Near-death experiences (NDEs) might be more common than most would think, according to a new study by the International Association for Near-Death Studies. 

The study reveals that 23 percent of American adults report having had a near-death experience, after which they returned to normal human existence. The study also reveals that 35 percent of the individuals queried about such experiences who have not had an NDE themselves said they know someone who has. 

“In an NDE, usually during a close brush with death, a person has a vivid, emotionally intense experience of lucidly perceiving the material world from a position outside the physical body and/or perceiving and interacting with beings and environments not of the material world,” said Janet Riley, executive director of the International Association for Near-Death Studies, in an email to The Debrief. “Afterward, experiencers are usually profoundly changed.”

The survey, conducted in March 2026 by Centiment and involving 2,100 Americans, looked more deeply at the effects of these experiences. Among those who reported having an NDE, 51 percent said the experience gave them a deeper meaning and appreciation for life, while 37.6 percent said they felt more connected to a “spiritual realm.”

Overall, thirty-one percent said the experience changed their life priorities; 30 percent said they were less afraid of death than before; 30 percent reported greater empathy for others; and 26 percent said they had become more generous and socially minded.

Among respondents who knew a friend or family member who had experienced an NDE, 44 percent said they became more curious about the afterlife, while 40 percent reported a stronger belief in life after death.

“This remarkable data tells us three important things: NDEs may be more common than we realized; people who have NDEs or hear about them are positively impacted, and the majority of Americans believe evidence exists to support the phenomena,” Riley said in a statement. “The survey also makes clear the importance of normalizing conversations about life, death, and what comes after. Those who have had NDEs or who research them may be some of the best teachers.”

What about those who have never had an NDE?

Additionally, the survey revealed that 27.3 percent of participants who had never experienced an NDE themselves found the evidence significant enough to change their minds, while 31.3 percent said it at least provided reliable evidence for some type of phenomenon.

The smallest category of responding participants, at 15 percent, said there was limited evidence, while 24 percent said there was insufficient evidence.

Nearly four out of five respondents (79.8 percent) said there is either some value (36.7 percent) or major value (41.1 percent) in studying near-death experiences.

A Paradigm Shift? 

Culturally, perceptions about NDEs and related subjects may be changing, and mainstream attitudes may be evolving. Even in the world of pop culture, celebrity gossip columnist Perez Hilton (Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr.), known for his often controversial commentary, has spoken publicly about a near-death experience after taking flu medication without food, which led to a stomach ulcer, perforation, and severe sepsis. He ultimately spent 21 days in the hospital.

After the experience, Hilton said he was appalled by his “selfish behavior” and offered apologies, explaining that after finding God, he came to regret the fact that, as he put it, “I didn’t care who I hurt.”

The International Association for Near-Death Studies survey also asked participants whether death frightened them. Twenty-five percent said the idea of dying scared them “a little,” while 14.8 percent said it scared them “a great deal.” However, 31 percent said they felt confident that they would be in a better place after death, while only 6.2 percent worried they would be in a worse place. Another 25 percent said they had “made peace with death.”

“We were founded as a research organization, and no survey like this had occurred recently,” Riley explained. “Given the strong interest in near-death experiences, we thought a survey would be timely.”

“We also felt that communicating the results could help normalize conversations about the phenomenon, which some people are reluctant to share because they fear not being taken seriously,” Riley added.

With this high level of confidence in life after death, such beliefs may continue to spread further into the mainstream, influencing everyday life and shaping how people view themselves and the world around them.

“We also know from NDE research that those who have had the experiences feel a deep connection to others, feel more loving and spiritual, and often feel more altruistic and generous,” Riley says. “We believe connection, love, altruism, and generosity have the potential to make the world a better place.”

Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.

Researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) have announced the first ultrafast laser delivering 1.05 nanojoules of energy in extremely short pulses as short as 147 femtoseconds integrated onto a photonic chip.

The research team behind the accomplishment said that successfully scaling down ultrafast lasers of this magnitude from large tabletop models to microchip integration could enable extremely advanced sensing technologies, improve medical imaging, and potentially enable next-generation atomic clocks for yet-to-be-developed communication and navigation applications.

Ultrafast Lasers on a Microchip Scale Have Remained an Elusive Photonics ‘Holy Grail’

In a statement announcing the breakthrough, team leader and EPFL Professor Tobias J. Kippenberg explained that ultrafast lasers emit extremely short pulses of light energy lasting only a few hundred femtoseconds, which are quadrillionths of a second. Although the development of this category of lasers has enabled ultraprecise micromachining, atomic clocks, and advanced eye surgery, the team notes that the “bulky” technology has been limited to optical laser tables.

On the other end of the spectrum, engineers have built extremely small photonic chips that channel light in a similar way to how traditional microprocessors channel electricity to perform calculations. Some photonic chip designs are already widely used in the communications industry. However, integrating the ultrafast laser technology at the power levels demonstrated by the research team into a smaller chip has remained particularly elusive.

“For more than twenty years, a high-pulse-energy femtosecond laser on chip was widely regarded as a holy grail of integrated photonics,” Professor Kippenberg explained.

“Overlooked, Surprisingly Elegant Technology” Could Enable Futuristic Technologies

To find the nexus between size, speed, and power that could enable a true high-energy, ultrafast laser on a chip, the EPFL team opted to turn away from traditional laser designs and instead took advantage of what they termed a “largely overlooked” design: a Mamyshev oscillator.

Unlike some designs, this oscillator uses a nonlinear waveguide placed between the two optical filters in the laser cavity, each of which allows a different color of the spectrum to pass through. When a strong light pulse travels through the installed waveguide, the beam broadens into a wider range of colors.

The team notes that this effect allows part of the light pulse to pass through both filters and remain in circulation. However, they also note that “weak light” does not broaden enough when impacting the waveguide and is ‘rejected.’

Zheru Qiu, a co-lead author of the paper, said that beyond speed and power, their chip has commercial potential due to its material simplicity.

“This design is especially attractive because it does not require any component that is difficult to make on this erbium-doped silicon nitride chip,” Qiu explained.

Another advantage to the team’s design is its resistance to nonlinear interaction. Put simply, when waveguides squeeze light into tiny spaces, that same light interacts strongly with itself.

The resulting nonlinear interactions can degrade the performance of traditional photonic chip designs. However, Qiu said that a laser with a Mamyshev oscillator is “well suited to the tight confinement of light in photonic chips.”

“Our result shows that it is not only possible, but that it can be achieved with a surprisingly elegant architecture that the integrated-photonics community had overlooked,” Qiu explained of their revolutionary architecture. 

Integrated Chips Could Replace Large, Expensive Laboratory Lasers

When discussing the versatility of their ultrafast laser on a chip, the researchers noted that the prototype’s 42-cm-long laser cavity can be folded down to a size smaller than a matchhead. For comparison, they noted that 42 centimeters is “far smaller than optical fiber-based lasers.”

For potential commercial applications, the team said their chips can be manufactured “at-scale,” with an excess of 1,000 individual laser cavities per chip. Although currently in the demonstration phase, the team suggested that a fully realized commercial-grade ultrafast laser-on-a-chip could provide engineers with a critical microengineering tool they have lacked.

“With kilowatt-level peak powers, the chip can drive demanding applications that have long depended on large, expensive laboratory lasers,” says Qiu.

The researchers suggested their chip could impact several technologies, such as advanced sensing and medical imaging, and potentially pave the way for futuristic technologies based on ultraprecise atomic clocks.

The study “High-pulse-energy integrated mode-locked laser using a Mamyshev oscillator” was published in Nature.

Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.

Newly released NASA satellite images reveal the extent of recent wildfire damage on Santa Rosa Island in vivid detail, showcasing the impact of the largest Channel Islands fire on record.

The images, obtained with NASA satellite observation platforms that include the Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) and the Fire Event Explorer, reveal fire damage to nearly half of the island’s southeastern side.

The fire was initially spotted on May 15, 2026, and containment efforts began as the blaze spread across the island over the following days.

Now, the new NASA imagery is revealing the extent of the damage caused by the historic fire, which officials say came close to endangering one of our nation’s rarest species.

18,000 Acres Scorched on Santa Rosa Island

Current damage estimates indicate that close to one-third of the island was impacted, constituting more than 18,300 acres on the island, which is part of California’s Channel Islands National Park.

Comparisons with past NASA imagery of Santa Rosa Island, made possible with Landsat satellite images, reveal a sharp contrast between once verdant regions of the island, which are now scorched by fire, shown in reddish brown in the more recent images (see below).

Fortunately, Channel Islands National Park officials reported that the fire had been 97 percent contained by May 26, after burning its way through chaparral and grassland covering large portions of the island.

Endangering One of America’s Rarest Species

The Channel Islands serve as a unique and extremely diverse habitat for a range of species of both plants and animals. Among the species threatened during the recent fires were Torrey pines (Pinus torreyana), recognized as our nation’s rarest pine tree, which only grows on Santa Rosa Island and in a preserve in urban San Diego.

Fortunately, most of the island’s Torrey pine forest remains intact, although some damage was reportedly discernible in surveys by firefighters on the island and in drone imagery of the scorched areas.

According to island officials, the fire appears to have burned its way inland at lower intensity, making its way through pine areas that burned ground-dwelling vegetation while leaving the overlying canopy largely unaffected.

Damage from the Largest Channel Island Fire

Park officials say that some smaller areas of forest did sustain significant damage, as conditions in those pockets allowed a greater burn intensity.

Closer to the fire’s northern boundary, Santa Rosa’s cloud forests—the wooded areas comprised mostly of oak and pine growth surrounded by chaparral, whose name is derived from the island fog that sustains them—were successfully preserved by firefighting crews who worked ahead of the fire to cool areas where combustible vegetation grows.

Based on recent local reports, the fire that consumed large portions of Santa Rosa Island’s vegetation is the largest known to have impacted any of the Channel Islands. Fortunately, many of the island’s indigenous trees and other vegetation are resilient enough to withstand fire, since they do not rely on it as part of their growth cycles like many mainland plant species.

Additional information about the fires can be found here, and more imagery of the recent damage has been made available at NASA’s Earth Observatory page.

Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.

An international team of astronomers has uncovered what they are calling the clearest evidence yet for dying white dwarf stars as the origin of a class of mysterious cosmic signals called long-period radio transients.

The research, led by University of Sydney PhD student Kovi Rose, potentially offers researchers a ‘Rosetta Stone’ capable of deciphering and categorizing other such signals.

“For the first time, we have pinpointed the origin of these signals, confirming the source to be a ‘cataclysmic variable’, or an accreting white dwarf star,” Rose explained in an email to The Debrief.

The team behind the discovery, including the astronomers at CSIRO’s ASKAP radio telescope, said that identifying the origin of these transient cosmic signals that come from a few remote regions of the Milky Way galaxy could also offer researchers a “natural laboratory” to study the extreme physics that occur in such environments.

Mysterious Cosmic Signals “Have Puzzled Astronomers for Years”

According to the same email, long-period radio transients were initially thought to be slow-spinning neutron stars, known as pulsars, emitting periodic energy bursts. However, the team notes that mathematical models suggest that slow-rotating neutron stars cannot generate enough energy to produce the mysterious cosmic signals.

“Long-period radio transients have puzzled astronomers for years,” Mr. Rose explained. “We’ve only found about a dozen, and their origins have been unclear.”

Hoping to solve the mystery, the University of Sydney-led team aimed their instruments at a region of space and discovered a small, dense star called a white dwarf. However, unlike our solitary Sun, this white dwarf is part of a binary star system, named ASKAP J1745−5051, with a much larger but less dense red dwarf as its companion.

After several scans with ASKAP, the team discovered that the smaller white dwarf, about the size of Earth but with a mass closer to the Sun’s, was shedding or accreting material onto the larger but less dense red dwarf star. As the material heats up, it releases X-rays.

The team also detected periodic bursts of radio signals from the binary system. Although these regular emissions are tied to the system’s orbital motion, the researchers found that the bursts of X-rays and radio signals didn’t peak at the same time. According to Mr. Rose, this lack of synchronicity “tells us they’re being produced in different regions of the system.”

Analysis Reveals Long-Period Radio Transient Match

A closer analysis suggested that, due to the proximity of the two stars, which orbit each other in just one hour, their interacting magnetic fields were producing regular radio-wave bursts, which the team clocked at 1.4-hour intervals.

Professor Murphy, Head of School at the University of Sydney School of Physics and Chief Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), said that similar objects have previously been linked to binary star systems, “but this is the first one where we can clearly see both stars and the accretion process in action.”

When the team compared the emissions from the binary system with those of previously detected long-period radio transients, the data were a clear match. According to Rose, this comparison proved definitively that this elusive category of mysterious cosmic signals “comes from a white dwarf actively pulling material from a companion star.”

Natural Laboratories for Exploring Extreme Plasma Physics

Although the team’s findings do not rule out other causes of these mysterious cosmic signals, they said their discovery “strengthens an alternative explanation” that at least some are caused by binary star systems involving white dwarfs.

“The system is also only the second known long-period radio transient to emit regular X-rays – and the first where the cause of the regularity has been confirmed,” they explained.

When discussing the potential impact of their findings on future research, the team noted that ASKAP J1745-5051 could provide astronomers “a reference point” for understanding other long-period radio transients that have remained uncharacterized.

Mr. Rose said that the system could help researchers determine whether other long-period transients are more like pulsars or like white dwarf systems, “acting like a stellar Rosetta stone,” referencing the famous stone tablet that helped modern researchers decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs. He also noted that the system offers researchers a unique opportunity to study extreme plasma physics and magnetic-field interactions “under conditions that cannot be replicated on Earth.”

“These systems are natural laboratories,” Mr Rose said. “They allow us to test our understanding of how matter behaves in strong magnetic fields and under intense gravitational forces.”

In the future, the University of Sydney-led team said they are planning future observations of the system with a combination of optical, radio, and X-ray telescopes “to better understand how these emissions are generated” and to determine whether similar mechanisms found in this system can explain the full population of long-period radio transients spotted to date.

“Each new discovery is helping us piece together the bigger picture,” Mr Rose explained. “We’re only just beginning to understand this new class of cosmic events.”

The findings are published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

 Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.

For thousands of years, human population growth occurred so slowly that there wasn’t even a noticeable curvature in the graph of humanity’s civilization. Villages became towns. A harvest fed another generation. Empires grew and collapsed while the total number of people on Earth crept upward by degrees.

This has changed dramatically with the onset of the modern age, as industry, medicine, energy production, agriculture, and technology drove our population curve into one of the most spectacular population explosions in human history. This growth, however, has also defied mathematical explanations, challenging some of the best models used to explain life on our planet.

Now, a new mathematical model suggests that hidden within that rise is a deeper pattern, one that may also point to how quickly things could change if humanity abruptly runs into the planet’s limits.

A Worst-Case ‘Crisis’ Scenario

Published in Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, the study was authored by University of Milan physicist Dr. Alessio Zaccone and the late Dr. Kostya Trachenko of Queen Mary University of London. Their work used more commonly used mathematical methods to describe disordered materials, where scientists study how complex systems evolve, relax, and respond over time.

By applying this new model to our population growth, Dr. Zaccone and Dr. Trachenko have discovered that their simple equation appears to embrace a wide range of growth regimes observed over the last 12,000 years, from long periods of relative stability to rapid acceleration of our growth after the onset of the industrial age.

They also demonstrated just how rapidly our growth curve could shift if we lost the underlying assumptions for rapid human growth.

In a deliberately conservative worst-case scenario in which carrying-capacity constraints became abruptly active today, the researchers found that the global population could be cut in half as early as 2064.

Instead of trying to predict the future by looking at factors such as migration, fertility rates, technological development, economic changes, climate policy, and others, Dr. Zaccone and Dr. Trachenko sought to address a simpler, much more profound issue. Namely, can a general nonlinear model be used to describe the population growth curve in the history of humanity?

The answer is yes, though with important caveats.

“We show that a simple nonlinear differential equation (originally studied in the physics of disordered systems) mathematically describes key regimes of global population growth over the past 12000 years,” researchers write. “The proposed framework provides a compact analytical setting to explore future scenarios, including a deliberately conservative, worst-case illustration in which the global population could halve as early as 2064 if carrying-capacity constraints became abruptly active today.”

Why Population Models Are Hard to Build

Historically, modeling of population growth has been a controversial issue. As far back as 1798, English cleric Thomas Malthus proposed a simple exponential growth curve. According to his framework, the growth rate is determined by the difference between birth and death rates. If birth exceeds deaths, the population grows exponentially. If the opposite happens, it declines.

The problem with that approach is that the population of any species, including humans, doesn’t grow indefinitely. The carrying capacity, i.e., how many individuals of the species can be sustained, is limited.

It was Dr. Pierre François Verhulst who, in the 19th century, added this factor to our population growth models. He showed that population growth occurs, though it is progressively slowed by resource limitations and eventually comes to a stop.

Later, in 1960, Dr. Heinz von Foerster and colleagues famously proposed a hyperbolic model suggesting that human population growth was accelerating toward a mathematical “doomsday” singularity in 2026.

Obviously, Dr. von Foerster’s prediction did not come to fruition. However, his model raised a further crucial issue in population dynamics—namely, that any mathematical population framework can be fitted to describe certain historical events. The problem is that when applied to a much wider timeframe, they can completely break down.

According to Dr. Zaccone and Dr. Trachenko, the problem isn’t that those models were useless per se. On the contrary, most of them are very useful and supply valuable information about various aspects of population dynamics. However, none of them can be universally used, as they are typically local estimates valid for a specific timeframe.

A Single Mathematical Model To Capture It All

In their new study, Dr. Zaccone and Dr. Trachenko developed a nonlinear differential “rate-feedback” equation. In essence, it implies that the population growth rate depends on the population size, and a single parameter K determines whether the dependence is positive or negative.

If K = 0, the model yields a simple exponential growth curve. For negative values of K, the behavior approaches logistic dynamics, with population growth being increasingly slowed by resource restrictions. If K is positive, the model shows a rapidly accelerating growth curve.

Importantly, according to researchers, the classic models aren’t equivalent to theirs. Rather, these behaviors appear as local approximations within the proposed framework. It means the researchers do not claim to have developed a magical equation that will solve all problems. Instead, what they propose is a mathematical tool to bring a few key models under a single umbrella.

“Different growth regimes since the early Neolithic until the present can be interpreted within a single nonlinear rate-feedback equation in appropriate limits,” researchers write. “These include the well-known Malthus (exponential) and Verhulst (logistic) growth laws, as well as von Foerster-type hyperbolic growth as a controlled low-order truncation.”

Humanity’s Population Growth Regimes Keep Changing

Based on empirical estimates of the global population over the last 12,000 years, researchers discovered that our species has experienced multiple regimes throughout its history. While some of these periods were defined by relative population stability, others featured exponential growth, and others featured compression or stretching of the growth curve.

While there were shorter periods of population decline, for instance, during the Black Death in Europe, researchers focused on broader trends in population growth. These regimes, they say, were clearly distinct from each other.

The era of early agricultural societies was relatively stable. Later periods featured increasing acceleration in our population growth. Since the 1970s, the authors argue, our population dynamics can be best approximated by a stretched exponential regime, suggesting that population growth has slowed significantly compared to earlier stages.

Within this mathematical model, the current stretched-exponential regime implies K < 0. In other words, humanity’s growth doesn’t approach a critical threshold, and the possibility of catastrophic runaway growth can be ruled out.

When the mathematical Model Runs Into Earth’s Limits

Researchers suggest that if there were a serious shock to our planet, such as a global war, rapid climate change, or a massive pandemic, we could potentially see a collapse of our growth regime due to a drastic reduction in the exploitation efficiency of available resources.

To illustrate this, researchers introduced an additional term in their equation. Specifically, they accounted for the carrying capacity of our planet. Using an extremely conservative estimate of the carrying capacity of 2 billion individuals, they found that under these assumptions, our population would halve by 2064.

However, it’s important to note that this estimate is highly speculative. It cannot be viewed as an exact prediction of our future for several reasons. First, researchers explicitly state that their model is purely illustrative and not intended for prediction.

Secondly, the choice of a carrying capacity of 2 billion is highly debatable. The carrying capacity of Earth itself, rather than per person, depends on many parameters and is not a constant. Technological progress, energy efficiency, agricultural productivity, climatic stability, and international cooperation determine, to a great extent, how many people our planet can sustain at any given time.

Still, the study’s warning is clear. Mathematical population trends can look stable until the assumptions behind them suddenly change. A world that continues along its current stretched-exponential trajectory may avoid doomsday-style runaway growth. But a world that abruptly runs into hard limits could experience a very different future.

The Real Warning Is in the Curve, Not the Date

The researchers acknowledge that the model’s empirical fits vary in strength. The 1970–2023 regime shows a stronger fit than the earlier compressed-exponential periods analyzed in the study, as indicated by the goodness-of-fit metrics reported for each historical window.

However, the significance of their analysis lies not in the exact numbers but in what they imply. According to researchers, their results show that human population growth is not governed by a single law throughout its entire history.

Ultimately, the model’s value may lie less in its specific dates than in its wider message. Human population growth is not governed by a single permanent law. It is formed by feedback, constraints, and changing historical conditions.

The future, in this mathematical model, depends not only on how many people exist, but also on whether the systems supporting them continue to function efficiently enough to avoid sudden encounters with carrying-capacity limits.

“While the current global population growth trend corresponds to 𝐾 < 0 and does not lead to a doomsday criticality, reverting to an effectively 𝐾 > 0 regime would reintroduce a finite-time divergence in the uncontrolled dynamics,” researchers conclude. “In a separate conservative scenario where carrying-capacity constraints become abruptly active, [it] predicts a rapid population decline.”

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

The question of whether artificial intelligence can be conscious has moved well beyond science fiction. It now sits at the center of scientific debate and is increasingly shaping discussions about a range of contentious issues, from AI ethics to animal welfare, fetal development, and laboratory-grown brain tissue.

However, according to a new analysis published in Neuron, the science used to answer that question may not actually be measuring what researchers think it is. A research team led by Hakwan Lau at the Institute for Basic Science in South Korea, with collaborators from the Université de Montréal and New York University, argues that many common experimental methods in consciousness research do not separate subjective experience from general information processing.

In the paper, The Ethical Impasse of Current Consciousness Science, the researchers argue that current scientific tools may not be capable of reliably detecting consciousness.

The Measurement Problem

Consciousness research relies heavily on methods such as visual masking, binocular rivalry, and the detection of perceptual limits. These methods usually compare brain responses when a person is aware of something versus when they are not. The idea is that the difference between these two cases shows whether conscious experience is present or not.

Lau and his team challenge this assumption. When experiments make a stimulus invisible, they often reduce both conscious awareness and the brain’s ability to process information about that stimulus. This means that what appears to be a marker of consciousness in the brain may actually reflect general cognitive activity.

“Many current theories of consciousness appear to be supported by a range of experimental findings,” Lau said. “But those findings may actually reflect general information processing rather than consciousness itself — so it remains difficult to conclude that these theories truly explain consciousness.”

A Historical Warning

The authors compare the current situation to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when strong claims about consciousness led to a crisis in psychology. The resulting backlash led to the rise of behaviorism, which focused only on observable behavior and halted consciousness research for many years.

Researchers caution that a similar situation could occur again. As AI systems become more advanced and public interest in machine consciousness increases, scientists are under pressure to provide answers. If researchers make strong claims about consciousness in AI, organoids, or fetuses that lack robust methods to support them, scientific credibility could be undermined.

Better Science Required

The authors suggest a different approach. Conditions like blindsight, in which people with brain damage can respond to stimuli they do not report seeing, offer a more controlled way to study consciousness. Another example is hemispatial neglect, where patients fail to notice one side of their visual field while still having basic perception. For researchers, these conditions provide a rare opportunity to separate awareness from information processing and investigate each process on its own.

These conditions show that subjective experience and information processing are distinct from one another. The team says that building experiments around this difference is needed to make reliable scientific claims about consciousness.

The implications of this study extend far beyond the academic world. Deciding whether non-human entities are conscious has direct legal and ethical concerns. The researchers say that the science behind these decisions must meet high standards.

“Questions about consciousness increasingly carry ethical and societal implications,” Lau said. “If scientific claims about consciousness are going to influence discussions about animal welfare, AI ethics, or bioethics, then the scientific foundations supporting those claims must be especially rigorous.”

The researchers conclude that the most urgent challenge is not deciding whether AI, animals, or organoids are conscious, but developing better tools to identify consciousness if it emerges.

Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.

A massive discovery in northeastern Romania has revealed links to a curious ancient culture from ancient Eastern Europe’s Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods.

Archaeologists say the very large prehistoric structure is associated with the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture, a group recognized as one of the earliest European cultures to construct large dwelling spaces and settlements.

Estimated to be close to 6,000 years old and covering an area of approximately 350 square meters, the discovery of the ancient “mega-structure,” reported in the journal Plos One, occurred at Romania’s Stăuceni-Holm site.

A Mysterious Neolithic Culture

Thousands of years ago, during Europe’s Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods, the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture was among the first to build large settlements, the remains of which have been found in Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, and other parts of Eastern Europe.

Many of the settlements associated with this ancient culture date to as recently as 3500 BCE, although some are thousands of years older. However, crucial context for the lifestyles of those who inhabited these ancient communities is often lacking, as past excavations have revealed little in the way of any graves associated with rulers or other individuals who might have had power or influence in society.

Additionally, most dwellings in even the largest communities associated with the Cucuteni-Trypillia were relatively small, leaving few signs of how their local law and government were organized.

Discovery at Stăuceni-Holm

During fieldwork between 2023 and 2024 at the Stăuceni-Holm site, Romanian and German researchers conducted work over consecutive excavation seasons following initial surveys of the area, which uncovered the existence of massive structures buried beneath the settlement site.

In particular, the team noticed a very large feature located near a foundation ditch that surrounded the archaeological site, as well as areas where the presence of a thick floor of clay was evident. Significantly, unlike most of the small dwellings associated with Cucuteni-Trypillia sites, there was little sign that this structure had been used for daily activities like cooking.

One likely interpretation for the unusual site had been that it was some kind of communal structure, which might have been used for community engagements or other group activities.

Cucuteni-Trypillia Megastructures

Another clue involves the fact that at other Cucuteni-Trypillia settlement sites in Eastern Europe, the remains of similar megastructures, which were seemingly designed as large public buildings, have been found. However, few of these discoveries have undergone significant excavation in the past.

As the research team notes in their study, “at the actual state of the research, it seems unrealistic to consider the function of the building as a storage building or a communal place for consumption of food.”

“Also, there are no clear indications for cult purposes,” the researchers note. However, it is possible that the site could represent something as simple as a house that was built in proportion to the size of a larger family who may have used it, if not “a communal building for decision making or a meeting place for special high-ranking inhabitants reflecting a change towards a more hierarchized organization of the community.”

Lingering Questions About an Ancient Neolithic Marvel

Whatever the case, it seems obvious that these very large structures had some kind of community purpose, which may have been an outgrowth of steadily growing populations at the time. Given their frequent appearances at Cucuteni-Trypillia settlements, it is also obvious that such constructions were important to this culture, whatever their exact purpose had been.

With the discoveries at Stăuceni-Holm, archaeologists have a unique opportunity to add to the existing knowledge about these massive features and new interpretations about their possible uses.

The study, “The mega-structure at Stăuceni-‘Holm’, Botoşani county, Romania and the debate about the governing of Cucuteni-Trypillia-settlements,” appeared in the journal Plos One.

Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.