These include firing many — then rehiring some — staff across major science agencies, as well as holding up over a billion dollars in federal funding and triggering a pause in graduate admissions and faculty job postings at universities. Executive orders prompted the flagging of research projects for review based on whether they contain words like "female" or "gender," and scrubbing peer-reviewed papers from agency websites if they conflict with the current administration's policy priorities.

In response, scientists have begun to mobilize. On her Bluesky feed, Colette Delawalla, a graduate student in clinical psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, posted on Feb. 9 simply, "Get in Dorks, we are going protesting."

Delawalla is the lead organizer of Stand Up for Science, a grassroots movement with three main policy goals: to end political interference in science, to secure science funding, and to defend diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility in science.

Related: Trump executive order calls mental health prescriptions a 'threat' — why?

On Friday (March 7), people in more than two dozen cities across the U.S. attended Stand Up for Science rallies. The main rally was held in D.C., with speakers like Bill Nye slated to talk, and 31 other cities held their own events.

Live Science reported from two of these locations — New York City and Raleigh, North Carolina — to learn more about what science supporters want from the U.S. government.

In New York City

Hundreds of rally attendees assembled in Washington Square Park in Manhattan under a bright-blue sky, although they occasionally had to grasp their signs tightly as they were buffeted by gusts of strong wind.

The crowd represented a wide range of age groups and vocations. Young children teetered on their caregivers' shoulders, high schoolers hoisted homemade cardboard signs, members of professional groups crowded together for a group photo in front of the square's iconic arch, and prominent professors stood alongside members of state government.

Among the clever and emphatic signage was the giant head of the beloved Muppets character Beaker, worn by an attendee affiliated with the Zuckerman Institute at Columbia University.

Although many attendees were scientists, not all were.

"I think all expertise is under attack. That's really why I'm here," said Randi from Brooklyn, a retiree who previously worked in construction and asked that her last name not be used. "When you undermine expertise, then nobody knows what the facts are." She said she "had to come out" to the event after she heard that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was telling scientists to scrub their research papers of "words that might cause trouble."

"I think they're going after experts of all kinds, trying to bankrupt them so that eventually functions that scientists do will all be privatized," Randi told Live Science.

Two young attendees, Caitlin and Amalia, who declined to give their last names, held up signs reading, "Science is for everyone" and "Girls just wanna have fun-ding for research." In regard to the recent developments in the federal government, Amalia, a high-school senior who plans to major in biology in college, said, "I'm just kind of in awe — shock — that this is all going on."

Among the medical providers in attendance was Dr. Michelle Ng Gong, secretary of the American Thoracic Society (ATS), a medical society dedicated to accelerating the advancement of global respiratory health. The work of ATS is aimed at preserving lung health, in terms of both caring for patients and understanding factors that affect lung health, such as climate change and pollution, Gong said.

Cutting National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for diverse research teams and studies that aim to meet the needs of all patients is "basically gambling on our futures," she emphasized.

"Scientists have always tried to speak through our work, and our publications," she added. "But now I think we need to do a better job of communicating overall the impact that science has on day-to-day life."

That point was driven home by the chant "Science, not silence," which the crowd called out between the speakers featured at the rally. When asked to raise their hands if their work relies on federal research funding, the majority of the crowd reached to the sky.

Among the formal speakers at the rally was Dr. Claire Pomeroy, president and CEO of the Lasker Foundation, which gives out the coveted Lasker Awards for biomedical research. She spoke of her experience during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, when she couldn't offer patients solutions; she could only hold their hands and attend their funerals. Science changed that — now, people with HIV can lead long, prosperous lives, and the infection can be prevented with powerful medications.

Attacks on science put those kinds of breakthroughs in jeopardy, Pomeroy emphasized. She encouraged those gathered to stay informed and keep their networks outside science in the loop, as well. "We have to spread the message beyond this crowd," Pomeroy said.

Josh Dubnau, a Stony Brook University professor who studies ALS and other neurodegenerative disorders, underscored the wide range of jobs that NIH funding supports — tens of thousands of jobs in New York State, alone, he said. He called the funding cuts and firings orchestrated by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and other federal actors a "planned and coordinated assault" on science, as well as on America's education system.

Dubnau urged the rally attendees to band together in response, not stay silent in an attempt at self preservation.

Additional speakers included Griffin Gowdy, a biomedical researcher with Scientists Rebellion, a collective calling for action to address the climate crisis, who encouraged attendees to start or join organizations assembling on behalf of the scientific enterprise.

"Like a burning Tesla battery that not even Poiseden himself could put out, we will never stop fighting for what's right," Gowdy quipped.

Several New York politicians also stepped to the microphone, including state Assemblymember Harvey Epstein and state Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal.

Epstein, who also teaches an environmental law clinic at CUNY Law School, acknowledged there will be cuts to federal funding but called on the crowd to collectively stand up to "bullies in the White House" despite that.

Hoylman-Sigal condemned Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for claiming measles can be cured with vitamin A and fish oil amid the ongoing outbreak in Texas and said it's "not right" that anyone is dying from vaccine-preventable diseases.

To conclude his talk, Hoylman-Sigal also thanked scientists for their role in making it so that HIV is no longer a death sentence; as a gay man, Hoylman-Sigal was grateful for the lives HIV drugs have spared within the LGBTQ+ community.

In Raleigh

A crowd of around 500 people gathered slowly but steadily on Halifax Mall, a block from the state capitol building and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. A stiff wind blew posters willy-nilly as people listened to speakers, including Jamie Vernon, the executive director of Sigma Xi, the scientific honor society headquartered in North Carolina's "Research Triangle."

Protest leaders encouraged the gathering of young, mid-career and retired scientists and supporters to take occasional "warm-up breaks" while chanting phrases like "What do we want? Science! When do we want it? Now!" and "Vaccines are awesome, imagine if we lost 'em."

Toxicologist Noelle Muzzy told Live Science that she organized the Raleigh Stand Up for Science rally because "in one sentence: science is under attack."

The executive orders affecting funding, federal jobs and censorship were at the forefront for Muzzy. "All of that is limiting what we can do as researchers. That's very concerning, not just for career scientists but also for the general public," she said, adding that "we're going to be losing access to new technology that could save lives and produce medical treatments as well."

But the general tenor of the Raleigh event was optimistic, even as many signs satirized the language that President Trump and Elon Musk in particular have used recently to denigrate science they deem worthless, such as "Transgender ≠ Transgenic."

"I'm here because I support science in every way, shape and form. Not only for myself and my colleagues personally, but for everyone because science is, in fact, for everyone," McKenzie Gehris, a graduate student in pharmacology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told Live Science. She had a poster of the muppet Beaker that read, "This is the only orange muppet I trust to tell me about science."

"The research that scientists do across the country helps cure diseases, helps figure out things about our climate and the world that we live in," Gehris said. "It's important that we fund that sort of research."

In that case, these individuals may be diagnosed with a specific phobia. Specific phobia refers to an extreme fear or anxiety about a certain object or situation. Colloquially, people sometimes say they have a phobia of something they're fearful or wary of — but what really counts as a specific phobia, as it's understood in psychology?

To qualify as a specific phobia, a fear must be persistent — it happens each time the object or situation is encountered — and it must interfere with a person's daily life, affecting their hobbies, relationships or work, for instance.

"You have to cross the line of what’s called 'distress' or 'impairment,'" said Ellen Hendriksen, a clinical psychologist at Boston University's Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders. "Distress, meaning it freaks you out, and impairment, meaning it keeps you from living the life you want to live," Hendriksen told Live Science.

Related: 'This is largely uncharted territory': Scientists reveal the brain's 'fear circuit' works differently than we thought

According to Martin Antony, a clinical psychologist at Toronto Metropolitan University who leads an anxiety research and treatment laboratory, psychologists break specific phobias into these five categories:

• Animals: All animals fall under this category. Snakes and spiders are common triggers, with studies in different countries finding that spider phobias affect between 2.7% and 9.5% of the population.
• Natural environment: A fear of heights, a fear of water, and a fear of storms are some examples of phobias triggered by features of nature.
• Blood, injury, injection: These phobias involve the fear of needles, surgery, blood or similar stimuli.
• Situational: Situational phobias involve a fear of being in a certain situation or environment. Driving, flying and being in elevators are common examples of these phobias.
• Other: This category covers anything that doesn't fall into the other four categories, such as a fear of clowns or of costumed figures. "People can be afraid of anything," Antony said.

Sometimes, specific phobias develop after a person experiences a traumatic event, or after they have a panic attack that then gets associated with the environment and leads to a self-reinforcing fear of that scenario, said Sandra Capaldi, a clinical psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. For example, someone who has a panic attack while they happen to be driving might develop a phobia of getting behind the wheel again for fear that they might have another attack and wreck the car.

However, sometimes phobias develop without any particular trigger. In many cases, these are phobias that center around something that's actually dangerous — like falling from a height — but a person's fear is out of proportion with the actual risk.

"This anxiety that's associated with the fear is overestimating both the likelihood that they're going to encounter some sort of featured object of the situation, or [overestimating] the intensity and the severity of the consequence," Capaldi said.

People with one anxiety disorder are more likely to have another anxiety disorder, Antony said, so specific phobias sometimes co-occur with generalized anxiety or panic disorders. On occasion, these disorders can overlap in a way that makes them tricky to diagnose.

Antony once treated a woman with social anxiety who also feared driving. He eventually realized that her fear of driving wasn't a specific phobia, though. She didn't fear crashing, he said, but rather that other drivers would judge her on the road. In her case, the driving fear was an offshoot of her social anxiety, rather than a specific phobia.

"The diagnosis isn't always clear-cut, and you can't always go by the situation people fear," Antony said. "You also have to look at why they fear that situation."

Fortunately, phobias have a well-researched and very effective treatment. The gold standard is exposure therapy, in which the patient gradually faces their fear in a controlled manner and environment. A person who has a phobia of snakes might first look at a squiggly line on a piece of paper, then a cartoon drawing of a snake, then a photo of a snake and, finally, the real thing.

"We want to push the client out of their comfort zone, but not into a panic zone," Hendriksen said. "The zone in between that is what I call the 'learning zone.' We do something a little bit hard, and it does activate our anxiety. But then when the feared outcome doesn't happen, our fear doesn't get reinforced."

The patient is in control of this process, Hendriksen added. They're never surprised by any stimuli and can decide how they want to proceed. Patients may start the treatment in a therapist's office and gradually move to the real world. Someone with a phobia of elevators might start by looking at pictures or videos of elevators, then eventually step on a real elevator themselves, for example.

Psychologists help the person monitor their anxiety throughout the process, aiming to keep the patient in a place of discomfort but not panic. As the person experiences the anxiety without any actual danger from the phobia trigger, the brain's fear system becomes desensitized and the anxiety gradually decreases.

In some special cases, psychologists might recommend an additional therapy alongside exposure therapy. This is most often true in the case of blood, injury or injection fears, Antony said.

About 70% of people with a blood phobia and half of those with a needle phobia report a fear of fainting, which is caused by an involuntary reflex called the vasovagal response. Being prone to fainting, at baseline, probably reinforces the phobia in these people; in other words, their fear of the situation is validated when they really do faint. So, in these cases, a patient might also practice a strategy called "applied muscle tension." This involves tightening certain muscles to reduce the vasovagal response, which helps prevent fainting.

It is exceedingly difficult to get a handle on exactly how big the problem is. About 55,000 scholarly papers have been retracted to date, for a variety of reasons, but scientists and companies who screen the scientific literature for telltale signs of fraud estimate that there are many more fake papers circulating — possibly as many as several hundred thousand. This fake research can confound legitimate researchers who must wade through dense equations, evidence, images and methodologies, only to find that they were made up.

Even when bogus papers are spotted — usually by amateur sleuths on their own time — academic journals are often slow to retract the papers, allowing the articles to taint what many consider sacrosanct: the vast global library of scholarly work that introduces new ideas, reviews and other research and discusses findings.

These fake papers are slowing research that has helped millions of people with lifesaving medicine and therapies, from cancer to COVID-19. Analysts' data shows that fields related to cancer and medicine are particularly hard-hit, while areas such as philosophy and art are less affected.

To better understand the scope, ramifications and potential solutions of this metastasizing assault on science, we — a contributing editor at Retraction Watch, a website that reports on retractions of scientific papers and related topics, and two computer scientists at France's Université Toulouse III—Paul Sabatier and Université Grenoble Alpes who specialize in detecting bogus publications — spent six months investigating paper mills.

Co-author Guillaume Cabanac also developed the Problematic Paper Screener, which filters 130 million new and old scholarly papers every week looking for nine types of clues that a paper might be fake or contain errors.

An obscure molecule

Frank Cackowski at Detroit's Wayne State University was confused.

The oncologist was studying a sequence of chemical reactions in cells to see whether they could be a target for drugs against prostate cancer. A paper from 2018 in the American Journal of Cancer Research piqued his interest when he read that a little-known molecule called SNHG1 might interact with the chemical reactions he was exploring. He and fellow Wayne State researcher Steven Zielske began experiments but found no link.

Meanwhile, Zielske had grown suspicious of the paper. Two graphs showing results for different cell lines were identical, he noticed, which "would be like pouring water into two glasses with your eyes closed and the levels coming out exactly the same." Another graph and a table in the article also inexplicably contained identical data.

Zielske described his misgivings in an anonymous post in 2020 at PubPeer, an online forum where many scientists report potential research misconduct, and also contacted the journal's editor. The journal pulled the paper, citing "falsified materials and/or data."

"Science is hard enough as it is if people are actually being genuine and trying to do real work," said Cackowski, who also works at the Karmanos Cancer Institute in Michigan.

Legitimate academic journals evaluate papers before publication by having other researchers in the field carefully read them over. But this peer review process is far from perfect. Reviewers volunteer their time, typically assume research is real and so don't look for fraud.

Some publishers may try to pick reviewers they deem more likely to accept papers, because rejecting a manuscript can mean losing out on thousands of dollars in publication fees.

Worse, some corrupt scientists form peer review rings. Paper mills may create fake peer reviewers. Others may bribe editors or plant agents on journal editorial boards.

An 'absolutely huge' problem

It's unclear when paper mills began to operate at scale. The earliest suspected paper mill article retracted was published in 2004, according to the Retraction Watch database, which details retractions and is operated by The Center for Scientific Integrity, the parent nonprofit of Retraction Watch.

An analysis of 53,000 papers submitted to six publishers — but not necessarily published — found 2% to 46% suspect submissions across journals. The American publisher Wiley, which has retracted more than 11,300 articles and closed 19 heavily affected journals in its erstwhile Hindawi division, said its new paper mill detection tool flags up to 1 in 7 submissions.

As many as 2% of the several million scientific works published in 2022 were milled, according to Adam Day, who directs Clear Skies, a company in London that develops tools to spot fake papers. Some fields are worse than others: biology and medicine are closer to 3%, and some subfields, such as cancer, may be much larger, Day said.

The paper mill problem is "absolutely huge," said Sabina Alam, director of Publishing Ethics and Integrity at Taylor & Francis, a major academic publisher. In 2019, none of the 175 ethics cases escalated to her team was about paper mills, Alam said. Ethics cases include submissions and already published papers. "We had almost 4,000 cases" in 2023, she said. "And half of those were paper mills."

Jennifer Byrne, an Australian scientist who now heads up a research group to improve the reliability of medical research, testified at a July 2022 U.S. House of Representatives hearing that nearly 6% of 12,000 cancer research papers screened had errors that could signal paper mill involvement. Byrne shuttered her cancer research lab in 2017 because genes she had spent two decades researching and writing about became the target of fake papers.

In 2022, Byrne and colleagues, including two of us, found that suspect genetics research, despite not immediately affecting patient care, informs scientists' work, including clinical trials. But publishers are often slow to retract tainted papers, even when alerted to obvious fraud. We found that 97% of the 712 problematic genetics research articles we identified remained uncorrected.

Potential solutions

The Cochrane Collaboration has a policy excluding suspect studies from its analyses of medical evidence and is developing a tool to spot problematic medical trials. And publishers have begun to share data and technologies among themselves to combat fraud, including image fraud.

Technology startups are also offering help. The website Argos, launched in September 2024 by Scitility, an alert service based in Sparks, Nevada, allows authors to check collaborators for retractions or misconduct. Morressier, a scientific conference and communications company in Berlin, offers research integrity tools. Paper-checking tools include Signals, by London-based Research Signals, and Clear Skies' Papermill Alarm.

But Alam acknowledges that the fight against paper mills won't be won as long as the booming demand for papers remains.

Today's commercial publishing is part of the problem, Byrne said. Cleaning up the literature is a vast and expensive undertaking. "Either we have to monetize corrections such that publishers are paid for their work, or forget the publishers and do it ourselves," she said.

There's a fundamental bias in for-profit publishing: "We pay them for accepting papers," said Bodo Stern, a former editor of the journal Cell and chief of Strategic Initiatives at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a nonprofit research organization and funder in Chevy Chase, Maryland. With more than 50,000 journals on the market, bad papers shopped around long enough eventually find a home, Stern said.

To prevent this, we could stop paying journals for accepting papers and look at them as public utilities that serve a greater good. "We should pay for transparent and rigorous quality-control mechanisms," he said.

Peer review, meanwhile, "should be recognized as a true scholarly product, just like the original article," Stern said. And journals should make all peer-review reports publicly available, even for manuscripts they turn down.

This article is a condensed version of the full six month-long investigation. To learn more about how fraudsters around the globe use paper mills to enrich themselves and harm scientific research, read the full version.

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

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A new analysis of 30 studies that collectively included almost 20,000 people revealed that parents are more likely to favor their daughters over their sons. The research also suggests that parents favored children who are perceived to be more agreeable and conscientious than their siblings. The studies included in the analysis were conducted only in North America and Western Europe, and they included predominantly white people, meaning that the results may not be applicable to people from other demographics.

In this context, favoring a child doesn't necessarily mean that parents have "favorites" — rather, they choose to treat certain children in a more favorable way than their siblings, the researchers noted in the study, which was published Jan. 16 in the journal Psychological Bulletin.

"It isn't about the parents loving one child and hating the other," said study co-author Alexander Jensen, an associate professor in the School of Family Life at Brigham Young University in Utah. "It's about being more affectionate with one of them, having more conflict with one of them, or spending more time with one of them," he told Live Science in an email.

Related: Middle children are more agreeable, humble and honest than siblings, new study suggests. The baby of the family would like a word.

It is important to understand these different parent-child interactions because children who receive more favorable treatment from their parents are more likely to have better mental health, increased academic success and healthier family relationships, among other benefits, previous research has shown. The opposite is true for children who receive less favorable treatment.

"A study several years ago suggested that if children understand why they are treated differently, then the differences don't matter," Jensen said. In other words, if a child sees that their treatment is justified, they may be more likely to accept it. For example, an older child may feel left out if their mom spends more time helping their younger sibling with their homework, until they realize that their sibling needs extra help with it.

"I hope parents will use our study as a catalyst to consider how they may treat their children differently, then work to make sure those differences are fair and understood by their children," Jensen said.

In the new analysis, Jensen and colleagues looked at data from 30 scientific papers and 14 databases, which chronicled information on the family dynamics of 19,469 people. Around 67% of these individuals were from the U.S., while the rest were from Western Europe and Canada.

The researchers investigated how specific characteristics of a child correlated with how their parents treated them. This data had been collected in a variety of ways, including via interviews, surveys and at-home observations.

The children's characteristics included factors such as when they were born relative to their siblings, their gender, and their temperament and personality traits, such as extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and neuroticism — the tendency to experience negative emotions. Parents' preferential treatment was measured by how parents interacted with their children, how much money they spent on them or how much control they wielded over them, in regards to having strict or lenient rules.

The study only looked at correlations between child characteristics and differential parental treatment. Therefore, the findings alone cannot explain why parents seem to favor daughters and more-agreeable children over sons and less-aggreeable children, respectively.

That said, agreeable children are likely to be more willing to do what they're asked, meaning that their parents may find it easier to manage them and thus respond more positively towards them, the study authors speculated.

In the future, more research is needed to understand whether these parental preferences also exist in families from a more diverse range of cultures, as well as across different stages of life — for instance, looking at parents' treatment of their kids in adulthood, too.

Yet the physics-breaking power of the space-time ruptures is also part of their draw — sucking in scientists who want to study the role of black holes in sculpting galaxies and those searching for a unified theory of gravity. Here are the most monstrous black hole findings of the year.

Scientists spot an ultra-rare "missing link" black hole hiding in the Milky Way's center

The known black holes that populate the universe fall into two types: those up to a few dozen times the mass of the sun and their supermassive counterparts that can weigh up to 50 billion solar masses. But exactly how the former evolved into the latter is unclear, especially as there have yet to be any confirmed sightings of black holes in their awkward intermediate phases.

Enter a new intermediate black hole candidate, which astronomers spotted inside the IRS 13 star cluster, just a tenth of a light-year from Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy. If scientists can confirm its existence, it could give vital clues to how black holes evolve.

A feasting supermassive black hole is consuming material 40 times faster than should be possible

This year, scientists found another clue to how supermassive black holes grow to their unimaginable scales, in the form of the gluttonous monster LID-568.

The James Webb Space Telescope spotted the black hole as it appeared just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, and it was gobbling material 40 times faster than its theoretical feeding limit (called the Eddington limit). The discovery could explain why so many giant black holes appear so early in the universe's history.

"Impossible" black holes discovered by the James Webb telescope may finally have an explanation

The finding about LID-568's feeding frenzy was far from the last word on early supermassive black hole formation. Theoreticians also proposed how black holes came to be seeded across the universe without, as they typically do today, emerging from dead stars: by rapidly collapsing pockets of gas that formed primordial black holes.

Most of these tiny singularities evaporated, according to the new hypothesis, but the ones that survived gorged and merged at a breakneck pace to reach their enormous scales.

Tiny black holes could be hollowing out planets and zipping through our bodies

Another theoretical proposal about primordial black holes also made waves this year: the suggestion that they might still exist. Perhaps they're hollowing out planets and zipping through our bodies and buildings, leaving only microscopic traces.

If bits of tiny black holes swarming across the cosmos can be found, they would be immediate candidates for most of the missing matter that seems to exert a gravitational pull yet barely interacts with light.

Biggest black hole jets ever seen are as long as 140 Milky Ways

Some black holes spew infalling matter out again, forming gigantic, near-light-speed plasma jets that can extend for hundreds of light-years. But one black hole jet pair astronomers spotted — named Porphyrion, after a giant in Greek mythology — really took the cake: At 23 million light-years in length, the pair is as long as 140 Milky Way galaxies laid end to end.

Black hole "blowtorch" is causing nearby stars to explode

Black hole jets aren't just incredible features. They're a powerful — yet still mysterious — force for the cosmic monsters to shape the wider universe. For the first time, researchers have observed a black hole jet causing stars in its vicinity to burst in explosions called novas.

Because the stars weren't directly hit by the beam, exactly how the jet is causing the stars to pop is unknown. By searching for answers, astronomers could gain a better understanding of how black holes affect even extremely distant surroundings.

Astronomers discover why some black holes have a "heartbeat"

While feeding, black holes can heat up their "food" to immense temperatures to release enormous X-ray flares that last millions of years. But inside these flares lurks another, strange signal: a regular pulse of light that resembles a heartbeat. By studying one of the flares, astronomers now think they have an explanation for black hole heartbeats: They're produced by shock waves that ripple through black holes' food as they feast.

Event Horizon Telescope reveals why our galaxy's black hole is spinning so weirdly

Our galaxy's central black hole, Sagittarius A*, is a gargantuan tear in space-time that is 4 million times the mass of the sun and 14.6 million miles (23.5 million kilometers) wide. But these are pretty standard proportions for a black hole of this scale. What is unusual about Sagittarius A* is that it's spinning surprisingly fast and it's out of kilter with the rest of the Milky Way.

This year, using the Event Horizon Telescope, which in 2022 captured the first image of our galaxy's black hole, scientists found the answer: Sagittarius A* was likely born from a gigantic collision between two giant black holes, and its lopsided rotation is a key sign of its violent origins.

Scientists spot the first black hole "triple" system

Many black holes exist in binary systems, orbiting a star companion, but researchers have now spotted one orbited by two stars, making it the first black hole triple system ever seen. Beyond creating an entirely new category in its own right, the discovery has serious implications for black hole formation.

Black holes that exist in binary systems are typically thought to have emerged from the gravitational collapse of a star. But astronomers say this triplet could offer firsthand evidence of black holes directly collapsing from gas clouds.

Dormant black hole roars to life

Black holes are typically either active and consuming material around them, or dormant because they have already swallowed everything in their midst. It's rare to see black holes shift between the two states. But astronomers have now spotted a black hole that's waking up after a long slumber.

The reasons for the black hole's reactivation remain unclear, but astronomers hypothesize that it may have begun to capture new material. Alternatively, the light coming from near the space-time singularity star that it has snared and exploded.

Debates between scientists are usually confined to the pages of scientific journals, with researchers criticizing one another's work via letters and commentaries. Occasionally, though, these disputes spill out into the wider media, and they can range from squabbles over dinosaur bones to huge controversies around key archaeological artifacts.

This year, scientists argued about everything from climate change, to space junk to black holes. Here is our list of 2024's most controversial science stories.

Building world's 1st pyramid

In a preprint study published this summer, researchers proposed that ancient Egyptians built the world's first pyramid — the 4,700-year-old Step Pyramid of Djoser, which sits on Egypt's Saqqara plateau — using a "modern hydraulic system" powered by a long-gone branch of the Nile River. The system comprised a dam, a water treatment plant and a hydraulic freight elevator, the researchers suggested, enabling workers to deliver heavy construction materials to the pyramid building site.

The proposed infrastructure addresses long-standing questions about how ancient Egyptians erected the Step Pyramid of Djoser, which contains 11.6 million cubic feet (330,400 cubic meters) of stone and clay, before the advent of large machinery like bulldozers and cranes. Study lead author Xavier Landreau told Live Science the hydraulic system was "a watershed discovery," but another expert wasn't so sure about the findings.

Julia Budka, an archaeologist specializing in ancient Egypt at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany, told Live Science that "scientifically, their hypothesis is not proven at all." Budka added: "My biggest concerns about the study are that no Egyptologists or archaeologists were directly involved and that the authors actually question the use of the Djoser Pyramid as a burial site." (Peer-reviewed research shows the pyramid was in fact used as a burial site.)

Black hole image

A groundbreaking picture of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole that sits at the center of the Milky Way, caused a stir this year, with a study published online in May claiming the image displays important errors. The photo, which was taken with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) in 2017 and released in 2022, is the first ever image of our galaxy's central black hole, located 26,000 light-years from Earth.

The image shows an orange, donut-shaped ring of gas against a pitch-black background — but researchers say the ring is distorted due to the way the data for the image were stitched together. The ring should be more elongated than it appears in the image, the researchers said, and the eastern half should be brighter than the western half.

"We hypothesize that the ring image resulted from errors during EHT's imaging analysis and that part of it was an artifact, rather than the actual astronomical structure," study lead author Makoto Miyoshi, an astronomer at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, said in a statement at the time.

The EHT team responded to the claims in November saying that their methods were extensively verified, and their results consistent over two days of observations. The team pointed out inconsistencies in the revised image, arguing that Miyoshi and colleagues mistook "the biases in their own methodology as demonstrations of biases" in the original EHT methods.

Global warming's beginning

A study published early this year found Earth is on course to reach 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) of warming relative to preindustrial levels by the late 2020s — more than a decade earlier than current projections. Global warming of 2 C is considered a critical threshold to prevent the worst effects of climate change; warming beyond this would greatly boost the likelihood of extreme weather and other destructive impacts.

The study authors said in a news conference that their results mark "a major change to the thinking about global warming," because they bring forward the advent of human-made climate change by four decades, meaning scientists have been underestimating the level of warming all along. The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that global warming began around 1900, but the recent study says the start date is more likely to have been in the 1860s.

The authors based their results on climate indicators found in old skeletons of sponges from the Caribbean Sea. But other experts criticized the findings, saying the authors wrongly extrapolated from highly local data to draw conclusions about the whole world. "The study fails to support its global claims with robust evidence, and it fails by a huge margin," Jochem Marotzke, a professor of climate science and director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany, told Live Science.

"Skepticism is warranted here," Michael Mann, director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, told Live Science. "It honestly doesn't make sense to me."

Weakening Earth's magnetic field

Defunct satellites that burn up as they enter Earth's atmosphere could be releasing dust that interferes with the planet's magnetic field, according to a preprint study that attracted criticism this year. Metal pollution from falling space junk may theoretically create an invisible conductive shell around Earth, weakening the magnetosphere — the bullet-shaped field around Earth that stretches roughly 39,800 miles (64,000 kilometers) above our planet's surface.

The metal pollution, a problem that is being made worse by the unchecked expansion of commercial satellites orbiting Earth, could slice the magnetosphere in half and lead to "atmospheric stripping" down the line, study author Sierra Solter-Hunt, who was then a doctoral candidate at the University of Iceland, told Live Science. Although this is a worst-case scenario, the findings are "really, really alarming," Solter-Hunt said.

Some scientists praised the study for highlighting potential issues arising from spacecraft dust, but others said the results were too speculative or based on flawed assumptions. "Even at the densities [of spacecraft dust] discussed, a continuous conductive shell like a true magnetic shield is unlikely," John Tarduno, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester in New York, told Live Science.

Nevertheless, space junk pollution "is not an issue to be ignored," said Fionagh Thompson, a research fellow at Durham University in the U.K. "There is a need to step back and view this as a completely new phenomenon."

Baby T. rex or tiny dino?

A study in January weighed in on a long-standing debate over a set of dinosaur fossils that could belong either to a young Tyrannosaurus rex or to a distinct species called Nanotyrannus lancensis. The study supported the Nanotyrannus hypothesis, based on growth rings on the fossils, and claimed to snuff out the opposing side of the dispute once and for all — but other experts still weren't convinced.

The study authors found that growth rings were closely packed toward the outside of the bones, which is inconsistent with the rapid growth of a dinosaur, and therefore refutes the juvenile T. rex hypothesis, they said. "If they were young T. rex they should be growing like crazy," lead author Nicholas Longrich, a paleontologist and senior lecturer at the University of Bath in the U.K., said in a statement at the time. Instead, the bones showed a pattern consistent with slowing growth, Longrich said.

But some experts remained resolutely team T. rex. "The authors don't seem to have a solid grasp on growth variation in tyrannosaurs," Thomas Carr, a vertebrate paleontologist and an associate professor of biology at Carthage College in Wisconsin, told Live Science. Others said they will sit on the fence until fossils come to light that belong to either a fully adult Nanotyrannus or a young T. rex that definitely isn't Nanotyrannus — at which point comparison work could settle the question once and for all.

Alexander the Great's lost tunic?

A scrap of cloth discovered decades ago in a royal tomb belonged to none other than Alexander the Great, according to a controversial study published in October. Located in Greece, the tomb is generally believed to hold the remains of Alexander's father, Philip II, but the study argues it actually belongs to Alexander's half-brother, Philip III. Therefore, the cloth inside was once part of a sacred tunic worn by Alexander that, after his death, was passed on to Philip III and accompanied him to his grave, the author claimed.

The study's conclusions are based on multiple lines of evidence — such as the art on the tomb's walls, studies of the skeletons found inside and ancient records of garments worn by different kings — but the findings sparked mixed reactions from experts. Some researchers said there is no evidence to support the idea that the cloth formed part of a tunic, while others noted that the author of the study never actually saw the piece of material, discrediting the paper's conclusions.

Another group of researchers, meanwhile, thought the case for the cloth being Alexander's lost tunic was strong.

AI fingerprint-matching tool

A new technique to match fingerprints from separate digits belonging to the same person sparked controversy at the beginning of 2024. It's long been suspected that connecting prints from different digits could help solve criminal cases, but forensic methods so far haven't been able to do so accurately, only reliably linking fingerprints from the same digit.

Researchers used artificial intelligence (AI) to develop a tool that can connect different fingerprints left by the same person 77% of the time, based on similarities between the angles of arches, whorls and loops on each finger. The study in which they detailed their methods was rejected by several journals but was eventually published, receiving mixed reactions from other experts.

Simon Cole, a professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine, said the study was "overhyped" and only had "rare and limited use," given that law enforcement routinely takes prints from all 10 digits and can match prints simply by looking at records.

Ralph Ristenbatt, a criminalist and assistant teaching professor of forensic science at Pennsylvania State University, argued the technique could prove useful in certain cases. But more work is needed until the AI tool is accurate enough to be rolled out and used in a court of law.

Megalodon misrepresented?

A new analysis of megalodon fossils published in January found that the long-extinct, supersized sharks looked nothing like researchers previously thought. Reconstructions to date indicated that megalodons (Otodus megalodon) measured around 52 feet (16 meters) long and resembled great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias), but this body shape "looked very awkward," according to the authors of the new study.

The anatomy of megalodon has remained somewhat elusive because shark skeletons are made of cartilage rather than bone, and therefore don't preserve well as fossils. Scientists mostly only had fossilized teeth and vertebrae to work with, so they often used great white sharks as models to establish what megalodon looked like.

The analysis in January found megalodons were much slimmer and longer than great whites, with a body plan closer to that of a shortfin mako shark (Isurus oxyrinchus). The evidence suggested the meg may have reached 66 feet (20 m) long or possibly slightly more, the authors told Live Science. But other researchers who had previously examined megalodon fossils weren't convinced by the findings.

According to them, the analysis used "circular logic," where an argument uses the assumption that its conclusion is correct to support itself. "The 'elongated body' interpretation is based on a single observation, a comparison with a single analogue, and lacks any statistical tests to support its hypothesis," Jack Cooper, a researcher at Swansea University in the U.K., Catalina Pimiento, also of Swansea University, and John Hutchinson from the Royal Veterinary College in London told Live Science. The study is also impossible to fully verify as the authors held back crucial data, the researchers said.

But don't crow too loudly at your holiday meal (not that you would, being so humble). The research contradicts previous large studies on birth order and personality and will likely need more research to replicate the findings.

Stereotypes abound

There are plenty of pop-psychology stereotypes about how one's birth order affects personality, from the overachieving first born to the peacekeeping middle children to spoiled babies of the family. But most research has not supported these stereotypes. A 2015 commentary in the journal PNAS noted that studies over two decades found wildly contradictory results, with some showing very strong correlations between personality traits and birth order and others finding none at all. Many of these studies were small, non-representative samples.

In 2015, two studies with large samples were published. One looked at 20,000 people in the U.S., U.K. and Germany and tried to find relationships between birth order and personality traits as measured by the Big Five – five standard psychological categories of personality that are well-supported by research. (They are extraversion/introversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, neuroticism and conscientiousness.) The other study did something similar with a sample of 272,000 U.S. adults who attended high school in 1960 and are part of a long-running study called Project Talent.

Neither study made much of a case for birth order influencing personality. The three-country study found no relationship, while the Project Talent study found a very small relationship between intelligence and being an older sibling, perhaps suggesting that older siblings benefit from teaching their younger siblings. Still, despite this statistically detectable difference, a younger sibling will still score higher on an IQ test than their older sibling in four out of ten cases, the researchers wrote, meaning the finding has limited power to predict intelligence in the real world.

Related: Are these 4 personality types for real?

New dataset

Now, a new study argues that there are differences – and that crucially, they depend on family size. This study, published Monday (Dec. 23) in the journal PNAS, used a different personality measure called HEXACO, which was developed by Michael Ashtona and Kibeom Lee, the two authors of the new study. HEXACO overlaps with the Big Five personality dimensions, but with some differences. Its categories are honesty/humility, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience. Agreeableness in HEXACO means a tendency toward flexibility, grace, and forgiveness, whereas agreeableness in the Big Five is defined by warmth and cooperation.

The researchers used data from hexaco.org, where anyone can take a personality test to find out where they fall on this scale. For 710,797 individuals, they had information about birth order. For another 74,920 individuals, they had information about both birth order and number of siblings. (These studies do not differentiate between step-siblings, half siblings or other biological relationships, instead defining siblings as any other children in the household.)

In this dataset, the researchers found that middle children had the highest scores for honesty/humility and for agreeableness, followed by youngest siblings, then oldest, then only children. They also found that the more siblings a person had, the higher they scored in these same traits.

Because religious families tend to have more children, the researchers controlled for religiosity and found that religion explained about 25% of these differences, but that still left birth order and family size responsible for the rest. The differences between siblings are small, but the authors speculate that they could be due to the forced cooperation that occurs in large families.

"A commonsense possibility is that when one has more siblings, one must more frequently cooperate rather than act on selfish preferences," Lee and Ashtona wrote. "This ongoing situation might then promote the development of cooperative tendencies generally."

These findings are not likely to be the last word in birth order research, however. In 2020, for example, another study searching for differences between only children and children with siblings turned up no differences in narcissism. And a 2019 study comparing only children and people with siblings using HEXACO found only vanishingly small differences.

Fast-forward 150 years, and conspiracy theories are more prevalent than ever, which can be put down to the rise of social media, the spread of disinformation and a number of psychological factors — including a need to make sense of the world.

But how much do you know about the wildest conspiracy theories? Test your knowledge on the Illuminati, faked moon landings, flat Earth and even more bizarre claims in our conspiracy theory quiz. Make sure you login to add your name to the leaderboard, and if you need a hint, tap the yellow button.

More science quizzes

—Evolution quiz: Can you naturally select the correct answers?

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But is there real science behind attachment styles?

The short answer is yes — but there are plenty of misconceptions about what a person's attachment style can tell you about them.

Psychologists use attachment styles to describe people's approach to relationships. However, these styles do not necessarily rule people's relationships, nor can people always be neatly categorized into these different ways of interacting. Instead, attachment styles occur along a continuum, and people may be "secure" in some types of relationships and "insecure" in others.

Related: Was Freud right about anything?

"There isn't a magical threshold at which a person suddenly becomes secure or insecure," said R. Chris Fraley, a social and personality psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who studies attachment. Nor is there a set amount of relationship-related trauma in someone's past that determines their attachment style, Fraley told Live Science. People vary widely in how they react to poor parenting or untrustworthy romantic partners, for instance.

What are the different attachment styles?

The styles come from attachment theory, which arose in the late 1960s out of work conducted by psychologists John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. Bowlby hypothesized that if young children did not form secure attachments with a primary caregiver in toddlerhood, they would struggle to do so for a lifetime.

To test this idea, Ainsworth devised an experiment in which babies around age 1 were left by their parent to play alone in an unknown room for a few minutes. Then, the parent would return. Psychologists would observe how the child reacted to both the parent's departure and return.

From these observations, Ainsworth posited four attachment styles:

• Secure attachment: Securely attached babies were upset at their parent's departure and were immediately comforted when the parent returned.
• Anxious attachment: Anxiously attached babies were upset at their parent's departure and difficult to console when the parent returned.
• Avoidant attachment: Avoidantly attached babies barely reacted to their parent's departure or return.
• Disorganized attachment: Disorganized attached babies had unpredictable responses to their parent either coming or going. They could become very anxious or distressed, which could manifest as uncontrollable outbursts or a flat, seemingly unemotional affect.

Over time, other psychologists began to consider these attachment styles in the context of adult relationships.

There are different ways to measure attachment, but one common method that social and personality psychologists use is to measure a person's attachment-related avoidance and attachment-related anxiety, usually via questionnaires about their relationships and behaviors.

Someone who is avoidant in a relationship shies away from intimacy or opportunities to disclose their emotions; they have difficulty trusting others and may push people away if they feel they are getting too close. Meanwhile, someone who is anxious in a relationship feels insecure, worries that the other person does not really care about them, and thus may become clingy and uncomfortably dependent on their partner.

Someone low in both avoidance and anxiety is considered securely attached, Fraley said.

"We consider someone to be 'secure' in their relationship if they are comfortable depending on the person in question, using them as a safe haven in times of distress, and are assured that the person is truly invested in their well-being," he said.

On average, there is an association between people's early childhood experiences and their adult attachment styles, Fraley said. People who experience early life abuse, neglect, or otherwise cold or unpredictable caregiving are more likely to struggle with attachment in adult relationships. However, he said, childhood experiences don't cement your fate — there are many people who encounter bad experiences early in life but have secure adult relationships, and vice versa.

"People change, relationship experiences change, and life gets complicated in ways that can't be captured simply by knowing what happened early in a person's life," Fraley said. "Most attachment scholars think of attachment as reflecting the history of a person's interpersonal experiences rather than something that happened at one specific point in time. Although people tend to have some continuity in their interpersonal histories, those twists and turns matter too."

In other words, attachment styles can change.

"Fairly simple strategies, such as simply reflecting on and writing about attachment experiences, can lead to short-term boosts in security," Fraley noted. "What we don't understand well is what it takes to create and sustain longer-term change."

Researchers are working to answer that question, Fraley said. In the meantime, he and his colleagues run a website with scientifically validated attachment style questionnaires for anyone wondering what their own styles in their own relationships might be.

The new research, published Nov. 6 in the journal Neuron, shows that our brains are actually incredibly active when we watch movies. Researchers at MIT took advantage of this to create the most accurate functional brain map to date, charting specific circuits that activate to support different aspects of cognition.

They tracked where the brain becomes active during movie scenes — for instance, when Dom Cobb explores a dream world in "Inception," Kevin McCallister realizes he is "Home Alone," or Leia calls Han a "scruffy-looking nerf-herder" in "Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back." From there, they were able to identify different brain networks needed to process different types of scenes.

"Our work is the first attempt to get a layout of different areas and networks of the brain during naturalistic conditions," study first author Reza Rajimehr, a neuroscientist at MIT, told Live Science. By comparison, many functional brain mapping studies have been performed when the brain is "at rest," not engaged in observing a specific scene.

Related: 'Universal language network' identified in the brain

Snapshots of the resting brain are still informative, but the challenge is that some of the brain's networks are activated only with external stimulation.

In the new study, the researchers used a functional MRI (fMRI) dataset from the Human Connectome Project, which consisted of brain scans from 176 young adults who watched 60 minutes of short clips from several independent and Hollywood movies. An fMRI scan indirectly measures brain activity by tracking where blood flows to different regions of the brain. If a part of the brain is active, blood flow to that part increases.

"The movie stimulus is a rich stimulus, but on the other hand, it is not a very well-controlled stimulus," Rajimehr said. "And when you show a movie to a subject, you may get some idiosyncratic responses, which cannot be generalized to other subjects." Not everyone reacts to or processes movies in the same way.

So a trick Rajimehr and his team used was to average the brain activity across participants. This enabled them to map and study brain responses and networks that are common across all the people in the study. With this initial map in place, they could then identify which networks were active during different movie scenes.

Overall, 24 different brain networks were activated during movie watching. The researchers could then assign functions to each network by associating them with specific cognitive processes, such as recognizing human faces, watching people interact with one another, and observing familiar settings and landmarks.

This analysis resulted in the most comprehensive functional map of the brain to be presented so far, the researchers say.

From this map, the researchers discovered an inverse relationship between "executive control domains" — parts of the brain involved in planning and decision-making — and parts of the brain with other functions.

When a movie scene was complex and difficult to follow — like when Danny Ocean and his crew are planning a Las Vegas heist in "Ocean's 11" — the executive domains responsible for making plans, solving problems and prioritizing information were highly active. However, when a scene was relatively simple — like when Julia Roberts talks casually to a plaintiff in "Erin Brokovich" — more specialized brain regions including those involved in language processing dominated.

"One result that was quite surprising was that … whenever the clip ends, there is [also] a huge response in these executive control networks," Rajimehr added. During the study, the clips would end abruptly with a 20-second rest between each scene. Rajimehr proposed that this abrupt end might automatically activate specific memory circuits, as subjects attempted to recall the content of the clips.

A functional map of the brain with this level of detail could provide insights into how the organ's networks are organized in both healthy people and those with conditions, such as schizophrenia or autism. And in theory, understanding how the brain responds to movies could even teach Hollywood a thing or two, helping filmmakers create more engaging content, Rajimehr said.

Ever wonder why some people build muscle more easily than others or why freckles come out in the sun? Send us your questions about how the human body works to community@livescience.com with the subject line "Health Desk Q," and you may see your question answered on the website!

But how many weeks are there in a year?

Generally, there are 52 weeks and one additional day in a regular year. In a leap year, which occurs almost every four years, there are 52 weeks and two additional days.

When did we decide there are 52 weeks in a year?

The story of how we arrived at these timekeeping rules is rather complex. Early methods of timekeeping date to as early as 11,000 years ago. An Australian Aboriginal stone arrangement suggests the people who constructed it used the patterns of the sun to track the passage of time.

"The biggest driver [for keeping time] was probably religion," Demetrios Matsakis, former chief scientist at the Department of Time Services of the United States Naval Observatory and now chief scientist at Masterclock, Inc. told Live Science. "The Egyptians, Sumerians and others needed to recite certain prayers at certain times of the day and night."

Since then, cultures have employed both the positions of the sun and the moon to chronicle the passing of time. Some calendars have been based solely on the sun or the moon and others have attempted to combine the two.

"The sun is much better [as a means of calculating time] because the moon's orbit is very irregular due to the interplay between the gravitational fields of the Earth and the sun," Matsakis said.

The Gregorian calendar, the most commonly used calendar worldwide, is a solar calendar based exclusively on the movement of Earth around the sun. It is derived from a calendar Julius Caesar instituted in 46 B.C. The Julian calendar calculated the length of the year at 365.25 days, so it added an extra day every four years. However, a year is actually 365.2422 days. The Julian calendar failed to account for about 11 minutes, which compounded over time.

By the time the discrepancy was noticed in the 1600s, around 10 additional days had accrued in the calendar. This became a concern for the Catholic Church, which desired to keep a precise calendar to maintain an accurate observance of holidays.

"Over the centuries that difference added up, and Pope Gregory XIII was worried that Easter was being celebrated at the wrong time," Matsakis said. The celebration of other holidays was calculated by their distance from Easter, creating additional complications for the church.

The pope determined that the problem should be corrected by skipping leap years in any centurial year not divisible by 400. Gregory decreed that Oct. 4, 1582 would skip directly to Oct. 15, thus correcting for the extra days that resulted from the slight inaccuracy in the Julian calendar.

While some countries quickly adopted the new calendar, others did not. Some, such as England, refused due to religious reasons — the nation's Protestant faith conflicted with edicts issued by the Catholic Church. The United Kingdom did not adopt the new system until 1752. Others had long observed alternative calendrical systems. China, for example, had long used a lunar calendar and did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1912. The country did not actually put it into wide use until 1929.

As a result, many documents in the years following Pope Gregory's decree listed both Old Style dates, which reflected the Julian calendar, and New Style dates, which reflected the Gregorian calendar, in order to avoid confusion.

Later, the calendar was further refined to be even more accurate than the Gregorian. "In 1923, on the advice of the Serbian astronomer Milutin Milanković, the leap year system was changed again," Matsakis said.

This time, any year not divisible by 100 was not a leap year, with the exception of those that left remainders of 200 or 600 when divided by 900. The Milanković calendar will align with the Gregorian calendar until 2800. Despite the increased accuracy, it has only been adopted by certain branches of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

But how many nuclear bombs have actually gone off?

Although the exact answer isn't known, scientists estimate that at least 2,056 nuclear weapons have been tested. According to the Arms Control Association, the U.S. has tested 1,030 nuclear bombs and utilized two in warfare, the Soviet Union/Russia has tested 715, France has tested 210, the United Kingdom and China have each tested 45, North Korea has tested six, India has tested three and Pakistan has tested two. (A suspected additional test, known as the Vela incident, would bring the tally to 2,057.)

While nuclear testing has not been common since the 1990s, it has had extensive political, environmental and public health impacts that extend to this day. The international community now condemns it. But for almost 20 years, from 1945 to 1963, nuclear testing was commonplace for many countries as they vied for status as world powers.

Nuclear testing skyrocketed during the Cold War between the U.S. and the USSR following World War II. According to the Arms Control Association, 1962 holds the record for most tests conducted in one year, when 178 nuclear tests were conducted, of which 97% were set off by the U.S. and the USSR. The U.K. also conducted two tests, and France conducted one.

Related: What happens when a nuclear bomb explodes?

But 1962 was also a key turning point for nuclear tensions. That same year, the Cuban Missile Crisis marked the closest the U.S. and USSR came to nuclear conflict. Many people around the world had begun protesting the nuclear arms race, and the public began to understand the impact testing had on health.

A landmark 1961 study published in the journal Science tested baby teeth in children in St. Louis for strontium-90, a cancer-causing radioactive isotope created by nuclear explosions and easily absorbed by children. The study showed that strontium-90 levels were 50% higher in the baby teeth of children in the 1960s than in the 1950s, despite St. Louis being hundreds of miles away from the blast sites in Nevada.

The study generated vast public concern about testing, and helped push the U.S. into signing the Limited Nuclear Test Ban in 1963, Tilman Ruff, the former co-president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, told Live Science in an email.

Less than a year later, in 1963, the Limited Test Ban Treaty was introduced to the United Nations and wholeheartedly adopted. The treaty prohibited nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in outer space and underwater, which were all drastically more harmful than underground tests.

"By 1963, nearly two decades of bomb testing had poisoned the air, land and water with hundreds of radioisotopes," Robert Alvarez, an expert with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, wrote in an email to Live Science.

The world had seen the devastating impacts of nuclear testing gone-awry. During the 1954 Castle Bravo test, unfavorable wind conditions and unexpectedly high radiation yields caused a local population in the Marshall Islands to be exposed to the near-lethal radiation doses, the highest ever following a single nuclear test, according to an article published in the journal International Review of the Red Cross. "The Rongelap Atoll in the Marshall Islands remains a radiological hazard, because of life-threatening fallout from the 1954 Bravo test," Alvarez said.

In all, 108 countries, including the U.S. and the USSR, signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, and an era of slow disarmament began. Still, hundreds of nuclear bombs would continue to be tested underground for decades to come. Countries like China, India, Pakistan and North Korea also started testing nuclear bombs, despite the efforts of the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968 to limit the growth of global nuclear weapons programs.

It wasn't until the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) was proposed in 1996 that testing slowed to a standstill. While technically not ratified into law, it has been signed by 187 countries.

Related: How radioactive is the human body?

The CTBT's monitoring system also ensures that nuclear testing can't be hidden. This system, put in place when the CTBT was signed in 1996, uses 321 stations equipped with seismic, hydroacoustic, infrared and radionuclide technologies to detect nuclear testing worldwide. This monitoring system encourages countries that haven't signed the CTBT to disclose their nuclear testing.

The most recent nuclear test was conducted in 2017 by North Korea, which has not signed the CTBT. The CTBT organization's monitoring system recorded the test, which measured at least 140 kilotons, Alvarez wrote — eight times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

How have nuclear bombs and tests affected our planet?

"The concern and protests of people worldwide about radioactive fallout from nuclear testing has played a major role" in shutting down nuclear testing programs, Ruff said. As nuclear testing continued, science revealing the detrimental effects on the health of people and the environment grew. A 2006 study estimated that 22,000 additional radiation-related cancers and 1,800 additional deaths from radiation-related leukemia were expected to occur in the United States from nuclear testing-related fallout of the 1950 and 1960s.

"For people in the immediate vicinity and downwind of nuclear test explosions, nuclear testing has had profound and long-term effects on their health and communities," Ruff said.

While the U.S. utilized multiple testing sites in Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado, its most powerful bombs were tested in the Marshall Islands, in the Central Pacific Ocean. Starting in 1946, the islands and their inhabitants experienced "the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima bombs each day over the twelve years of the tests," according to the International Review of the Red Cross article, which continued even after the Castle Bravo test disaster.

On top of the health hazards, nuclear testing in places like the Marshall Islands also created "broader social effects of displacement, loss of use of traditional lands for cultural and food gathering purposes, social stresses and disruption, and impoverishment," Ruff said.

However, day-to-day radiation across the U.S. has fallen dramatically since the end of atmospheric nuclear testing, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Could nuclear testing start again?

Many countries still have nuclear weapons, even if they aren't testing them. The world's nine current nuclear states — China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States — have approximately 13,000 nuclear warheads combined.

North Korea's most recent nuclear test set off a wave of concern from South Korea, which was heightened by the intensive missile tests North Korea conducted in 2022 and 2023. For the first time, South Korea suggested that developing its own nuclear program may be a possibility.

If South Korea or other nuclear-armed countries decide to test their weapons, it would likely prompt other nuclear-armed countries to restart their nuclear tests as well.

"Resumption of nuclear testing would be an extremely provocative and backwards step for the prospects of peace," Ruff wrote.

Christopher French, a professor emeritus of psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, recently wrote a book about the science of the paranormal and said ghost sightings are often "sincere misinterpretations of things that do have a natural explanation."

"Just because you can't think of an explanation doesn't mean there isn't one," French told Live Science.

French is a skeptic who explores non-paranormal explanations for ghostly encounters. These explanations include hallucinations, or perceptions of things that aren't there; false memories, or recollections of events that didn't happen; and pareidolia, or the tendency to see a face or something significant in an inanimate object or random pattern.

The human brain is prone to missing things and misremembering events, and it can jump to conclusions when trying to understand an ambiguous experience. This is especially true when a person wants to believe they've seen a ghost or another legendary creature, Live Science previously reported.

Related: Are ghosts real?

There are also some medical conditions that make perceived ghostly encounters more likely. One area of study for French is a disorder called sleep paralysis, in which people think they've fully woken up but are unable to move, often while sensing an evil presence.

"It's as if your mind wakes up, but your body doesn't," French said. "You've got this interesting mix of normal waking consciousness and dream consciousness, and the contents of the dream are coming through into waking consciousness. The results can be absolutely terrifying."

French noted that if someone gets sleep paralysis without having any prior knowledge of the disorder, then it's not irrational for that person to assume they've had a supernatural experience. However, even during sleep paralysis, when humans are at the mercy of their dreams, the presence people encounter is often a shadowy figure in the corner of the room.

Movies depict ghosts as full-bodied translucent humans, but these kinds of sightings make up only a small minority of perceived paranormal reports. Johannes Dillinger, a professor of early modern history at Oxford Brookes University in the U.K. is working on understanding the types of ghosts people have believed in over the centuries in Western society and culture. He said that the most commonly reported haunting is an unseen poltergeist.

"Many, many ghosts over the centuries were mere poltergeists, meaning they remained invisible throughout," Dillinger told Live Science. "We only think they are there because we hear strange noises, usually at night, that are difficult to explain."

Dillinger found that prior to 1800, people believed that ghosts had important unfinished business, but in a much more literal sense than we might think of today. "Ghosts usually wanted people to find their treasures and put them to some good use," Dillinger said.

Perceived ghosts have become more personal since then. The 19th century marked the rise of spiritualism and a belief that humans could communicate with ghosts and spirits, according to the Science History Institute, a nonprofit that promotes the history of science.

Dillinger noted that people's beliefs changed from ghosts demanding things of the living to the living expecting to be consoled or comforted by the dead. However, throughout all of this, ghosts have remained, above all else, an explanation that people readily accept for strange noises in the dark.

"The ghost is really that thing that goes bump in the night," Dillinger said.

There is no time limit on the quiz, and if you need a hint you can get one by tapping the lightbulb in the top right corner.

We hope you enjoy it, and be sure to share your results with your friends and followers on social media.

It might be obvious that internet quizzes are not scientific, but many of the seemingly serious personality tests used to guide educational and career choices are also not supported by research. Despite being a billion-dollar industry, commercial personality testing used by schools and corporations to funnel people into their ideal roles do not predict career success.

Beyond their lack of scientific support, the most popular approaches to understanding personality are problematic because they assume your traits are static – that is, you're stuck with the personality you're born with. But modern personality science studies find that traits can and do change over time.

In addition to watching my own personality change over time from messy and lazy to off the charts in conscientiousness, I'm also a personality change researcher and clinical psychologist. My research confirms what I saw in my own development and in my patients: People can intentionally shape the traits they need to be successful in the lives they want. That's contrary to the popular belief that your personality type places you in a box, dictating that you choose partners, activities and careers according to your traits.

What personality is and isn't

According to psychologists, personality is your characteristic way of thinking, feeling and behaving.

Are you a person who tends to think about situations in your life more pessimistically, or are you a glass-half-full kind of person?

Do you tend to get angry when someone cuts you off in traffic, or are you more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt – maybe they're rushing to the hospital?

Do you wait until the last minute to complete tasks, or do you plan ahead?

You can think of personality as a collection of labels that summarize your responses to questions like these. Depending on your answers, you might be labeled as optimistic, empathetic or dependable.

Research suggests that all these descriptive labels can be summarized into five overarching traits – what psychologists creatively refer to as the "Big Five."

As early as the 1930s, psychologists literally combed through a dictionary to pull out all the words that describe human nature and sorted them in categories with similar themes. For example, they grouped words like "kind," "thoughtful" and "friendly" together. They found that thousands of words could be accounted for by sorting them between five traits: neuroticism, extroversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness and openness.

What personality is not: People often feel protective about their personality — you may view it as the core of who you are. According to scientific definitions, however, personality is not your likes, dislikes or preferences. It's not your sense of humor. It's not your values or what you think is important in life.

In other words, shifting your Big Five traits does not change the core of who you are. It simply means learning to respond to situations in life with different thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

Can you change your personality?

Can personality change? Remember, personality is a person's characteristic way of thinking, feeling and behaving. And while it might sound hard to change personality, people change how they think, feel and behave all the time.

Suppose you're not super dependable. If you start to think "being on time shows others that I respect them," begin to feel pride when you arrive to brunch before your friends, and engage in new behaviors that increase your timeliness — such as getting up with an alarm, setting appointment reminders and so on — you are embodying the characteristics of a reliable person. If you maintain these changes to your thinking, emotions and behaviors over time — voila! — you are reliable. Personality: changed.

Data confirms this idea. In general, personality changes across a person's life span. As people age, they tend to experience fewer negative emotions and more positive ones, are more conscientious, place greater emphasis on positive relationships and are less judgmental of others.

There is variability here, though. Some people change a lot and some people hold pretty steady. Moreover, studies, including my own, that test whether personality interventions change traits over time find that people can speed up the process of personality change by making intentional tweaks to their thinking and behavior. These tweaks can lead to meaningful change in less than 20 weeks, instead of 20 years.

Cultivating personality traits that serve you best

The good news is that these cognitive-behavioral techniques are relatively simple, and you don't need to visit a therapist if that's not something you're into.

The first component involves changing your thinking patterns — this is the cognitive piece. You need to become aware of your thoughts to determine whether they're keeping you stuck acting in line with a particular trait. For example, if you find yourself thinking "people are only looking out for themselves," you are likely to act defensively around others.

The behavioral component involves becoming aware of your current action tendencies and testing out new responses. If you are defensive around other people, they will probably respond negatively to you. When they withdraw or snap at you, for example, it then confirms your belief that you can't trust others. By contrast, if you try behaving more openly — perhaps sharing with a co-worker that you're struggling with a task – you have the opportunity to see whether that changes the way others act toward you.

These cognitive-behavioral strategies are so effective for nudging personality because personality is simply your characteristic way of thinking and behaving. Consistently making changes to your perspective and actions can lead to lasting habits that ultimately result in crafting the personality you desire.

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

However, before the sun shrinks to this diminutive size, it will expand into a red giant, which threatens to swallow Earth alongside Mercury and Venus. If our planet survives, then we may well resemble KMT-2020-BLG-0414. Whether humanity will be there to see it …

Lost Biblical tree resurrected from mystery seed

For 14 years, researchers have been growing a tree from an ancient seed that archaeologists excavated from a Judean Desert cave in the late 1980s. Now that the specimen stands at around 10 feet (3 meters) tall, the scientists believe that the tree grown from this 1,000 year old seed could belong to a long-lost lineage mentioned in the Bible.

The seed of the tree, dubbed "Sheba," dates back to somewhere between A.D. 993 and 1202, and the researchers believe that the fully-grown specimen could be the source of Biblical "tsori" — a resinous extract associated with healing in Genesis, Jeremiah and Ezekiel.

"The identity of Biblical 'tsori' (translated in English as 'balm') has long been open to debate," the researchers wrote in the study. Now, having revived Sheba, the team thinks it has finally unraveled its mystery of this ancient plant.

Discover more archaeology news

—2,700-year-old shields and helmet from ancient kingdom unearthed at castle in Turkey

—Mysterious 'horseman' from lead coffin unearthed in Notre Dame Cathedral finally identified

When was steel invented?

Steel is the backbone of the modern world and used in houses, skyscrapers, automobiles and more. But steel isn't found in nature, so when did humans invent steel?

Near-indestructible '5D memory crystal' could survive to the end of the universe

Scientists have developed a new data storage format that, under the right conditions, could survive well beyond the destruction of Earth as it gets consumed by the sun, and possibly until the very end of the known universe. Most data storage systems degrade over time, but researchers at the University of Southampton in the U.K. made a synthetic "5D memory crystal" that mimics the properties of fused quartz, one of the most chemically and thermally stable materials there is.

And what have they done with this incredible new material? They etched a copy of the entire human genome on it, in the hope that our species could be revived long after our extinction — however unlikely that may be.

Discover more technology stories

—'The dystopian possibilities seem endless': How attempts to merge human brains with machines could go disastrously wrong

—What is artificial general intelligence (AGI)?

Also in science news this week

• Nuking an asteroid could save Earth from destruction, researchers show in 1st-of-its-kind X-ray experiment
• 1st-ever observation of 'spooky action' between quarks is highest-energy quantum entanglement ever detected
• Pollen allergies drove woolly mammoths to extinction, study claims

NASA reveals images of enormous, snowman-shaped asteroid

We're no strangers to "potentially hazardous" asteroids, given that as of September 2024, NASA has identified more than 2,400 known asteroids that will pass within 4.65 million miles (7.5 million kilometers) of our planet. While "potentially hazardous" sounds alarming, that's roughly 20 times the average distance between Earth and the moon, and astronomers do not believe any of them threaten our home for at least the next 100 years.

However, when they do pass, it gives us an opportunity to study asteroids in greater detail than when they are farther away from us. One such asteroid flew safely past Earth at a distance of 620,000 miles (1 million km) earlier this month, and new images captured by the Goldstone Solar System Radar near Barstow, California, reveal the "snowman" shaped rock is actually two asteroids locked together by their own gravity — known as a contact binary.

Something for the weekend

If you're looking for something a little longer to read over the weekend, here are some of the best long reads, book excerpts and interviews published this week.

• Our pick of the best science books for kids and young adults [Reading list]
• Will language face a dystopian future? How 'Future of Language' author Philip Seargeant thinks AI will shape our communication [Interview]
• 32 of the world's smartest animals [Countdown]

Science in pictures: 'Scuba-diving' lizards

When danger lurks for certain semi aquatic lizards, there is one place they can hide — underwater. But how can they stay there long enough to avoid predation? A clever trick, whereby they create an air bubble on their forehead to store oxygen, allowing them to breathe underwater like a scuba diver.

This behavior was first discovered in 2018, but a recent study found that the bubble allowed them to stay underwater 32% longer than without it. "We know that they can stay underwater at least about 20 minutes, but probably longer," study author Lindsey Swierk, assistant research professor in biological sciences at Binghamton University in New York, told Live Science in an email.

Follow Live Science on social media

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

But these "spiders" are not the only thing we've had to keep an eye on from space: There is the new 'mini-moon' taking a short spin around our planet; the discovery that Earth may have once worn a Saturn-like ring; and the prospect of space trash leading us to intelligent aliens.

'Ramesses II' sword

3,200-year-old ancient Egyptian barracks contains sword inscribed with 'Ramesses II'

Archaeologists in Egypt recently unearthed the 3,200-year-old remains of a military barracks containing a sword with hieroglyphs depicting the name of Ramesses II.

Remains of pottery containing fish bones were also found on the site, alongside multiple cow burials.

The bronze sword was found in a small room in the barracks, near a less-protected area where an enemy could infiltrate. This is an indication that this sword was intended for fighting and not just for show, Ahmed El Kharadly, an archaeologist with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities who led excavations at the site, told Live Science in an email.

Discover more archaeology news

—Rare skeletons up to 30,000 years old reveal when ancient humans went through puberty

—Man buried with large stones on his chest to prevent him from 'rising from the grave' unearthed in Germany

Life's Little Mysteries

Why do we forget things we were just thinking about?

Have you ever walked into a room and forgotten why you went in there, or been about to speak but suddenly realized you had no idea what you were going to say? The human brain normally balances countless inputs, thoughts and actions, but sometimes, it seems to short-circuit. So what really happens when we forget what we were just thinking about?

Sea monster jaws discovered

80 million-year-old sea monster jaws filled with giant globular teeth for crushing prey discovered in Texas

A giant mosasaur's fossilized jaw fragments still hold the animal's blunt, mushroom-shaped teeth.

The two fossil fragments, discovered in Texas, give us an insight into the lifestyle of Globidens alabamaensis, which may have reached lengths of up to 20 feet (6 meters). The teeth show the brute force mosasaurs brought to bear on their prey.

"These structures … are great for impact attacks — for shell crushing. If something is getting away and you shatter it, that's kind of it," Bethany Burke Franklin, a marine paleontologist and educator at Texas Through Time fossil museum in Hillsboro who was not involved in the study, told Live Science.

Discover more animal news

—Ocean Photographer of the Year 2024: See stunning photos of hungry whale, surfing seagull, freaky fish babies, land-loving eel and adorable toxic octopus

—'All it takes is a predator to learn that children are easier prey': Why India's 'wolf' attacks may not be what they seem

Also in science news this week

• Pregnancy shrinks parts of the brain, leaving 'permanent etchings' postpartum
• Biggest black hole jets ever seen are as long as 140 Milky Ways
• Record-breaking fires engulf South America, bringing black rain, green rivers and toxic air to the continent

Science Spotlight

3 bold ways cities are already adapting to climate change

Milan's marble facades and narrow, stone-paved streets look elegant and timeless. But all of that stone emits heat and does nothing to absorb rain, and temperatures and flooding in the posh Italian city are only predicted to increase in the coming decades.

In Jakarta, black floodwaters already rush into homes every winter along the Indonesian city's many rivers. That water is filled with sewage and harbors disease, but many people can't afford to move. Soon, climate change will put more of Jakarta — and many other low-lying cities — below sea level.

And in arid San Diego, water is already treated like a precious commodity. As drought increases in the coming years, protecting this resource will become even more important.

Human-caused climate change is transforming weather patterns and shifting ecosystems around the globe. Cities will have to respond, and some are already taking bold steps.

Each of these three cities offers a different roadmap for climate adaptation that has lessons for other places around the world. And while no single approach will be a silver bullet, each offers a hopeful vision of how we can learn to live and thrive on a warming planet.

Something for the weekend

If you're looking for something a little longer to read over the weekend, here are some of the best long reads, book excerpts and interviews published this week.

• 'I have never written of a stranger organ': The rise of the placenta and how it helped make us human [Book excerpt]
• What is the dead internet theory? [Explainer]
• 'What is normal today may not be normal in a year's time': Dr. Dinesh Bhugra on the idea of 'normal' in psychiatry [Interview]

Science in pictures

Weird waves that 'shape life itself'

Mesmerizing microscopic footage showing "waves" inside a developing fly embryo has won the 14th annual Nikon Small World in Motion competition.

Bruno Vellutini's video was chosen from among 370 entries as overall winner of the competition on Tuesday (Sept. 17).

He captured the film using light sheet microscopy, a technique in which a focused "sheet" of laser light illuminates a sample to produce high-resolution 3D images of living cells, tissues and organisms.

Follow Live Science on social media

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

Van Gogh painted Starry Night in June 1889, while he was living in an asylum in southern France as he recovered from a mental breakdown that resulted in the self-mutilation of his left ear around six months earlier. The oil-on-canvas masterpiece shows the view of a swirling sky from the window of the painter's room with an imaginary village added in the foreground, and is famous for its detailed brushstrokes and use of bright hues.

The painting recently caught the eye of researchers in China who recognized some similarities between its spiraling shapes and the patterns seen in fluid dynamics — the study of the movements of fluids and gases. This inspired them to study the painting in greater detail.

In the new study, published Tuesday (Sept. 17) in the journal Physics of Fluids, the researchers analyzed the minute details of the brushstrokes and colors used in the paintings and found that these components both shared strong similarities with the "hidden turbulence" of gases in the atmosphere.

"It reveals a deep and intuitive understanding of natural phenomena," study co-author Yongxiang Huang, a fluid dynamics expert and oceanographer at Xiamen University in China, said in a statement. "Van Gogh’s precise representation of turbulence might be from studying the movement of clouds and the atmosphere or an innate sense of how to capture the dynamism of the sky."

Related: Hidden Van Gogh self-portrait discovered under 'peasant woman' painting

The researchers closely analyzed the 14 "whirls" in the painting's sky. Overall, these shapes generally followed patterns predicted by Kolmogorov’s law — a physical rule that describes how atmospheric gas moves at different scales depending on inertial energy. In the painting, that inertial energy is represented by the intensity of the yellows in the painting, the researchers wrote.

When the researchers looked more closely at the whirls, they also found the spacing and weight of individual brushstrokes revealed an alignment with Batchelor's scaling, which describes how small eddies and droplets can be before they dissipate in a turbulent fluid.

However, Kolmogorov and Batchelor developed their laws decades after the artist died. So, the authors wrote, Van Gogh was definitely not using fluid dynamics knowledge, but likely drawing on general observations of the sky or other naturally occurring spirals as inspiration. Similarly, the connection between energy and the color yellow is almost certainly a coincidence, the authors noted.

But it's clear that Starry Night evokes processes that crop up in the natural world.

In 2020, researchers named a new species of peacock spider after the painting due to a similarity between van Gogh's colorful swirls and luminous dots on the arachnid’s rear end. And in 2021, microbiologists also noticed a striking similarity between the painting's iconic swirls and swarming colonies of mutated bacteria.

In May this year, new photos of Jupiter from NASA's Juno probe also showed intense storm swirls in the planet's northern hemisphere which looked very similar to van Gogh's newly analyzed brushstrokes. These swirling clouds were also linked to "turbulent patterns" in Jupiter's atmosphere, similar to those on Earth.

However, where there is darkness, there is light, and so we also learned of an amazing discovery that could revolutionize your gadgets, watched an ethereal "spaghetti monster" dance across the seafloor, and investigated a new tool to see how healthy your gut microbiome is.

And don't forget to look up on Tuesday (Sept. 17), as the Harvest Supermoon will be shining bigger and brighter than normal. It's sure to be a sight to behold.

DNA of 'Thorin,' one of the last Neanderthals, finally sequenced

"Thorin," one of the last Neanderthals to walk the planet, was part of a previously unknown lineage that was isolated for 50,000 years, a new DNA analysis finds.

Discovered in 2015 at the entrance to the Grotte Mandrin rock shelter in the Rhône River valley of southern France, Thorin — nicknamed after a dwarf in J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit" — has sometimes been called the "last Neanderthal" because he may have lived as recently as 42,000 years ago, close to when our closest human relatives disappeared. Although only teeth and portions of the skull have been recovered so far, Thorin's genome was analyzed to better understand when and how Neanderthals disappeared.

"Our results suggest small group sizes and long-term genetic isolation of the Thorin population from other late Neanderthal populations with genetic data available," the researchers wrote in their study.

Discover more archaeology news

—16,000-year-old skeleton, crystals and stone tools discovered in Malaysian caves

—'Remarkable' 1,000-year-old ring from Scotland's 'painted people' found at destroyed fort

When was the last time Antarctica was ice-free?

Antarctica is covered by a miles-thick ice sheet, but was that always the case? And when was the coldest continent ice-free? We delve into the southernmost continent's past to discover that it wasn't always so frigid — even possibly being warm enough for dinosaurs to roam the region — and what factors caused this to change.

Scientists spot ancient 'smiley face' on Mars — and it could contain signs of life

Astronomers recently spotted a surprising "smiley face" beaming up from the surface of Mars as they surveyed the alien landscape. The emoticon-like structure, which is only visible under certain conditions, is the remnant of an ancient lake that dried up billions of years ago — and could be harboring signs of former life on the Red Planet.

Discover more space news

—NASA discovers planet-wide electric field around Earth that's shooting bits of our atmosphere into space

—The Milky Way's supermassive black hole is spinning incredibly fast and at the wrong angle. Scientists may finally know why.

Also in science news this week

• Easter Island's population never collapsed, but it did have contact with Native Americans, DNA study suggests
• Scientists 'rejuvenate' the aged eggs of mice — is it possible in people?
• Novel Chinese computing architecture 'inspired by human brain' can lead to AGI, scientists say
• Fossils of bone-crushing and meat-slashing Tasmanian tiger ancestors discovered in Australia

Analysis: 'Put glue on your pizza' embodies everything wrong with AI search — is SearchGPT ready to change that?

The role of artificial intelligence (AI) in influencing how we use the web looks set to increase inexorably, especially with OpenAI — the company behind ChatGPT — teasing SearchGPT. This is an AI-powered search tool designed to serve up direct answers to your queries rather than pages of "optimized" results.

Using its Gemini AI model, Google tested its "AI Overviews" tool which, like SearchGPT, is designed to scour the web and provide summarized answers to search queries. Only it didn’t really work — at least at first. In some egregious examples, Google's AI told users to add glue to their pizza sauce, suggested washing clothes with the toxic gas chlorine, and even noted that a solution to feeling depressed would be jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.

SearchGPT is underpinned by ChatGPT, which is arguably a more mature AI model than Gemini, and so could yield better results with less heinous answers. However, the tool is at a prototype stage so nobody knows how it will perform when released to the public.

But it does raise the question of how effective the role of AI will be in the future — if finessed, is there potential for AI to kill off traditional search engines, or will the accuracy of AI search remain a letdown?

But is that really true? Actually, it's the opposite in real life: A slew of research over the past several decades has shown that people tend to date people who are more similar to themselves. People with shared traits are also more likely to have the long-term attraction needed for lasting relationships.

"When people talk about opposites attracting, that's thought of as being, 'Oh, I know this one couple; they got together, and they don't have a lot in common.' But it tends to be the exception to the rule," Erica Slotter, a psychologist at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, told Live Science. "Similarity is still a robust predictor of attraction."

In fact, similarity plays a key role in all stages of relationship formation. Researchers look into a person's stated preferences, or the attributes people say they look for in another person.

"Most of the time, people say they want people who are like them," Slotter said. This holds for all sorts of attributes, such as socioeconomic status, religion, political orientation and hobbies.

When looking at the data on people in longer term relationships, similarity also seems to reign supreme. Tanya Horwitz, a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder, led a study on these trends by analyzing past literature and large-scale demographic datasets. The results, published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour in 2023, concluded that up to 89% of traits between partners were positively correlated, meaning if, say, one person exercised a lot, their partner was likely to as well. This held for politics, health habits, substance use and more. "We did the raw data analysis with the 133 traits," Horwitz said. "It was surprising just how uncommon it is to see a trend where people are less similar."

So does that mean you're destined for someone who is your carbon copy? Not exactly.

One trait that tends to be different between partners is how they take charge in social interactions, also known as social dominance. If both individuals in a pair are dominant, "they tend to butt heads," Slotter said. In contrast, two submissive, go-with-the-flow people may never deal with problems in a relationship. People with opposing social dominance tend to be happier than those with similar scores, Slotter added.

Two people who differ on paper may also be attracted to each other for another reason: chemistry. For instance, studies on speed dating have found that what we say we want in a partner doesn't always match up to who we're physically or emotionally attracted to. How this works is still a bit of a mystery. Slotter said that it’s partly because when we talk to someone face-to-face, we’re still looking for similarity but in a more holistic way. She added that increased holistic similarity is found to be linked to better romantic chemistry.

Even if they start out fairly different, partners can become more similar over time — a phenomenon called convergence, Horwitz said. Spending time together can shift things such as habits and lifestyle. This can also increase attraction as a relationship grows, Horwitz added.

Finally, who we think we are and our impressions of our partner may also affect lasting attraction. For example, a 2000 study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that it didn't matter whether strangers or friends thought individuals in a couple were similar. Instead, fondness, as well as relationship satisfaction, depended on whether the people in the relationship thought their partner was similar to them.

"It's really about that … subjective judgment you make," Slotter said. "If you feel like this person is similar to you, go for it. Because … that seems to matter the most."

With the help of our sister magazine "How It Works," we've pulled together some of the best science books for kids of all ages, which should keep their young minds fizzing with ideas long into the future.

To make things easier, we've grouped them into two sections: one featuring books for children under 10 years old, and the other books for older children and young adults. They are all books that have been released recently, but if there are any that you think we have missed then please let us know on social media (here's where you can find us), or ping us an email at community@livescience.com.

Best science books for kids under 10 years old

Almost Underwear

Muslin is a type of plain-woven cotton fabric that has a broad range of uses depending on its quality and weight. It can be used to make fine, floaty dresses suitable for a period drama, for example, to staunch blood flow on open wounds, or to mop up baby vomit. But much bigger things were in store for one bolt of muslin cloth purchased in a store in Ohio, in 1903. It was bought by Orville and Wilbur Wright, and used to cover the wings of the glider that made the world’s first successful crewed flight on December 17 the same year. That’s probably the biggest claim to fame any bit of fabric could have made at the time — but swatches of muslim from the Wright Flyer’s wings had an even greater destiny.

"Almost Underwear" follows the journey of the muslin used on the Wright brothers’ famous aircraft in a step-by-step fashion, from the wings of the Wright Flyer to a museum, to space, to the moon, and eventually to Mars, becoming a passenger on the first flight on another planet. Author and Illustrator Jonathan Roth anthropomorphises the little swatches of muslin in his inspirational story, referring almost affectionately to them in the text. He uses real photos that were taken over a century of flight, from the Wright brothers’ escapades near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to the flight of the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars. Then he overlays them with charming drawings of the muslin, with expressive little faces, smiling with pleasure at floating around in the Apollo capsule, or in open-mouthed surprise on the top of launching Atlas V rocket.

It’s a short but quirky and endearing history of spaceflight from a totally leftfield perspective. "Almost Underwear" will bring a smile to your face, whatever your age and your interests.

One Thousand Things: Learn your first words with Little Mouse

Like it says on the cover, "One Thousand Things" contains 1,000 things for young readers to name, with quirky geometric drawings that detail what they are and where they exist in the world. These items include body parts, things in nature, household items and assorted space stuff.

The simple illustrations combine to fill entire pages with dynamic scenes. The book is intended for children who are first being introduced to the names of animals, occupations, utensils, electronic devices and modes of transport. A tiny mouse follows the reader through the book, providing a “Where’s Waldo?”-style challenge to find the character on every page.

Despite the simple concept, categorising 1,000 things gives children an insight into many aspects of the world and provokes questions, from the differing skill sets that can shape a person’s job to the changing seasons, diverse landscapes and the technology that helps you navigate them. For any young person first learning about the world around them, "One Thousand Things" is a gentle and entertaining start.

The Big Aquarium Adventure

After schoolboy Stephen visits an aquarium with his family, his inquisitive friend Alex questions him about all the animals and the antics that went on there. From truck-sized fish tanks to scary-looking skates, Alex finds out all about this aquatic wonderland.

The first part of "The Big Aquarium Adventure" is written in a dialogue style, making it very conversational and easy for kids to follow. As Alex learns, the reader will explore new species and the logistics of the aquarium, while observing how children can learn from others their own age. The book has interactive elements, asking the reader questions about their own experiences at aquariums, or questions they may have about the events Alex talked about.

In the second half of "The Big Aquarium Adventure", the reader is introduced to another friend, who is inspired by the visit to research the animals found there. The results of this research are illustrated with diagrams of different species and fun facts about aquarium animals. Finally, the friends write a story about the trip to the aquarium and the book reveals top tips about turning any exciting experience into a flowing narrative.

"The Big Aquarium Adventure" is unique in providing young readers with scientific knowledge, as well as the English language skills needed to produce their own stories and interviews.

Related: 32 truly bizarre deep-sea creatures

Beat This Book

The challenge begins right out of the gate: the eponymous "Book" speaks to the reader in a tone that approaches that of the comic book supervillain, telling them that they cannot possibly beat the challenges it sets — though that shouldn’t put them off and they will certainly have fun trying.

Book’s super-confident demeanor lasts all of three pages, after which it gives the reader a slow-clap for spotting the smallest dog among a tightly packed spread of cartoon pooches. It’s downhill for Book from here, as it lines up one game after another only for its self-belief to waver as it assumes the reader beats every challenge. Challenges like, which is the longest of five slippery creatures that include a worm, a boa constrictor and a deep sea siphonophore. And, find the hole among all the spots on several different creatures — it’s an actual hole in the page of the book, as if someone had used a hole-punch on it.

Other types of challenge include those of the physical variety, like the one where the reader has to bend their body into certain shapes, lateral thinking puzzles and really silly stuff, like when Book challenges the reader to make a noise like an otter.

There’s a loose educational aspect to it, of course. Book throws the reader a curious animal fact here and there, but "Beat This Book" is largely about encouraging younger children to think outside the box — outside the book, even. It’s silly, it’s fun, it’s original, and it’s a great way for young readers and their parents to read and play together at the same time.

How to Explain Climate Science to a Grown-Up

In the latest installment in the "How to Explain" book series, children tackle the topic of our climate, and more importantly how humans affect it. In its typically charming way of turning the tables on who's teaching who,the book gives children all the information they need to explain climate science to adults. It includes how to explain the differences between weather and climate, why our climate is changing and what we can do to help stop things from getting worse.

Its humor and handy 'pro tips' on how to keep adults engaged while they learn are a brilliant way to teach young readers how to articulate what's going on in the world. It’s yet another great edition in this series that's helping children learn through teaching adults. "How to Explain Climate Science to a Grown-up" is a must-read for inquisitive children who love to tell you what they have learned in school.

Related: 3 bold ways cities are already adapting to climate change

Immune heroes: protectors of the wound

After a young boy named Mayu tumbles from a bicycle and scrapes his knee, an army of immune cells, led by Captain T, leaps into action to tackle the infection and heal the wound. In a brilliant blend of storytelling and science, this playful kids' book showcases how the immune system works to heal a wound.

The battle-plan narrative of the story sees a variety of real-life immune cells playfully transformed into cartoon heroes, each with their part to play. From the neutrophil first responders that reduce swelling to the glutinous macrophage cells that devour bacteria invaders, there's a whole host of immune cells to discover and watch as they fight off intruders that seek to wreak havoc.

By the end of this charming story, children will not only be entertained but will walk away with a better understanding of how the body heals.

Related: Why are scabs so itchy?

They Work: Honey bees, nature’s pollinators

The busy lives of honeybees are usually concealed inside their complex hives. But in "They Work" you can uncover the goings-on in and around their honeycombed homes. Through detailed and varied illustrations, this book clearly shows how bees work together to store food, serve their queen, reproduce and clean the rooms of their homes. There may be more roles than you realized, from nannies that care for young larvae to construction workers, engineers and the queen’s ladies in waiting.

This colorful book covers complex instinctual behaviors and mesmerizing map-making skills that bees have learned in the form of a sophisticated dance. In addition, biological cutaways show the honey stomachs of honeybees, which they fill with nectar and water from flowers around the hive. This separate stomach enables them to carry their gathered supplies back to their bases.

These animals are unique communicators who have developed an elaborate workforce and family that you will meet throughout "They Work".

Related: Do bees have knees?

Body Detective!

"Body Detective!" walks the reader through some of the basic functions of the human body and how our bodies communicate its needs to us. To use a simple example from the opening pages: "My tummy is making funny noises… my body signals tell me that I am feeling HUNGRY!"

The rest of the book continues in this vein, describing a spectrum of biological and emotional signals that include anxiety, tiredness, pain, the need to urinate and others. It’s appended by a detailed description of what "interoception" is — the sense or "feeling" of what's happening in your body — before asking the reader to focus on various parts of their body to gauge any sensation coming from it, however big or small that feeling may be.

Author Janet Krauthamer’s words are complemented by Christiane Engel’s appropriately fun, childlike illustrations, with paper flaps and panels that flip up or slide across to reveal words and pictures. The whole package is pithy, yet very effective at communicating its message on several levels.

As adults, we tend to take the signals generated by our bodily functions and primal emotions for granted, eating whenever we like or need to, putting up with persistent physical aches and pains, or pushing the stresses of life into a place where we feel we can cope with them — even if it’s not healthy for us to do so. But for young children, these signals — whether they feel positive or negative — are fresh and sometimes overwhelming. "Body Detective!" seeks to help children to understand and name what they’re feeling, and empower them.

There are lessons for any adults reading this book, as this form of mindfulness is every bit as applicable to them as it is to their children. "Body Detective!" leaves the reader with a poignant thought, that “There are no 'good' or 'bad' sensory signals" — they all serve a purpose that ultimately means we can take better care of ourselves, if only we listened to them more often.

Related: 10 body parts that are useless in humans (or maybe not)

On Track

All aboard the most spectacular trains in the history of the world! In this enthralling book of locomotive discovery, readers will travel along the railways that saw the invention of steam propulsion, suspended sky trains and the driverless trains of the future. You'll discover the fastest, heaviest and longest trains on Earth, along with a few 'oddballs' along the way.

This charming book is bursting with tales of trains from around the world, brought to life with wonderfully vibrant illustrations and informative diagrams. There are also several brief biographies of important people that propelled the evolution of trains, such as George Westinghouse, inventor of the air brake and Mary Elizabeth Walton, a pioneer of the railroads. Whether you're a young train enthusiast or have an interest in historical events, “On Track” is a must-read.

Fun with Outer Space

As part of the "Fun with…" series, this latest edition journeys beyond Earth to discover outer space through fun facts and activities. From cosmic crosswords to deep space dot-to-dots, there's a whole universe of different puzzles and cognitive workouts for future space scientists to enjoy.

You'll take a full tour around the cosmos and discover black holes, supernovae and nebulas, as well as the scientific instruments that study them. Each page is packed with illustrations of planets, stars and satellites, with orbital nuggets of easy-to-understand information to keep its young readers engaged and looking to learn more.

Targeted at a pre-teen audience, "Fun with Outer Space" is a great way to spend an afternoon for those with a passion for all things space. It brilliantly blends fun activities with fascinating facts that are out of this world.

Related: 25 gorgeous nebula photos that capture the beauty of the universe

Unlocking the Universe

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is one of the most advanced space telescopes ever created. Since 2022, it has been orbiting the sun, capturing distant celestial objects and peering deep into the darkness of space. "Unlocking the Universe" reveals some of the JWST's most awe-inspiring imagery and mesmerizing discoveries so far.

However, the road to Webb's launch was long and not without its hurdles. Within this insightful book, you'll discover the telescope's journey to space, the vast amount of technology that made its launch possible and the scientists who worked tirelessly to construct it.

The JWST is also packed with technology and scientific instruments that are revealed in the book as brilliantly annotated illustrations. No doubt, the James Webb Space Telescope will have uncovered much more about the universe by the time you've read this book, however, "Unlocking the Universe" acts as a written time capsule of its early achievements to look back on.

Related: The James Webb telescope has broken cosmology. Can it be fixed?

Volcano Atlas

This engaging and varied tour of the world’s volcanoes introduces young readers to the mightiest mounds and the geological events that cause volcanic eruptions. Beginning with the basics, the clear illustrations transport you underground to observe the magma flowing beneath us and the route it takes to emerge above the ground.

Each page is bustling with enticing information, while sporting a simplistic layout that doesn’t overwhelm, exploring volcano types, unique features, record breakers, and the mesmerizing patterns of mud pots.

For each noteworthy volcano from around the world, the reader is provided with a map and fact file to compare key statistics, historic stories such as the infamous Roman-era eruption of Vesuvius, and information about surrounding sites and communities. For example, did you know the active Mount Ruapehu volcano in New Zealand hosts three ski resorts on its slopes?

From the long-dormant to the most active and feared, this book is here to show you that no two volcanoes are the same.

Related: Antarctica is covered in volcanoes, could they erupt?

Akeem Keeps Bees!

In this book, Akeem invites you onto his family’s farm to teach you all about bees and how he looks after them. The story is written by Akeem’s father, but is presented from the boy’s point of view, helping young readers understand and relate to the content. The happy character gives you a tour of Sankofa Farms, NC, with expressive and detailed illustrations immersing the reader every step of the way. Akeem helps out with a lot of activities on the farm, but his firm favorite is raising the honeybees.

With a combination of comic-style imagery and factual diagrams, this book is an ideal blend of entertaining and informative. Akeem’s enthusiasm accompanies his father’s words of wisdom to guide the reader through the stages of the honeybees’ lifecycle, while creating a space for young readers to share in Akeem’s passion. The processes of looking after bees are presented in imaginative ways, from humorous bee dialogue to detailed diagrams of equipment.

You will discover the roles of each member of the bee colony, explore what it takes to harvest honey and learn how to care for bees all year round. At the end of the book you meet the real characters of the book in a gallery of photographs of the family and farm.

Related: Do bees really die if they sting you?

How to Explain Robotics to a Grown-up

Part of the "How To Explain" book series, this latest installment teaches children how to explain the mechanical world of robotics to their parents. The book follows a confident young boy and his curious mother, as he explains the basic components and principles that make a robot.

The inquisitive duo go on a journey of discovery through their home to a robotic expo, to uncover the science behind different robots and understand how they use technology to complete tasks. The story outlines the three main principles of robotic coding: Sense, Compute and Act, and delves into how the three work together to create a robot.

A charming feature of this book series are the handy 'pro tips' on how to help adults understand the subject, while simultaneously imparting learning skills to the young reader. For example, "Unlike robots, humans sometimes need a break! A snack and a little humor may be just what your grown-up needs to stay focused and ready to learn."

Related: Check out the best laptops for coding and programming you can get right now

Pet selector!

In this charismatic guide to pets, comedian turned pet detective Russell Kane lends a comedic helping hand to those looking to bring a new furry friend into the family. Focusing mostly on breeds across the feline and canine kingdoms, Kane introduces his young readers to the various personalities and behaviors of commonly considered pets. He uses a handy key to rate their qualities, such as intelligence, playfulness and neediness.

Helpful advice aside, Kane has also explored the origins of our furry friends, which some readers may find surprising. For example, French bulldogs, not from France, were bred by British lace-makers in the 1800s to ward off pests, and Shih Tzu or 'little lions' were Buddhist monks’ companions, who sometimes slept in their sleeves.

Although cats and dogs are featured heavily in the book, there is also a menagerie of other animals such as rabbits, rodents and reptiles to consider. Along with being helpful and humorous, this book is full of entertaining illustrations that bring each pet's personality to life, from easy-going Persian cats to ball-crazed Jack Russell terriers.

Related: Do any animals keep pets like humans do?

Our Earth

The declining state of the natural world is dire, making it an essential issue for us to be knowledgeable about. But the future of Earth doesn’t have to be a negative one. This rhyming children’s book contains vibrant and cheerful illustrations as it explains the planet we live on.

By providing ideas for ways in which we can all look after Earth in a conversational and child-friendly manner, "Our Earth" is the perfect book for budding environmentalists or indeed any member of the next generation. The delightful illustrations and memorable rhymes make the underlying message in this book a simple one, and children ages three to eight will enjoy reading it.

Whether you choose to walk and ride your bike to school, or you’re sorting your rubbish into recyclable materials, "Our Earth" teaches the reader that we can all play a part in shaping the future of the planet, no matter how small the action or how young the person.

Stomp, Soar, Dino Roar

In an immersive short story for young readers, the dinosaurs of the Cretaceous period are introduced through colorful cartoons and sounds. You will explore the world in this ancient era with newborn Triceratops Terri, as she encounters new species for the first time, too.

Each illustration enables the reader to visualise how every dinosaur would engage with its surroundings and — most importantly in "Stomp, Soar, Dino Roar" — its echoing sounds. The text’s size, shape and design helps readers to recreate the style of each sound, and phonetic spellings break down the complicated dinosaur names beneath the main text.

Hear from dunking, water-loving dinosaurs and dueling competitors as the rhymes become an entertaining and fast-paced tour. At the end of "Stomp, Soar, Dino Roar," you get more information about each dinosaur mentioned, with useful fact files and illustrations to show the size of each in comparison to a human. More thorough information about how we know what each dinosaur may have sounded like — through fossils and the analysis of living relatives — is included at the back of the book, as well as a timeline to visualise how long ago animals like Terri graced the Earth.

Read more: A brief history of dinosaurs

A Kid's Guide to the Night Sky

The night sky is filled with countless cosmic objects to explore and this book does its best to introduce a whole heap of them to the next generation of astronomers. From the little bear to the mighty dragon, there are many glinting constellations and bright stars to identify with the help of "A Kid's Guide to the Night Sky."

However, this book offers so much more for science-minded stargazers. The life cycle of stars, conjunctions and light pollution are just a few of the topics that his book introduces to its audience. It also takes a deep dive into each of the solar system's planets and some of the amazing technology that's working to find out more about them.

With so many constellations, satellites and comets to discover, this easy-to-follow guide offers helpful tips and tricks to make sense of what's in space.

Read more: Best telescopes for beginners and advanced scopes for stars, galaxies and nebulas

Doodle with Duddle: How to Draw Dinosaurs

Would you like to be able to draw cartoon dinosaurs? Draw them really well? If you put in a lot of practice with the lessons that Jonny Duddle teaches, you could!

The author and illustrator of "How to Draw Dinosaurs" is a self-proclaimed "doodler," which is a very modest way of saying he’s a cartoon artist — and a very good one, at that. Duddle begins to take the reader through his dinosaur-drawing methods by listing the basic equipment: "just a pencil to start," although he does have his favorite tools of the trade that include a sketchbook and a ballpoint pen — not an advisable drawing implement for mistake-prone beginners.

He then introduces us to a quartet of his own, made-up dinosaur-like characters who assist in the lessons, and then readers get to start drawing some (mostly) real dinosaurs.

Duddle alternates between pages of dinosaur facts with finished dinosaur illustrations, and step-by-step lessons on how to draw them in his style. It’s often a case of building layers on top of a basic shape — such as the ellipse that forms the body of a diplodocus. The section on dinosaur skeletons, which includes a step-by-step illustration of how fossils form, is a particularly vibrant chapter that gives the budding artist a sense of the internal structure of a dinosaur and some shapes that they can start to build their own dinosaur drawings around.

Finally, for those who have advanced in their dino-doodling and have the confidence to go it alone, there’s space in the back of the book to draw their own fantasy dinosaur and a comic strip of their own doodles.

But even if the reader has no interest in trying any of Duddle’s drawing lessons, "How to Draw Dinosaurs" is a fun read for school-aged students, accompanied by captivating cartoon dinosaurs. At the very least, it’s a good drawing reference for a future school dinosaur project or art homework.

Related: If birds are dinosaurs, why aren't they cold-blooded?

The Ultimate Kids’ Guide to Dogs

If you have a pet dog, or if you call yourself a "dog person," this book is the ideal introduction to their history, biology, behaviour and communication. The author’s engaging style guides young readers through all aspects of this popular pet, from their animal ancestors to the emergence of dogs 14,200 years ago.

Across each page are vibrant illustrations showing uplifting scenes of human-dog interaction. The timeline details how dogs have been helping humans for thousands of years — how humans have mistreated them, but also how work has been carried out to keep dogs protected.

Throughout "The Ultimate Kids’ Guide to Dogs" you will learn about the many jobs dogs have been selectively bred for, as well as the biology and behaviors of different breeds in the dog fact files. If you have a new puppy in your family, this is the perfect way to get to know them better. A visual timeline of a dog’s growth details what to expect from your new best friend, while the body language guide will explain what your pet is trying to tell you.

"The Ultimate Kids’ Guide to Dogs" is a brilliant blend of information and interaction. After absorbing the facts, use the dog training guide to test new tricks on your dog and — at the end of the book — test your knowledge in the ultimate dog quiz.

Related: Do any animals keep pets like humans do?

The World’s First Rollercoaster and Other Amazing Inventions

You can’t go far wrong with cool facts and funny comic strips, so author/illustrator dream team Mike Barfield and Franziska Höllbacher are off to a pretty good start with "The World’s First Rollercoaster and Other Amazing Inventions." It charts the greatest inventions from the last century or so — but when we say "greatest," we don’t necessarily mean the inventions that have significantly furthered our species.

Instead, fun inventions like the rollercoaster, the hamburger, skateboards and video games take precedence over the likes of electric vehicles and smartphones. This is where Mike and Franziska can have the most fun. There’s a full-page comic strip for every item on the contents page, giving a potted history of the people behind the invention and their world-famous ideas.

ome of those ideas are a little more out-there — like the "invention" of the dog, which was domesticated over the course of the last 10,000 years or so, the history of which has been distilled into a single silly, yet informative, comic strip. But even the more conventional inventions have been injected with good humor and an interesting angle.

For instance, instead of telling us how Carl Friedrich Benz built the world’s first petrol-drive automobile in 1885, Barfield veers slightly off that course to talk about Benz’s wife, Bertha, who achieved her own world-firsts with Carl’s invention and without whom we wouldn’t even know the name “Benz” in the world of motoring.

If you want to learn more about that, you’ll just have to read the book — we promise you it’s well worth it. "The World’s First Rollercoaster and Other Amazing Inventions" is as amusing as it will be interesting to anyone of any age, and by the end you’ll be sure to have learned a thing or two about some of your favorite inventions.

Related: 32 weird technologies that never took off

Your Sustainable World

It's safe to say that children have never been more aware of the impact that climate change is having on the world — and with that awareness come countless questions about how families can play their part in protecting the planet. In this simple guide to sustainable living, children will learn about different climate challenges, as well as some of the small ways in which we can help reduce our negative impact on the environment.

Along with well-known concepts in sustainability such as "the five R's" (reduce, reuse, recycle, repurpose and refuse), there are new ways of being greener to explore, such as "green fashion" and "smart eating." Packed with helpful tips and advice, "Your Sustainable World" is sure to inspire children to make more environmentally friendly choices.

Related: 15 unexpected effects of climate change

Respect the Insect

In this amusing, factual and engaging book, young readers are introduced to the insect world in a visual way, to help understand each creature’s importance.

Each insect is personified by a cartoon character who will explain their daily role in the environment. Let the critters welcome you into their home for a grand tour, detailing how they built their homes and some of the ways their actions are misunderstood.

From plastic problem-solving wax moth caterpillars to earth-moving termites and honey-making bees, each page will show you a new animal in action. One section reveals the prevalence of insects around the globe, from desert dwellers to the insects that need to live in conditions so cold that if you touched them, they would die from exposure to your body heat.

Wherever you live in the world, this book ensures that the next time you come across one of these species, you will have more respect for the insect.

Related: How do insects know which flowers have pollen?

Best science books for older children and young adults

Nature at Night

What goes on in the wild while we're all asleep? Naturalist and wildlife photographer Charles Hood shares some of his nocturnal adventures in this witty and insightful book. From forest owls hunting between trees, to bioluminescent squid in the ocean depths, Charles Hood takes readers on a journey around the globe to shine light on the animals that rely on and thrive under the cover of darkness.

Along with Hood's fascinating tales, the book includes more than 240 amazing images of the weird and wonderful animals that come out at night, and some breathtaking views of the auroras, moonbows and red sprites that you might spot if you were to step out into the night. It is a must-read for wildlife lovers and those curious about what goes on in the dark.

Related: Are all owls actually night owls?

There's No Such Thing as a Silly Question

Fact checked by the world-leading experts in their fields at the University of Cambridge, "There's No Such Thing as a Silly Question" answers many of those curious questions you and your little ones have been thinking about.

Do bees sting other bees? What is fire made of? Why are aeroplane toilets so loud? Those are a small sample of the sort of science and history questions that this light-hearted and fun, but informative children's book has to offer. Even if the question hasn't crossed your mind before, be assured that flicking through its pages is sure to have you tilting your head and wondering, "Who did invent time zones?" or "Can an elephant even jump, let alone to any significant height?".

As well as being jam-packed with information you didn't know you needed to know, each page erupts with humorous illustrations that make “There's No Such Thing as a Silly Question” a joy to read.

Discover more fascinating questions with Life's Little Mysteries

Boats: Steamers, Icebreakers, and Ghost Ships

This visually entertaining book sails you straight into the maritime world to explore the technology invented for traversing the seas. As you navigate the pages, you will learn how to communicate in Morse code, use a sextant and understand the science behind a submarine.

The scientific diagrams dispersed through "Boats" are subtle enough that they blend into creative and charismatic ocean scenes while teaching the basic physics behind floating boats, surging ships, radar reception and many more marine mechanics. "Boats" does exactly what its title claims, but what is surprising is the great array of water-borne machines that have been produced throughout the history of human exploration, and the diverse onboard devices that have evolved alongside them.

From intricate engineering to long-told maritime superstitions, you are sure to find something in "Boats" that will intrigue you.

The Tiny Farm Planner

Have you ever wanted to grow your own produce at home, but don’t know where to start? This book is the perfect way to keep your home farm on track, plan its layout and log its progress. Filled with essential information to consider and useful tips for producing the right plants and quantities for your needs, "The Tiny Farm Planner" will help to keep your garden growing healthily.

Chapters include trackers for chores, seed-starting schedules, disease trackers, seasonal reviews and expense logs. In between each season’s log, the author has written friendly reminders about the best practice for gardening, as well as extensive information about how the garden is changing throughout the year — and what you may not have considered as you approach a new season. Its advice draws on personal experiences from author Jill Ragan and there are relevant, inspirational quotes from famous individuals throughout.

This wealth of information and tracking prompts makes "The Tiny Farm Planner" a great gardening companion — and the task of producing a tiny farm that much less daunting.

Related: Who were the first farmers?

Up, Up High

It can be difficult to understand any environment beyond Earth’s. With this book, the reader is introduced to the solar system and the many worlds "Up, Up High". It’s written in a storybook style that takes you soaring through the skies and out of Earth’s atmosphere in a rocket.

From the astronauts who regularly venture into space, to electrical phenomena like nothing seen on our planet, any hard science and fascinating facts are explained in pop-up text boxes. This admirably combines smooth-flowing, lyrical language without missing out any crucial information that might answer children’s questions.

Katie Rewse’s illustrations show accurate representations of planets, phenomena and space technology, while introducing friendly faced characters, simplified space imagery and stimulating works of art for young readers to enjoy.

Overall, this short story covers a vast range of topics without feeling crammed. By the end, with the assistance of clear diagrams and an immersive storyline, the reader can begin to visualize the space beyond our sky.

Survival Gardening

During a time when people are more aware than ever of the importance of food sustainability, this gardening guide is a must-read for anyone looking to grow their food.

From fast five-week grows to establishing gardens for the long haul, this complete guide to at-home agriculture is overflowing with helpful information and instructions. There are also several DIY projects that tackle some of the equipment you'll need to create your survival garden, such as water filtration systems, compost, and "humanure" making.

Along with abundant advice on the practicalities of growing your food, there is also a great deal of nutritional insight to discover, such as fat-rich seeds and protein-loaded chickpeas. One of the most important aspects of this survival guide is that it teaches how to preserve and store the fruits of your labor, including how to dehydrate and how to build a root cellar in your garden. So whether you're a nature novice or a green-thumbed gardener, there's heaps of knowledge to harvest from "Survival Gardening".

Space: From Sputnik to the International Space Station

The story of humankind’s ventures into space, from unmanned spacecraft and our first tentative test flights in the 1950s to today’s International Space Station missions, is replete with incredible tales of technological feats and individual heroism.

Take the story of John Stapp, for example, which sets the standard for "Space," the latest transport book by writer and illustrator Jan van der Veken. Stapp was a test pilot who built a rocket sled to assess the effects of sudden, massive acceleration and deceleration on the human body. He was strapped into his sled by assistants before he hit the ignition button and went from zero to 620 miles per hour in just five seconds, then back to zero in an even snappier 1.4 seconds. Dozens of these human test runs left him with broken ribs, broken wrists and bruised eye sockets, but Stapp survived and the data from these experiments were invaluable to the safety systems incorporated into future space missions.

From one double-page spread to the next, "Space" takes us through some of the biggest milestones in space travel. Following on from Stapp’s exploits, we head into the first human spaceflight, the Moon landings, Skylab (the first US space station) and the Space Shuttle program. Between these historical waypoints, van der Veken explains the technology that got us there — the rockets, space suits and ground vehicles without which future astronauts would have been left to stare dreamily into the sky — and more incredible stories of human endeavor, such as the time Sergei Krikalev was stranded on the Russian space station Mir for six months, after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Like the other books in his transport series, "Space" is also gorgeously illustrated by van der Veken, and the retro, Tintin-style drawings of astronauts and ground crew in action around iconic spacecraft suit this book to a tee: Hergé would be proud. "Space" is recommended for ages 10 and upwards, but we think its eye-candy alone would appeal to just about anyone.

Amazing Jellyfish

Take the plunge into the marine world with this engaging and interactive guide to the mysterious lives and environment of jellyfish. "Amazing Jellyfish" is expertly written for 8- to 12-year-olds but contains plenty of impressive facts and statistics that would amaze much older readers.

The first-person style from the author helps to maintain the attention of young readers, by including personal anecdotes and avoiding packed pages of overwhelming text. There is a perfect balance of information and visual elements for confident readers, as each section is split into sophisticated sketches and a mixture of writing styles. The book also contains fact files of some of the most poisonous animals, a list of jellyfish-themed jokes, an interactive maze through marine litter and detailed life cycle illustrations.

Even if you have an idea of what life as a jellyfish might look like before reading this book, "Amazing Jellyfish" may introduce you to a much more fascinating and highly diverse world of the jellies.

Related: 13 of the most venomous sea creatures lurking in the water

Astrophysics for Supervillains

Taking plenty of cues from the bestselling "Horrible Histories" series, "Astrophysics for Supervillains" is a children’s book of space facts that moves space education beyond what a typical 9-year-old might learn in their classroom. And as long as there’s other stuff on the school curriculum, like English or Geography, there’s no chance of the teacher finding time to derail the learnings of a supervillain-in-training.

Author and astronomer Dr. Matt Bothwell steps up to the role of evil genius and takes us through six meaty chapters of space facts, from the relatively ordinary confines of our own solar system to the end of a star’s life, the heat death of the universe and, our favorite, "How to Destroy the Earth" — a list of the various cosmic fates to which Earth may finally succumb, however unlikely those might be.

Every chapter can effectively be split into a series of questions that might typically be asked by a school student of a certain age, such as "How long could you survive on Pluto?", "What is inside a black hole?" and "If the universe is growing, what is it expanding into?". These questions are comprehensively answered by Dr. Bothwell in his best supervillain professor voice, reveling in the extreme dangers posed by the space beyond our little bubble of atmosphere, and the apocalyptic scenarios that we might encounter if we could travel millions of light years from Earth and live a few billion years or more.

Dr. Bothwell is the public astronomer at the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, so engaging a school-age audience is all in a day’s work — and "Astrophysics for Supervillains" is no exception. It cleverly weaves around tough answers that might require an actual PhD to unpick, coupling them with plenty of cartoon illustrations and the kind of choice typography that makes a good comic strip.

All told, this is a really fun insight into the cosmos that could inspire future generations of astronomers.

Cloudspotting for Beginners

If the ever-changing sky and shape-shifting patterns of clouds have ever piqued your interest, this is the book for you. Those fluffy objects floating in the atmosphere are immensely complex, and each form of cloud has a specific classification, produces intriguing phenomena and exists only at favourable altitudes. "Cloudspotting for Beginners" introduces you to each type of cloud, often giving them a poetic personality to remember them by.

Just like the act of skywatching itself, reading this book has a calming effect, as each cloud type and phenomenon is presented with elegant sketches that beautifully capture the intricacies and moods of different skies. You will learn about the 10 main cloud types, positioned on the page at the altitudes where you can spot them. Artistic graphs detail the science of cloud formation, the anatomy of rainbows, halos formed by clouds’ crystals and the appearance of clouds on other planets.

How were clouds named, which weather pattern is each cloud type linked to and what clouds capture a sunset? The answers to all these questions and more are revealed in "Cloudspotting for Beginners."

A Brief History of Stuff

DK has selected a truly eclectic list of "stuff" for inclusion in this curiously put-together book. From baby bottles to ballpoint pens, there isn't much of a logical path or timeline — which, oddly, is part of what makes it a brilliant reference for kids of all ages.

Casting your eye over the contents page and seeing a list of everyday items such as a thimble or a fridge magnet, you're left realising there's a gap in your knowledge about how all these things came to be. Luckily, "A Brief History of Stuff" has all the information you need about their origins and impact on society.

Packed with bitesize facts, before you know it you'll be reciting the history of "stuff" to your friends and family.

Read more: 20 inventions that changed the world

The Pocket Calculator Story

These days, calculators have mostly been relegated to a smartphone or desktop app. However, this piece of electronic math wizardry has a history that is long and varied, as will become abundantly clear to readers of "The Pocket Calculator Story."

From the key invention of the transistor in the 1960s, you'll follow the evolutionary journey of the humble pocket calculator and watch it transform into a feature-packed mini-computer, capable of making short work of complex equations. You'll also discover the many weird and wonderful calculators that broke the mold, such as the calculator-pen hybrid, the credit card calculator and the iconic calculator watch that dominated the 1980s.

Offering a dose of tech nostalgia, this makes an excellent reference book for any personal electronics enthusiast.

Related: Best laptops for students 2024: Get the perfect laptop for college

What If Fungi Win?

Arturo Casadevall is a professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and the author of "What if Fungi Win?" — an insightful look at how fungi facilitated evolution and benefited the global biome, but how they could also be the downfall of civilization.

Drawing on his own research and experience, Casadevall describes the fascinating biology behind fungi, including their amazing powers of radiation resistance and healing abilities. There's an important cautionary tale in "What If Fungi Win?", too: In a post-Covid world, Casadevall shares the importance of tackling infectious fungi and warns about the rise of drug-resistant species.

By the time you've finished this fascinating and eye-opening book, you'll surely have gained a new appreciation for fungi — along with a cautious side-eye.

50 Women in Technology

In a celebration of the female pioneers that have helped advance technology throughout history, "50 Women in Technology" is sure to inspire the next generation of brilliant scientists. Along with some of the more recognisable names such as Katherine Johnson or Marie Curie, there are many unsung heroes of science to discover, such as Vera Rubin, whose work led to the discovery of dark matter.

In part, this reference book acts as a reminder of the great women whose work paved the way for modern minds. For example, Stephanie Willerth, a professor at the University of Victoria in Canada, oversees research to engineer treatments for central nervous system disorders, while data scientist Rumman Chowdhury is tackling solutions for ethical artificial intelligence. These are just some of the minds that you'll meet through a series of interview-based biographies that reveal the motivations of women who are making strides in technology.

Related: 25 amazing women in science and math

Radar and the Raft

The story of radar, its inventors and contributing scientists are combined in this true story about the technology’s emergence and lifesaving uses. Written for readers around the ages of 10 to 13, "Radar and the Raft" is for those with an interest in history and technology.

Unlike many technology-based non-fiction books, this story largely focuses on the people and families behind the technology, as well as life during World War II. The book includes a combination of character storylines and multiple scientific discoveries, intriguing the reader as to how they will connect together. Toward the end of the book, these stories and inventions meet in a dramatic scene that demonstrates the lifesaving potential of science.

"Radar and the Raft" grips readers through both personal stories and the evolution of technology. By connecting the story of the Bell family’s near-death experience at sea during World War II with the story of radar’s discovery, the author has produced an engaging and informative storyline. This is a great read that explores the direct consequences of scientific discoveries.

Read more: How radar works: The technology made famous by war

It may seem odd that a person could be happy as the end draws near, but in my experience as a clinical psychologist working with people at the end of their lives, it's not that uncommon.

There is quite a lot of research suggesting that fear of death is at the unconscious centre of being human. William James, an American philosopher, called the knowledge that we must die "the worm at the core" of the human condition.

But a study in Psychological Science shows that people nearing death use more positive language to describe their experience than those who just imagine death. This suggests that the experience of dying is more pleasant — or, at least, less unpleasant — than we might picture it.

In the BBC interview, Boas shared some of the insights that helped him come to accept his situation. He mentioned the importance of enjoying life and prioritizing meaningful experiences, suggesting that acknowledging death can enhance our appreciation for life.

Despite the pain and difficulties, Boas seemed cheerful, hoping his attitude would support his wife and parents during the difficult times ahead.

Related: What is the key to happiness? We look at the science behind it.

Boas's words echo the Roman philosopher Seneca who advised that: "To have lived long enough depends neither upon our years nor upon our days, but upon our minds."

A more recent thinker expressing similar sentiments is the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl who, after surviving Auschwitz, wrote Man's Search for Meaning (1946) in which he lay the groundwork for a form of existential psychotherapy, with the focus of discovering meaning in any kind of circumstance. Its most recent adaptation is meaning-centered psychotherapy, which offers people with cancer a way to improve their sense of meaning.

How happiness and meaning relate

In two recent studies, in Palliative and Supportive Care and the American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Care, people approaching death were asked what constitutes happiness for them. Common themes in both studies were social connections, enjoying simple pleasures such as being in nature, having a positive mindset and a general shift in focus from seeking pleasure to finding meaning and fulfillment as their illness progressed.

In my work as a clinical psychologist, I sometimes meet people who have — or eventually arrive at — a similar outlook on life as Boas. One person especially comes to mind — let's call him Johan.

The first time I met Johan, he came to the clinic by himself, with a slight limp. We talked about life, about interests, relationships and meaning. Johan appeared to be lucid, clear and articulate.

The second time, he came with crutches. One foot had begun to lag and he couldn't trust his balance. He said it was frustrating to lose control of his foot, but still hoped to cycle around Mont Blanc.

When I asked him what his concerns were, he burst into tears. He said: "That I won't get to celebrate my birthday next month." We sat quietly for a while and took in the situation. It wasn't the moment of death itself that weighed on him the most, it was all the things he wouldn't be able to do again.

Johan arrived at our third meeting supported by a friend, no longer able to grip the crutches. He told me that he had been watching films of him cycling with his friends. He had concluded that he could watch YouTube videos of others cycling around Mont Blanc. He had even ordered a new, expensive mountain bike. "I've wanted to buy it for a long time, but was tightfisted," he said. "I may not be able to ride it, but thought it would be cool to have in the living room."

For the fourth visit, he arrived in a wheelchair. It turned out to be the last time we met. The bike had arrived; he had it next to the couch. There was one more thing he wanted to do.

"If by some miracle I were to get out of this alive, I would like to volunteer in domestic care services — one or two shifts a week," Johan said. "They work hard and it gets crazy sometimes, but they make such an incredible contribution. I wouldn't have been able to get out of the apartment without them."

My experience of patients with life-threatening disease is that it's possible to feel happiness alongside sadness, and other seemingly conflicting emotions. Over a day, patients can feel gratitude, remorse, longing, anger, guilt and relief — sometimes all at once. Facing the limits of existence can add perspective and help a person appreciate life more than ever.

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

Some people, including me, cannot have imagined visual experiences. We cannot close our eyes and conjure an experience of seeing a loved one's face, or imagine our lounge room layout — to consider if a new piece of furniture might fit in it. This is called "aphantasia", from a Greek phrase where the "a" means without, and "phantasia" refers to an image. Colloquially, people like myself are often referred to as having a "blind mind."

While most attention has been given to the inability to have imagined visual sensations, aphantasics can lack other imagined experiences. We might be unable to experience imagined tastes or smells. Some people cannot imagine hearing themselves speak.

A recent study has advanced our understanding of people who cannot imagine hearing their own internal monologue. Importantly, the authors have identified some tasks that such people are more likely to find challenging.

What the study found

Researchers at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States recruited 93 volunteers. They included 46 adults who reported low levels of inner speech and 47 who reported high levels.

Both groups were given challenging tasks: judging if the names of objects they had seen would rhyme and recalling words. The group without an inner monologue performed worse. But differences disappeared when everyone could say words aloud.

Importantly, people who reported less inner speech were not worse at all tasks. They could recall similar numbers of words when the words had a different appearance to one another. This negates any suggestion that aphants (people with aphantasia) simply weren't trying or were less capable.

A welcome validation

The study provides some welcome evidence for the lived experiences of some aphants, who are still often told their experiences are not different, but rather that they cannot describe their imagined experiences. Some people feel anxiety when they realise other people can have imagined experiences that they cannot. These feelings may be deepened when others assert they are merely confused or inarticulate.

In my own aphantasia research I have often quizzed crowds of people on their capacity to have imagined experiences.

Questions about the capacity to have imagined visual or audio sensations tend to be excitedly endorsed by a vast majority, but questions about imagined experiences of taste or smell seem to cause more confusion. Some people are adamant they can do this, including a colleague who says he can imagine what combinations of ingredients will taste like when cooked together. But other responses suggest subtypes of aphantasia may prove to be more common than we realise.

The authors of the recent study suggest the inability to imagine hearing yourself speak should be referred to as "anendophasia," meaning without inner speech. Other authors had suggested anauralia (meaning without auditory imagery). Still other researchers have referred to all types of imagined sensation as being different types of "imagery."

Having consistent names is important. It can help scientists "talk" to one another to compare findings. If different authors use different names, important evidence can be missed.

We have more than 5 senses

Debate continues about how many senses humans have, but some scientists reasonably argue for a number greater than 20.

In addition to the five senses of sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing, lesser known senses include thermoception (our sense of heat) and proprioception (awareness of the positions of our body parts). Thanks to proprioception, most of us can close our eyes and touch the tip of our index finger to our nose. Thanks to our vestibular sense, we typically have a good idea of which way is up and can maintain balance.

It may be tempting to give a new name to each inability to have a given type of imagined sensation. But this could lead to confusion. Another approach would be to adapt phrases that are already widely used. People who are unable to have imagined sensations commonly refer to ourselves as "aphants." This could be adapted with a prefix, such as "audio aphant." Time will tell which approach is adopted by most researchers.

Why we should keep investigating

Regardless of the names we use, the study of multiple types of inability to have an imagined sensation is important. These investigations could reveal the essential processes in human brains that bring about a conscious experience of an imagined sensation.

In time, this will not only lead to a better understanding of the diversity of humans, but may help uncover how human brains can create any conscious sensation. This question — how and where our conscious feelings are generated — remains one of the great mysteries of science.

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

"The more often a population experiences disturbances or downturns, the more likely it is to be able to recover faster the next time around," study leader Philip Riris, an archaeologist at Bournemouth University in the U.K., told Live Science.

This seesaw between vulnerability and resilience was particularly strong among early farmers and herders, Riris and his colleagues found. Agricultural communities throughout history experienced more downturns overall than other societies, such as hunter-gatherer groups, but they also recovered from these downturns more quickly than other groups. 

"It's an important paper," said Dagomar Degroot, an associate professor at Georgetown University who studies how climate change influenced human history and who was not involved in the research. "There is a lot of really influential work on the collapse of societies faced with climate change," Degroot told Live Science, "but a focus on resilience and only resilience is significantly rarer."

Historians and archaeologists have published many case studies on individual societal crises, Riris agreed. But it's hard to compare these experiences across space and time. He and his team pulled together data from 16 separate archaeological sites around the globe, spanning from South Africa to Canada, with data stretching back as far as 30,000 years ago. 

Related: What's the deadliest month of the year?

To determine downturns and recoveries, the researchers used a method called "dates as data." Each site had records of radiocarbon dating, which gives an age for organic materials based on the decay of carbon-14, a radioactive form of carbon. Previous studies have established that the number of carbon-14 dates available for a certain time and place is correlated with population. When there are more people, it means more activity, buildings, trash heaps and firepits to excavate and date. 

Most of the downturns in the study took place on decades-plus timescales and had a variety of causes, ranging from environmental change to societal upheaval. In some cases, the researchers had specific historical or climatological information about what those crises were, such as a cold snap in Norway that led to crop loss. Farmers and herders may be inherently more vulnerable to disaster, Riris said, since one bad growing season or a drought can mean immediate famine. But agricultural and herding societies also may be well positioned to recover from disaster. 

"The winners [after a disturbance], either they're just lucky or they have some sort of technology or practice or behavior or social institution that means that they did better during the crisis," Riris said. "As a result, they're more likely to pass down that learning, that aspect of culture that will enable their descendants to do better down the line." 

The archaeological findings mesh well with historical case studies, said Degroot, who has researched resilience in the Dutch Republic in the face of the Little Ice Age in the 17th century. "I had found those things for a very narrow case study," he said, "and here the authors find them for a much broader set of case studies." 

Whether modern humans can pull directly from these lessons is less certain, Degroot said. All of the societies in the study were preindustrial and might have little in common with today's global order. However, Riris said, the ability to compare societies and look for patterns is important. 

"It provides that overarching framework that will allow resilience to be tackled systematically," he said. 

No, we’re not talking about the next instalment of James Bond, but the incredible female scientists in the "Curie Society" series of YA graphic novels.

Following the exploits of teen science prodigies Simone, Maya and Taj, the two books in the series are action-packed adventures where the main protagonists learn how to use their gifts to become the next secret agents in The Curie Society — a secret organization formed to support exceptional female scientists around the world (and save it at the same time).

Ahead of the second book's launch, we spoke to MIT professor Ritu Raman, one of the lead science advisors on the series, about how graphic novels can help promote STEM education, why diversity is so important and what it's like to be immortalized in comic book form.

Alexander McNamara: How did you get involved in the making of the Curie Society books?

Ritu Raman: I met Heather and Adam [Einhorn and Staffaroni, authors of the books] several years ago when I was postdoc at MIT, and we were talking about how there's a lack of content for preteen and teenage girls that shows science in both an exciting way, but also an accurate way. Something that motivates people, but then also shows them, within reason, what's going on in the world of STEM today.

When Heather and Adam did the first book, they talked to a bunch of different scientists and engineers from a variety of different perspectives. There was a huge collaborative effort to put the first story together, which I think was particularly important when they're fleshing out the three main characters and their origin story.

AM: What was your role in the series and how did you help in its creation?

RR: It changed between books. In the first, they talked to a lot of different scientists who do different kinds of work and had different paths to science. I think that was really important for them to take bits and pieces of people's authentic experiences and weave them into the characters.

Part of my story is moving around a lot growing up, and as a result I skipped a lot of grades bouncing between different schools. And so of the three characters, Simone's experience of being younger and not necessarily emotionally matched in maturity to the place that she is, while being matched scientifically, comes from me. 

Then in the context of Maya, who is supposed to be South Asian or Indian, the cultural exploration of science and other things, I think come a little bit from myself. The third character [Taj], is polar opposite from me, but honestly, reminds me of one of my close friends.

In the first book I shared my experience and provided feedback on a little bit of the science, but actually we talked more about depictions of bioethics and how scientists do or don't think about the consequences of their work. Who should be in the room when these decisions are being made? How do we portray a villain who starts off sort of as a good scientist and maybe things go wrong? I was providing feedback more at that level.

In the second book, they decided to pursue a strategy of having one main scientist to work with, and so I got to see the story and help craft it from very early visions. I did a lot more accuracy checking, but also if we needed a technology that would, say, paralyze somebody but not hurt them forever, I was brainstorming the different tools and technologies that could be highlighted.

We also decided to do a longer feature of the work that we do in our lab. Sometimes, when you want to make something super cool and exciting to read, you're depicting technologies five or 10 years from now, right? So we also wanted to give folks something that's happening in labs right now, and that people might be like, "Wow, I would have thought that that didn't exist yet." 

We wanted to show myself, as well as the women working with me in my lab and the kinds of things that they do. It was really cool to be able to highlight some real students at MIT in the context of the Curie Society.

AM: How does it feel to be immortalized in comic book form?

RR: I'm living in the dream, really. I've always wanted to write and contribute to the world of fiction, but when I write for work, I'm a scientist, I write a very specific plan of how to get a grant funded in the next five years that will do exactly this and this. There's creativity in there, but it's creativity within very strict constraints, and I think the opportunity to release those constraints a little bit and still scratch that creative part of my brain, while talking about the science…. It's very cool, I'm very happy about it.

AM: That creative process is pretty important, and obviously the book is crammed with science. As the advisor to the story, how far can you push the science from fact to fiction?

RR: That's an interesting question, particularly because there are probably different aspects of science that I treat differently in that way. I mean one of the things about being a PhD trained scientist and working in a lab is that I know about some very niche areas, but then I also have a degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering. But it's not like I can really comment too deeply on some of the work on airfoil design for planes, which showed up in one of the books.

I sometimes feel like I'm hypercritical of the things that are closer to my work related to genetic engineering or making new tissues by 3D printing — that sort of stuff that I know a lot about. So the first thing I do is try to modulate. For things that are not directly in my area of expertise, I think I'm able to give a lot more freedom — if this passes the smell test or it doesn't defy or fundamentally break the laws of physics, it's good. Maybe it's not exactly perfectly right, but it's a story and that's OK. With stuff that is more related to the things that I do, I have to first try to censor myself a little bit more.

So I try to first turn off that part of my brain, but I think now that we've worked together for many years the team hopefully feels comfortable being like, "Hey, this is the reason we wanted to say it that way. If you feel this is fundamentally wrong, is there something else we could say that would still move the story from point A to point B?" 

I think particularly being involved in an earlier draft is great, because then before they've committed too much to something, I can figure out how to best lead science into that. I think just having a good relationship with the authors over many years has helped.

AM: It must have been fun actually being able to explore other areas of science that you're not an expert in. Did you learn a lot from researching the story as well?

RR: Yeah, I mean, I'm not incentivized in my job to think outside of the exact context of what my lab works on because I'm paid to be an expert. Zooming back out and being a generalist sparks your own enthusiasm for the things that you thought were cool when you were a kid. I really wanted to go into aerospace and make rockets, and I still think those things are exciting, but it's not what I'm doing right now. 

You can't do everything, but I think that some of the technologies, in particular related to energy and the climate crisis, are very exciting. Even though a lot of my work is focused on human health — which is great and very motivating — sometimes, as a human being living on the planet, you're also thinking more broadly about other grand challenges that are facing us. So catching up on what everyone else is doing is very heartening and exciting to see.

AM: How effective do you think graphic novels are in getting people into STEM.

RR: One of the things that I think is very important is make sure we're meeting people where they are. Some people respond really well to the written word, some people respond well to digital media, some people would prefer everything to be delivered to them in the form of a dance — and that's OK. Usually most people are a combination of those things and you need to hear stuff repeated three or four different times for it to really sink in.

I think graphic novels fit in a nice space. We have TV shows where people describe science for kids of different audiences, and there's a lot of YouTube videos that do that. Science fiction novels also do a job of exploring that space, but they often seem to target older audiences and really focus on dystopian visions of the future.

So when you're thinking about this audience, how do you introduce realistic science fiction in a visually compelling way, that has a narrative and also highlights several different kinds of people? You could certainly do it through superhero movies, but [graphic novels] are another way of doing it that I think could actually reach a ton of people, and can be something they revisit over time. Maybe it's in their bookshelf and they look at it but can't understand it the first time; then they go and they learn something in school and they can come back and go to that page.

I think it's one part of the arsenal, which doesn't have a ton of things in it right now, but there's a big opportunity for us to reach a lot of people who would not otherwise see these kinds of stories.

AM: The book itself has a very diverse cast of characters and is obviously focused on getting more women into STEM. From your perspective, is science doing enough to make this positive change, and what more could we be doing?

RR: I think as long as society is evolving we're always playing catch up in any discipline to make sure that we're capturing whatever the current distribution of the population is. I think in science, for example, we have made tremendous progress in recruiting more women into undergraduate programs — certainly at MIT we've had 50% women in our undergraduate programs for many years, which is lovely — but as you go farther along, certainly in graduate school, in the professoriate, in the leadership of STEM businesses, the representation, at least of women and certainly people that match different aspects of diversity, it's still very low. 

One of the things I really like about the way the Curie Society structures its characters is that even though the protagonists are younger, there are a lot of older female scientists that are portrayed as really senior people in the books. I think that's very important because they pretty openly acknowledge that the world they faced was fairly different to what these younger girls are facing, and that interplay has been really nice to see. I haven't really seen that in other media or other stories.

I do think that despite inroads in getting more people excited about science, when I interact with middle schoolers, and teenage girls in particular, there is still a lot of hesitation and a lack of self-belief about the role that they can play in science. I don't think it's something that we can pat ourselves on the back and say, "This is a solved problem, we don't need to worry about this anymore." We're combating thousands of years of all of us having certain beliefs about who's capable of what, so I think we still have some work to do there, at least to keep the pipeline going. 

But we also have to recognize that just getting a bunch of 12-year-olds excited about science is not enough. You need to actually preserve and promote and retain that enthusiasm throughout their lives, and that's a much longer scale problem.

AM: Do you think there are any particular challenges to getting younger people, particularly young girls, into science? Is there anything we can do?

RR: One threat that I see right now is that it's wonderful to highlight women and young girls that are excited about science, but if those are the only people in the story, you're sort of removing them from a natural context or the fact that we live in a very gender-diverse society. I would love to see more male characters interacting with these female scientists in respectful ways.

I think we need to be very careful of not just telling young women to pursue science, but also educating young men that, "Did you know that there are women who do science and are very good at it and we can all play together and do cool things?" 

More broadly, making sure our interventions are not just targeted at people who identify as girls is the missing gap in the field that we can keep pushing toward.

AM: So essentially what we need to do is see more people who are in the science environment in front of people talking about what we're doing?

RR: Yeah, and get more young boys to read these books too. I just think about the number of books I read as a kid that featured young boys and I still learned a lot from them. I would love for it to go the other way. Yes the story is about women and I hope young girls like it, but I hope a lot of boys read it too and think that it's an exciting story and something to emulate.

AM: Finally, if you were a character in the book, what would your specialized skill be? If you're already a member of the Curie Society and are keeping it secret, that's fine…

RR: One of the things I always wish I could do — particularly because we in my lab are always building little tissues and models of the human body and then trying to understand what happens inside the human body — is being able to go inside a person and see exactly what's going wrong. I think probably being able to see, at very high resolution, how cells are talking to each other and how we can manipulate that, that would probably be the secret skill — but you'll never know, I'll never tell.

According to Leslie Dobson, a clinical and forensic psychologist, there are a number of reasons why someone may feel as if they are being watched. These causes span a broad spectrum, including exposure to scary books, movies or news; hypervigilance following a stressful or traumatic event; and serious mental health conditions.

"In more extreme cases, a person may experience paranoia and hypervigilance, often related to an underlying mental health condition or physical brain ailment," Dobson said in a written message.

Of course, sometimes we really are being watched. People likely evolved to be sensitive to another person's gaze, and it's been suggested the human brain has a neural network dedicated solely to processing gaze, according to an article written by Harriet Dempsey-Jones, a postdoctoral research fellow in cognitive neurosciences at The University of Queensland in Australia. It's possible that our attentiveness to gaze arose because it can support cooperative interactions between humans. This ability usually isn't difficult to master; it's fairly easy to see where a person is looking because we can see where their pupils are focused, and with our peripheral vision we can pick on cues, such as body language, indicating that a person is looking at us.

But sometimes, even if no one is watching, outside stimuli can make us feel afraid and look around to see if we're being watched. This could include watching or reading a thriller in which a protagonist is being stalked by a threatening figure, or hearing a random noise when home alone.

Related: Why do people dissociate during traumatic events?

For people who have experienced traumatic events, hypervigilance becomes a defense mechanism that is meant to prevent us from experiencing future stress by avoiding danger, according to a 2023 study in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. Symptoms like paranoia and anxiety that usually come after stressful events can occur in a similar region of the brain, Dobson explained.

"The amygdala processes our emotions such as stress and anxiety," she told Live Science. "If it is overactive or harmed from physical damage or ongoing trauma stressors, it may lead to heightened emotional responses such as perceiving threat."

It's not uncommon for people to feel watched, Dr. Alice Feller, a clinical psychiatrist based in California, told Live Science. So how do you distinguish reasonable caution from a more serious issue?

The problem arises when someone constantly feels watched or paranoid about being watched for a long period of time.

"[With] mental illness, what happens is you lose that ability to wonder if it's just a feeling, you know, you kind of lose insight into your own bodily and mental process," Feller said. "You can do a reality check, but it doesn't necessarily stick."

For example, symptoms of schizophrenia include hypervigilance and paranoia, which can include the delusion that someone is watching you. Research suggests that in people with schizophrenia, paranoia is associated with abnormal activity in the limbic system, a part of the brain that includes the amygdala and controls our emotional and survival-based behavioral responses, such as the fight-or-flight response.

A 2022 study explained that in patients with schizophrenia, paranoia has been associated with increased blood flow during resting state in the amygdala. Moreover, unusual connectivity between the amygdala and other areas of the brain, such as the visual cortex, hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex, has been linked with paranoia, suggesting that "current paranoia is linked to aberrant connectivity within the core limbic circuit" suggesting "amplified threat processing and impaired emotion regulation."

Regardless of the cause, Feller and Dobson both said that it's worth seeking mental health support if you experience persistent paranoia. This is especially true if the feeling of being watched happens despite physical evidence that no one else is there, or if the anxiety of being watched becomes worse.

"I encourage people to seek mental and medical intervention when they begin to notice they are struggling, rather than trying to wait it out," Dobson said. "Early intervention is key. If a person is struggling more days a week than not, or if their job, education, or relationships are beginning to struggle, it is important to seek out a professional."

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

"Unfortunately, we can't ask a baby exactly why they're rubbing their eyes," Dr. Rebecca Dudovitz, an associate professor of general pediatrics at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, told Live Science.

"But we do know from human experience that people do tend to rub their eyes when they're tired, and we think it may have to do with just a feeling of discomfort that you get when your eye muscles have been working hard and it's time for a break," Dudovitz said.

The same way your shoulders might need a massage after you sit at a desk all day, the muscles that help your eyes focus feel better after you rub them. Babies spend a lot of their time staring at objects in their environment, and their eyes get tired.

Related: What happens when a baby takes its first breath?

Staring also dries out the eyes — and considering that babies blink only a few times a minute, it shouldn't be surprising that their eyes get dry, too.

"Tears are not just salt water, but mucus near the surface, salt water in the middle, and a layer of oil from the eyelid meibomian glands to prevent evaporation," Dr. Robert W. Arnold, an ophthalmologist at Alaska Children's Eye & Strabismus, told Live Science via email. "Therefore, a healthy tear is a tri-layer. That tri-layer must be renewed and spread over the surface smoothly by blinking."

When we're faced with too much intense visual attention, we don't blink enough. And without enough blinking, that tri-layer can break apart and leave dry patches on the surface of the cornea, the outer, clear part of the eye that covers the iris and pupil. When that happens, eye rubbing may just be a reminder to blink more.

"This is similar to breathing, the rate of which is usually automatic, and sufficient. However, when we are distracted or tired, we may not breathe often, or deep enough," Arnold said. "Therefore, we sigh. Eye rubbing in children may be akin to sighing for eyeball health."

Rubbing your eyes isn't particularly good for you, however. Excessive eye rubbing can lead to vision problems.

One commonly cited reason it feels good to rub your eyes when you're tired is that it reduces blood pressure by stimulating the trigeminal and vagus nerves, which run from the brain to the eyes and from the brain throughout the body, respectively. In some people, this can reduce heart rate by more than 20% in a phenomenon known as the oculocardiac reflex.

But Arnold questions this reasoning. "There is no obvious reason why a kid would feel better with a slow heart rate," he said.

In fact, the oculocardiac reflex can have life-threatening results, including bradycardia — a heart rate below 60 beats per minute — and cardiac arrest.

"We don't think purposeful stimulation of the oculocardiac reflex is a reason for children rubbing the eyes, but it could be a result of excessive rubbing of the eyes," Arnold said.

But most likely, babies rub their eyes for the same reasons adults do: Their eyes are tired and dry, and they're ready for a nap.

In short, dissociation can be useful for situations in which someone can't physically get away from stress or danger, such as being the victim of a violent crime or abuse, said Steven Dubovsky, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University at Buffalo in New York.

Typically, the sympathetic nervous system — which is responsible for our "fight or flight" response — activates when a person is in imminent physical danger. Mammals, including humans, evolved to have this response, as it pushes them to survive by fighting or fleeing from danger. Dissociation is another way the nervous system is primed to respond to trauma when fight or flight appears to be too dangerous or impossible. Dubovsky described a scenario in which someone could be followed and attacked by a group of people on a dark street. If a person can't find a way to escape or fight back, they might find themselves stuck in the situation.

"When the stressful thing is something you can't escape from, you're going to have trouble functioning unless you can turn [the fear] down," he told Live Science.

Dissociation can protect someone in the moment so that they are mentally separated from a situation causing physical pain, emotional pain or both. This coping strategy may also be associated with freezing and separating the person from the memory of the traumatic event, according to a 2017 study in the journal Current Psychiatry Reports. Oftentimes, victims of abuse or sexual assault report dissociation during the event, a 2015 study in the journal Medicine outlined. Some people report having foggy memories of an event after the fact due to dissociation. Though the lack of clear memory or lack of feeling attached may be jarring after the fact, the dissociation can stop someone from having to relieve painful memories, Dubovsky said.

Related: Is it possible to avoid unwanted thoughts?

Ruth Ellingsen, an associate clinical professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, reiterated that for some people, dissociation may be the only way to stay safe when experiencing abuse. "There's also times when trying to flee a situation could result in more hurt," Ellingsen told Live Science. "For example, if you're a child being abused, [flight] could potentially make the abuse even worse."

In scenarios like this, freezing and disconnecting do more than emotionally separate someone from the stress; this response may be the best decision for survival.

Problems can arise if people continue to dissociate even once they are separated from the intense trauma, as opposed to relying on other coping mechanisms, such as mindfulness, meditation or help from a professional, Ellingsen said.

Both Dubovsky and Ellingsen explained that people who continue to dissociate often struggle with daily stress, like meeting work deadlines or speaking with their peers. Many feel detached in their relationships and may find themselves distracted during what used to be usual interactions or tasks. It's possible that because the disconnection from the traumatic event kept them "safe" or at least detached from bad memories, this coping mechanism becomes the default for other forms of stress, Ellingsen said.

"We tend to see this [overreliance on dissociation] when regular coping resources are depleted," she said. "If you're dissociating a lot when you're encountering stress, that is indicating that maybe you don't have more healthy coping strategies that are working for you."

But the goal of addressing chronic dissociation isn't to eliminate it. After all, it can be a useful tactic to help survive a dangerous situation. But memories of the traumatic event are often disruptive and painful, so having some distance from that could mean a better quality of life after the trauma, Dubovsky said.

Before diving into this question, it's important to know that the medical definition of psychopathy is incredibly complicated, and experts are still debating what this term should encompass. "Psychopathy is not a diagnosis in itself," Katarina Howner, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, told Live Science. "It's a personality disorder with really close connections to antisocial and criminal behavior."

Like other personality disorders, this condition is identified through life history interviews in which psychiatric professionals probe every aspect of an individual's life, looking for patterns of psychopathic traits, such as callousness and quickly-triggered aggression. Affected individuals are at particularly high risk of committing violent crimes or reoffending after release from prison.

"People with psychopathic traits are really focused on themselves and their own needs," Howner explained. "They have a lack of empathy and they don't experience feelings of shame or guilt. There's a grandiosity and impulsivity which means they think that they can do anything without consequence."

However, this doesn't mean people with psychopathy don't have any empathy at all, Howner said. Psychologists break this complex emotion down into several different sub categories.

"Affective or emotional empathy is where you feel the emotions that others are showing. You have a kind of emotional resonance with the other person, and this is something psychopaths struggle with," she said. "But cognitive empathy is more like mentalization. That is, you can think how another person is thinking or feeling. Psychopaths are usually good at this and use it to manipulate people."

Related: Are humans inherently violent?

This apparent lack of emotional empathy is what makes psychopathic individuals seem cold and cruel. However, studies consistently show people with psychopathy have the capacity to experience this type of empathy under the right conditions. "When you deliberately focus people with psychopathy on labeling an emotion in a photograph in an unambiguous way (meaning the face is showing 100% of that emotion), they can do that accurately," Arielle Baskin-Sommers, a psychologist at Yale University told Live Science. "If you flash the faces really quickly or blend the emotions, then people with psychopathy seem to struggle." The difficulty, she said, is not that psychopaths lack this empathy but that they lack the natural ability to do it easily.

But is this a skill that psychopaths can learn? There's every reason to believe so, Baskin-Sommers told Live Science. That they can experience empathy and that this ability seems to change depending on the situation is a promising sign. 

So why does this behavior develop in the first place? Scientists aren't exactly sure, although evidence suggests it's a mixture of genetic and environmental factors. But while the cause is unknown, psychopathy's effect on the brain is well-established.

Studies have shown profound differences in both the structure of the brain and how different brain regions communicate in psychopathic individuals.

"The size of the structure and function of the amygdala, which is a region of the brain important for our emotional processing, reliably shows up as different in people with psychopathy," Baskin-Sommers said. "We also tend to see differences in prefrontal structures of the brain that have to do with general cognition and control of behavior. People with psychopathy fundamentally have very different brains." These neurological differences mean that psychopathic individuals don't process emotions in the same way as individuals without psychopathy do and this physical disparity is difficult to overcome.

Current treatments rely on a combination of approaches including cognitive behavioral therapy and medication, but there's no simple cure to help psychopathic individuals easily experience empathy. Strategies focusing on rewarding good behaviors have shown some success in helping patients adapt to society and both Howner and Baskin-Sommers said that this should be the focus of interventions, rather than developing empathy.

"Current data suggest that psychopathy is no more or less untreatable than any other psychiatric disorder," Baskin-Sommers said. "There's been an unfortunate narrative about psychopathy that these people are fundamentally evil, but society needs to realize that this is a condition that deserves support and necessitates treatment."

The dawn of a new year marks a fresh start and motivates many people to break bad habits. Some are easier to shake than others, however, and the tendency to procrastinate is among the stickiest.

Whether it's finishing a piece of work, sending an email or going for a run, some tasks can feel insurmountable. The easiest way to avoid these tasks is to put them off until later or to never complete them at all. But why do people procrastinate, and is there anything we can do to reduce this tendency? 

"At its heart, procrastination is about avoidance," Fuschia Sirois, a professor of psychology at the University of Durham in the U.K., told Live Science. Rather than the task itself, however, it's often the emotions attached to an activity that cause people to recoil, she said. 

Tackling the first lines of a college essay may bring up feelings of self-doubt, for example. When you're faced with a broad question or topic to write about, the lack of clear instructions can trigger a fear of not getting it right or of what might happen if you get it wrong, Sirois said.

Related: Do New Year's resolutions really work?

Procrastination is a specific form of delay that is both unnecessary and voluntary, meaning it isn't caused by the person's need to prioritize other tasks or by an unforeseen emergency, Sirois said. The person procrastinating usually does so despite knowing that the task is important or valuable to them or others, and that putting it off could be detrimental to them or others, she added.

Chronic procrastinators typically struggle to manage and regulate their emotions, Sirois said. In a 2021 brain imaging study, Sirois and her colleagues found that college students with a higher volume of gray matter in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex — a region of the brain associated with self-control — were less prone to procrastination than their peers were. The more neural connections there were between this part of the brain and the frontal regions, the better the students were at regulating negative emotions, focusing on long-term benefits and sticking with tasks. Those with fewer connections between those areas were more likely to procrastinate at the cost of future rewards, the researchers concluded.

Difficulties in emotion regulation partly explain why people with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are more likely to procrastinate.

A 2018 study also showed that the threat detection center of the brain, the amygdala, tends to be larger, and therefore more sensitive, in people who procrastinate. "The threat can be something tiny," Sirois said — how to word an email, for example. But the anticipated discomfort may be strong, so the urge to avoid discomfort may override any considerations of the consequences of not completing the task.

The fewer connections that existed between the amygdala and another region of the brain called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, which determines how we react to perceived threats, the more likely people were to put things off, according to the study.

"Like any personality trait, there are some biological underpinnings," Sirois said. Research suggests that procrastination is linked to impulsivity on a genetic level and may be a heritable trait. Sirois agreed that "there can be some genetic underpinnings, but that doesn't mean you're stuck and that's who you are."

Environmental factors are just as important in shaping our response to aversive tasks, Sirois said. Someone who doesn't usually procrastinate can do so if they find themselves in a situation that depletes their coping resources over a long period of time, such as the death of a family member.

"Procrastination becomes a quick, easy and 'dirty' way of coping with something, albeit in an avoidant way, when your coping resources are maxed out," Sirois said. But procrastination can pile on more stress by leaving a task hanging over a person's head, thus triggering a vicious cycle that can damage mental health, lower academic performance and lead to financial distress. 

Luckily for those of us who drag our feet — it took the author of this article eight months to start writing it — research has shown that learning to manage negative emotions can help reduce procrastination. Sirois recommended taking a step back when a task feels overwhelming to assess what emotions the situation has triggered and why you wish to avoid them. In the case of a college essay or work assignment, it may help to clarify any uncertainties about what the task actually is or to break it down into smaller tasks, Sirois said. Finding something meaningful about the task and rewarding yourself for finishing it might also be helpful, she added.

But if this is the year you want to stop procrastinating, let your resolution be to exercise self-compassion. "Forgiveness for your procrastination is very effective in reducing subsequent procrastination," Sirois said.

Leap years are years with 366 calendar days instead of the normal 365. They happen every fourth year in the Gregorian calendar — the calendar used by the majority of the world. The extra day, known as a leap day, is Feb. 29, which does not exist in non-leap years. Every year that is divisible by four, such as 2020 and 2024, is a leap year except for some centenary years, or years that end in 00, such as 1900. (We'll explain why further down.)   

The name "leap" comes from the fact that from March onward, each date of a leap year moves forward by an extra day from the previous year. For example, March 1, 2027 will be a Monday but in the next leap year, 2028, it will fall on a Wednesday. (Normally, the same date only moves forward by a single day between consecutive years.) 

Related: Earth's core wobbles every 8.5 years, new study suggests

Other calendars, including the Hebrew calendar, Islamic calendar, Chinese calendar and Ethiopian calendar, also have versions of leap years, but these years don't all come every four years and often occur in different years than those in the Gregorian calendar. Some calendars also have multiple leap days or even shortened leap months.

In addition to leap years and leap days, the Gregorian calendar also has a handful of leap seconds, which have sporadically been added to certain years — most recently in 2012, 2015 and 2016. However, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (IBWM), the organization responsible for global timekeeping, will abolish leap seconds from 2035 onward.

Why do we need leap years? 

On the face of it, all of this "leaping" may seem like a silly idea. But leap years are very important, and without them our years would eventually look very different. 

Leap years exist because a single year in the Gregorian calendar is slightly shorter than a solar, or tropical, year — the amount of time it takes for Earth to completely orbit the sun once. A calendar year is exactly 365 days long, but a solar year is roughly 365.24 days long, or 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 56 seconds. 

If we did not account for this difference, then for each year that passes the gap between the start of a calendar year and a solar year would widen by 5 hours, 48 minutes and 56 seconds. Over time, this would shift the timing of the seasons. For example, if we stopped using leap years, then in around 700 years the Northern Hemisphere's summer would begin in December instead of June, according to the National Air and Space Museum.

Related: How many times has Earth orbited the sun?

Adding leap days every fourth year largely removes this problem because an extra day is around the same length as the difference that accumulates during this time. 

However, the system is not perfect: We gain around 44 extra minutes every four years, or a day every 129 years. To solve this problem, we skip the leap years every centenary year except for those that are divisible by 400, such as 1600 and 2000. But even then, there is still a tiny difference between calendar years and solar years, which is why the IBWM have experimented with leap seconds. 

But overall, leap years mean that the Gregorian calendar stays in sync with our journey around the sun.

When was the last leap year? When is the next leap year?

The history of leap years 

The idea of leap years dates back to 45 B.C. when the Ancient Roman emperor Julius Caesar instituted the Julian calendar, which was made up of 365 days separated into the 12 months we still use in the Gregorian calendar. (July and August were originally named Quintilis and Sextilis respectively but were later renamed after Julius Caesar and his successor Augustus.)

The Julian calendar included leap years every four years without exception and was synced up to Earth's seasons thanks to the "final year of confusion" in 46 B.C., which included 15 months totaling 445 days, according to the University of Houston.

For centuries, it appeared that the Julian calendar worked perfectly. But by the mid-16th century, astronomers noticed that the seasons were beginning around 10 days earlier than expected when important holidays, such as Easter, no longer matched up with specific events, such as the vernal, or spring, equinox.

To remedy this, Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calendar in 1582, which is the same as the Julian calendar but with the exclusion of leap years for most centenary years (as outlined above). 

For centuries, the Gregorian calendar was only used by Catholic countries, such as Italy and Spain, but it was eventually adopted by Protestant countries, such as Great Britain in 1752, when their years began to greatly deviate from Catholic countries. 

Because of the discrepancy between calendars, countries that later switched to the Gregorian calendar had to skip days to sync up with the rest of the world. For example, when Britain swapped calendars in 1752, Sept. 2 was followed by Sept. 14, according to the Royal Museums Greenwich. 

At some point in the distant future, the Gregorian calendar may have to be re-evaluated as it slips out of sync with solar years. But it will take thousands of years for this to happen. 

Why is leap day on Feb. 29?

In the eighth century B.C., the Roman calendar had just 10 months, beginning in March and ending in December. The cold winter season was ignored, with no months to signify it. But this calendar had only 304 days, so January and February were eventually added to the end of the religious year. As the last month, February had the fewest days. But Romans soon began associating these months with the start of the civil year, and by around 450 B.C., January was viewed as the first month of the new year.

When Pope Gregory XIII added the leap day to the Gregorian calendar in 1582, he chose February because it was the shortest month, making it one day longer on leap years.

There are stories you expect to ruffle some feathers — we're looking at you, aliens — and then there are the ones we never thought would kick up a storm. This year, scientists surprised us with claims of successful room temperature superconductivity, reported sightings of long-extinct species and alternative theories to the origin of humankind. We've not missed out on juicy UFO content either, so without further ado, here's our pick of the most controversial science stories in 2023. 

UFO and 'alien mummy' Congress hearings 

In May, Congress held its first public hearing on UFOs since the 1960s to discuss 144 reported sightings of mysterious objects. During the hearings, two military officials were questioned about their knowledge of the unexplained phenomena. The May hearing was followed by another in July, in which three military witnesses claimed evidence of non-human technologies was being hidden from the public. All three witnesses said it's possible unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) are being launched by aliens interested in America's nuclear capabilities, testing for weaknesses in U.S. air defense systems or conducting reconnaissance in American airspace.

Related: 20 of the best conspiracy theories

Mexico had its own extraterrestrial matters to deal with, after a journalist unveiled two "alien" bodies before the country's congress in September. Together with a military medical doctor, the journalist, Jaime Maussan, claimed that DNA tests showed the bodies were non-human but not necessarily extraterrestrial. Scientists rallied to refute these claims and debunk them.

'Anomalous' metal spheres 

This year, a prominent Harvard astrophysicist claimed that more than 50 "anomalous" metal spheres pulled from the Pacific Ocean could be the work of intelligent aliens. Avi Loeb claimed the tiny pellets likely fell into the ocean in 2014, when a fireball shot across the sky above Papua New Guinea. Loeb argued the blazing object could be a relic from another star system and might harbor traces of alien technology.

In November, several studies found that the metal spheres are more likely a by-product of burning coal and therefore probably come from industrial pollution on Earth. Loeb refuted these results in a blog post on Nov. 15. He argued that coal is non-magnetic and could not have been picked up by the instruments he used to dredge the pellets from the ocean. He noted that 93% of the collected samples have not yet been analyzed and cautioned that scientists should not jump to conclusions. 

Tasmanian tigers prowling the wilderness 

Based on reported sightings since 1910, researchers suggested in March that Tasmanian tigers (Thylacinus cynocephalus) survived in the wild until the 1980s and may still be prowling the Tasmanian wilderness today. These marsupials were thought to have gone extinct in 1936, when the last known Tasmanian tiger died in captivity, but the researchers estimated the earliest date for extinction was in the mid-1950s — that is, if the species did go extinct.

However, the study was met with skepticism, as the findings were based solely on reported sightings of Tasmanian tigers. No carcass was ever found to suggest the species persisted in the wild, experts told Live Science, and the resemblance between Tasmanian tigers and dogs means people who reported sightings could easily have been mistaken.

Contentious Brazilian dinosaur fossils 

In May, paleontologists criticized a team of researchers in Europe after they published a study on 115 million-year-old dinosaur fossils that had been unearthed by commercial diggers in Brazil then sold and shipped to Germany. The specimens belong to a carnivorous species related to Spinosaurus known as Irritator challengeri, which the new study suggests scooped up prey like a pelican.

The study authors thought the fossils legally belonged to Germany, as they arrived there before 1990, after which time Brazil began restricting scientific exports to other countries. But an older 1942 law states that Brazilian fossils are federal property and cannot be sold, meaning the fossils may have been stolen. Paleontologists, including the authors, agreed the fossils should be returned to Brazil.

Semiconductor furore 

This summer, researchers in South Korea claimed they made a superconductor at room temperatures and pressures, sparking a flurry of attempts to replicate the results. If verifiable, the discovery of a material able to carry electricity in everyday temperatures and without electrical resistance would open new technological windows.

But other experts cautioned the published work was sloppy and not peer-reviewed. When they tried to replicate the findings, none of the materials they created yielded identical results to LK-99, the South Korean team's superconductor. Subsequent publicized attempts have also proven unsuccessful. Regardless of the outcome for LK-99, the announcement gave rise to meaningful discussions on social media and elsewhere about an area of science unfamiliar to the general public. 

Hominin fossils in space 

In September, a Virgin Galactic space flight took off from Earth with priceless and extremely contentious cargo: the fragmentary remains of two of our ancient relatives, Australopithecus sediba and Homo naledi. South African-born billionaire Timothy Nash carried the hominin fossils to the edge of space in a cigar-shaped tube, causing an uproar in the scientific community.

Related: NASA may have unknowingly found and killed alien life on Mars 50 years ago, scientist claims 

The permit to take the fossils on the flight, which was approved by the South African Heritage Resources Agency, said the goal of the mission was to promote science and bring global recognition to human origins research in South Africa. But experts criticized the undertaking because it lacked a scientific purpose, especially as a malfunction could have destroyed the fossils. Critics also noted the trip raised ethical issues surrounding the respect for human ancestral remains and tainted the image of paleoanthropological research.

Antarctica's ozone hole 

A study that claimed the ozone hole above Antarctica is not recovering as fast as we thought and could be getting bigger came under fire in November, with experts criticizing the methodology and accusing the authors of cherry-picking data.

The conclusion that the concentration of ozone at the center of Antarctica's ozone hole decreased by 26% between 2001 and 2022 omitted several factors — including three consecutive years of La Niña from 2020 to 2022, massive wildfires that raged in Australia during 2020 and water vapor from Tonga's huge eruption in 2022 — that would explain why the past few years have been unusual, experts told Live Science. Experts also questioned the authors' decision to exclude two years' worth of data, which they argued would have skewed the results.

Overall, experts said, the results were unrealistic and useless to infer much about global ozone recovery trends. 

Alternative origin story 

A newly identified ape fossil from an 8.7 million-year-old site in Turkey led scientists to posit that hominines — a group that includes humans, the African apes and their fossil ancestors (and different from hominins, which comprise species belonging to the human lineage after it diverged from the ancestors of chimpanzees and bonobos) — first evolved in Europe. This deviates from the conventional view that hominines originated exclusively in Africa and suggests members of this group dispersed to Africa from the Mediterranean instead.

But paleontologists pointed out that comprehensive analyses of great ape and early human relative fossils do not support this argument. It's also possible that the newfound species, Anadoluvius turkae, migrated to the Mediterranean from Africa after evolving there, rather than the other way round, experts told Live Science. Fossils like these are sparse in the African fossil record, and while that doesn't mean hominines weren't there, it does raise questions about where the group first evolved, they added. 

Netflix documentary under scrutiny 

Homo naledi — an ancient human relative that lived about 300,000 years ago — became a lightning rod for controversy earlier this year after a research team claimed the extinct hominins deliberately buried their dead and engraved rocks. These complex behaviors, for which there was "no convincing scientific evidence," were featured in the hit Netflix documentary "Unknown: Cave of Bones" (2023), which was released just days after the claims were published in the journal eLife.

Related: Early human relatives purposefully crafted stones into spheres 1.4 million years ago, study claims 

The findings could be substantiated one day, experts told Live Science, but there is currently no strong evidence to support the idea that hominins with orange-size brains could perform behaviors only known in species with much larger brains, such as modern humans. The team behind the claims responded to reviewers' comments, but it's unlikely their words will be the last in this debate.

'Curse tablet' or fishing weight? 

A postage stamp-size piece of lead was discovered in the West Bank in 2019, and this year, some researchers found that it carried the earliest-known inscription of the name of the Israelite god Yahweh. The authors of the original paper called the artifact a "curse tablet," based on their interpretation of the markings as calling on Yahweh to curse his enemies. But others are not convinced, because they think it shows no words and might actually be a fishing weight.

The controversial lead tablet bore no inscriptions on the inside, critics told Live Science, just indentations caused by weathering. The tablet closely resembles weights commonly used for fishing or birding nets during the time the tablet was dated to, between 1400 and 1200 B.C.

The original researchers responded to critics by saying they are confident there is writing on the tablet and are working on a second paper detailing inscriptions on the folded tablet's exterior.

While we're always on the lookout for the best LEGO for adults, there's certainly some crossover with educational LEGO sets to inspire the next generation of master builders.

This LEGO Ideas Insect Collection features three impressively detailed builds, and it's seen a 41% discount at Amazon. With $87.39 off of the MSRP, that's a hefty saving on a set that's so beautifully crafted.

The LEGO Ideas Insect Collection (set number 21342) features a trio of insect builds, each with their own color palette and poseable features. They also come with LEGO flora and fauna — including adorable funghi.

The morpho butterfly is impressively detailed, with adjustable wings and a beautiful wing pattern that looks just like the real thing. It comes with a small array of flowers, too. The Hercules beetle is instantly recognizable, with its large antlers and bright yellow back, while the Chinese Mantis can be put into a variety of positions and even comes with foliage that allows it to camouflage itself.

Each insect comes with its own detailed instruction manual, and looks just as good on the display shelf as in the classroom. As for the brick count, you can expect 1111 pieces spread between the three models and their base stands, so there's plenty to do with the set.

With the Ideas Insect Collection, you can easily create an adorable insect diorama, and while we'd argue it's a great purchase for any LEGO builder, this set is a particularly good fit for educational projects with your loved ones.

Andrew Benfield, a writer and meditation teacher, has spent years looking for the Yeti with his skeptical friend and political analyst Richard Horsey. The pair traveled through India, Myanmar, Nepal and Bhutan, listening to stories about the legendary creature and eventually making "Yeti," a BBC Radio 4 series about their search.

The series finished on a cliffhanger in June — a mysterious hair supplied by an unnamed source awaiting DNA analysis. A bonus episode published Oct. 20 has now revealed the hair came from a horse.

Benfield told Live Science the result "didn't feel good" after three years of searching. "A horse was about as boring as we could get," Benfield said. But the DNA analysis doesn't invalidate the series or the stories of the people they spoke to, according to the pair.

Related: The most famous Bigfoot sightings

Tales of an ape-like creature roaming the Himalayas date back centuries. Western interest in the Yeti, or Abominable Snowman, took off in the early 1950s after British mountaineer Eric Shipton returned from Everest with photos of giant footprints. Subsequent investigations led by westerners failed to find any scientific evidence of the creature's existence.

Having worked in international development, Benfield didn't like that local accounts of the Yeti were dismissed just because white explorers hadn't found one. He was also reassured by a Sir David Attenborough interview filmed in 2013, in which Attenborough said he thinks "there might be something in the Abominable Snowman mystery." Attenborough doesn't take part in the new radio series.

Benfield set out in 2019 to hear first-hand stories of the Yeti and invited Horsey, who has a PhD in cognitive psychology, to join him. "If I could convince him, I knew I was on to something," Benfield said.

The BBC became involved in 2022, just before the duo headed to Bhutan and the Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary, a 286-square-mile (740 square-kilometer) national park established, in part, to protect the "Migoi," or Yeti, according to the Daily Bhutan. Here, Horsey finally gets a story that shakes his skepticism, and Benfield acquires the purported Yeti hair.

The hair was about 6 inches (15 centimeters) long. Benfield cut it in half and sent piece to Charlotte Lindqvist, an evolutionary biologist at the University at Buffalo in New York. Lindqvist and her team found the DNA matched Altai horses, a mountain breed from Asia.

Lindqvist was also part of a 2017 study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B that analyzed nine purported Yeti samples and found eight came from bears and one came from a dog. She has previously said that she has no doubt the creature is a myth.

Benfield accepts the DNA results but still hasn't parted with the other half of the hair, which he told Live Science is currently in his cupboard. He also spoke of the vast, untouched, unexplored nature of the Himalayas and said Yeti stories come from people who know the region.

"You certainly respect local people's knowledge when you're up there because they're keeping you alive," Benfield said. "Who am I to question these people? They're out there every day."

Horsey didn't think they'd come back with DNA evidence, but told Live Science the Yeti is more important to local people than he'd ever imagined. "We realized it doesn't really matter to most of these people whether it physically exists," Horsey said. "It's the role that it plays in their world."

Writer Tshering Tashi detailed Bhutanese belief in the Yeti in a 2020 article for Kuensel Online, the web edition of Bhutan's national newspaper. In it, he said that people in Bhutan are convinced that the Yeti exists but are in "no hurry" to produce evidence.

"While there is certainly a biological being behind the mythology, we believe that it will not be in the shape and form that Westerners have romanticised it to be," Tashi wrote.

A mysterious, malevolent-looking mermaid mummy that was brought back to the U.S. from Japan more than 100 years ago appears to be a mix of fish, monkey and lizard parts that have been joined together like Frankenstein's monster, initial scans suggest. 

The haunting mummy, which is around 11.5 inches (29 centimeters) long, is known as the "Fiji mermaid" due to its similarities with an object of the same name supposedly acquired from Fiji by controversial showman P.T. Barnum in the 1840s. The mummy was purchased in Japan by an American naval officer who donated it to the Clark County Historical Society in Springfield, Ohio, in 1906. Documents supplied to the society with the mummy suggest it dates back to the mid-1800s.

Now, for the first time, researchers have investigated the mermaid's identity by carrying out X-ray and CT scans on the disheveled remains.

"This allowed us to see [the mummy] in almost every dimension in the hopes to see what was inside it," project leader Joseph Cress, a radiographer at Northern Kentucky University, told Live Science. 

Related: Are there any mythological creatures that haven't been debunked? 

The initial investigation found that the mummy appears to be made from the head and torso of a monkey sewed onto the decapitated body of a fish, while the mermaid's hands are the clawed legs from a lizard — most likely a Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis), Cress told Live Science.

The scans also revealed a pair of wooden stakes inside the remains — one running from head to tail and another across the shoulder blades — which were presumably added to keep the creature intact, Cress said.

The researchers are currently trying to reconstruct a more detailed model of the mermaid and its individual parts from their scans. Once the models are complete, the team plans to send them to zoos and aquariums to help identify the components on a species level.

This is not the only mummified mermaid to have undergone intensive scans recently. 

In March 2022, researchers analyzed a similar specimen that was unearthed in a hidden box in a Japanese temple. Researchers initially expected that this mermaid, which was 12 inches (30.5 cm) long and dates to the mid-1700s, was also a monkey-fish hybrid. But subsequent scans this February revealed that the mummy was predominantly made from cloth, paper and cotton, painted with sand and charcoal and held together by metal pins. Various animal parts, including mammal hair and fish skin, were stuck to the outside of the doll. 

Both mermaids most closely resemble "ningyo" — mythical fish-like creatures with human heads. In Japanese mythology, a woman is fabled to have lived for 800 years after eating one of these fictional beasts, and so the creatures became a symbol of longevity. It is therefore likely that fishers made the cryptid concoctions to sell them to wealthy people seeking to prolong their lives, Live Science previously reported. 

He’s right. Since the early 1990s, Bigelow has bankrolled a voluminous stream of pseudoscience on modern-day UFO lore—investigating everything from crop circles and cattle mutilations to alien abductions and UFO crashes. Indeed, if you name a UFO rabbit hole, it’s a good bet the 79-year-old tycoon has flushed his riches down it.

But it’s also a good bet that Bigelow would see this differently. After all, both the media and Congress are now solemnly discussing a supposed massive UFO cover-up by the U.S. government. There’s even proposed legislation to open the X-Files! "The American public has a right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, non-human intelligence, and unexplainable phenomena," Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York harrumphed in a recent public statement.

This legacy of plutocrat-backed fringe science comes as political partisanship, corporate propaganda, and conspiracy mongering continues to sow distrust in science. One lawmaker, Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee, recently said, "The devil's been in our way," claiming a "cover-up" of UFO reports by military and intelligence agencies.

Such talk was once solely the domain of Internet fever swamps and late-night conspiracy- themed radio shows. Now it's part of the political mainstream. This doesn’t happen without Bigelow (and other wealthy eccentrics) greasing the way with their fat wallets. For example, Laurance Rockefeller was undoubtedly the most prominent UFO benefactor in the 1990s. The wealthy heir financed numerous UFO panels, conferences and book-length reports that kept flying saucers in the public discourse.

From a scientific standpoint, all this money seems wasted on a zany quest that is akin to the search for Bigfoot or Atlantis. The same might be said of Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb's recent hunt for evidence of extraterrestrial life off the coast of Papua New Guinea, which cost $150,000 and was funded by cryptocurrency mogul Charles Hoskinson. Loeb's polarizing claims of finding traces of alien technology and of having a more open-minded and dispassionate approach to fringe science have garnered a truly staggering amount of media coverage, but his peers in the scientific community are rolling their eyes.

It's the latest stunt by Loeb, who also helms a controversial UFO project and previously drew the ire of his colleagues with outlandish claims about the supposedly artificial nature of an (admittedly weird) interstellar comet. Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University, recently told the New York Times: "What the public is seeing in Loeb is not how science works. And they shouldn't go away thinking that."

True, but as communication researcher Alexandre Schiele wrote in a 2020 paper for the Journal of Science Communication, what people see about "science" is usually on TV, particularly via sensationalist programming on cable channels  such as Discovery and the misnamed History Channel, where viewers are "bombarded with aliens, ghosts, cryptids and miracles as though they are indisputable facts."

Unfortunately, much of this nonsense has, at one point or another, been masked with an aura of legitimacy by prestigious institutions. For example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lent its imprimatur to an alien abduction conference in the early 1990s—which Robert Bigelow helped pay for. A generous benefactor to academia, Bigelow also gave millions to the University of Nevada during the 1990s to study supposed psychic phenomena, such as telepathy, clairvoyance and the possibility of life after death. (In recent years, the billionaire has turned his attention and money largely to the afterlife.)

Indeed, there is a long tradition of fringe science at prestigious universities. The dubious field of parapsychology, for instance, owes its existence to the decades of pseudoscholarship churned out at Duke and Harvard University—and financed by wealthy private patrons. Some of our most illustrious thinkers, such as the eminent psychologist William James, have fallen for it. Belief in Martians sprang in large part from a wealthy amateur astronomer, Percival Lowell, who built the observatory that still bears his name. A University of Arizona psychology professor attracted criticism in recent years for taking money from the Pioneer Fund, founded in 1937 by textiles magnate to promote the racist science of eugenics.

Eventually, this wacky stuff, be it ESP or UFOs, makes its way to Congress and the Pentagon. That's how we end up with people in government-funded programs who claim they can bend spoons with their minds or walk through walls. And that’s how we end up with the Department of Defense giving Robert Bigelow $22 million from 2008 to 2011 to investigate UFOs, werewolves and poltergeists (seriously) on a Utah ranch.

This would be the same ranch Bigelow had already bought after reading a story in a Utah newspaper about how the property was teeming with UFOs, including one "huge ship the size of several football fields."

Does this sound familiar? If so, that's because in recent weeks, a number of similar hard-to-fathom, evidence-free UFO claims have echoed without challenge through the halls of Congress and all over television networks. Among the most eyebrow raising: tales of recovered saucers, hidden alien bodies, and a football field–sized UFO spotted over a military base.

Guess what: You can draw a line from these outlandish assertions to the vast repository of so-called studies once funded by Bigelow. In fact, some of the people he contracted to write them, such as astrophysicist Eric Davis, have acknowledged speaking (behind closed doors) with Congress.

To say UFO enthusiasm has swept Washington D.C. is not an overstatement. In recent years, there have been three Congressional hearings and two Pentagon task forces. NASA is about to deliver its own verdict after a year-long study. As Timothy Noah writes in the New Republic, "UFOs are fast becoming the most-studied topic in American governance."

Perhaps, but Robert Bigelow will tell you that nobody has studied the topic more than him. He might be right. Whatever the latest UFO whistleblower says and whatever Congress turns up, you can bet that Bigelow already paid for it.

This article was first published at ScientificAmerican.com. © ScientificAmerican.com. All rights reserved. Follow Scientific American on Twitter @SciAm and @SciamBlogs. Visit ScientificAmerican.com for the latest in science, health and technology news.

While our sense of smell is often compared unfavorably with those of super sniffing species such as dogs, mice and pigs, humans aren't actually bad at smelling, and in some cases can outsniff these animal competitors. Our noses have roughly 400 different smell receptors capable of registering 10 types of odors and more than 1 trillion scents, and smell is thought to have been one of the first senses that humans evolved. One study found that humans were better at detecting plant aromatic compounds than dogs, thanks to our evolutionary history as hunter-gatherers.

Although we can indeed smell our own odors — a quick sniff of the underarm will bear this out — over time, we become desensitized to our particular scent, said Hiroaki Matsunami, a molecular neurobiologist at Duke University. "The same is true of any smell we routinely encounter," such as perfume or the inside of our house, he added. This process is known as odor fatigue, and while the cause isn't entirely understood (the thinking is it could be a change in the scent receptors or in how the brain responds to a smell), it can be reset by smelling areas with fewer sweat glands, such as the elbow or forearm.

Our ability to detect our own smell also heightens in certain situations, according to Rachel Herz, a neuroscientist at Brown University. "We have a unique body odor, and so we're really attuned to any changes in that," she told Live Science.

Related: Why does cannabis smell skunky?

For example, if you eat something garlicky or have a stressful day, you'll likely smell it in your sweat and saliva. Studies have also found links between smell and more than a dozen illnesses. Breath that smells like rotten fruit can be indicative of untreated diabetes, while typhoid makes your sweat smell like freshly baked bread. Parkinson's disease allegedly gives off a "woody, musky odor," according to one woman who claimed to notice that her husband's smell changed prior to his diagnosis. She was later able to detect the disease with almost perfect accuracy after smelling the shirts of six Parkinson's patients and six controls, and scientists are currently studying whether changes in the skin's oil, called sebum, can be used to diagnose cases before the onset of symptoms.

Beyond health, our scent is also linked to our social relationships. In a famous 1995 study, scientists asked women to sniff the T-shirts of men who had eschewed scented products. The women each had strong preferences, and researchers linked them to a set of genes called the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) that code for peptides the immune system uses to flag foreign invaders. Something in our body odor advertises our unique MHC assemblage, and women preferred the scent of men with MHC genes that were dissimilar from their own. The reason remains contentious, Matsunami said, but it's possible that having children with someone with a different combination of MHC genes might give those kids immunity to more diseases.

Even as we push for genetically dissimilar sexual partners, we use scent to judge the similarity of our friends and often prefer those who smell like us by virtue of living in a similar environment. "We are using our sense of smell as a way of assessing the other versus the self, and have different qualifications for the role we want that person to fill," Matsunami told Live Science.

Because humans are largely visual creatures, smell simply hasn't gotten the same attention as other senses, and so many aspects of it remain unknown. But the COVID-19 pandemic reignited an interest in smell, though, because many people lost the ability in the days, weeks or years following their infection. The virus doesn't seem to destroy scent receptors or olfactory neurons, so it's unclear why it happens, Herz said. "But I'm really hoping that this interest in smell doesn't go by the wayside and that there's a continued interest and awareness and recognition that scent is actually really important and connected to everything in our lives."

A new study suggests that heat may make some people more aggressive, but only when they are already feeling marginalized. In most cases, however, heat doesn't directly affect people's decision-making.

"Given climate changes happening around the world, and changing temperatures, we felt this was an important line of inquiry," said Robert Pickmans, a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, who co-authored the new research.

The findings have been released by the National Bureau of Economic Research as a working paper. Many past studies on the psychological effects of heat were done using small and limited sample sizes, Pickmans said. In the new research, the team recruited about 900 participants from Berkeley, California, and 1,000 from Nairobi, Kenya. The volunteers were taken to either a 71.6-degree-Fahrenheit (22 degrees Celsius) room or an 86 F (30 C) one, and were put through a standard battery of decision-making and cognitive tests. The researchers then compared the performance of the individuals in the cool and hot rooms.

The first finding was that, for the most part, there weren't a lot of differences. People in the hot rooms complained of feeling sleepier, but their decision-making abilities didn't slip.

"It looks like there is a degree of resilience," Pickmans told Live Science.

There was, however, an interesting result in one task, dubbed the "joy of destruction" task. In this test, participants got the opportunity to erase some of the savings of another participant. There was no major benefit or risk to doing so; they didn't get any monetary reward, but the other participant also wouldn't know how much this person chose to erase. Thus, Pickmans said, the task is a standard measure of aggression.

Heat didn't affect how people played the "joy of destruction" game in Berkeley, but in Nairobi, participants in the hotter room were more ruthless. Upon further investigation, the researchers discovered that this effect was driven by participants who were members of ethnic groups that had been marginalized in a contested election that was upending daily life in Kenya at the time.

"We thought this was pretty interesting, especially given the climate literature that documents associations in temperature and political violence," Pickmans said. But he warned that the results should be taken as exploratory, because the researchers did not go into the study intending to look at differences between ethnic groups.

Also open to further research, Pickmans said, is whether temperatures above 86 F would yield more impacts on the human mind or behavior. He and his colleagues have been doing follow-up research in Berkeley on keeping people in 86 F rooms longer — two hours rather than one. So far, they don't see a huge erosion of ability, Pickmans said, though people do show some declines in certain kinds of reasoning and in overriding their gut impulses.

The findings suggest that researchers trying to predict the impact of climate change should focus on how climate will affect things such as resource availability, rather than on the heat itself affecting people's behavior.

The Loch Ness Centre, a visitor attraction in Scotland, announced earlier this month that it was "looking for budding monster hunters" to help search Loch Ness on Aug. 26 and Aug. 27 in what it's calling a "giant surface watch." 

A spokesperson for the Loch Ness Centre told Live Science that more than 200 people have signed up to attend the search in person, while over a hundred more plan to take part virtually. The center promises this search will be "the biggest of its kind" since a group called the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau last studied the loch in 1972. However, scientific research suggests there's nothing monstrous lurking beneath the waves. 

A scientific survey of Loch Ness DNA in 2019 found no traces of "monster DNA" to support the legend. The researchers did, however, find a lot of eel DNA and couldn't rule out a theory that overgrown eels are responsible for sightings. Loch Ness is also low in nutrients and unlikely to support a large unknown predator species like a massive ancient reptile, Live Science previously reported. 

Related: No, the Loch Ness Monster was not a whale's penis 

The Loch Ness Monster legend dates back many centuries, but this year marks the 90th anniversary of a famous Nessie sighting from 1933. Aldie MacKay, manager of the then Drumnadrochit Hotel — now the Loch Ness Centre site — helped ignite the modern Nessie craze after reporting seeing a "whale-like fish" or "water beast" in the loch.

Despite no hard evidence for the fabled monster's existence, Nessie became famous the world over, and the loch remains a popular tourist destination. This weekend, the Loch Ness Centre will host various activities as part of their search, including operating 90-minute-long "Premium Deepscan Cruises," where paying customers can join Nessie hunters using a hydrophone to "listen for noises in the depths of the loch," according to the announcement statement. 

The visitor center claims it will also have surveying equipment not used on the loch before, including flying thermal drones equipped with infrared cameras to detect heat in the water. Meanwhile, surface watch volunteers will be asked to look out for "breaks in the water and any inexplicable movements," according to the statement. While in-person volunteering is now fully booked, people can still join the search from home by logging onto a live stream of the loch.   

"The weekend gives an opportunity to search the waters in a way that has never been done before, and we can’t wait to see what we find," Paul Nixon, the Loch Ness Centre general manager, said in the statement. 

From significant moments in history, such as the Cold War and the Pacific War, to the technologies that transformed warfare today, Live Science’s expert writers and editors have you covered with the latest news, articles and features on how war impacts science.  

Our expert writers and editors will also guide you through the history of politics and how it interacts with the sciences, helping you to be fully equipped for your next dinner-time disagreement.

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Researchers and conservationists have set off on a two-year voyage to retrace Charles Darwin's famous journey across the globe. The expedition comes more than 190 years after the naturalist sailed the world collecting specimens and shaping ideas that would help him formulate his theory of evolution. 

The expedition, named Darwin200, began on Aug. 15 when an international team set off from Plymouth, England, on board the Dutch tall ship Oosterschelde. The team will sail more than 46,000 miles (74,000 kilometers) and drop anchor in 32 different ports across four continents, before ending their journey in Falmouth, U.K. Along the way, they will collect scientific data, train future environmentalists and promote conservation.

The expedition's route will closely follow Darwin's original voyage aboard the HMS Beagle, which set off from Plymouth on Dec. 27, 1831 and returned to Falmouth on Oct. 2, 1836. Darwin was 22 years old when he joined the expedition with the intention of seeing the world before joining the church. But during the trip, Darwin became fascinated by the wide range of different species he encountered, which eventually led to him formulating his theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin's account of the journey, which was published after his return, also helped him establish his reputation as one of Victorian Britain's academic elite. 

Related: Charles Darwin's stolen 'tree of life' notebooks returned after 20 years 

The main aim of the new expedition is to train and inspire 200 young environmentalists, between 18 and 25 years old, who will each spend a week on board the Oosterschelde studying threatened species that Darwin encountered on his voyage. 

"We wanted to create a similarly transformative experience [for the young naturalists]," Stewart McPherson, mission director of Darwin200, said in a statement. They have "the potential to be the STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] and conservation leaders of tomorrow," he added.

Every week, the team will broadcast interactive "nature hour" sessions live from the ship for people across the world.

The team will also collect important data on ocean plastics and coral reef health, as well as survey seabirds, whales and dolphins.

The Oosterschelde will make its next stop in Tenerife in the Canary Islands, before heading to Brazil. From there it will cruise around South America before sailing to Australia, New Zealand, Pacific island nations and South Africa, and then finally returning home. 

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It’s no secret that Lego’s Ideas range is one of our favorites from the plastic block company. This innovative range invites Lego fans to design their own sets then submit them, via the Lego Ideas website, to be voted on. Once a set reaches 10,000 public votes, it’ll then be assessed by a panel of Lego judges. And, two or three times a year, a handful of sets that the judges have had eyes on are turned into real life, retail Lego sets.

The result is a range filled with some of the most unique, innovative sets. The Lego Ideas Motorized Lighthouse is just one of them, but it absolutely nails everything that the Lego Ideas range should be.

Boasting a fantastic design, some really nifty mechanisms that are rarely seen outside of Lego Technic sets and an engaging build process, the Lego Ideas Motorized Lighthouse isn’t just one of our favorite Lego Ideas builds but one of the best Lego sets of all time. That’s a grand statement to make, but there’s very little to be disappointed about in this true feat of Lego engineering.

Lego Ideas Motorized Lighthouse review: Build

• It takes some time before it begins to take shape
• A pleasant, enjoyable build from start to finish

Being over 2,000 pieces, the Lego Ideas Motorized Lighthouse is a rather time-consuming build. It’s the sort of thing you’re likely to complete over two or three evenings rather than doing in one sitting, likely taking around six hours, give or take, to complete in full. It’s a building process that is clearly split into two parts – and that’s highlighted thanks to the fact that the instructions are spread over two books. The first half sees you building the rocky base and the cottage, and the second half concerns itself with raising the lighthouse.

For the first few sets of bags, there’s very little clue as to what you’re building. Your progress resembles little more than randomly scattered bricks on a base board, but keep going and you’ll eventually start to see details form: a pier, a cave, a set of steps leading up to the top of the cliff. In fact, in those early stages, the Motorized Lighthouse’s fan designer, Sandro Quattrini (who goes by rosesmustbuild on Lego Ideas) purposefully included a mismatched hodge-podge of bricks. A note in the instruction book states it’s a little nod to all the Lego fans who’ve had to cobble together their own designs from whatever bricks they’ve had laying around. It’s a cute little inclusion which made us smile. 

Our only real grumble about the build process of the Motorized Lighthouse is that it’s sometimes hard to find where your pieces need to go. You’re often working across the entire space of your base board, and any newly-placed pieces aren’t highlighted within the instructions. As a result, we occasionally spent a little too long for comfort simply scanning each step, trying to spot the bricks that we haven’t already placed. Lego used to highlight the pieces you needed to place in each step, and it’s a shame that they’ve moved away from that - it made reading the instructions much easier.

But that’s only a small gripe, and it didn’t get in the way of our enjoyment of putting together the Lego Ideas Motorized Lighthouse. Even building the lighthouse tower itself, which we worried would be a little repetitive, ended up being engaging. It’s been designed in such a way that, despite looking very similar on all sides, each piece is built slightly differently and so boredom never sets in. There’s only a handful of small pieces that are replicated, which isn’t a problem.

As great as the lighthouse looks, thanks to its imposing stature, it’s probably the cottage that makes up our favorite part of the build. This tiny little lighthouse keeper’s home is packed with so many lovely details: a bed with a checked duvet; a stove (which lights up the whole cottage!); a writing desk. 

The homely additions of pictures on the wall really finish off this living space. It’s just a shame that, once the model’s finished, you need to remove the whole roof to properly admire it.

Lego Ideas Motorized Lighthouse review: Design

• Electronic components are wonderful
• Packed with lovely, tiny details

The nature of the Lego Ideas program means, essentially, the Motorized Lighthouse has been designed twice. Its original design, submitted by Quattrini to Lego Ideas, is then changed, refined and finalized by a team of Lego designers. In some cases, the changes are minor. But in the case of the Motorized Lighthouse, it really feels like it’s been taken back to the drawing board.

Sandro Quattrini’s original concept does bear some resemblance to the finished, retail model, but the changes it’s gone through are numerous. For one, Quattrini’s design wasn’t minifigure scale: the lighthouse keeper was instead a tiny microfigure. It provided perhaps a more epic sense of scale, but the inclusion of minifigures makes a set more appealing. As such, the design of the cottage has been changed to accommodate, too. It’s now more of a focal point, with more detailed brickwork and a full interior. Even the lighthouse and the cliff have been reworked.

The result is a set that’s far more visually appealing, and has allowed for Lego to include the small design details that make their sets so special. Without the changes, we wouldn’t have had a fully-furnished cottage, or a lighthouse with ladders going all the way inside. There wouldn’t have been a cave hiding a treasure chest, either.

Bringing the Lego Ideas Motorized Lighthouse to life has clearly taken a lot of expertise, and we are in awe of the job the design team has done. From the cottage’s intricate brickwork to the tapered shape of the lighthouse, there isn’t a brick out of place. There's even been a brand new brick created especially for this set (a very rare occurrence): a mini fresnel lens to give the lighthouse an air of authenticity. 

The careful consideration of each part of the design means that the lighthouse is a pleasure to build, and even with the addition of wiring for the motorized functions – the Lighthouse is hiding a battery pack, a medium motor and cabling leading to the LED lights – no part of the process is ever frustrating. 

To the contrary, in fact: we loved the clever ways that the wires are hidden, with their placement considered at every part of the build. The battery pack, too, has been cleverly disguised as part of the cliff, allowing for easy access if you need to change the batteries. Well, providing you can remember which part of the cliff it is: it blends in so well that it’s hard to tell! 

Should you buy Lego Ideas Motorized Lighthouse?

This is a no-brainer: yes, you absolutely should buy Lego Ideas Motorized Lighthouse. Well, providing you have the money and the space for it. But if you're happy to drop $300 on one Lego model, we're very confident in saying that you won't be disappointed with this one. The Motorized Lighthouse is one of our favorite Lego sets ever (and we've built a lot of them). In terms of the building process, the little details, the electronics and, of course, the finished model, everything is close to perfect. With the Motorized Lighthouse, the Lego Ideas range has hit a home run once more.

Other Lego sets to consider

The Motorized Lighthouse isn't the only worthwhile set from the Lego Ideas range. It may be one of the best, sure, but we also love Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night, a brick-built replica of the iconic painting. There's also the wonderful Tree House, complete with leaves made out of plant-based plastic, or The Globe, which might not be geographically accurate but still looks fantastic on your shelf.

Elsewhere in Lego's collection, we heartily recommend the Botanicals range, which includes the Bird of Paradise and the Orchid, which both somehow manage to look like the real things, despite being made out of bricks.

For more ideas about what Lego sets are available, why not check out our guide to the best Lego sets for adults?

The FBI says that it linked James Nott, the man living with the skulls, to a ring of people accused of buying and selling remains stolen from Harvard Medical School, CNN reported. 

Nott allegedly used Facebook to sell human remains, but he wasn't charged for this — it's not illegal to buy and sell human remains in most U.S. states — nor are the remains in his apartment believed to be from Harvard Medical School, HuffPost reported. He had, however, allegedly tried to sell remains to someone connected to the Harvard ring. Nott was instead arrested and charged with possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. A call to Nott's public defender for comment went unanswered, according to CNN. 

In June, prosecutors charged six people with trafficking in stolen human remains, and indictments allege a "nationwide network of individuals" bought and sold human remains stolen from both Harvard Medical School and an Arkansas mortuary. Nott's arrest brings more attention to that case, though the remains found in his apartment haven't been tied to either. 

Live Science previously reported on a booming online collector's trade in human remains, with skulls and other body parts openly sold on social media. This trade often exists in a legal gray area and is typically poorly regulated. 

Related: 7,000-year-old cult site in Saudi Arabia was filled with human remains and animal bones

What happened at Harvard? 

A morgue manager at Harvard Medical School allegedly stole parts from bodies donated to the school for medical research and education between 2018 and 2022 and sold them with his wife. The couple, Cedric and Denise Lodge of New Hampshire, pleaded not guilty to charges, according to HuffPost. 

Prosecutors also accused Lodge, who was fired in May, of letting two of his buyers, Katrina Maclean of Massachusetts and Joshua Taylor of Pennsylvania, into the morgue to choose which body parts to purchase. 

Maclean and Taylor, who also pleaded not guilty, allegedly resold the body parts, including to Jeremy Pauley of Pennsylvania, who corresponded with Nott on Facebook Messager. Pauley told FBI agents about a network of stolen remains after local authorities received a tip and found body parts at his home in the summer of 2022, CNN reported. According to HuffPost, Pauley signed an agreement to plead guilty to conspiracy and interstate transport of stolen goods. A call to his attorney for comment went unanswered, CNN reported.

Pauley is also accused of buying remains stolen from an Arkansas mortuary and crematorium by one of its employees, Candace Chapman Scott of Arkansas, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office. 

"Some crimes defy understanding," U.S. Attorney Gerard Karam said in a statement released on June 14. "The theft and trafficking of human remains strikes at the very essence of what makes us human."

Karam also thanked Harvard Medical School for cooperating in the investigation, describing the school as a "victim."

While the alleged theft of human remains from a medical school and mortuary might sound shocking, the human remains trade and the role of social media in it are well established. 

A 2020 Live Science investigation found people offering looted skulls and other human remains for sale in private Facebook groups, and in 2022, Live Science published a two-part investigation revealing desecrated human skulls are sold on social media and evidence of grave robbing in the U.K.'s unregulated bone trade. 

An old Einstein letter, in which the famous physicist tells a religious studies teacher and her students that science "supersedes" religious creation and that God can be thought of as "analogous to humans," has been put up for sale for $125,000. 

The typed letter, from April 11,1950, was sent by Einstein to Martha Munk — a rabbi's wife and religious studies teacher at an unnamed school or college in New York City. Munk, like Einstein, was forced to flee Nazi-occupied Germany during the Holocaust, according to The Raab Collection, the company facilitating the letter's sale. (The letter is written in German and has been translated to English.)

Munk had previously written to Einstein to ask him questions posed by her pupils. "On behalf of the students of a series of lectures on religion, I would like to ask you whether you think that it is possible for a modern scientist to reconcile the idea of the creation of the world by God, a higher power, with his scientific knowledge," Munk wrote in her initial letter sent earlier that year.

In response, Einstein wrote: "The person who is more or less trained in scientific thinking is alien to the religious creation (in the original sense) of the cosmos, because he applies the standard of causal conditionality to everything. This does not refute the religious attitude but, in a certain sense, replaces and supersedes it."

Related: 10 discoveries that prove Einstein was right about the universe — and 1 that proves him wrong

In the letter, Einstein also addressed his thoughts on how God might be interpreted: "As long as the stories in the Bible had been taken literally, it was obvious what kind of faith was expected from the readers. If you are however to interpret the Bible symbolically (metaphorically), it is not clear anymore whether God is in fact to be thought of as a person (and therefore not a monotheistic deity), which is somehow analogous to humans," Einstein wrote. "In that case, it is difficult to assess what remains of the faith in its original sense."

Einstein's views on religion are well known. The physicist was raised Jewish and maintained his association with Jewish people, despite not believing in the God depicted in the Torah. Einstein spent his life trying to explain how the universe was formed without divine influence. 

In 2018, a lengthy missive penned by the German scientist in 1954, known as "Einstein's God letter," was auctioned for $2.9 million. In this document, the physicist detailed how he had not believed biblical stories in his youth and how this had freed him to a "fanatic orgy of free-thinking." Einstein also noted that he instead believed in Spinoza's God — an amorphous, impersonal god responsible for the orderliness of the universe that was first proposed by the 17th-century Jewish Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, according to Christie's, which facilitated the auction. In the letter he also wrote: "The word God is for me nothing but the expression and product of human weakness."

Other letters from Einstein have also fetched a high price. In May 2022, one of his handwritten letters containing his famous E=mc2 equation sold for $1.2 million. 

The new letter adds further insight into Einstein's views on religion.

"Not only was the letter written by Albert Einstein, one of the great figures and scientists of all time, it speaks to the ongoing, powerful debate between science and religion," Nathan Raab, principal of The Raab Collection, told Live Science in an email. "It's beyond exciting to get a glimpse of his personal thoughts on such an important issue."

Biopics that focus on famous scientists often must tread a fine line of explaining the science while humanizing the faces behind the discoveries. Here we reflect on 10 of the most significant, influential, and/or accurate science biopics over the past decades.

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1. Hidden Figures

• Age rating: PG

Released in 2016, Hidden Figures follows three Black women working as mathematicians at NASA during the space race. The women highlighted include Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan. Each with their own specialties, we see them fight and work through the systemic racism present in the industry to have real impacts on human spaceflight. 

One of the most well-known biopics in recent years, Hidden Figures (loosely based on a book by the same name) rightly served the almost meta purpose of highlighting Black women who truly had been lost to history. The setting and stories at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, VA are mostly recognized to be true, with some changes made to serve the story. 

This film is a fantastic watch for all ages, and even young kids can be drawn into the pacing and relatable characters. Highly recommended for all viewers.

2. Einstein and Eddington

• Age rating: 12

Originally released as a BBC Two drama, Einstein and Eddington has been widely overlooked despite its stellar cast and storytelling. Starring David Tennant as Sir Arthur Eddington and Andy Serkis as Albert Einstein, this film tells the story of the introduction of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity to the world, and Eddington’s relationship therein. Eddington was instrumental in assisting with the first indirect test of General Relativity during a solar eclipse in 1919. This was a particularly turbulent time in physics as Einstein’s theories and Eddington’s observations were contrasting long-accepted Newtonian physics laws. 

A key story in the film centers on Eddington’s romantic feelings for his best friend at Cambridge, which has never been confirmed by historical records. Regardless, this film is a fantastic retelling of a snapshot in physics history against the backdrop of the First World War. While it might be a bit slow for younger audiences, the stellar acting and fascinating story make this a must-see for fans of science and history. 

3. October Sky

• Age rating: PG

Along the theme of rocket research, October Sky tells the story of four young men from West Virginia who are inspired to take up rocketry after the launch of Sputnik 1. Based on the memoir “Rocket Boys”, this film is a classic coming-of-age story that inspires across recommendations. It beautifully and honestly depicts life in the late 1950s coal mining regions of the Appalachians. 

The film is based on the true story of Homer H Hickam Jr, the son of a coal miner who fought against expectations to become an engineer at NASA, generally faithful to the book and life depicted therein, despite the omission of Wernher von Braun’s Nazi associations. 

Though this film was released in 1999, it remains an inspirational classic for families and folks of all ages.

4. Agora

• Age rating: 12A

Reaching far back in the annals of history, Agora is an English-language Spanish film that tells the story of Hypatia, a woman in late 4th century Roman Egypt who challenges the heliocentric model of our solar system. Starring Rachel Weisz, the film is not without its criticism for anachronistic portrayals and misleading attributions of inventions and theories to Hypatia due to the lack of historical evidence. However, this intensely cerebral drama holds themes that are still relatable today, specifically to women in STEM fields. 

With some violence and intense themes, Agora is not recommended for everyone, but its unique subject and portrayal of science in ancient times makes this a worthy viewing.

5. The Imitation Game

• Age rating: 12A

The Imitation Game recounts the famous story of the Enigma Machine developed during World War II to decrypt Nazi communications. Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, the film follows the life of Alan Turing, noted for his work at Bletchley Park and contributions to the machines built. In addition to mathematics and cryptography, the film pays tribute to Alan Turing himself and the challenges he faced in the first half of the 20th century. 

Notably, Alan Turing was prosecuted for homosexuality and underwent chemical castration before dying of suicide in 1954. While a significant amount of liberties are taken with respect to Turing’s personal life and personality, the film nonetheless contributed to the passing of the Policing and Crime Act 2017 (the “Alan Turing law”) which serves as an amnesty law for men who were cautioned or convicted under historical legislation that outlawed homosexual acts in England and Wales. 

This award-winning film is generally acceptable for all ages though the themes may be intense for younger viewers. 

6. Temple Grandin

• Age rating: PG

Starring Claire Daines, Temple Grandin is a 2010 film which examines the life and work of Temple Grandin, a woman with autism who revolutionized treatment of livestock. Based on her own memoirs, this film beautifully examines the stigma of autism and women in scientific fields. Critically well received and winner of multiple awards, Grandin herself praised Danes’ performance as if “going back in a weird time machine”. 

Grandin is currently a professor of Animal Sciences at Colorado State University and a prominent advocate for autism rights and neurodiversity movements. 

Rated PG, this film would be an excellent watch for older children interested in studying and working with animals though caution must be given as the subject matter includes cruel treatment of animals.  

7. Tesla

• Age rating: 12

Chronicling the life of famous inventor Nikola Tesla, Tesla examines the ups and downs of inventions and business. Ethan Hawke brings a fantastic performance in an otherwise straightforward biographical film. Hitting the highlights of Tesla’s life and career, the film misses out on nuance and drama, but is a decent watch for those interested.  

It’s generally appropriate for all ages and may be an interesting watch for young inventors, though realizing there is a significant portion focusing on relationships. The film takes some interesting directorial choices but overall is a faithful adaptation of his life, winning the Alfred P. Sloan award at Sundance Film Festival in 2020.

8. Gorillas in the Mist

• Age rating: 15

Reaching back a few decades, this film is ripe for a rediscovery despite its success at the time. Gorillas in the Mist tells the story of primatologist and conservationist Dian Fossey, following her career change and move to Africa to study rare mountain gorillas. Fossey’s work explored the communication and social behavior of these gorillas, capturing the attention of National Geographic. However, the attention also highlights the poaching crisis of gorillas, turning Fossey into an anti-poaching activist. 

A good amount of the racial imagery in the film is not appropriate and if made in this day and age, one imagines a different approach would be taken. Despite some critics examining the rather neutral treatment of Fossey and her personality, the film is notable for its dozens of award nominations, particularly highlighting Sigourney Weavers’ performance and how it integrated the gorillas both live and artificial. 

The film is fairly violent and distressing, but highlights an important moment in history for the study of mountain gorillas and anti-poaching movements. 

9. Ammonite

• Age rating: 15

The romantic drama Ammonite examines the personal life and struggles of Mary Anning, a fossil collector and paleontologist in the mid-1800s. Starring Kate Winslet as Mary Anning, and Saoirse Ronan as her friend and eventual lover Charlotte Murchison, the film predominantly explores their romantic relationship in the backdrop of seaside fossil collecting in Dorset. 

From a scientific point of view, the film is illuminating to how fossils were discovered, examined, sold, and donated, often ignoring the work (particularly of women) who unearthed them. While there is no historical evidence of Anning’s sexuality, it can’t be discarded as queer history has often been told through a heterosexual lens. Regardless, Mary Anning was a pivotal paleontologist who made dozens of discoveries in Jurassic marine fossil beds along the English Channel. She was frequently, and almost completely, overlooked due to her being a woman at this time. Her story is a fascinating one, and any stories highlighting her contribution to paleontology must be lauded. 

This film is a beautiful, slow drama with the brutal English coast and life in the Victorian era playing a key role. There is a significant amount of nudity and sex so it is not recommended for younger viewers.

10. The Man Who Knew Infinity

• Age rating: 12A

Starring Dev Patel, The Man Who Knew Infinity explores the life of mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan and his life moving from poverty in Madras, India to Cambridge University during World War I. Under the tutelage of Professor G. H. Hardy, played by Jeremy Irons, Ramanujan became a notable theoretical mathematician. His friendship and relationship with Professor Hardy is the key drama in the film, and the struggles of maintaining a life in a new country while sustaining relationships back home. 

With real-life mathematicians collaborating with the film, it’s praised for its accurate portrayal of mathematics and professional mathematicians, often drawing comparisons to Good Will Hunting. It is generally appropriate for all audiences and is a beautiful portrayal of the lives of famous mathematicians.  

RICHARD FEYNMAN was standing 20 miles from the Trinity site when he was handed dark glasses. 

He decided he wouldn't see anything through the dark glasses, so instead he climbed into the cab of a truck facing Alamogordo. The truck windshield would protect his eyes from harmful ultraviolet rays, and he'd be able actually to see the flash. Even so, he reflexively ducked when the horizon lit up with a tremendous flash. When he looked up again, he saw a white light changing into yellow and then orange: "A big ball of orange, the center that was so bright, becomes a ball of orange that starts to rise and billow a little bit and get a little black around the edges, and then you see it's a big ball of smoke with flashes on the inside of the fire going out, the heat." A full minute and a half after the explosion, Feynman finally heard an enormous bang, followed by the rumble of man-made thunder.

James Conant had expected a relatively quick flash of light. But the white light so filled the sky that for a moment he thought "something had gone wrong" and the "whole world has gone up in flames."

Related: Who was J. Robert Oppenheimer? Biographer Kai Bird delves into the physicist's fascinating life and legacy

Bob Serber was also 20 miles away, lying face down and holding a piece of welder's glass to his eyes. "Of course," he wrote later, "just at the moment my arm got tired and I lowered the glass for a second, the bomb went off. I was completely blinded by the flash." When his vision returned 30 seconds later, he saw a bright violet column rising to 20,000 or 30,000 feet. "I could feel the heat on my face a full 20 miles away."

Joe Hirschfelder, the chemist assigned to measure the radioactive fallout from the explosion, later described the moment: "All of a sudden, the night turned into day, and it was tremendously bright, the chill turned into warmth; the fireball gradually turned from white to yellow to red as it grew in size and climbed into the sky; after about five seconds the darkness returned but with the sky and the air filled with a purple glow, just as though we were surrounded by an aurora borealis. . . . We stood there in awe as the blast wave picked up chunks of dirt from the desert soil and soon passed us by."

Related: What was the Manhattan Project?

Frank Oppenheimer was next to his brother [Robert] when the gadget exploded. Though he was lying on the ground, "the light of the first flash penetrated and came up from the ground through one's [eye]lids. When one first looked up, one saw the fireball, and then almost immediately afterwards, this unearthly hovering cloud. It was very bright and very purple." Frank thought, "Maybe it's going to drift over the area and engulf us." He hadn't expected the heat from the flash to be nearly that intense. In a few moments, the thunder of the blast was bouncing back and forth on the distant mountains. "But I think the most terrifying thing," Frank recalled, "was this really brilliant purple cloud, black with radioactive dust, that hung there, and you had no feeling of whether it would go up or would drift towards you."

Oppenheimer himself was lying facedown, just outside the control bunker, situated 10,000 yards south of ground zero. As the countdown reached the two-minute mark, he muttered, "Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart." An Army general watched him closely as the final countdown commenced: "Dr. Oppenheimer . . . grew tenser as the last seconds ticked off. He scarcely breathed. . . . For the last few seconds he stared directly ahead and then when the announcer shouted 'Now!' and there came this tremendous burst of light followed shortly thereafter by the deep growling roar of the explosion, his face relaxed into an expression of tremendous relief."

We don't know, of course, what flashed through Oppie's mind at this seminal moment. His brother recalled, "I think we just said 'It worked.'"

Afterwards, [physicist Isidor] Rabi caught sight of Robert from a distance. Something about his gait, the easy bearing of a man in command of his destiny, made Rabi's skin tingle: "I'll never forget his walk; I'll never forget the way he stepped out of the car. . . . his walk was like High Noon . . . this kind of strut. He had done it."

"Later that morning, when William L. Laurence, the New York Times reporter selected by Groves to chronicle the event, approached him for comment, Oppenheimer reportedly described his emotions in pedestrian terms. The effect of the blast, he told Laurence, was "terrifying" and "not entirely undepressing." After pausing a moment, he added, "Lots of boys not grown up yet will owe their life to it."

Extracted from American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin published by Atlantic Books (2023).