This week's science news was all about goings on in space, with reports that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) picked up a signal from a mysterious, never-before-seen substance on Pluto and Titan.
The space telescope detected a specific absorption line in the spectra of these worlds' atmospheres, revealing the characteristic trace of a unique and unknown molecule. It's unclear exactly what the molecule could be, and the mystery is made even more compelling by the fact that the environments of Pluto and Titan are very distinct.
Farther afield, the JWST's predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, spotted "impossible" light from a galaxy we shouldn't even be able to see. And in the busy skies surrounding our own planet, scientists are dreaming up a scheme to drop a giant "airbag" that could protect us from solar storms, sending spacecraft into orbit to save doomed telescopes, and also giving answers to why metal sticks together in space.
And just in time for Independence Day weekend, the sun has launched a string of eruptions to Earth that will likely paint the night skies with colorful auroras.
China is no stranger to engineering projects designed to bring its environment to heel; we've recently covered the Asian powerhouse's attempts to tame nature through the creation of atmospheric rivers, the world's biggest dam and water transfers. But these are hardly China's only forays into sculpting its natural environment, with the country having planted more than 66 billion trees along its northern borders to halt the advance of the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts.
Now, new research has revealed a startling detail about the trees in this "Great Green Wall": they're growing significantly faster than natural forests. Exactly why remains a mystery, but, as Live Science contributor Brian Owens reveals, it could be due to a stronger response from the trees to rising atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Discover more planet Earth news
Are you a robot? It used to be a question that only humans could answer — by clicking on traffic lights or strings of warped and grainy characters, or Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHAs). But what happens now that autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agents can ace some of these trials without detection? Have they made CAPTCHAs obsolete?
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The Medici family ruled Renaissance Tuscany with an iron fist, fulfilling their ruthless ambitions with methods so underhand that the name of their most famous advisor, Niccolò Machiavelli, became a synonym for skulduggery.
So, when two brothers from the infamous family died under mysterious circumstances, it was believed for 500 years that they were murdered, possibly by arsenic poisoning. Now, science has revealed the true culprit behind the medieval cold case, and it's not what we expected.
Discover more archaeology news
—Ancient ring discovered underground in Scotland could be a Stonehenge-like monument
—500-year-old freeze-dried potato snacks discovered in Inca storage room in Peru
—2,000-year-old scrolls buried by Mount Vesuvius eruption finally deciphered with help from AI
—Chinese supercomputer leapfrogs best US machines to be ranked world's fastest
—The hantavirus outbreak is over, WHO declares
—Rise in cancer in younger adults may be explained by faster 'biological aging,' early study hints
—Dead-end bitcoin mining wastes as much energy as Switzerland's entire hydropower generation capacity
Antibiotic resistance is a growing threat in the U.S., with more than 2.8 million Americans developing antimicrobial-resistant infections each year. The solutions to this worrying trend can be very complex— such as moving agricultural systems away from their overreliance on antibiotics, or preventing the rapid spread of superbugs through international travel.
But stopping doctors from overprescribing antibiotics is one of the easiest strategies in the battle against this "silent pandemic." And it turns out that Japan has already fought it with some success, driving down antibiotic overuse with an innovative new policy. To investigate further and ask what notes the U.S. should be taking, Live Science's health editor Nicoletta Lanese visited Japan and reported back on their investigation.
If you're looking for things to keep you busy over the weekend, here are a smattering of our best expert opinion pieces, alongside a crossword, an interview and a quiz, that we published this week.
— Computer scientists are rushing to tame AI's voracious appetite for energy [Opinion]
—Live Science crossword puzzle #50: Longest-serving president in US history — 1 across [Crossword]
—Ancient empires quiz: Can you match these lands to the historical powers that ruled them? [Quiz]
If you ask me, it looks more like a rusty anchor, or a blurry deep-sea fish. But whichever way you see it, the newly discovered "bow and arrow" galaxy — or, more formally, the RAD-Bow-And-Arrow Radio Galaxy (RAD-BAARG) — is an oddball unlike any other recorded.
The galaxy's unique structure is likely the result of gravity, which is warping RAD-BAARG into a funhouse mirror version of its former self as it falls into a nearby galaxy cluster. A shock front from this plunge surrounds the galaxy as it moves through hot gas.
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.
Fourth of July celebrations across the United States this weekend could be accompanied by light shows in the night skies, as a string of powerful solar eruptions appear set to strike Earth.
The sun has been especially hyperactive over the past few days — firing off 10 M-class solar flares over 24 hours that have been accompanied by multiple coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which are set to slam into Earth on July 3 and July 5.
CMEs are large, fast-moving clouds of magnetized plasma and solar radiation that occasionally get flung into space with solar flares when kinks in the sun's magnetic field snap. If CMEs smash into Earth, they cause disturbances in Earth's magnetic field, called geomagnetic storms, that can trigger partial radio blackouts and produce vibrant aurora displays farther away from Earth's magnetic poles than usual.
"Machine-Gun Sun! More than 5 storms on their way to Earth and 3 of them offer good chances for aurora views," Tamitha Skov, a space weather physicist at Millersville University of Pennsylvania, wrote in a July 2 post on the social platform X. "NOAA and NASA model predictions do not show all the storms yet (it's hard to keep up with the rapid-fire storm launches!) but the first should hit before noon July 3 UTC."
The CMEs are expected to give a glancing blow to our planet, creating conditions for a moderate (G2) geomagnetic storm, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center. It's also possible that these storms will strengthen to become strong (G3), depending on how they interact with Earth's magnetic field.
Auroras resulting from G3-class geomagnetic storms are often visible in northern parts of Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York and Maine, according to NOAA. Skywatchers farther south in Oregon, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont and New Hampshire will also have a chance of catching the light show. In any case, skywatchers interested in seeing or photographing the auroras will need to get as far from artificial light sources as possible.
The weekend storms might not be the last activity we see from the sun in the coming days, as two gigantic sunspots currently pimpling its face are displaying "beta-gamma-delta" magnetic fields — the most tangled and unstable type. This means these sunspots harbor the potential to launch powerful X-class flares, according to spaceweather.com.
The last few years have seen a record number of powerful X-class flares explode from the sun's surface, hitting Earth with several major solar storms, including 2024's Mother's Day storm. This record comes partly from improvements to scientists' solar monitoring technologies, but also due to the sun reaching its 11-year peak in sunspot production, or solar maximum, in 2024.
Following this peak, the sun has now entered a period known as the "battle zone," a relatively understudied solar phase where instabilities across our star's newly flipped magnetic field ramp up the production of solar holes, gigantic, highly-tangled sunspots and subsequent geomagnetic storms.
The worst-case scenario for a solar storm is a superstorm like the 1859 Carrington Event, which released roughly the same energy as 10 billion 1-megaton atomic bombs. After slamming into Earth, the powerful stream of solar particles set telegraph systems around the world on fire and caused auroras brighter than the light of the full moon to appear as far south as the Caribbean.
The Carrington Event unleashed a roughly X45 magnitude solar flare that remains a record, yet it's likely far from the worst the sun can muster — with ancient tree rings harboring evidence of even more powerful blasts that occurred long before humans existed.
Regulus creeps up to Venus in twilight this week. Vega and Arcturus balance across the zenith. And this being July, Scorpius decorates the south.
The post This Week's Sky at a Glance, July 3 – 12 appeared first on Sky & Telescope.
The hantavirus outbreak that struck a cruise ship in April, killing three people and sparking fears of further spread, is over, the World Health Organization (WHO) has announced.
"Today, the final contact of a person exposed to hantavirus on the cruise ship MV Hondius completed their quarantine period, tested negative and returned home. No further cases have been reported since the 25th of May," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO's director-general, said in his opening remarks at a news conference Thursday (July 2). "We are therefore very pleased to say that WHO considers the outbreak of hantavirus over."
The total number of cases linked to the outbreak was 13. All those affected were either passengers or crew on the ship.
The outbreak began aboard the Dutch-flagged cruise ship MV Hondius after it departed southern Argentina on April 1. It involved the Andes virus, the only known hantavirus that can spread between people.
Hantaviruses are rodent-borne viruses that are found in the Americas, Europe and Asia and spread to humans relatively rarely, usually via contact with the urine, droppings or saliva of infected rodents. The Andes virus, however, has sparked short chains of human-to-human transmission in the past.
Before public health authorities were informed of the cases on MV Hondius, several dozen people disembarked the vessel on the island of St. Helena. To find them, authorities launched an international contact-tracing operation, tracking down more than 650 contacts in total who were then followed by health authorities in 33 countries and territories, according to the WHO.
Additionally, health authorities coordinated the monitoring, care and transport of the remaining passengers and crew aboard MV Hondius.
Of these contacts, those considered at the highest risk of infection were then quarantined and monitored for up to 42 days, because sometimes, hantavirus symptoms don't show up until weeks after exposure to the virus. Depending on their jurisdiction and degree of exposure, some contacts quarantined at home while others stayed in specialized facilities.
The initial unchecked travel of some contacts, alongside the virus's long incubation period, prompted concern from the public that the cluster of cases could explode into an enormous outbreak, or even a global pandemic. Many infectious-disease experts emphasized that the Andes virus does not spread easily between people and that the containment effort was going well, so the risk of a large outbreak was low. Still, some experts raised concerns that the international travel of contacts could trigger pockets of the deadly disease, and some argued that the Andes virus does have "pandemic potential."
Now, with the final contact having completed their quarantine period and no further cases reported, the WHO has declared the outbreak over. All of the contacts who were repatriated to the U.S. completed their quarantine period by June 21.
"WHO will continue working with governments and partners to advance our understanding of this outbreak and of hantavirus more generally," Tedros said. "We are also coordinating a study involving 21 countries to understand how the disease develops, which will support the development of diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines for future outbreaks."
Besides rigorous contact tracing, the WHO credited the coordinated actions of national public health bodies as being vital to preventing the further spread of the disease. These measures included the response of the Spanish government, which created a safe zone on the island of Tenerife for the ship's remaining passengers to disembark before they were repatriated under quarantine.
As the hantavirus outbreak concludes, there's an ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and an outbreak of the Marburg virus in Uganda. These and future outbreaks will require similarly robust international cooperation, the WHO emphasized.
"The outbreaks of hantavirus, Ebola and Marburg all show why there is no alternative to international cooperation in the face of international threats," Tedros said. "No country alone can fight."
This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.
This month’s episode highlights the bright star Spica, now prominent high in the southwest after evening twilight. It’s leading the parade of constellations, along with the brilliant planet Venus, that will grace the Northern Hemisphere’s summer skies. You'll also get to know other brights stars in Spica’s vicinity, along with excellent tips on how to be a better stargazer. So grab curiosity and come along on this month’s Sky Tour.
The post July Podcast: Spotlight on Spica appeared first on Sky & Telescope.
The almost-full Moon steps past orange Antares between Friday and Saturday evenings, June 26th and 27th.
The post This Week's Sky at a Glance, June 26 – July 5 appeared first on Sky & Telescope.
Everyone's getting back into vinyl these days, whether it's for that hit of nostalgia or because you don't want Spotify feeding you AI slop (vinyl, at the time of writing, does not facilitate AI slop… let us all hope it stays that way). And a new discount from Fluance makes picking up its entry-level turntable even easier.
This is the Fluance RT81, which we called "Easily the best starter turntable you can buy" when we tested it back in 2024. And it's a relatively affordable model even without a discount, designed to offer you the record-playing basics without expensive audiophile features.
But right now, it's 20% off, taking $60 off its already-affordable asking fee to make it just $239.99 (was $299.99) on Amazon.
A warning: turn back now if you're not reading this between 8:25am and 8:25pm ET on Wednesday, June 4 (that's 5:25am - 5:25pm PT, though it's not clear if Fluance will budge the window for Westerners). This discount is available as a Lightning Deal on Amazon, as part of Prime Day deals, so it's only live for a slender 12-hour window.
• Shop more Prime Day deals at Amazon US
Fluance RT81: was $299.99 now $239.99 at Amazon
Turntable discounts aren't hugely common, so any kind of reduction is something that'll turn heads. It's great that the sale is on an entry-level model, lowering the price of entry for prospective vinyl fans a little. And the discount? It's the lowest our trackers have seen… View Deal
Hold the needle a sec: the Fluance RT81 does miss one feature common in entry-level turntables, which you should probably know about before you buy.
The turntable doesn't feature Bluetooth connectivity (which plenty of new spinners do in 2026), so you can't pair it with your JBL speaker to enjoy your tunes, say. Instead, you'll need to connect wired speakers via RCA (those white and red dual cables).
While audiophiles prefer to avoid Bluetooth for record listening, due to the compression inherent in Bluetooth losing some of the detail within the vinyl, it's much more common in entry-level record players. The feature makes it much easier to integrate a player into your home hi-fi set-up if you only own wireless tech.
So it's only worth buying the Fluance RT81 deal if you can fit a wired turntable into your home, or you already have a set of stereo speakers that you want to put to good use.
If that's no issue, you'll find the RT81 a nice, good-looking and convenient starter turntable. It's easy to set-up and use, and it sounds pretty great.
The deal will save you $60 which, admittedly, is about the cost of one record these days, but you've probably inherited a collection of those. Instead, I'd put the money towards one of the best stereo speakers so you can use the Fluance properly.
Handful of gas plants paid £4m to generate electricity at half- and full-time in World Cup game
A handful of Great Britain’s gas power plants were paid almost £4m to generate electricity for just a few hours on Tuesday evening as millions of sweltering viewers turned to air conditioning, electric fans and icy drinks during England’s second World Cup game.
The heatwave has caused electricity prices across Europe to surge this week amid higher demand for cooling and a string of power plant outages due to the record high temperatures.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: DeFodi Images/Shutterstock
© Photograph: DeFodi Images/Shutterstock
© Photograph: DeFodi Images/Shutterstock
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Protecting a household of devices, storing family memories, and protecting your online identity would usually have your searching for multiple solutions from different providers. But right now, Norton 360 Advanced is currently 77% off, reducing the monthly cost of protecting 10 devices to just £2.92/mo.
It may not seen like it looking at the price, but 360 Advanced is Norton's highest level of protection - spanning across antivirus, data, identity, and financial defence.
Inside, you get Norton's award winning antivirus protection to defend against malware, ransomware, and hacking, alongside a 200GB Cloud Backup, password manager, parental control app, dark web monitoring, social media monitoring, financial monitoring, identity restoration support, and much more.
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Read our full Norton 360 reviewView Deal
If you are used to storing your family photos or important documents on your home computer, there is always the risk of your computer failing or your storage corrupting.
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With Norton's 200GB cloud backup, you can choose which files are regularly uploaded in to the cloud, so that any recent changes you make are automatically saved into your online drive.
Its no secret that many people rely on the same password, or a combination thereof, across all of their accounts. From bank logins, to social media, and beyond - if just one of these passwords is leaked on compromised it can put your entire online life at risk.
Norton's password manager can securely store your current passwords, generate new, highly secure passwords, and autofill your credentials when you want to log on so you don't have to spend time remembering and typing long and complex passwords.
A Virtual Private Connection (VPN) is an encrypted internet tunnel that secures your browsing traffic. That means that even if you internet activity is intercepted in transit, it cannot be read or decrypted.
This helps to protect against crooks attempting to steal your IP address or find your location, and can help secure your internet activity when browsing on unsecured networks such as those in cafes or airports.
Norton's VPN is fast and unlimited with over 100 connection locations across the globe.
A parental control app helps you manage and secure the online activity of any children in your house. Unrestricted access to the internet can be dangerous, even in online gaming or on social media.
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Most of your identity is now stored online. From social media and online accounts, to the daily services you use to communicate. But sometimes things go wrong. Your credentials and personal information can get leaked during data breaches, and while it may not be your fault, hackers are just waiting for the opportunity to steal accounts and personal info.
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There are some sights in this world that no photograph can truly capture.
Think of the rolling ribbons of the aurora in the northern and southern skies, the depth and breadth of the Grand Canyon, or the sense of immersion when diving on the Great Barrier Reef. Astronauts will tell you that not even large-format cameras can truly capture the blackness of outer space or the majesty that is our planet as seen from orbit or beyond.
It's not every day that a new one of those sights debuts. But such will be the case on Friday, November 13, when the California Science Center in Los Angeles finally reveals the launch-pad-like display of the space shuttle Endeavor inside the new Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center.
© California Science Center/Mike Kelley
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