique that I am the first person to lay eyes on this boat since it was last seen,” Thuss tells the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Caitlin Looby. The ship was built in Manitowoc in 1881 by the Rand & Burger shipbuilding company. Initially named the J.C. Perrett, the vessel cost $50,000 to build which would be more than $1 million today, as the Wisconsin Historical Society notes. According to the 1990 book Green Bay Workhorses: The Nau Tug Line, the vessel was “one of the largest and most powerful tugs on the lakes, developed 670 horsepower with her fore-and-aft compound engine,” per the historical society. The vessel was initially used for the lumber trade, and it could haul as many as five barges to port, according to the Wisconsin Shipwrecks database. In 1889, the steambarge M.T. Greene crashed into the tugboat in the Sturgeon Bay Ship Canal, causing extensive damage. But the tugboat was repaired and it was sold to the Lake Michigan Car Ferry Transportation Company in 1895. The firm used the vessel to haul two railroad barges between Chicago and Peshtigo, Wisconsin. The tugboat got new boilers and was renamed the J.C. Ames in 1896. In 1908, it was purchased by the Nau Tug Line, which used it to haul barges full of pulpwood from ports on Lake Superior to Green Bay. The ship changed hands again in 1918 when it was sold to the Newaygo Tug Line of Appleton, Wisconsin. Eventually, however, the vessel fell into disrepair and was scrapped. “[The ship] was dismantled at Manitowoc with its engine/boiler removed, towed outside the harbor, burned and abandoned in 1923,” Thomsen tells Fox News Digital’s Andrea Margolis. “Abandoning ships that had outlived their use was how it was done back in the day.” Burning ships like the J.C. Ames was a form of entertainment for residents living along the Great Lakes, Thomsen adds. Historians think that more than a dozen ships were scuttled in the same area as the J.C. Ames, though only a handful have been discovered. “We only find them when they are uncovered by storms if someone sees them before they are covered again—it needs to be perfect timing,” Thomsen tells Fox News Digital. The vessel changed hands several times before it was eventually scuttled in 1923. Wisconsin Historical Society Today, the J.C. Ames is located within the bounds of the Wisconsin Shipwreck Coast National Marine Sanctuary. Established in 2021 and managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the state of Wisconsin, the marine sanctuary protects 36 known shipwrecks. It’s also protected by state and federal laws, which prohibit divers from removing, defacing or destroying underwater artifacts and structures. Maritime archaeologists also want to get the J.C. Ames listed on the State Register of Historic Places. “Due to the wreck’s unique position in Lake Michigan, it has the potential to become a popular destination for kayaking and snorkelers,” according to the announcement. Archaeologists say the J.C. Ames is unusual because of its large size. Tugboats from the period are typically 50 to 100 feet long, per WGBA-TV. “We don’t have any other versions of tugboats that are quite this big,” Caitlin Zant, research coordinator for the marine sanctuary, tells the publication. Historians are looking forward to learning even more about the vessel, she adds. “We can understand how it was constructed, why it was built as big as it was, and tell that story,” Zant says. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Where Was Soccer Invented? A New Archaeological Discovery Suggests Scotland, Not England, Was the Sport’s Birthplace Archaeologists say they’ve found the ruins of a soccer field in southwest Scotland that date to the 17th century England has long been considered the birthplace of modern soccer. But new archaeological evidence is challenging that long-held belief. Pixabay An archaeological discovery in Scotland is stirring up debate about the origins of soccer. England has long claimed to be the birthplace of soccer, known around the world as “football.” However, researchers recently identified what they think was a 17th-century soccer field in Scotland. They argue the find proves football was invented in Scotland, not England. “Our discovery has serious implications for sports historians,” says Ged O’Brien, who founded the Scottish Football Museum in Glasgow and helped find the field, to the New York Times’ Franz Lidz. “They will have to rewrite everything they think they know about the origins of the so-called beautiful game.” The quest started when they discovered a letter from Samuel Rutherford, who was a minister at a Presbyterian church in the town of Anworth in Kirkcudbrightshire, Scotland, between 1627 and 1638. In the letter, he wrote: “There was a piece of ground on Mossrobin farm where on Sabbath afternoon the people used to play at foot-ball,” per the Telegraph’s Ben Rumsby. The minister then directed churchgoers to place stones across the field, to prevent athletes from playing on it. After reading this, O’Brien and a team of archaeologists decided to go looking for the stones. Sure enough, they found 14 large rocks lined up across a flat area that measured 147 feet wide by 280 feet long. The team also found five tracks leading to the edge of the field. Did Scotland invent modern football? | A View From The Terrace Watch on Based on their analyses, the stones do not appear to have been placed there for agricultural purposes, such as to mark the boundary between croplands or to fence in livestock. Soil samples suggest the stones were placed there around 400 years ago, which aligns with the timing of Rutherford’s letter. “This is not a wall. It’s a temporary barrier to stop a particular event happening—in this case, football,” says Phil Richardson, an archaeologist with Archaeology Scotland who worked on the project, to the Telegraph. O’Brien also argues that, if residents were playing football every Sunday, they must have established a set of agreed-upon rules for the game. They likely weren’t playing a violent version of the game, because they had to be able to go to work on Monday uninjured. “This is the ancestor, the grandparent, of modern world football, and it’s Scottish,” O’Brien tells the Telegraph. However, not everyone agrees with that interpretation. Perhaps Scots were playing “foot-ball” at Mossrobin farm, but their game may have “no known connection to modern association football,” says Steve Wood, a trustee at the Sheffield Home of Football, a British charity that aims to preserve the city’s football heritage, to the Times. Sheffield is home to the world’s oldest football club, Sheffield F.C., which was founded in 1857. Historians have long theorized that modern football evolved from “mob football,” a chaotic, violent game popular in the Middle Ages that had almost no rules and no set time limit. But by the mid-19th century, footballers decided to draft a set of rules. They were adopted by the Football Association in London, which was founded in 1863. Based on O’Brien’s interpretation of the evidence, however, footballers in Scotland had already invented the game more than 200 years earlier. “Football has been played in Scotland for hundreds of years,” O’Brien tells BBC Scotland’s “A View From the Terrace.” “Not mob-football, but proper football.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

New Research Scientists Use DNA to Trace Early Humans’ Footsteps From Asia to South America Over thousands of years, humans from Eurasia trekked more than 12,400 miles to eventually reach the southernmost tip of South America, a new genetic investigation suggests Researchers have used genomic sequencing to trace what they’re calling the “longest migration out of Africa.” Nanyang Technological University Tens of thousands of years ago, Homo sapiens embarked on a major migration out of Africa and began settling around the world. But exactly how, when and where humans expanded has long been a source of debate. Now, researchers have used genomic sequencing to trace what they’re calling the “longest migration out of Africa.” Over the course of many generations and thousands of years, humans from Eurasia trekked more than 12,400 miles to eventually reach the southernmost tip of South America, according to a new paper published in the journal Science. In addition to providing insight into human expansion throughout the Americas, the analysis also sheds new light on health differences between populations. In the future, the researchers hope their work will contribute to personalized medical care based on an individual’s genetic profile. “[It is] only after we know the entire genetic makeup of humanity that we can provide precision medicine that is specific to the needs of every ethnic group, in particular, those that have become endangered and are on the brink of going extinct,” co-author Stephan Schuster, a genomicist at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, tells the Straits Times’ Judith Tan. #NTUsg researchers: Early Asians made the longest human migration in prehistory Watch on For the study, an international team of scientists analyzed the genomes of 1,537 individuals from 139 ethnic groups in South America and Northeast Eurasia. Comparing this DNA allowed them to reconstruct the human migration from Asia to South America, following the “genetic footprints left behind by the early settlers,” as lead author Elena Gusareva, a biologist at Nanyang Technological University, tells Cosmos magazine’s Evrim Yazgin. Modern humans arrived in northern Eurasia around 45,000 years ago. By roughly 31,600 years ago, they had migrated east toward Beringia, the land bridge connecting Asia and North America in what is now the Bering Strait. From there, they walked into present-day Alaska. They expanded across North America and eventually headed into South America, reaching the continent’s northwest tip around 14,000 years ago. “Our findings show that Native Americans are descendants of Asian populations, particularly from the West Beringian region,” says study co-author Kim Hie Lim, a genomicist at Nanyang Technological University, to the South China Morning Post’s Victoria Bela. This South American group then split into four genetic lineages, the researchers found. One population headed east toward the Dry Chaco region, while another went south to Patagonia. One climbed up into the Andes Mountains, while another remained in the Amazon basin. Once the groups split off, they became isolated by the continent’s geography, which reduced their genetic diversity. More specifically, the researchers found a reduced diversity of human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genes, which help support immune health. Reduced genetic diversity may have made these early South Americans more susceptible to diseases introduced by European colonists, the researchers posit. “Understanding how ancient populations moved and settled not only helps us understand human history, but also explains how their immune systems adapted to different environments,” Kim tells the Borneo Bulletin. Data used in the study came from GenomeAsia 100K, a large-scale project that aims to sequence 100,000 Asian human genomes. “Most existing medicines were developed based on studies of European populations, often excluding Indigenous populations,” Kim tells Live Science’s Kristina Killgrove. “It is critical to provide tailored healthcare and disease prevention strategies that consider their specific genetic profiles.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

The Smithsonian Transfers Rare 2,300-Year-Old Silk Manuscripts to China The Zidanku Silk Manuscripts were smuggled into the United States in the 1940s. Scholars say they provide remarkable insights into ancient Chinese philosophy and religion Newly transferred fragments of the Zidanku Silk Manuscripts on view in Beijing on May 18 Fu Tian / China News Service / VCG via Getty Images In the early hours of May 18, an airplane touched down in Beijing carrying precious cargo: fragile fragments of 2,300-year-old philosophical texts, which were making a long-awaited homecoming. The Zidanku Silk Manuscripts arrived from Washington, D.C., where the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art (NMAA) had formally deaccessioned them several days earlier during a ceremony at the Chinese Embassy. The museum transferred the artifacts to China’s National Cultural Heritage Administration, ending their 79-year voyage overseas. “As a museum of Asian art, much of our work engages with cultures around the globe,” Chase F. Robinson, the director of the museum, tells Smithsonian magazine in an email. “We value the work that we do with our international partners. These relationships allow us to serve as a global and national resource for understanding the arts and cultures of Asia and their interaction with America, past and present.” The museum acquired the manuscripts in 1992, when it received fragments known as Volumes II and III in a bamboo basket as a gift from an anonymous donor. Volume I is privately owned and was not included in the recent transfer. Dating to around 300 B.C.E., the Zidanku Manuscripts are the oldest known silk manuscripts found in China and the only ones from the Warring States period. They’re thought to be a divination guide that offers rare insights into ancient Chinese philosophy and religion. Fragments of Volumes II and III of the Zidanku Silk Manuscripts National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution Volume II, also known as “Wuxing Ling,” contains lunar calendar illustrations and accompanying text that explains “seasonal taboos and auspicious practices,” per the Chinese news agency Xinhua. The texts in Volume III, or “Gongshou Zhan,” are arranged in a rare circular pattern and are read clockwise. They may offer guidance for attacking and defending cities. “The Dead Sea Scrolls are foundational to understanding the religious roots of Judaism and Christianity,” Li Ling, a scholar of Chinese studies at Peking University, tells the Chinese broadcaster CCTV, per South China Morning Post’s Luna Sun. “The Zidanku manuscripts are no less vital to Chinese civilization. They speak to our ancient knowledge systems, our understanding of the cosmos and the details of everyday life.” In the 1940s, the manuscript fragments were looted from a tomb near the city of Changsha in China’s Hunan Province. A Chinese collector gave them to John Hadley Cox, an American collector who brought them back to the United States. Arthur M. Sackler, a pharmaceutical marketer and art collector, bought Volume I, the most complete portion of the manuscript, in 1965. Questions surrounding how the other two volumes arrived at the Smithsonian remain largely “unsettled,” Robinson tells the Art Newspaper’s Gabriella Angeleti. “In the case of these particular manuscripts, there are gaps,” he adds. “Our colleagues in China have done an excellent job of piecing together whatever evidence there is.” Museum officials say the transfer resulted from a collaboration with China’s National Cultural Heritage Administration. Because the decision wasn’t based on provenance research, it was processed through the museum’s standard deaccession protocols.While the fragments never went on display at the museum, they have been “documented, researched, diligently preserved and undergone scientific analysis,” according to a statement from the museum. They have also been the subject of scholarship, including Li’s two-volume monograph The Chu Silk Manuscripts from Zidanku, Changsha (Hunan Province), published in 2020 and 2025. Efforts to secure the transfer of the manuscript fragments began in 2022, after the Smithsonian issued a new ethical returns policy that detailed how to handle objects in its collections that it “would not have acquired under present-day ethical and professional standards.” “This transfer reflects a carefully considered decision, grounded in our focus on sound stewardship and the belief that these materials belong in dialogue with their cultural and archaeological context,” Robinson says in the statement. While the physical manuscripts have returned to China and will go on view at the National Museum of China in July, the Smithsonian will retain digital versions of the documents for further research. At last week’s ceremony, Xie Feng, China’s ambassador to the U.S., noted that more than 40 artifacts had been returned to China from the U.S. since the beginning of this year, per the South China Morning Post. “The return of the Zidanku manuscripts reflects a national revival as lost treasures of Chinese civilization make their way home,” he said. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

This Deposit of ‘Weird’ Cretaceous Amber Could Reveal Hints to Long-Forgotten Tsunamis in Japan A new study highlights the potential of amber fossils to capture evidence of powerful, prehistoric ocean waves A tsunami might have occured some 115 million years ago, near where deposits of Cretaceous amber were found in Japan. Wikimedia Commons under CC0 1.0 Scientists in Japan have uncovered amber deposits that may hold elusive evidence of tsunamis that occurred between 114 million and 116 million years ago. Their findings were published in the journal Scientific Reports last week. The researchers stumbled upon the amber—fossilized tree resin—by chance while collecting rocks from a sand mine in Hokkaido, an island in northern Japan. The deposit would have been on the seafloor when it was formed during the Cretaceous period. “We found a weird form of amber,” says lead author Aya Kubota, a geologist at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan, to Katherine Kornei at Science News. The scientists analyzed the resin with a technique called fluorescence imaging, in which they snapped photos of the remains under ultraviolet light. This helped them see how the amber was separated by layers of dark sediment, creating shapes known as “flame structures.” The unusual pattern arises when soft amber deforms before completely hardening. “Generally, they will form when a denser layer gets deposited on top of a softer layer,” says Carrie Garrison-Laney, a geologist at Washington Sea Grant who was not involved in the study, to Science News. The researchers suggest this is evidence that the resin rapidly traveled from land while it was still malleable and solidified underwater. A tsunami could be what swept the trees from land to the ocean so quickly, the study authors write. If true, this could offer scientists a potential new technique for finding prehistoric tsunamis. “Identifying tsunamis is generally challenging,” Kubota explains to Live Science’s Olivia Ferrari in an email. Tsunami deposits are easily eroded by the environment, and they can also be hard to distinguish from deposits caused by other storms. But in this case, “by combining detailed field observations with the internal structures of amber, we were able to conclude that the most plausible cause was tsunamis.” Cretaceous amber deposits (a, b, d, e) and fossilized driftwood (c) examined in the study Kubota, Aya et al., Scientific Reports, 2025, under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Other evidence also bolsters the researchers’ conclusion: A massive, nearby landslide offers a sign that an earthquake may have occurred around the same time the amber formed, and displaced mud and tree trunks were found in the same sediments—all signs of a violent tsunami. The trunks didn’t show any signs of erosion by shallow water-dwelling marine creatures, suggesting they were carried quickly out to sea. The vegetation found in the fossil deposit suggests multiple tsunamis occurred within the span of two million years, reports Hannah Richter for Science. But Garrison-Laney tells Science News that more evidence is needed to prove the amber is linked to a tsunami. She’s not sure the Cretaceous tree resin would have stayed soft once it hit the cold ocean water. “That seems like a stretch to me,” she tells the publication, adding that research on more of the area’s amber deposit will be needed to confirm the findings. With further study, scientists could use amber-rich sediments as a way to identify tsunamis throughout history. “Resin offers a rare, time-sensitive snapshot of depositional processes,” Kubota tells Live Science. Previously, scientists have found tiny crustaceans, prehistoric mollusks and even hell ants encased in the orangey resin, a window into worlds past. Now, “the emerging concept of ‘amber sedimentology’ holds exciting potential to provide unique insights into sedimentological processes,” Kubota adds to Live Science. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday. More about: Fossils Japan New Research Oceans Tsunami

See the First Photos and Videos of the Rare Subalpine Woolly Rat, a Massive but Elusive Rodent in New Guinea’s Mountains Working with local Indigenous people, biologist František Vejmělka spent six months surveying the creatures that live on Mount Wilhelm in Papua New Guinea Trail cameras recorded nocturnal subalpine woolly rats roaming around in search of plants to eat. Czech Academy of Sciences The subalpine woolly rat lives high in the mountains of New Guinea, where it spends its nights searching for plants to eat and its days hiding in underground burrows or tree canopies. This furry rodent is massive, measuring more than 2.5 feet from nose to tail and tipping the scales at more than four pounds. But despite its large size, the subalpine woolly rat (Mallomys istapantap) is incredibly elusive. First described in 1989, the species was only known to scientists because of a few museum specimens, and it had never been photographed in the wild—until now. František Vejmělka, a biologist at the Czech Academy of Sciences and the University of South Bohemia, spent six months exploring the highlands of Papua New Guinea. With help from local Indigenous people, he surveyed and genetically identified 61 species of rodents and marsupials found on Mount Wilhelm, a 14,793-foot peak and the country’s highest mountain. But perhaps his most significant work centered around the subalpine woolly rat. Vejmělka captured the first photos and videos of the mysterious creature in the wild. He also caught a few individuals, which allowed him to take the first biometric measurements of males and gather data about the rats’ behavior, diet and parasites. He shared his findings in a paper published April 18 in the journal Mammalia. By capturing several subalpine woolly rats, František Vejmělka was able to take the first biometric measurements of males of the species. Czech Academy of Sciences “It’s astonishing that such a large and striking animal has remained so poorly studied. How much more is there to discover about the biodiversity of tropical mountains?” Vejmělka says in a statement shared last week. The subalpine woolly rat is the biggest rodent in Australia and Oceania, and it’s one of the largest in the world. It’s a “striking and formidable creature,” with three-inch-long paws, sharp teeth and dense, shaggy fur covering most of its body, according to the statement. But these rodents are only active at night, and they live between 10,500 and 12,140 feet above sea level. Their rugged, remote habitats, coupled with their nocturnal habits, have made them difficult for researchers to study. Subalpine Woolly Rat Filmed For The First Time Watch on Vejmělka was up for the challenge. He wanted to know more about this mysterious species, as well as the mammalian diversity of New Guinea more broadly. For help, he turned to several tribes living on Mount Wilhelm. Their support and collaboration were crucial to the project, he says. The rats spend their days hiding in underground burrows or tree canopies, but they come out at night to search for food. Czech Academy of Sciences “If it weren’t for the Indigenous hunters who accompanied me in the mountains and helped me locate the animals, I would never have been able to collect this data,” he says in the statement. From trail camera footage and biometric observations, Vejmělka was able to glean several new insights into the lives of these mysterious creatures. He learned they primarily eat ferns and other plant material, for example, and that both males and females have a reddish brown color on their chests, reports IFLScience’s Eleanor Higgs. The species’ large size is likely due to “insular gigantism,” a biological phenomenon in which animals on islands evolve to become larger than those on the mainland, Vejmělka tells Live Science’s Jess Thomson in an email. Scientists think the rodents’ predecessors first arrived on New Guinea roughly five million years ago. Without much competition to worry about, they’ve been able to adapt to the rainforest landscape and thrive. “Their ancestors arrived from Asia to the island completely absent of any other terrestrial placental mammals (only marsupials and monotremes),” Vejmělka adds to Live Science. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Clownfish Shrink Down Their Bodies to Survive Ocean Heat Waves, New Study Suggests The adaptation appears to help the fish cope with high temperatures, since individuals and breeding pairs that shrank improved their survival odds Clownfish seem to become shorter during heat waves, according to the new study. Morgan Bennett-Smith A new study reveals that clownfish use a surprising strategy to adapt their bodies to ocean heat waves: They shrink. “[Clownfish] have these amazing abilities that we still don’t know all that much about,” says study co-author Theresa Rueger, a tropical marine ecologist at Newcastle University in England, to the Washington Post’s Dino Grandoni. The findings offer some hope for fish in the face of climate change, she adds. “There’s potential that maybe some other species will adapt in a way that will allow them to hang on longer than we think.” Rueger and her team didn’t initially plan to study a heat wave. They were monitoring how freshwater runoff might affect breeding clownfish in Papua New Guinea’s Kimbe Bay, when temperatures dramatically rose and warmed the water to 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit above average. But these conditions, they realized, offered a key opportunity for research. The scientists measured 134 clownfish in Kimbe Bay every month during the ocean heat wave, which spanned from February to August 2023. Astoundingly, 100 of those fish shrank. The researchers found that 71 percent of the dominant females and 79 percent of the breeding males reduced in size at least once over the study period. Their findings were published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday. At first, lead author Melissa Versteeg, a PhD researcher at England’s Newcastle University, thought she was making a mistake in her measurements. She kept trying again. And again. “She had several people measuring them at the same time to really make sure that we’re confident with the numbers,” Rueger says to Melissa Hobson at National Geographic. But after these repeated attempts, she concluded the measurements were correct. The fish that shrank increased their chances of surviving the heat wave by 78 percent, according to the study. Some of the clownfish even shrank in pairs, reducing their size alongside their breeding partner—a move that also boosted their chance of survival. The study marks the first time a coral reef-dwelling fish has been documented to shrink in response to environmental and social cues, according to a statement from Newcastle University. A pair of clownfish swims near an anemone. When the studied fish became smaller, females maintained a larger size than males. Morgan Bennett-Smith Clownfish aren’t the only animals shifting their size because of heat. Fish around the world are adapting to warmer temperatures by downsizing their bodies. “This is another tool in the toolbox that fish are going to use to deal with a changing world,” says Simon Thorrold, an ocean ecologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who was not involved in the new work, to Adithi Ramakrishnan at the Associated Press. But these clownfish stand out from the rest. “Until now, when talking about shrinking fish, nearly all studies do not mean that fish literally shrink but that they grow to smaller sizes,” explains Asta Audzijonyte, a senior lecturer at the University of Tasmania in Australia who was not involved in the work, to the Washington Post. “This study, in contrast, reports observations of [clownfish] actually shrinking by a few percent of their total length over the course of a month.” Previous research has found that other animals, like birds and rodents, appear to have gotten smaller because of climate change. And marine iguanas will shrink in response to warmer water temperatures during El Niño years. The researchers don’t yet know how the clownfish are pulling off their shrinking act. One hypothesis is that the fish are reabsorbing their own bone matter, reports the Associated Press. They’re also not sure why, exactly, changing size is so advantageous to the clownfish. But it could be that a smaller size makes it easier to maintain oxygen levels or get by with less food available. “If you’re small, you obviously need less food, and you’re also more efficient in foraging a lot of the time,” explains Rueger to National Geographic. Still, this adaptation method can only go so far. The heat wave exacerbated coral bleaching, which decreases available reef habitat, and subsequent heat waves ultimately killed many of the fish the researchers studied. “We’ve lost many of those fish,” Rueger says to the Washington Post. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

This German Town Carefully Reconstructed a 5,500-Year-Old Megalithic Monument After years of excavation and study, archaeologists have restored the Küsterberg burial site to its original layout to celebrate the annual European Day of Megalithic Culture Volunteers and archaeologists rebuilt the tomb site, lifting massive stones with modern excavation tools. Saxony-Anhalt State Office for Monument Preservation and Archaeology / Barbara Fritsch The Haldensleben forest in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt is home to more than 80 megalithic tombs from the Neolithic period—the largest concentration of such structures in central Europe. While some remain in fair condition, others have fallen victim to hazards ranging from ancient invasions to modern development. But instead of awaiting further decay, the town of Haldensleben has rebuilt a prominent 5,500-year-old tomb site known as Küsterberg to celebrate the European Day of Megalithic Culture, an annual holiday on the last Sunday of April. Archaeologists first excavated Küsterberg, located in a field southeast of Haldensleben, between 2010 and 2013, according to a statement from the Saxony-Anhalt State Office for Monument Preservation and Archaeology. Based on their findings, they were able to create a detailed plan of the site’s original layout. The semicircular site includes layers of rings around a central burial chamber, which is oriented from east to west. Saxony-Anhalt State Office for Monument Preservation and Archaeology / Anja Lochner-Rechta With the help of modern surveying equipment, excavators and a group of volunteers, archaeologists moved the massive granite megaliths stone by stone. In late April, the team unveiled the site, which has been transformed into an approximation of its original Neolithic layout. Like many Neolithic burial sites, Küsterberg is oriented from east to west. Some scholars speculate that this practice was meant to link the path of the sun to the course of a human life, according to Artnet’s Richard Whiddington. With an opening on the southern side, the semi-circular interior burial chamber once measured nearly 40 feet long and about 6.5 feet wide. It featured 19 orthostats—upright stone slabs—with seven capstones on top. Neolithic masons filled the gaps between individual stones with shards of greywacke, a type of sandstone that also lined the chamber floor. The reconstruction was based on years of measurements and careful study of the site's original layout. Saxony-Anhalt State Office for Monument Preservation and Archaeology / Barbara Fritsch The burial chamber was surrounded by 16 megaliths spaced about 6.5 feet apart. These gaps were also filled with greywacke. The complex was ringed by an earthen mound, which archaeologists suspect was built with dirt taken from a nearby hill. The reason for the abundance of burial sites in the region is the dense population that once lived in the forests, as Johannes Müller, an archaeologist at the University of Kiel, tells the German TV station MDR-Fernsehen. He adds that scholars have identified ten settlements nearby, and every family may have built their own gravesite. Barbara Fritsch, an archaeologist with the State Office for Monument Preservation and Archaeology, tells MDR-Fernsehen that the site was built around 3600 B.C.E., when migrants from northwestern Europe settled in the area. An aerial view of the reconstructed Küsterberg site Saxony-Anhalt State Office for Monument Preservation and Archaeology / Barbara Fritsch However, some 3,000 years ago—around the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age—newcomers to the area disturbed the burial site by removing parts of the mound and displacing stones. Much later, agriculture and road construction caused additional damage to sites like Küsterberg throughout central Europe. Last year, archaeologists uncovered a Neolithic burial landscape, including burial mounds and cattle sacrifices, as they excavated the site of a proposed Intel semiconductor fabrication plant in Magdeburg, Germany, per Artnet. Now reconstructed and preserved, the Küsterberg site will join Megalithic Routes, a network of European archaeological sites from the Neolithic period, per a statement from the University of Kiel. Researchers hope it will “inspire visitors with enthusiasm for the region and its long history.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

A New, Shape-Shifting ‘Flapjack’ Octopus Has Been Discovered in the Deep Sea Off the Coast of Australia The tiny Carnarvon flapjack octopus is the latest of ten species described by Australian scientists after a 2022 research trip The newly described octopus, Opisthoteuthis carnarvonensis, has red tentacles. Cindy Bessey / CSIRO A new species of shape-shifting octopus has just been described by scientists in Australia. The tiny cephalopod grows only about 1.6 inches across, but it can survive more than half a mile beneath the ocean’s surface. Scientists have named the octopus the Carnarvon flapjack (Opisthoteuthis carnarvonensis), after the Carnarvon Canyon Marine Park off the coast of Western Australia, where it was found back in 2022. The “flapjack” part of its name comes from its shape-shifting nature—flapjack octopuses can flatten their bodies into pancake-like discs. The octopus marks the tenth new species to be described from specimens collected by researchers aboard the Investigator, a vessel led by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), Australia’s national scientific research agency. The ship has been charting Australia’s waters for years, mapping the seafloor and studying marine life. During the 2022 expedition, the team used high-tech cameras, nets and sleds to collect samples and snap photographs deep below the ocean’s surface. Many of the specimens they found are thought to be new species, according to a statement from CSIRO. Tristan Verhoeff, a volunteer systematic taxonomist at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, went through a long, multi-step process to name the new octopus and verify that it had never been seen before. “It is exciting, but at the same time, there is pressure to do it right,” he says to Crystal McKay at theAustralian Broadcasting Corporation. “It is easy to think you have a new species when you don’t. That’s why it takes time, as you need to compare specimens and literature descriptions.” To name the new species, Verhoeff had to collect measurements of the octopus, count its suckers, dissect its organs and take detailed photos, per the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Then, researchers compared that information to records of already identified species. Top view of the new octopus species (Opisthoteuthis carnarvonensis) Cindy Bessey / CSIRO The Carnarvon flapjack is a type of deep-sea dwelling “dumbo” octopus, so nicknamed because the ear-like fins just above their eyes give them a resemblance to the popular Disney elephant. “Dumbo octopus are a rare and unusual species that live on the seafloor,” adds Verhoeff in the statement. “They reproduce and grow slowly, are very soft and gelatinous and, unlike other octopus, they produce no ink and cannot change color.” Some of the Investigator’s other recent discoveries include the painted hornshark, the parallel-spine scorpionfish and an “incredibly rare” blind cusk eel. These creatures all add to scientists’ understanding of seafloor habitats in Western Australia. A researcher holds the painted hornshark, which was discovered on the Investigator's 2022 expedition. Frederique Olivier / CSIRO Scientists discovered the parallel-spine scorpionfish on the 2022 research voyage. Frederique Olivier / CSIRO The findings also “help marine managers, such as Parks Australia, better conserve and protect the incredible diversity of marine life that inhabits Australia’s oceans,” says Venetia Joscelyne, the CSIRO Marine National Facility team leader, to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Incredibly, scientists estimate that there are likely more than 1,000 new species waiting to be described from specimens collected on CSIRO RV Investigator voyages over the past ten years,” she adds in the statement. If you want to feel like you’re part of the adventure, you can watch a live stream of the vessel on its journey of discovery. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Cool Finds Archaeologists Unearth Two Rare African Figurines in 1,500-Year-Old Christian Burials in Israel The artifacts were buried in the graves of a young woman and child, who may have converted to Christianity in Africa before traveling to the region, researchers say This ebony figurine was found in a child's grave. Dafna Gazit / Israel Antiquities Authority Archaeologists in Israel have found two tiny African figurines buried in early Christian graves. Dating back roughly 1,500 years, the artifacts are carved from rare ebony wood that originated in India or Sri Lanka. The burials are located in a necropolis in Tel Malhata, an archaeological site in the Negev desert. Humans have occupied Tel Malhata since the Middle Bronze Age, and hundreds of graves have been found in the cemetery. According to new research published in ‘Atiqot, the journal of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), three of those graves belonged to two women and a child who died in the sixth or seventh century C.E. These burials contained a trove of grave goods—including bronze jewelry, alabaster jars and five carved figurines. The ebony figurines are quite rare, while the bone figurines are more common for the region. Dafna Gazit / Israel Antiquities Authority “It is a very special find,” Noé D. Michael, an archaeologist at the IAA and the University of Cologne in Germany, tells Haaretz’s Ruth Schuster. Three of the five figurines were made from bone, and the researchers say that bone artifacts of this kind were commonly used in domestic rituals and burials in the region. However, the two others are quite rare. They were carved from ebony, and they depict a man and woman with “typical African features,” per the study. This ebony figurine was found in a young woman's grave. Dafna Gazit / Israel Antiquities Authority “As far as we know, no such figurine had ever been identified in Israel, Jordan [or] our region,” Michael tells the Times of Israel’s Rossella Tercatin. During the sixth and seventh centuries, Tel Malhata stood at the intersection of major trading routes “where merchants from southern Arabia, India and Africa passed,” according to a statement from the IAA. The grave goods reflect this international exchange. Ebony, a kind of dark wood, was a valuable import. “Experts at Tel Aviv University tested the wood and confirmed it came from India or Sri Lanka,” Michael tells the Times of Israel. “An ebony trade between Asia and Egypt and the Horn of Africa is attested starting from the fourth century C.E.” The two ebony figurines were found in the graves of a woman who died between the ages of 20 and 30 and a child who died between the ages of 6 and 8. In the statement, the researchers explain that the artifacts could have been “intimate personal items carrying with them a story of identity, tradition and memory.” Each figurine features a small hole through which a cord might have been threaded, allowing the owner to wear it around their neck.“Since the tombs were close and presented the same kind of burial gifts, they were probably a mother and a child,” Michael tells the Times of Israel. “Unfortunately, we could not extract DNA remains from the bones to run a test.” Two of the bone figurines were also found in these burials. The third was discovered in the tomb of a woman who died between the ages of 18 and 21. The team thinks these individuals may have traveled north from Africa, where conversion to Christianity was becoming increasingly common. As the researchers say in the statement, “It is possible that the figures represent ancestors, and thus they reflect traditions passed down from generation to generation—even after the adoption of the Christian religion.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

The U.S. Ran Its First Space Weather Preparedness Drill—Here’s How It Went Ironically, the exercise last May was interrupted by a real scenario, when Earth was hit by the strongest solar storm in two decades NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) captured this image of extreme solar activity on May 10, 2024. NASA SDO In May last year, the United States government hosted its first-ever “Space Weather Tabletop Exercise,” a hypothetical practice test to determine whether the country is prepared for space weather events, such as intense geomagnetic storms. The exercise brought together agencies such as NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Department of Homeland Security to talk through how they would handle such a threat—and the risks it would pose to Earth. “Minimizing the impacts of such storms requires close coordination, and this meeting was their chance to practice,” reads a NASA statement. The outcome of the test? State and federal agencies found out they need all the practice they can get. “Overall, the exercise demonstrated the need for better coordination to produce meaningful [space weather] notifications that describe the potential impacts to critical infrastructure,” reads the post-exercise report, “as well as emphasized the importance of the whole-of-government planning approach for significant [space weather] events.” Geomagnetic storms are strong disturbances in Earth’s magnetic field, and they can result from solar storms: explosions of material including energy, particles and magnetic fields from the sun’s surface, which can include solar flares and coronal mass ejections. Geomagnetic storms can wreck satellites, trigger radio blackouts and power outages and endanger astronauts by exposing them to intense radiation, according to the statement. Extreme geomagnetic storms only occur every few decades, per Live Science’s Tereza Pultarova. But our society has become so dependent on vulnerable technologies that the impact of space weather today could be significant. On May 8 and 9, 2024, participants at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland and the Federal Emergency Management Agency office in Colorado pretended it was January 2028, and they had to work through hypothetical scenarios involving harmful solar activity. At the beginning of the exercise, NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center notified participants that an active region on the sun had rotated to a point that, if it exploded, it could impact Earth. To make matters worse, two NASA astronauts were in a spacecraft orbiting the moon, with two of their colleagues currently on the lunar surface. The scenario quickly introduced harmful solar activity. Hypothetical effects included satellites, astronauts and airplanes exposed to intense radiation; disrupted or blocked radio communication and GPS systems; degraded communication with orbiting satellites and widespread power outages. One issue the report highlights is that space weather forecasters have very little time to determine the potential impact of the sun’s coronal mass ejections (CMEs). They can’t measure the CME until it passes satellites at the first Lagrange point, a gravitationally stable location that’s about 930,000 miles from Earth. “We never know … what the CME is composed of and what to make of it until it gets just one million miles from Earth, where it’s only 15 to 45 minutes away,” Shawn Dahl, senior space weather forecaster at the Space Weather Prediction Center, told Gizmodo’s Passant Rabie in August. “That’s when we can see what the CME is composed of. How strong is it magnetically? What’s the speed of its movement? Is it going to connect with Earth?” According to the NASA statement, the exercise demonstrated “a critical need” for “more robust forecasting capabilities of space weather drivers and effects.” The report also emphasizes the need to educate the public, continue developing response plans, make critical infrastructure less vulnerable and collaborate with both the private sector and international agencies. What Happened During the Biggest Geomagnetic Storm in More than 20 Years Watch on Notably, the hypothetical exercise last year was interrupted by a real one, when Earth was hit by the most severe solar storm in more than 20 years, now named the Gannon storm. That staggering event, which first struck our planet on May 10, 2024, provided a real-world example for scientists to study. “These extraordinary events required key participants to simultaneously manage both simulated actions of the [exercise] and the real-world needs of the nation,” according to a statement from NOAA. The storm tripped high-voltage lines, overheated transformers, interfered with GPS-guided farm equipment and re-routed flights over the Atlantic Ocean. The atmosphere expanded from heat, reaching a whopping 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit (compared to the standard high of 1,200 degrees), and that led to increased drag on satellites. It super-charged the magnetosphere with the largest electric current seen in 20 years, and it temporarily restructured the planet’s ionosphere. Participants reported that running through the hypothetical scenario generated important conversations and improved communication across agencies. Still, it remains to be seen how prepared we’ll be next time an angry solar region turns our way. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Humpback Whales Can’t See as Well as Scientists Thought, and It Might Explain Why They Keep Getting Tangled in Fishing Gear Despite having big eyes, the whales can’t make out details of objects more than a few body lengths away, according to a new study Humpback whales have poorer eyesight than previously thought, according to a new study. by wildestanimal via Getty Images With large, grapefruit-sized eyes, it would make sense if humpback whales had decently strong eyesight. So, why do these intelligent cetaceans continue to become entangled in fishing gear? Scientists have dissected the left eye of a juvenile humpback and revealed the species’ eyesight is weaker than biologists previously suspected. Their results, published Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, carry implications for how humans can help humpback whales steer clear of fishing nets. When lead author Jacob Bolin, at the time studying marine biology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, cut open the specimen with his colleagues, they found that the white of the whale’s eye was particularly thick at the back. This made the humpback’s focal length—the distance between the eye’s lens and retina—shorter than expected, as Bolin tells bioGraphic’s Marina Wang. Longer focal length usually indicates sharper eyesight, so this was one sign that humpbacks may have poor vision. Another limitation they discovered involved the number of retinal ganglion cells, which are like “the pixels of the eye,” as Bolin says to the New York Times’ Elizabeth Anne Brown. These neurons are responsible for converting the image on the retina at the back of the eye into electrical signals for the brain. The dissection revealed that humpback whales have a surprisingly low density of these cells, especially compared to humans. The whale had, at most, 180 retinal ganglion cells per square millimeter; humans, meanwhile, have up to about 40,000 in the same area. The researchers also found that the humpback whale could see at 3.95 cycles per degree (CPD), a measure of vision determined by how many pairs of black and white lines an animal can make out in one degree of visual space. Humans have much higher visual acuity, between 60 to 100 CPD, per the paper. Researchers investigate a preserved humpback whale eyeball. Michael Spencer / UNCW The team processed these observations with computer models to simulate how humpback whales see their environment. Their visualizations demonstrated that while the animals can see large, faraway shapes, like schools of fish, they can only detect smaller details within about three to four body lengths of the whale, according to a University of North Carolina Wilmington statement. (That’s about 150 to 200 feet.) Overall, humpback whale eyesight is surprisingly less sharp than what scientists had suggested it might be, given the size of their eyeballs, per a Nature research highlight. That means humpback whales might not see fishing nets until it’s too late. Researchers measuring the dissected humpback whale eye.  Michael Spencer/UNCW “[A low CPD] is bad for a human, but not bad for a whale at all,” says Thomas Cronin, a visual ecologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who did not participate in the study, to bioGraphic. Whales don’t typically need sharp vision to catch their prey, he adds. In other words, if humans’ boats and nets didn’t get in their way, the whales could get along perfectly well. “This work helps fill a major gap in our understanding of the sensory ecology of large whales, how humpbacks experience their world,” Lori Schweikert, a co-author of the study and neurophysiologist at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, explains in the statement. Elena Vecino Cordero, a biologist at the University of the Basque Country in Spain who has previously analyzed whale eyes but didn’t participate in the study, tells the New York Times that the research might even be overestimating humpback whale eyesight because of how the dissected eye may have changed after spending more than a decade in a jar. Ultimately, the researchers suggest their work could help inspire fishing net designs that are more visible to humpback whales and potentially result in fewer entanglement incidents. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Morris, the Movie Star Alligator Who Appeared in ‘Happy Gilmore,’ Dies of Old Age Based on his growth rate and tooth loss, the 640-pound gator was estimated to be at least 80. He starred in movies and TV shows between 1975 and 2006 After starring in numerous movies and television shows, Morris retired in 2006 and lived out his final days at the Colorado Gator Farm. RJ Sangosti / MediaNews Group / The Denver Post via Getty Images Morris, the alligator who starred in Happy Gilmore and numerous other movies and TV shows, has died. In an announcement from the Colorado Gator Farm, where the beloved 640-pound reptile had lived for the last two decades, caretakers say the cause of death was “old age.” “He started acting strange about a week ago. Wasn’t lunging at us and wasn’t taking food,” says Jay Young, the farm’s owner and operator, while tearfully petting Morris’ head in a video posted on Facebook. Morris was nearly 11 feet long at the time of his death, according to another post the Colorado Gator Farm shared on Facebook. Based on his growth rate and tooth loss, Young estimates the gator was at least 80 years old. “While we knew this was inevitable, we are very saddened by his passing,” the Colorado Gator Farm writes. Morris was rescued from a Los Angeles backyard, where he was being kept as an illegal pet. He began his prolific career in 1975 and kept working until his retirement in 2006. His TV and film credits include Interview With the Vampire, Dr. Dolittle 2, Blues Brothers 2000, “Coach,” “Night Court” and “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” reports Thomas Peipert of the Associated Press. But he’s perhaps best known for Happy Gilmore, the 1996 comedy starring Adam Sandler as a down-on-his-luck hockey player who discovers his powerful golf swing. After Gilmore hits a shot in a tournament, Morris grabs his golf ball with his mouth. Gilmore confronts the alligator. “Give me my ball! Give it here!” he shouts, while waving his golf club in the alligator’s face. Morris responds by snapping his jaws a few times. After Gilmore tries unsuccessfully to grab the ball from the alligator’s gaping mouth, he sees the creature is missing one eye. Gilmore realizes it’s the same gator that bit off the hand of his mentor, Derick “Chubbs” Peterson (Carl Weathers). When Morris sprints into a nearby pond, Gilmore follows. After a brief tussle, Gilmore retrieves his ball from the gator’s mouth and holds it above his head as the crowd cheers. Later, he presents the alligator’s head to Chubbs, who is so shocked he falls backward through an open window to his death. On May 14, Sandler posted a tribute to Morris on Instagram.“You could be hard on directors, make-up artists, costumers—really anyone with arms or legs—but I know you did it for the ultimate good of the film,” the actor wrote in a caption accompanying a still from the movie. “The day you wouldn’t come out of your trailer unless we sent in 40 heads of lettuce taught me a powerful lesson: Never compromise your art.” He added: “I will miss the sound of your tail sliding through the tall grass, your cold, bumpy skin, but, most of all, I will miss your infectious laugh.” Sandler is working on a sequel to the film, called Happy Gilmore 2, which will be released on Netflix in July. Morris does not appear in the new film, since he died in the first movie. But his memory will live on. “We have decided to get Morris taxidermied so that he can continue to scare children for years to come,” the Colorado Gator Farm writes on Facebook. “It’s what he would have wanted.” The farm is located in Mosca, a small town roughly 200 miles southwest of Denver. Situated in the San Luis Valley, the farm is home to roughly 300 alligators, as well as snakes, lizards, crocodiles and tortoises, per CBS News Colorado’s Logan Smith. Young’s parents, Erwin and Lynne, started the operation as a tilapia farm in the late 1970s. They brought in baby alligators to clean up the dead fish, but as the reptiles grew, visitors began showing up to see them. Today, the farm serves as a refuge for unwanted, illegal and abused reptiles. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

This Record-Setting Robot Can Solve a Rubik’s Cube Faster Than You Can Blink Designed by a group of undergraduate students at Purdue University, the robot completes the puzzle in 0.103 seconds "Purdubik's Cube" was developed and built by undergraduate students Junpei Ota, Aden Hurd, Matthew Patrohay and Alex Berta. Purdue University Blink and you might miss it: A new robot developed by college students can solve a Rubik’s Cube in 0.103 seconds, setting a new world record. “We solve in 103 milliseconds,” says Matthew Patrohay, one of the electrical and computer engineering undergraduates at Purdue University who designed and built the robot, in an announcement from the university. “A human blink takes about 200 to 300 milliseconds. So, before you even realize it’s moving, we’ve solved it.” The high-speed robotic system—named “Purdubik’s Cube”—now holds the Guinness World Record for the fastest robot to solve a puzzle cube. Patrohay, along with fellow students Junpei Ota, Aden Hurd and Alex Berta, officially set the record in a laboratory on the university’s campus in West Lafayette, Indiana, on April 21. Purdubik’s Cube handily beat the previous record of 0.305 seconds, which was set last year by a Mitsubishi Electric robot. “[The students] said, ‘You know what? I think we can do better,’” says Milind Kulkarni, who leads the university’s electrical and computer engineering department, in a video accompanying the statement. Though developing the robot was a team effort, it was Patrohay who initially spearheaded the project. His love affair with the scrambled, multicolored puzzle cube dates back to the fourth grade. “There was a competition, and you get a prize if you could solve it, and I could never solve it,” he tells NPR’s Ailsa Chang. “And I wanted to win the prize, so a few friends and I tried to learn how to solve it.” Then, while he was in high school, he heard about a pair of MIT students who’d designed a robot that solved a Rubik’s Cube in 0.380 seconds in 2018. He was immediately intrigued. “I thought, ‘Hey, someday, I should try and beat that,’ and here I am,” he tells NPR. Purdue ECE students shatter Guinness World Record for Fastest Puzzle Cube-Solving Robot Watch on When Patrohay got to Purdue, he learned everything he could to make his dream a reality. After spending time building the necessary skills for the project, the group actually constructed the robot in just one semester for their senior design class. To develop a robot that could solve a Rubik’s Cube in record time, the students integrated several systems and technologies, including machine vision for color recognition, custom algorithms and industrial-grade motion control hardware. They also optimized the Rubik’s Cube itself, designing a strong, custom internal core to hold all the pieces together as it moves at a rapid pace. “The cubes themselves just kind of disintegrate,” Patrohay says in the video. “The pieces just snap in half and fall apart.” Though 0.103 seconds is fast, Patrohay is optimistic that Purdubik’s Cube might be able to work even faster. “We’re going to give one last little effort to try and push below 100 milliseconds, so we can say we’re even faster,” he says in the video. “But realistically, I think 103 milliseconds is going to be very tough to beat.” The Rubik’s Cube was invented in 1974 by Hungarian architect Ernő Rubik. Five decades later, it’s the most popular puzzle toy in the world—especially among “speedcubers,” or competitors who try to solve it as quickly as possible. For humans, the world record for solving a 3x3x3 rotating puzzle cube is 3.05 seconds, set by Xuanyi Geng of China a little more than a month ago. “Speedcubers” have also set world records for solving them while underwater, while running 100 meters, while blindfolded, while roller skating, while upside down and while juggling. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Photographer Who Scales Buildings to Get the Perfect Shot Arrested at Opening Night of His First Solo Exhibition Isaac Wright was detained for climbing the Empire State Building’s spire in 2024. The photo he took during the climb was on display at the show in New York City Lillian Ali - Staff Contributor May 21, 2025 2:01 p.m. And When We Die It Will Feel Like This (2023), one of Wright's photographs on display at the exhibition Drift / Robert Mann Gallery At the opening for his first solo gallery exhibition, photographer Isaac Wright was speaking with the crowd when a woman tapped him on his shoulder. She revealed that she was a plainclothes officer and told him he was under arrest. “I really thought it was a joke,” Wright, who is known as Drift, tells the New York Times’ The incident occurred just after 8 p.m. on May 15, the opening of Wright’s show, titled “Coming Home,” at the Robert Mann Gallery in New York City. After the plainclothes officer informed him of his arrest, uniformed officers entered the exhibition and led Wright to the back of a squad car. Wright’s lawyer, Priya Chaudhry, tells the Cincinnati Enquirer’s Cameron Knight that the artist has been charged with misdemeanor criminal trespassing. The charges are linked to a photograph on display at the exhibition, which Wright shot after climbing to the top of the spire of the Empire State Building in 2024. “Ansel Adams probably trespassed in his day to get a great photo; plenty of photographers did,” gallery owner Robert Mann, who has exhibited works by renowned photographers including Adams and William Eggleston, tells the Times. “But in all my years, I have never seen an artist taken out of an opening in cuffs.”Urban explorer Vitaliy Raskolov expressed a similar disbelief to Now Media’s Matt Medved, saying that over 16 years of scaling buildings and photographing his escapades, he had “never seen anything like this before.” Wright began climbing buildings in 2018 to cope with post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from his years of service in the Army. When he was stationed with a battalion in Louisiana, he started acting as an “ad hoc chaplain, filling in as needs dictated,” as the Cincinnati Enquirer reported in 2022. “Part of my job was helping our soldiers reintegrate into life at home after deployment,” Wright told the publication. “Without a chaplain in the unit, many soldiers came to me for counseling and to talk about their struggles with suicide.” At the end of his service, he was diagnosed with PTSD and depression. He decided to take up photography, and he found solace in the hobby. One day, he took the stairs to the roof of a skyscraper in Texas to get a more interesting shot. “[I] just ended up sitting there for two or three hours, all by myself, taking in the view,” he tells the Times. “And this wave of catharsis and peace came over me. I was so present and alive, and I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, I don’t know what this is, but I have to keep doing it.’” The recent gallery opening wasn’t the first time Wright’s art has led to encounters with police. In late 2020, the artist, who is from Ohio, sneaked onto the rooftop of the Great American Tower, the tallest building in Cincinnati.Weeks later, police shut down an interstate to arrest him in Arizona. They had been told that he was a veteran with specialized military training and PTSD, and that he might be armed. “Five to ten officers approached my vehicle with handguns and assault rifles pointed at me,” he told the Cincinnati Enquirer After a judge set his bond at $400,000, Wright spent months in jail. He ultimately accepted a plea deal, agreeing to pay $5,500 in restitution and enroll in a treatment program. At that time, the artist had around 13,000 followers on Instagram. Today, he has about 225,000. Wright regularly posts and sells photos taken from the tall buildings he scales. In 2022, he donated $500,000 from his art sales to the Bail Project, which helps low-income Americans pay bail. Wright was released last week and is scheduled to return to court on June 4. The artist explains that this encounter with the law has been less harrowing than his previous arrests. “I had always been treated as some sort of dangerous weapon for what I do, even though I had never hurt anyone,” he tells the Times. “This time, the cops were very respectful. In the cop car, they even told me they liked the art.” “Coming Home” is on view at the Robert Mann Gallery in New York City through June 28, 2025. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

New Research These Scientists Say They’ve Identified the Oldest Known Star Chart in the World A new preprint suggests that an ancient Chinese star catalog dates to 355 B.C.E. But other researchers aren’t convinced, arguing that the original coordinates are misaligned by one degree An ancient star map (not the document analyzed in the new research) unearthed in Dunhuang, China, in the seventh century C.E. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons Thousands of years ago, Chinese astronomers studied the sky using an ancient record of constellations and their coordinates. Known as the “Star Manual of Master Shi,” the document is the oldest surviving star catalog in China. But now, scientists say the map dates to the fourth century B.C.E.—some 250 years earlier than previously thought. If their conclusion is correct, it would make the document the oldest known star chart in the world. Boliang He and Yongheng Zhao, both researchers at the National Astronomical Observatories in Beijing,Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, the manual was created in 355 B.C.E. and modified in 125 C.E. That’s more than 200 years before the ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus made his star catalog, which has long been considered the world’s oldest. The manual is attributed to Shi Shen, a famous court astronomer during China’s Warring States period. The new date falls around the period historians think Shi may have lived. “Our findings align perfectly with these historical accounts, vividly demonstrating the continuity and completeness of ancient Chinese historical records,” He tells Science’s Joshua Sokol. “These discoveries left us deeply surprised.” A 19th-century artist's portrait of Hipparchus, a Greek astronomer who made one of the world's oldest star maps Public domain via Wikimedia Commons Over thousands of years, Earth’s axis of rotation has slowly shifted, altering the locations of the celestial poles—the points in the sky around which scientists map stars. This slow change is called precession, and it forms the basis of Zhao and He’s research. Accounting for precession in an old star map should allow “modern researchers to precisely date when the catalog must have been created, much like counting rings in a tree trunk can reveal a tree’s age,” according to Science. Zhao and He used a type of A.I. known as computer vision to estimate the position of the celestial north pole at the time the star manual was made. They dated the map using that information. “I think this is pretty definitive,” David Pankenier, an emeritus scholar of Chinese astronomy at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania who wasn’t involved in the study, tells Live Science’s Joanna Thompson. Pankenier adds that the study also confirms previous research by the 20th-century British biochemist Joseph Needham, who specialized in ancient Chinese scientific development. But as Boshun Yang, a science historian at the University of Science and Technology of China, tells Science, “I hold a totally different perspective.” Yang studies the dating of ancient astronomical documents, and he thinks that many of Shi’s coordinates may be misaligned from the celestial north pole by roughly one degree. Previous research has shown that the star map dates to around 103 B.C.E. when taking this potential misalignment into consideration. The new study claims that the map was updated in 125 C.E. in order to account for measurements that appear to have been taken centuries apart. However, the one-degree misalignment theory also removes those discrepancies, as Daniel Morgan, a science historian at France’s Center for Research on East Asian Civilizations, tells Live Science. “It just so happens that if you take this really anodyne consideration into account—that maybe they built an instrument and it was not perfect—then the astronomers’ data analysis perfectly aligns with the human story,” Morgan says. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

What’s the Best Way to Cut Onions Without Crying? New Research Suggests That Thin, Sharp Blades Are Key to Minimizing Tears For a new study, physicists visualized and quantified the tear-producing droplets that get expelled from onions when they’re cut New research suggests using a thin, sharp knife and cutting slowly could help prevent crying while cutting onions. Pexels From wearing goggles to rubbing the knife with lemon juice, home cooks have come up with a wide variety of clever tricks to keep themselves from crying while cutting onions in the kitchen. Now, physicists have come up with another possible solution. Using a sharp knife while making slow, controlled cuts seems to be the best way to minimize the spray of tear-producing compounds in onions, according to a new study. The paper has been published on the preprint server arXiv and has not yet been peer reviewed. Scientists know why onions make us cry: When cut, these spherical alliums produce a chemical that stimulates the nerves responsible for producing tears. The volatile, irritating compound is called syn-propanethial-S-oxide. But, recently, a team of physicists decided to explore the underlying mechanisms at play when syn-propanethial-S-oxide gets released from onions. Using techniques known as high-speed particle tracking velocimetry and digital image correlation, they were able to visualize and count droplets as they were being expelled from cut onions, per IFLScience’s Russell Moul. They also studied the onions themselves, making note of strain and deformations on the flesh during chopping. To start, the team gathered fresh onions from local vendors, cut them into halves or quarters, then coated them in black spray paint. (This step made it easier for them to see and track what was happening when the alliums got cut.) Then, they set up a high-speed camera and started chopping. “Cutting is a really strange process,” says Anne Juel, a physicist at the University of Manchester who was not involved with the research, to NewScientist’s Alex Wilkins. “We cut things with knives every day, but to cut something, you need to go down to the atomic scale.” Using a custom guillotine, the researchers experimented with cutting speeds ranging from 1.3 and 6.5 feet per second and blade thicknesses between 5 and 200 millimeters. They changed the steel blades manually and modified the speed by adjusting the height of the blade, which was released from above. By analyzing the footage from the high-speed camera, they could investigate the dynamics of tear-producing particles that sprayed out from the onion as it was cut. The thinner, sharper blades produced fewer droplets that moved more slowly and with less energy, they found. Meanwhile, the thicker, duller blades caused an explosion of high-speed particles that moved at up to 141 feet per second. This is because the dull blade initially bent the onion skin, which caused pressure to build up inside. When the blade finally sliced through, it released all that built-up energy and sent onion juice flying. Then, once the particles were in the air, they also fragmented into smaller pieces to create “an even more diffuse mist of all-natural mace,” writes Andrew Paul for Popular Science. The duller blades produced as much as 40 times more particles than the sharper blades. Faster cutting speeds produced up to four times as many droplets as slower speeds. This suggests that the best way to minimize tear-producing chemicals while chopping onions is to cut slowly with a thin, sharp knife. However, the researchers did not test this theory in their experiments, per NewScientist. Refrigerated onions released a “noticeably larger volume” of droplets compared to room-temperature onions, the researchers write. Pixabay Home cooks are often advised to chill their onions before cutting them to minimize crying. So, the researchers also experimented with onions that had been refrigerated for 12 hours. However, in their tests, the refrigerated onions released a “noticeably larger volume” of droplets compared to room-temperature onions. Preventing tears while cutting onions might seem like a trivial research topic. But the scientists say their work could also have important implications for food safety. The fragmented droplets that spray out of raw foods while they’re being cut could contribute to the spread of disease-causing pathogens, the researchers write in the paper. “Ejected droplets can come into direct contact with contaminated blades or carry surface-borne pathogens as they leave the food surface,” they write. “Lighter droplets [are] readily suspended and can be transported by ambient air currents, thereby posing a potential risk for airborne transmission.” Keeping knife blades sharp, then, might be an easy way to help reduce food-borne illnesses, they posit. “Sharper blades reduce not only the number of droplets but also their speed and kinetic energy,” the scientists write in the paper. “This is particularly relevant for fruits and vegetables, which can carry food-borne pathogens such as Salmonella.” Many other recent research projects have attempted to use science to solve everyday problems. Scientists have visualized the plume of aerosolized particles ejected from commercial toilets during flushing, and some are even coming up with new urinal designs to help reduce urine splashing. And in the realm of enhancing food, Italian physicists came up with the perfect cacio e pepe recipe, while others have figured out the best way to make pour-over coffee and boil an egg. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday. More about: Food Food Science New Research Physics