Popular Science

In the animal kingdom, life can sometimes look more like Game of Thrones than Charlotte’s Web. Bloody conflicts over territory, mates, and more are common in social animals, and several species have their own anticipatory behaviors to prepare when a fight looks imminent. They stay quiet, monitor their surroundings, conduct raids, and even bond with their allies through play and grooming. 

According to a study published today in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution, environmental cues and memories can signal that it’s time to prepare for war. These behaviors are so important that these preparations can impact a species’ evolution, population dynamics, and even the structure of  communities. 

“Intergroup conflict is rife throughout the natural world, being found in social species from ants to primates,” Andrew Radford, a study co-author and behavioral biologist at the University of Bristol in the U.K., said in a statement. “Studying other species experimentally and in natural conditions can not only expand our understanding of a widespread aspect of sociality but also help to provide insights into our own conflict ancestry.”

Battle prep is an evolutionary force

Conflict over the resources all animals need exerts a powerful evolutionary force on a host of social species, including various primates, meerkats (Suricata suricatta), several bird species, and most obviously, humans. This force potentially impacts fitness and survival, according to the team. 

Humans prepare for warfare with more surveillance, taking to higher ground to gather information, conducting ambushes and raids, and quietly spying on enemy territory to avoid detection. Groups of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) tend to rest on hilltops in locations where intergroup contests occur, instead of feeding, traveling, or other more noisy activities. Experiments have also shown that dwarf mongooses (Helogale parvula) will move more slowly and engage in look-out behaviors when they hear a rival’s vocal cues or pick up their scents to monitor their surroundings more easily. 

“What is becoming very clear is that preemptive behavior is widespread whenever intergroup conflict is found,” added study co-author and University of Bristol behavioral ecologist Josh Arbon. “There is growing evidence that the amount of anticipatory behavior displayed is dependent on the current threat level. More is seen when rivals are more likely to be encountered, larger in size, less familiar, or more likely to attack.” 

Territory, raids, and play

A threat of  intergroup conflict can also influence how animals use space. Dwarf mongooses deposit more territorial scent markings when a rival is detected nearby, meanwhile meerkats tend to scent mark near burrows that intruders have scoped out. Black howler monkeys (Alouatta caraya) will even go back to locations of past contests, potentially as a way to signal their presence to neighbors. By contrast, Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata), chacma baboons (Papio ursinus), and long-tailed tits (Aegithalos caudatus) tend to avoid the areas inhabited by rivals. 

A more extreme conflict preparing behavior is raiding, or actively seeking out rivals on their home turf. Male chimpanzees silently invade neighboring territories in a single file line. They then move towards other groups’ vocalizations, potentially preparing to attack their rivals. Banded mongooses engage in deadly gang attacks, and even conduct raids to kill their rivals’ offspring.

Grooming activities like allopreening help these birds called woodhoopoes bond. Image: Chris van Rooyen.

When an outside threat increases, various mammal species will respond by sticking close together. Chimpanzees groom and play with one another more ahead collective territory defense. These kinds of behaviors likely facilitate better communication, reduce anxiety, enhance bonding, and promote a stronger fighting force. 

“There is increasing evidence that non-human animals adjust various behaviors to enhance information gathering, incentivize contest participation, reduce anxiety, and minimize collective and individual risk in anticipation of encounters with rival groups,” Arbon said. “What is notable is that these behaviors occur across a diverse range of social species.” 

Driving evolution

According to the team, future studies could assess how animals sense threat levels and adjust their preemptive behavior. It is also unclear how much brain power is associated with these preemptive strategies.  

“Intergroup conflict could be an important social driver of cognitive evolution,” Radford says. “But this remains an idea that is difficult to test, and teasing apart the relative importance of signals and cues from memories is a challenge.”

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In 2023, neurologists at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in New York achieved a medical breakthrough that many experts believed was once impossible. After 15-hours of open-brain surgery, a team of specialists successfully completed the first “double neural bypass” procedure, and installed and virtually mapped a brain-computer interface (BCI) for a man named Keith Thomas living with quadriplegia. As Thomas slowly regained feeling and strength in his arm and wrist, the monumental advancement made international headlines and was inducted into TIME Magazine’s Best Inventions Hall of Fame.

“There was a time that I didn’t know if I was even going to live, or if I wanted to, frankly. And now, I can feel the touch of someone holding my hand. It’s overwhelming,” Thomas said four months after the initial surgery.

Nearly three years later, the pioneers behind the double neural bypass have offered updates on their findings and Thomas’ progress. As they detail in a study published today in the journal Nature Medicine, the combination of BCI and artificial intelligence technologies continues to provide their patient with lasting, life-changing recovery in their limb. By rerouting the nervous system’s neural pathways, Thomas can now feed himself and drink from a cup using restored feeling in his hand, and has gained increased both his arm strength and wrist sensation.

“This approach is a new way to treat severe paralysis—we’re not just bypassing the injury, we’re actually rewiring the nervous system,” Chad Bouton, a bioelectronic medical specialist and study co-author, said in a statement.

The system relies on five microelectrode arrays surgically installed in Thomas’ brain, which machine learning algorithms then interpret brain signals denoting movement with nearly 85 percent accuracy. Those neural messages are then translated into electrical stimulation patterns given to the forearm muscles, which move as intended. Meanwhile, sensors inside a 3D-printed limb brace that measures grasping pressure. This then creates electrical stimulation in the sensory cortex to generate the perception of touch.

The results are so effective that Thomas is now able to grab and lift hollow eggshells without breaking them nearly 90 percent of the time. He can also perform this and similarly calculated tasks while talking—a vast improvement compared to existing BCI systems when handling cognitive burdens.

“Being able to feel my sister’s hand, to pet my dog and feel her fur— these experiences that the injury took away have been restored. “But beyond the study sessions, I can now scratch my face, wipe my eyes independently,” Thomas said. “The technology has given me back both connection and sense of self.”

“This research holds promise for millions of patients, opening up potential for future research and practical clinical applications that could help hundreds of thousands of people living with paralysis,” said Bouton.

Moving forward, the team is working to improve their system while expanding clinical trials to include other patients with differing levels of spinal injuries and neurological conditions. Recently, they tested the first interhuman neural bypass, which allowed Thomas to feel sensations from another patient as they touched multiple objects.

“We’re not just bypassing the injury, we’re actually rewiring the nervous system,” Bouton added.

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Before the invention of the printing press, the only way to make a copy of a text was by hand. Whether intentionally or by accident, the copy wasn’t always identical to the original, and the differences carried over into all the other copies made from the new version. This is also akin to how genetic mutations spread in populations across evolutionary history.

People first noticed the similarities between the genealogy of species and the genealogy of manuscripts in the 19th century, Julien Randon-Furling, a mathematician at Centre Borelli in the  École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay, tells Popular Science. Randon-Furling studies the intersection of mathematical sciences and humanities, among other disciplines.

Following in the footsteps of polymath Michael P. Weitzman who, in the 1970s and 1980s, applied mathematics to manuscript genealogy, he and colleagues used computer models to reconstruct and simulate the spread of chivalric narratives starting in the 1100s. Chivalric literature is a genre that dates back to the medieval period and frequently portrays the adventures of knights.

Image: Bodleian Library, Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek

By reconstructing the branches of how various medieval texts were copied and disseminated over the centuries, the team was able to estimate how much of the entire tree survived. Their results, published in PNAS Nexus study, indicate that up to 60 percent of chivalric texts and over 95 percent of chivalric manuscripts might have been lost to history. While that may sound extreme, it actually bolsters previous theories.

“Philologists and historians have known for quite a long time that the amount of loss was impressive,” explains Ulysse Godreau, a co-author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at the Ecole nationale des chartes, Paris Sciences & Lettres University. The team wanted to “confirm or infirm these estimates and maybe enrich them via more dynamical quantity studies.”

In fact, what makes this study unique is how it understands manuscript genealogy and texts’ endurance as a dynamic process, according to Jean-Baptiste Camps, principal investigator of the study and a computational philologist at the École nationale des chartes, Paris Sciences & Lettres University. Their approach accounts for time as an influencing factor. It also considers the consequences of events such as wars, pandemics, or even the decreasing popularity of a work on text genealogy, allowing researchers to align the proposed theory with historical information. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, if only a few copies of a text were made in its first few years, it’s very likely that it will have been lost—another factor that was included and quantified in their computer models. The team’s study indicates that, because of this and other potential reasons—random accidents, important historical events like the plague—the original version of most chivalric texts have likely disappeared. 

While the study might come across as grim, it provides a tool to better understand not just history, but what we don’t know of that history, Randon-Furling emphasizes.

“One of the driving questions for us was, how much of the past do we have in our hands?” he explains. “Because if you tell me that the manuscripts that we have represent 90 percent or even 50 percent or 25 percent of what existed, or if they represent less than 5 percent of what existed, it’s a completely different story, a completely different picture of the past.”

Now, the team is aiming to investigate the genealogy of even older texts, such as ancient Greek plays. The team has already taken a stab at texts from the Church fathers. 

Furthermore, the researchers say they plan “to widen our approach by taking into accounts cultural transfers between different regions and languages in Medieval Europe, from France to Iceland or Spain. Different regions could function like different ‘ecosystems,’ with different results in terms of diversity of texts or their survival,” explains Camps. “Some elements already hint at differences between ‘insular’ and continental settings.” 

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Cursive is making a comeback. States and provinces across North America are re-introducing the continuous form of handwriting, making all sorts of arguments as to why. 

There are good arguments for teaching cursive, granted, but some of the most common ones don’t stand up to scrutiny. People will confidently state the idea that cursive is faster, that it offers cognitive benefits over manuscript handwriting, and that signatures legally need to be in cursive. The problem: None of that’s true. Let’s dig into what the science, and the law, actually suggests. 

Cursive isn’t faster than handwriting

A common idea is that cursive is faster than printing, but scientific research doesn’t bear this out. I couldn’t find a single study that suggests cursive is faster, though I did find some interesting ones. 

A 1998 study by researchers at the University of Maryland and the University of Washington found no speed difference between students who wrote in cursive and manuscript. There’s a weird caveat, though: students who combined elements from each were both faster and more legible. 

But more interesting is a natural experiment. Schools in France teach all students to write exclusively in cursive, while schools in Quebec teach both cursive and manuscript. A 2013 study by researchers at the University of Brest and the University of Sherbrooke found that kids from Quebec wrote faster, though their handwriting was less legible. Writing in cursive was found to be slower than manuscript.

So why is this? The researchers in both studies don’t speculate, but I have a personal guess: Ballpoint pens are the culprit. A 2015 article in The Atlantic by teacher Josh Giesbrecht outlines how cursive is a natural fit for fountain pens, where the continuous flow makes connecting letters natural. “Fountain pens want to connect letters,” he writes, “Ballpoint pens need to be convinced to write, need to be pushed into the paper rather than merely touch it.” 

But the research doesn’t clarify this—it just shows that cursive really isn’t any faster than manuscript. 

Cursive doesn’t have magical educational benefits

I’ve written in the past about how writing by hand is better for remembering things, and there’s all kinds of research that backs this up. Taking notes on paper activates a different part of your brain than typing, and that seems to be connected to learning. It’s a good reason for kids to learn to write with a pen.

But that’s an argument for writing on pen and paper, not writing in any particular style. There’s a common argument that writing in cursive has cognitive benefits compared to manuscript handwriting, but I couldn’t find a single study proving that. Neither could Jim Hewitt and Nidhi Sachdeva, two education researchers from the University of Toronto. They extensively reviewed the scientific literature and had a clear conclusion: “Our review of the literature failed to find any evidence of advantages for cursive writing,” they wrote. “We think it is unlikely that cursive offers more cognitive benefits than printing, or vice versa.” 

Similarly, a 2012 research review, also by researchers based in Toronto, found no clear evidence that one form of writing is superior to the other. “We cannot yet say definitively whether cursive or manuscript writing is best for children when first learning to write,” the paper concludes, adding that “whether both are necessary is also questionable.” The paper does state that writing by hand has clear learning benefits over typing—just that the way you write doesn’t matter. 

Signatures don’t have to be in cursive

An extremely common myth is that kids need to learn cursive because only cursive signatures are legally binding. There’s no truth to this at all. According to the Uniform Commercial Code, a US law setting various standards for trade and commerce in the United States, a signature may be “a word, mark, or symbol executed or adopted by a person with present intention to authenticate a writing.” In other words: a printed signature is fine. So is any kind of symbol, so long as you use it consistently with the intention of proving your identity. 

I tried to find any example of a country, anywhere, that specifically required cursive for signatures—I couldn’t find one. Printed signatures are legally enforceable just about everywhere. 

The post 3 myths about cursive handwriting appeared first on Popular Science.

The day has finally arrived. On July 10, hundreds of professional and amateur snake hunters entered the annual Florida Python Challenge, a 10-day race to remove as many of the invasive animals as possible from the Everglades. The person who bags the most snakes will earn a $10,000 first-place prize, while another $15,000 in payouts will go to various other categories, including for the longest snake captured.

Conservationists estimate between 100,000 and 300,000 Burmese pythons (Python bivittatus) live across the state’s subtropical regions, where they have thrived as apex predators since their accidental introduction into the wild during the 1970s. Pregnant females can lay upwards of 70 eggs at a time, and each hatchling can reach an adult length of 13-feet long. Despite their population explosion, only around five percent of all pythons are spotted by the average onlooker. That means only one in about 20 snakes are noticed on any given day.

The python hunt ends on July 19. Credit: Joe Raedel via Getty Images

Over 600 people registered to participate in this year’s Florida Python Challenge as of July 7, according to Naples Daily News. Last year saw more than 900 local and international competitors, and the largest snake captured measured nearly 16 feet long. The annual event isn’t a free-for-all, however. Every hunter must complete a safety course prior to scouring for snakes, and while guns are allowed on private land with owner’s permission, all pythons must be euthanized as humanely as possible.

It may come as a surprise, but beheading one of the massive, coiling predators absolutely isn’t an ethical means of disposal. Because the snakes possess extremely slow metabolisms and can survive with very low amounts of oxygen, they can remain conscious (and in immense pain) for a prolonged period of time after decapitation. Instead, hunters are recommended to draw an imaginary line from each eye to the opposite jaw bone, then locate where those paths intersect. Then can then use a sharp rod or screwdriver to impale the top of the head before moving the tool in a multilateral direction to ensure an immediate loss of consciousness and a quick death. No one said python hunting was for the squeamish.

The Florida Python Challenge will end at 5 p.m. EDT on July 19, with champions announced soon afterwards.

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Remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) including the submersible that rediscovered the Titanic recently captured images of yet another long-lost shipwreck. Researchers collaborating between the Royal Canadian Geographic Society (RCHS) and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have released the first images of famed explorer Ernest Shackleton’s final ship. Quest rests around 1,280 feet deep in the Labrador Sea.

Although Ernest Shackleton survived his multiyear misadventure aboard the Endurance, he wasn’t so lucky during his final return attempt to the Antarctic. In 1922, the intrepid voyager died from a heart attack at the age of 47 while sailing on his 125-ton sealer ship. Shackleton’s death wasn’t the end of Quest’s career. A Norwegian family took possession of the vessel, returning it to its original hunting duties for another 40 years until ice floes crushed and sank it in the Labrador Sea on May 5, 1962.

Sonar scans conducted by the RCGS Shackleton Quest Expedition finally revealed the ship’s final resting place in 2024, which prompted plans for a return visit and closer inspection. The project ultimately involved the use of WHOI’s Falcon ROV along with DSV Alvin, which traveled deep into the frigid, murky Arctic waters to examine Quest’s current state.

“At first, there was a lot of darkness, but suddenly the bow emerge[d] as you [were] going towards it. It’s incredible,” RCGS CEO and expedition leader John Geiger said in a statement.

The wreck was imaged by DSV Alvin, which also helped find the ‘Titanic’ 40 years ago. Credit: Canadian Geographic and Voyis

The bow, deck, and multiple portholes are still visible, although its main mast broke during sinking. Over six decades on the seafloor has transformed Quest into a marine habitat filled with pink corals and multiple residents such as cod, wolf fish, and red fish. Unfortunately, the local inhabitants aren’t alone—many areas of Quest are now hidden by multiple large, abandoned fishing nets lost by passing ships over the years.

Portholes on the shipwreck similar to those in historical photos of Quest helped identify it as Shackleton’s ship. Credit: Canadian Geographic and Voyis

“There’s a lot of damage to the ship. The nets are a sad story, limiting our ability to look at the wreck,” Geiger said. “I think we have to take responsibility for what we are doing to our oceans; that’s a huge issue.”

Researchers are now working to survey and map the wreckage using underwater photogrammetry technology, which will generate a 3D digitalization of the ship for additional examinations by both oceanographers and curious amateur historians.

Quest at the Base Fjord with glacier in the background, taken August 29, 1930. Credit: British Arctic Air Route Expedition Photograph SuperStock / Alamy Stock Photo

“This type of 3D modelling has only existed in ocean science for the last couple of years, and it’s giving us entirely new ways to explore these historic wrecks and make them real for the public,” added WHOI’s expedition co-chief scientist Dwight Coleman.

In the meantime, the team is traveling northeast towards Greenland to survey Terra Nova, the final ship of Shackleton’s rival, Robert Falcon.

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Metal detectorists encounter plenty of junk beneath the ground, but the good ones know the importance of always giving their discoveries a closer inspection. Recently, a hobbyist named Morten Eek unearthed a small, dingy discovery in southwestern Norway near Utstein Abbey. With one silvery side and the other seemingly copper, Eek assumed he found yet another post-medieval clothing button commonly found in the area.

Only while reexamining the object months later did he and fellow detectorists notice a previously overlooked detail on the supposed button’s shinier face—a clearly visible cross design. Examining it under a magnification lens also revealed that the copper side was actually a plate attached and folded around the coin’s edge. After consulting numismatic (coin-related) historical records, Eek decided to bring the “button” to archaeologists at Norway’s University of Stavanger.

The experts’ analysis further strengthened the suspicion that they weren’t dealing with an ordinary clothing accessory. The artifact’s copper side was an example of what’s known as secondary modification—when an object is later altered to serve a different purpose. In this case, two tiny notches along the rim suggested holes for a chain or cord. The silver side’s “cross over cross” design further underscored the archaeologists’ theory that the button was actually a Viking era Norwegian coin dating back to the late 11th or early 12th century CE.

X-ray imaging revealed a griffin-like design hidden beneath one side’s copper plating. Credit: Hege Hollund / University of Stavanger

Although the shinier side also displayed an inscription, it was too fragmentary to discern. The team suspected similar wording may be found underneath the copper plate, but knew removing it would compromise the delicate object’s historical integrity. They instead opted to utilize X-ray imaging, which uncovered a griffin-like creature on the opposing face.

With that, they finally had their answer. Eek hadn’t found a button; he discovered a rare coin minted during the reign of Magnus Berrføtt, aka Magnus Barefoot.

King of Norway from 1093 to 1103 CE, Barefoot is considered the country’s last Viking ruler, and is remembered for his attempts to extend power across the North Atlantic. Compared to his relatively peaceful father, Olaf Kyrre, the final monarch’s legacy is much bloodier and violent. His ambitions eventually brought Norwegian influence into the western isles, the Isle of Man, portions of Ireland, and the Hebrides. These excursions made him many enemies, and Barefoot died at around 30 years old in Ireland after he was ambushed during his second western campaign.

Beyond his military aims, King Barefoot is also remembered for coins like the one discovered near Utstein Abbey. He enacted significant currency reforms, specifically when it came to coinage silver content. As Arkeonews explained, he ordered a reduction in coin weight while maintaining the same amount of silver, which increased their fineness to around 90 percent.

Only about 100 Barefoot coins are known to archaeologists, making Eek’s find a major discovery for historians. With further examination, researchers may soon learn where it was minted based on the die cast, which would better contextualize the scale and organization of coin production at the very end of the Viking era. Not bad for a mistaken button.

The post Rare coin from Norway’s last Viking king mistaken for old button appeared first on Popular Science.

In a win for animal conservation, a Bengal tiger (Panthera tigris tigris) recently gave birth to three cubs at Tanganyika Wildlife Park in Goddard, Kansas. The new litter came into the world on June 11 and consists of three furballs—one female and two males. 

Their mother, Sienna, is an orange tiger, while their father, Grayson, is a white Bengal tiger. All three cubs take after their mother’s orange hue. Given that white is a recessive trait in Bengal tigers, this doesn’t come as a surprise. The birth itself, however, was a bit of a surprise as it came with little warning. 

Pregnant tigers don’t look all that different from their nonpregnant peers, especially first-time mothers. What’s more, the team at the Tanganyika Wildlife Park hadn’t yet seen a confirmed breeding between Sienna and Grayson. As such, they were only truly clued in when a keeper saw mammary development in Sienna during a training session. 

“We saw some mammary development and realized we were most likely going to have babies,” Carnivore Supervisor Phoebe Andrews said in a statement. 

The yet-unnamed cubs are the mother and father’s first litter. Sienna’s maternal instincts came out immediately, and she groomed her babies and allowed them to nurse shortly after birth. Nonetheless, animal keepers are hand-rearing the cubs. 

“Hand-rearing is a deliberate choice,” reads the press release. “Newborn cats are fragile, and the park’s first priority is giving each cub the best possible chance at survival. Raising the cubs by hand lets keepers tailor nutrition to their needs, provide immediate medical care, monitor their health closely, and support healthy development through the most vulnerable stage of life.”

The trio spent their first weeks with their mother, and then was transferred to the nursery for full-time care. The keepers will weigh them, document their growth, and feed them several times a day. The siblings’ stripes are currently too alike to distinguish them visually. Instead, the animal keepers are using small fur trims as short-term identifiers. 

Unfortunately, the Bengal tiger family’s counterparts in the wild are threatened by deforestation, habitat loss, poaching, and conflicts with humans. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species classifies the species as Endangered.  

“They’re still endangered in the wild. It’s important to maintain a population in professional care so we can keep that genetic diversity,” highlighted Samantha Russak, Curator of Research & Welfare and Registrar at the Tanganyika Wildlife Park. 

The post Three tiger cubs born in Kansas appeared first on Popular Science.

As anyone who’s grown up favoring their southpaw can attest, the world overwhelmingly caters to right-handers. The vast majority of humans (somewhere around 85-90 percent) are right-handed, a tendency influenced by a combination of genes and environment. But it turns out this long-known preference towards the right may go back much further than scientists once thought—hundreds of millions of years further back, in fact. This preference toward the right may have been shared by some of the oldest known multicellular organisms.

That’s the core argument presented in a study published this week in the journal Scientific Reports. The international team of researchers examined over 100 well-preserved fossils of Spriggina floundersi, an ancient, inch-long worm-like animal that wriggled its way around southern Australia about 550 million years ago. The majority of those fossils shared something in common: they all showed the creature favoring its left side. And since fossils are mirror-image impressions captured at a moment in time, that actually means the animals favored their right side during life. 

Researchers say this represents the earliest known example of this type of asymmetry in nature, and it may lend credence to the idea that handedness is hardwired deep into the evolutionary history of complex living creatures.

“The dominance of bends to the left in fossils of Spriggina suggests a preference for right turns in life and represents the oldest evidence of behavioural handedness among animals,” researchers write in the paper. 

Evidence of ancient handedness, trapped in stone  

Spriggina fossils date back to the Ediacaran Period, an era of immense biological change and adaptation. This period was responsible for introducing the first multicellular animals visible to the naked eye. Though they might not seem like much today, Spriggina and its contemporaries were some of the first animals capable of movement and other abilities scientifically considered complex behaviors. These are among the first organisms many people would identify as actual animals, rather than simply globs of goop.

The Spriggina fossil analyses in the study primarily came from Nilpena Ediacara National Park, located on the western part of the Flinders Ranges in southern Australia. It’s a remote area home to some of the best-preserved fossils from the Ediacaran Period. In this case, the collection of Spriggina fossils was buried together during some storm event around 550 million years ago.

Bend angles observed for Spriggina. Image: Scott D. Evans, Jenson Webb, Ian V. Hughes, William Parker & Mary L. Droser

And while it might not seem like it, the ancient hammerheaded worm has some key things in common with humans. Specifically, it’s among the earliest known examples of an animal with bilateral symmetry, meaning it has a distinguishable front and back, left and right, and top and bottom. That’s also true for humans and most animals today, but that wasn’t always the case. The findings suggest that favoring one side or the other isn’t some recent adaptation humans developed, but instead is possibly something deeply rooted in the way complex animals have evolved. While interesting on its own, the research stops short of answering why that’s the case.

“When we talk about being right-or-left-handed, most people likely think about how they hold a pencil or a kick a soccer ball,” American Museum of Natural History assistant curator of invertebrate paleontology and study lead author Scott Evans said in a statement. “But our research shows that an animal without hands or feet, living over 500 million years ago, may have had its own version of handedness.” 

Humans and handedness: It’s in the genes

The fact that the overwhelming majority of humans today are right-handed isn’t entirely explained by genetics. Certain cultures in Asia and Africa have traditionally viewed left handedness as unclean. Others have gone even further, baselessly suggesting it was a sign of influence from satanic forces. Those and other cultural forces have led generations of people who naturally favor their left hand to be forcibly steered away from it. Tools and basic infrastructure are also largely designed around right-handedness, which can further pressure those who are naturally inclined to favor their left to conform to the social standard.

Related: [Why are most people right-handed?]

But still, even when accounting for those factors, handedness has a strong genetic component. Studies show that as many as 40 genes may play some role in determining handedness, which can present itself even before birth, in fetuses. Though it’s still not entirely certain what causes some people to favor the left hand, some researchers attribute it to random mutations during early brain development.

And while left-handers have typically had to work harder in many respects, their minority status does offer some unique advantages, especially in combat and sports. In fact, some modern athletes today, like tennis legend Rafael Nadal, were actually born favoring their right hand but trained to use their left specifically for the slight edge it offers.

Obviously, quite a few things happened in the 548 million years between Spriggina and the first human ancestors, which may account for right handed dominance today. Still, the findings suggest this ancient biological bias may have an origin story far older than anyone had expected.

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The French president and his wife were among the audience of thousands at the debut performance of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair. 

Cody’s raucous tribute to the golden age of the American West was already a huge sensation in the United States. In 1887, the show had taken the United Kingdom by storm. But the French weren’t quite sure what to make of the Lakota Sioux warriors and lanky cowboys as they came whooping into the outdoor arena, spurring their horses into streaks of lightning. Even one of the show’s most popular acts—the rescue of a stagecoach ambushed by Native Americans—left them cold.

Then, Annie Oakley skipped into the arena and launched into her act, her guns shattering a flock of glass balls thrown into the air. When her bullets were spent, she threw the pistols like hot irons and grabbed another. The audience roared to life. 

Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show was “a great success in every way,” declared the front page of the Paris Herald the next day. Within weeks, the French capital had been infected by “Wild West Fever.” 

In 1894, Thomas Edison filmed Annie Oakley showing off her sharpshooting skills. Video: Annie Oakley 1894 Filmed by Thomas Edison, silentfilmhouse The “Savage Indian” turned French celebrity

By the late 1880s, a deep nostalgia for an American West full of “savage Indians” and “noble pioneers”—a place that, by then, existed only in memory due to the brutal policies of the U.S. federal government against Native Americans—had settled into the American consciousness. 

Europeans, too, were intrigued by the idea of the vast plains and their “primitive Indians.” Indigenous people had been displayed in Paris for decades, sometimes as performers on stage, other times as temporary residents of “living habitats” in the city’s zoological gardens. Close to 400 Indigenous individuals from French colonies were living on the main fairgrounds that same year. Early anthropologists—adherents of Social Darwinism, the ideology that all human groups occupied a rung of the evolutionary ladder between savagery and enlightened civilization—studied them as specimens in the science of race. 

Parisians “had heard about the [American] Indians, but the Wild West Show was their first exposure,” says Steve Friesen, former director of the Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave in Golden, Colorado, and author of Galloping Gourmet: Eating and Drinking with Buffalo Bill. “They saw the real thing and they were impressed.” 

Buffalo Bill as well as his father were firmly anti-slavery, and Buffalo Bill fought for the Union Army during the American Civil War. Image: Public Domain

Indeed, it wasn’t long before young Parisian women began flocking to the “Indian Camp” at the Wild West Show (the area where the performers lived, which was open to the public). Dozens stood waiting, ready to elbow one another out of the way to proffer cigarettes and coy smiles to the handsome, young Sioux warriors. Men, too, hung around, intrigued by the expert horsemen and sharpshooters. Cowboy hats and American- and Mexican-style saddles flew off the shelves of shopkeepers cashing in on the trend. 

Popcorn sold at the show, unfamiliar to the French, became so popular that, soon, it could be found at the city’s other sites of entertainment. By October, five months after the debut of Cody’s company, “it was said that the people of Paris seem to go to the [any] theater just to eat popcorn,” Friesen laughs.

Buffalo Bill Cody—Guillaume Buffalo to the French—was the ideal ambassador for the legend of the American West. Back in his own country, he was already a major celebrity—an authentic cavalryman, scout, who claimed to have ridden for the Pony Express, as well as a stage actor known for his charisma and good looks. 

Soon, “he became one of the darlings of Paris,” says Friesen. “Everybody wanted to meet him.” He, along with several of the Native American and cowboy performers, were often seen about town, at the theaters, and on the grounds of the World’s Fair, including climbing the Eiffel Tower, which was built for the event. 

This 1908 footage shows Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show that took Paris by storm in the late 19th century. Video: Buffalo Bills Wild West Show 1908 original footage, Motion Pictures

For six months, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show performed twice a day to a full-to-bursting 30,000-person arena that, despite being some distance from the core of the World’s Fair grounds, sometimes upstaged the main event. No one in town could get enough, including some of Europe’s most famous artists.

“Paul Gauguin went to the show once,” says Friesen. “He liked it so much he went a second time and then he went out and bought himself a Stetson hat. At the Musée d’Orsay, in a self-portrait he made in Tahiti, he’s wearing a hat that looks very similar.” 

Edvard Munch visited; French painter Rosa Bonheur was a regular fixture at the Indian Camp, capturing the performers on canvas. It was also in Paris that Cody met Thomas Edison, who was at the fair to demonstrate new electrical technologies. A few years later, he put the showman and his Lakota performers into one of the world’s first motion pictures. 

The Wild West lives on in Paris

“Buffalo Bill was basically the first emissary of the American West to France, telling people what the West was like,” Friesen says. The appeal was anything but fleeting. When the company returned for a six-month tour of the country in 1905, they reignited the “Wild West Fever” that had swept Paris 16 years earlier.

Today, the impact of that “fascination with the American West is certainly still being felt in the larger sense,” he continues.

Phoebe Anne “Annie Oakley” Moses poses in front of her tent in a camp for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show while touring in Europe, possibly in Paris in 1889. Image: Public Domain

According to Friesen, the trend of women wearing cowboy hats with skirts, Annie Oakley’s signature style, likely began with the Wild West Show. The kind of “Western” shops that cashed in on the trend back in 1889 are still found in the city and beyond. There is even a French steakhouse chain called Buffalo Grill that has featured a portrait of Buffalo Bill in its logo.

While the French were skeptical when Disneyland Paris opened its doors in the early 1990s, one thing in the Disney Village was “turning a really good profit,” Friesen says: their knockoff Wild West Show. 

“It had room for 2,000 people, twice a day, who would go in and eat American food—cornbread and steak and things like that. Everybody would get a straw cowboy hat and they’d watch a performance of Buffalo Bill kinds of acts,” says Friesen. 

“The popularity, the name recognition of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show had enough of an impact that it remained all the way to the 2000s.”

In That Time When, Popular Science tells the weirdest, surprising, and little-known stories that shaped science, engineering, and innovation.

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In a world first, doctors successfully completed not one, but two surgeries with the use of remotely controlled humanoid robots. The proof-of-concept preclinical trial involved gallbladder removals in large, non-primate mammals. A humanoid robot and a human attendant completed one procedure while a pair of robots conducted the second one..

Lifesaving, robotically assisted surgical procedures are commonplace in many medical facilities, but they have limitations. Many of these multiarmed devices are massive systems weighing over 1,800 pounds, and require specialized teams to install them into retrofitted operating rooms. They’re also typically only designed with one type of procedure in mind. In comparison, humanoid robots are what their name implies. At about five feet tall and weighing only 60 pounds, the surgery bots (nicknamed “Surgie”) are comparatively small, nimble, customizable, and much more affordable. With the proper training and technological advancements, fleets of Surgies could one day deploy to critically under-resourced communities.

“Remotely operated and autonomous humanoid robots have real potential for amplifying access to critical surgeries to which patients would otherwise not have access,” Michael Yip, an engineer at the University of California San Diego (UC San Diego), said in a statement. “This can help address the healthcare crisis not only in the United States, but also worldwide.”

Yip and his colleagues recently detailed their groundbreaking trial in a study published in the journal Nature. Although the team needed to design adapters to allow each robot to hold surgical tools, operators said controlling them from afar felt unexpectedly natural.

“We were surprised at how well Surgie meshed with our workspace and workflow,” said UC San Diego surgeon Nikita Thareja.

“It’s a fraction of the cost and it takes a fraction of the space in an operating room. So it’s easy to deploy, anywhere from rural areas, to the battlefield, and even to space,” added UC San Diego surgeon and study co-author Shanglei Liu.

The first teleoperated humanoid surgeries did encounter a few early issues. The Surgie bots required recalibration multiple times, which greatly slowed the overall process compared to performing them with existing surgical systems. Latency between the controller and the robot also needs improvement. However, researchers are confident the technology will improve, and cite similar progress with robotic laparoscopic surgery. The first of those procedures took six hours, while today’s machine-assisted examples only take around 30 minutes.

A Surgie isn’t necessarily relegated to the operating table, either. The team envisions future humanoid robots could also assist by grabbing tools, or clean up following a surgery.

“One of our goals is to develop [an] autonomous surgical assistant,” Yip said. “Many communities struggle with adequate staffing on the surgical team, which means patients are not being treated. Our goal is an operating theater of the future, where humanoid robots and humans work side by side as an integrated team.”

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It’s easy to craft a paper airplane capable of soaring across a classroom, but one that can travel 200 feet is a bit harder. A group of students from Italy’s University of Pisa not only managed to reach that distance on a single glide—they did so with the Guinness World Record holder for the largest paper airplane ever assembled. 

Built using only paper and some glue, the team’s nearly 23-foot-long creation and its over 65-foot wingspan cruised through a warehouse at Italy’s annual We Make Future expo on June 25. According to the university’s announcement, the students broke a record previously held since 2013 by Germany’s Braunschweig Institute of Technology.

“It all started with [constructing] some paper airplanes between lessons, almost as a joke,” the team said in a statement. “We were students convinced that, with the right method, even a piece of paper could become real engineering.”

Science YouTuber Jakidale documented the design process and testing, which highlight the hours of trial and error, CAD renderings, and experimentation needed to pull off their collective success. You can watch the entire exercise in a pair of videos—provided you’re fluent in Italian. But even if you’re not well versed in the Romance language, it’s still fascinating to watch “Project Icarus” come together.

“In the end we managed to bring back to Italy a world record that had stood for thirteen years,” the team added.

Don’t have the engineering know-how or enough paper to craft your own gigantic glider? There are still plenty of aeronautically sound paper plane schematics to attempt, including one officially endorsed by NASA.

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Not every invasive species is as dramatic or fearsome as a Burmese python or a feral hog—but that doesn’t lessen their impact on native ecosystems. Coastlines across North America and Europe have contended with the spread of the Manila clam (Ruditapes philippinarum) for at least the last century. Although a favorite among seafood lovers, the shellfish is also taking over the habitats of local shellfish, and even hybridizing with similar species.

After decades of slow conquest, the delicious mollusk is finally setting up shop along the New England coastline. According to wildlife biologists writing in the journal Biological Invasions, the region marked the Northern Hemisphere’s last holdout against the Manila clam.

“Given that Manila clams are everywhere else in the Northern Hemisphere, it was only a matter of time before they showed up here, and we’ve been keeping an eye out for them,” Aly Putnam, a study co-author and University of Massachusetts Amherst ecologist, said in a statement.

The first tip off to the mollusk’s arrival came via a photo and a text message. Last summer, Putnam received a picture from colleague and study co-author El Fernekees Hartshorn depicting a suspected Manila clam shell. Putnam and fellow researcher Carolina Bastidas were leading a biodiversity workshop on Spectacle Island in Boston Harbor at the time, and began paying attention to the coastlines. It wasn’t long before they located many more Manila clams.

Coincidentally, an entirely separate team led by the Center for Coastal Studies had recently started investigating reports of “weird clams” near Provincetown, Massachusetts. They soon combined forces, confirming that Manila clams were definitely beginning to thrive in the area.

“I realized that this was a golden opportunity to not only combine forces, but also to catch a detailed snapshot of the moment a new invasive species establishes itself,” added study co-author and Williams College marine scientist James Carlton. 

The Manila clam’s origins are nowhere near Cape Cod. Instead, they’re native to Russia’s Sakhalin Islands and the coasts of Japan and southern China. The clams were introduced both intentionally and accidentally to North America and Europe during the early 20th century, where they quickly proliferated. The food industry also capitalized on the shellfish, turning them into a $7 billion-a-year industry.

While dense colonies can adversely impact local ecologies, they also offer nutritious food for crabs, small mammals, and seabirds. Now that they’re confirmed across the Northern Hemisphere, ecologists can begin to examine how the clams are spreading throughout New England, and how they will impact their new homes. Although they are likely here to stay, it’s not necessarily a terrible situation.

“On the positive side, because Manila clams can become a source of food for other animals, they can relieve pressure on native species—-for example, the predator pressure of green crabs on softshell clams,” explained Bastidas. “So, there could also be positive impacts.”

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The United States officially conducted 1,054 nuclear tests between 1945 and 1992, but only one of them is known to have satellites among its casualties. In 1962, the U.S. detonated the 1.4-megaton Starfish Prime thermonuclear warhead 250 miles above the planet. The resultant electromagnetic pulse (EMP) blast was vastly wider than expected, and even damaged an estimated 300 streetlights in Hawaii around 900 miles away. In space, Starfish Prime’s lingering artificial radiation belt also unintentionally destroyed many of the earliest satellites launched by the U.S., the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union.

“When you have a nuclear detonation in outer space, basically the whole body of the bomb becomes ionized, and nearly every single electron in the weapon’s mass becomes free,” Areg Danagoulian, a nuclear scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said in a statement.

Once free, these ions merge into the Van Allen radiation belt, where the electrons bombard everything in their path. This further ionizes particles while producing damaging radiation. To put it simply—detonating nuclear weapons in space can be as disastrous as detonating them on Earth.

In 1967, the U.S., U.K., and Soviet Union signed the Outer Space Treaty designating the cosmos as the “province of all mankind” while also banning the usage or testing of nuclear weapons beyond the planet’s atmosphere. Another 115 other nations including China have since entered into the agreement, which by all accounts kept space neutral and nuke-free for nearly 55 years—until the satellite called Cosmos2553.

In 2022, Russia launched their alleged surveillance and sensor satellite, but watchdogs and critics immediately raised suspicions about its true purpose. Cosmos2553 has an unusual orbit, routinely passing through some of the most radioactive regions above Earth.

“It goes through the most hostile environment possible around the planet,” said Danagoulian. “Why would you put a satellite in that orbit? Well, that location is likely the best point for trapping electrons if you were to detonate a thermonuclear weapon.”

Cosmos2553’s true purpose remains unclear, but the worst case scenario envisioned by Danagoulian would have devastating consequences. A nuclear anti-satellite weapon in its position hypothetically has the capability to destroy many international communication and internet satellites, GPS, and reconnaissance equipment.

To make matters worse, it’s still extremely difficult to confirm whether or not a satellite houses nuclear weapons. After reviewing the available unclassified research, Danagoulian realized there still weren’t even any proposed methods to assess suspicious orbiters. But that doesn’t mean the problem is unsolvable.

According to Danagoulian, there is a way forward for international monitoring against nuclear satellites. In a feasibility study published today in Nature, he describes a new satellite-based sensor system that could be launched near a suspected orbiter, then monitor it for signs of nuclear activity. The key lies in a type of atomic reaction called spallation that involves energized protons in radioactive conditions.

“When an energetic proton slams into elements with a high atomic number, like uranium and plutonium, each proton may knock out something like 40 neutrons. That’s a ridiculously large number,” said Danagoulian. “We’re talking about millions of protons per second per square centimeter, with many of them generating 40 neutrons.”

Basically, there are a lot of smoking guns—if you have the right equipment to find them. In his system, two neutron sensing panels called scintillators are installed between synthetic crystal diamond devices. The combined array allows it to differentiate between nuclear radioactive neutrons versus naturally occurring protons and electrons. From there, the device can estimate the neutrons’ direction of origin to determine if they’re natural atmospheric particles or those from a nuclear-bearing satellite.

Danagoulian calculated that his sensor system could flag an orbiting nuke with 99 percent accuracy if it spent a week orbiting within about 2.5 miles of the target. However, multiple sensor satellites within around 0.6 miles of the suspected weapon could get an answer after only a few hours.

“You can fake intelligence, but you can’t fake physics,” he added.

The MIT researcher stressed his system is currently purely hypothetical, and requires more development and real-world testing. At the same time, he hopes his feasibility study highlights that such solutions are not only realistic, but worth exploring.

“The goal right now is to get national labs to use this work for their own research, and to get policymakers to seriously consider this technology as a potential part of national technical means,” said Danagoulian.

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It’s no surprise how lovebirds got their name, and how that name became slang for an affectionate human couple. Mated pairs of these African parrots feed, cuddle, groom each other, and become distressed when separated. Their behavior is summed up even better by their Spanish name: inseparables.

Lovebirds are unusual not just because of their shameless PDA, but because they choose one mate for life. While more than 90 percent of birds pair up in the practice of “social monogamy,” most choose a new mate every year or every few years. Besides lovebirds and some other parrots, only a few birds actually mate for life, including swans, eagles (shout out to our favorite bald eagle team: Jackie and Shadow), and albatrosses. Mating for life is even less common in non-avian animals.

You might expect that it would be more practical to keep the same partner year after year than to have to find a new one every breeding season. But it’s not always the most effective plan, especially if the animal couple doesn’t stay together year-round. 

From an evolutionary standpoint, sticking with one mate is not in all animals’ best interests. Although some animals have lifelong partners, most prefer different breeding strategies. And far from the perfect picture of two lovebird soulmates, even monogamous animal relationships include just as many complications as human ones. 

Mating for life has many advantages

In birds, “social monogamy is linked to biparental care—the male and the female caring for the offspring together,” says Dr. Bart Kempenaers, Director of Ornithology at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence in Seewiesen, Germany. For bird parents, “it’s advantageous to stay together because you have to coordinate this care. With more experience breeding together, this coordination might be easier.” 

Teamwork for long-term partners isn’t limited to co-parenting. Kempenaers notes that some birds, such as cardinals, partner year-round, not just during the breeding season. When there’s no offspring to rear, the male and female cardinal defend their territory together. 

Mammals and other animals can also derive various benefits from a lifelong partnership. In addition to sharing parental care, wolves, coyotes, and foxes hunt and defend territory with their partners, while pairs of beavers maintain their dams and lodges together. Breeding pairs of French angelfish (one of the only fish that mate for life) don’t care for their young at all, but stick together to patrol their feeding grounds.

What makes some birds more likely to stay together

In birds, Kempenaers identifies longevity as one major influence on whether a species mates for life. “To stay together, both partners have to live to the next breeding season,” he says. And since “larger birds, like albatrosses, live much longer than a small bird like a chickadee” on average, says Kempenaers, the birds which mate for life are mostly large-bodied and long-lived. Albatrosses, which mate for life, can live over 50 years; chickadees, which do not, live only two or three years in the wild. 

Great blue herons do not mate for life. While they are monogamous during a single breeding season, they choose new partners every year. Image: NurPhoto / Contributor / Getty Images / Ronen Tivony

Small animals also have more predators to contend with than large ones, decreasing their chances of surviving from one breeding season to the next. Many of the birds and mammals that mate for life, such as eagles and wolves, have few natural predators. 

There are also other factors which influence mating habits. For two partners to stay together long-term, they have to be able to consistently find each other every breeding season. Birds that mate for life are generally those that either stay together year-round, or return to the same places at the same time every year. They may even use the same nesting site every year, which biologists call “site fidelity.” 

Bird couples can “divorce”

The breakup of a pair of birds is often called “divorce,” but Kempenaers cautions that this term “suggests that it’s a decision by one or both partners to stay together or not, and that’s not necessarily the case.” 

Some birds that mate for life, such as cranes and swans, migrate together in family units. However, in most migratory birds, partners travel separately. This can lead to birds choosing a new mate out of necessity more than incompatibility with the previous partner. 

“If one of the partners comes back [from migration] but the other partner isn’t back yet, then this individual faces a dilemma,” says Kempenaers. 

“It doesn’t know if its partner is still alive. The breeding season is happening, it’s ready to breed. So this bird might decide to mate with another individual rather than wait for the partner who might never show up.” Even if the previous year’s partner shows up late, Kempenaers notes, the one who got there first will typically stay with its new partner.

For birds, seizing the opportunity to breed comes before human notions of fidelity. A study of mute swans found that their low rate of “divorce” was three times higher in pairs that did not breed successfully than in pairs that did (nine percent versus three percent). 

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Animals also “cheat” on each other 

Social monogamy in animals doesn’t necessarily mean sexual monogamy. Even for species that mate for life, there may be survival benefits to teaming up with one partner while continuing to mate and have offspring with others. 

This behavior is common across bird species. In some cases, says Kempenaers, the “social father” cares for the offspring, “but he isn’t the father of any of them” genetically, or at least some of them. A study of black swan pairs found at least one baby fathered by a different male in up to 40 percent of nests. Similar behavior has been observed in socially monogamous mammals, such as wolves and gibbons.

“If you ask why it happens, or what the advantages are, it’s always important to distinguish between the male side and the female side,” says Kempenaers. Males who mate with many females might be trying to father as many offspring as possible.  However, says Kempenaers, “it is more difficult to understand” why female birds often take the initiative by leaving their nesting territory for liaisons with neighboring males. 

This might ensure that the female’s own genes get passed on, just in case her nesting partner is infertile. It might even bring in extra parental care from the other males, as has been observed in some birds, such as the blue tit. But the exact drivers for this behavior remain a mystery. 

There’s still much we don’t know about animal mating habits

Kempenaers explains that scientists are still working to define what better cooperation actually looks like in partners that stay together long-term. Other existing questions include how different mating systems evolve and why they can vary so much, even among species that have a lot in common. 

Kempenaers was part of a 2023 study on the Alaskan breeding grounds of a shorebird called the long-billed dowitcher. Dowitchers are relatively large, long-lived birds that practice social monogamy. “Both the male and the female are essential for reproduction,” says Kempenaers, sharing tasks like incubating eggs. 

One might expect a bird with these characteristics to return to the same mate and nesting site, at least for several years in a row. This is what similar birds in the same environment as the dowitchers do. Yet dowitchers choose a new mate and a new place to nest every year. “We found this really puzzling,” says Kempenaers. “If all the others come back to the same place, why don’t the dowitchers do this?” 

To find out, researchers put satellite trackers on dowitchers and followed their movements throughout the year. They found that “the females leave much earlier than the males from the breeding grounds, and they winter at different places,” says Kempenaers. Crucially, once they have mated, “they never meet up again.” But why dowitchers behave this way when other socially monogamous birds in the same environment do not “remains a bit of an enigma,” he adds. 

In nature, fidelity has benefits for some, but not for others, though what those benefits are is not always perfectly clear. And while it’s tempting to see animal relationships in human terms, monogamy in the animal kingdom often looks very different from human romance.

In Ask Us Anything, Popular Science answers your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the everyday things you’ve always wondered to the bizarre things you never thought to ask. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.

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Major clues to the origins of our planet—and life itself—are locked inside some three billion-year-old volcanic rocks from Western Australia. These ancient rocks show that water was likely already shaping Earth’s interior and driving volcanic activity over three billion years ago. 

The findings published today in the journal Nature Communications suggest that Earth was already running a version of the water-recycling processes that shape our planet today, even though our home planet was a dramatically different place billions of years ago. Geologists found signs that roughly three billion years ago water traveled deep beneath the Earth’s surface, helping to create the magmas that formed volcanoes like the ones found in the Pacific’s explosive Ring of Fire today. 

Every single day, Earth’s water is continually recycled through a process called plate tectonics. Ocean water is carried down into the Earth’s middle layer, or mantle. The water is then pulled down at subduction zones. In these zones, one tectonic plate slides beneath another, feeding volcanoes that are powerful enough to build continents. However, billions of years ago, that internal water recycling process worked completely differenly—if at all.

“The early Earth was too hot for plates to behave that way [pulling water down to the mantle],” Dr. Eric Vandenburg, a study co-author and geochemist at Australia’s Adelaide University, said in a statement. “So until now it has been unclear whether surface water could have made that journey more than three billion years ago, and if so, how.”

In other words, it may have been too hot for Earth’s early plates to move water down to the mantle the way it does today. 

To learn more, the team studied rocks from Western Australia’s Pilbara Craton. The rocks were formed between 3.6 billion and 2.8 billion years ago and are some of Earth’s oldest. The iron-rich rocks began forming before there was oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere—or even life itself. The Pilbara remains one of the few places where geologists can study the young Earth.

This image shows part of the Hamersley Basin in Western Australia, which lies on the southern Pilbara Craton. A craton is the stable, geologically inactive core of an ancient continent. The Pilbara Craton has remained intact, surviving the affronts of plate tectonics and erosion since the Archean Eon (four billion to 2.5 billion years ago). Image: NASA.

The team analyzed the chemical fingerprints preserved within the Pilbara Craton rocks and reconstructed events that occurred 3.1 billion years ago. Surprisingly, they found evidence that large amounts of water had already made its way deep into the Earth’s interior. All of that water also influenced the formation of volcanic rocks. The team believes that while modern plate tectonics may not have existed on Earth yet, a different process may have been bringing water into the mantle.

So, how was water getting so deep into the Earth without plate tectonics? The team proposes it was because of a mechanism they call dripduction. During dripduction, dense water-rich sections of the Earth’s cool outer crust sporadically sag and then collapse into the hotter mantle below. As these pieces of crust collapsed, they brought water down with them. The water was then released into the Earth’s mantle, creating magmas that fed volcanic eruptions.  When magma interacts with water, the intense heat turns that water into steam. The steam then expands and erupts along with the magma. That magma then solidified into rocks that geologists still study today. 

“The Earth wasn’t operating exactly as it does now, but it appears some of the key processes were already in place,” Vandenburg said.

For geologists, understanding when water first started moving deep underground helps explain one of our planet’s most critical processes. Plate tectonics influence everything from volcanic eruptions and continental growth. Shifting plates may even produce some of the chemical elements that are necessary for life to exist at all. These findings provide clues about how the Earth’s continents formed, and how our planet evolved into what we know today.

According to the team, these new findings suggest that Earth’s interior and surface may have been connected much earlier than we thought. Earth appears to have been a surprisingly dynamic young planet that was already recycling one of its most crucial ingredients: water.

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For Luigi the lobster, it was simply time to grow. Literally. The spineless American lobster (Homarus americanus) recently molted—when a crustacean sheds its outer shell—in front of visitors to the New York Aquarium in Brooklyn. Luigi is an unusual shade of orange that is only seen in one in 30 million American lobsters.  

“On the morning in question, keeper staff discovered a molt in Luigi’s habitat,” William Hana, the Director of Animal Programs at New York Aquarium, tells Popular Science. 

“Based on our experience, molts typically occur during the evening hours and may continue overnight. Following the molt, Luigi displayed the bright coloration characteristic of a newly formed shell.”

During molting, crustaceans take in excess water. The water then pushes against the shell, and splits it. The lobster then takes the rest of its body out like taking a foot out of a shoe, as it sheds its old outer shell. A shiny new softshell then emerges as the animal’s exoskeleton. 

That new shell is soft and paper-thin, so crustaceans are more vulnerable after molting. Since Luigi was housed alone at the time, he did not have to worry about predators or aggressive behavior from other animals. 

Young lobsters tend to molt multiple times per year because they are growing more rapidly. Once they reach adulthood, lobsters tend to molt annually. Molting rates can vary between lobsters under human care like Luigi and those in the wild. Since aquarium lobsters live in a protected habitat with consistent feedings, they are typically able to devote more energy to growing instead of foraging and avoiding predators. However, one food source is consistent no matter where a lobster lives.

“Lobsters frequently consume their shed exoskeleton after molting,” Hana says. “This behavior allows them to reclaim calcium and other essential minerals needed to harden their new, soft shell. For this reason, our staff typically leave the shed shell in the habitat for several days following a molt so the animal has the opportunity to feed on it.”

American lobsters are typically a dark-blue green or greenish-brown color, but Luigi’s rare orange hue makes him look a little more like a lobster you may encounter on a dinner plate. 

He gets his color from a genetic mutation caused by the lack of proteins that help bond the pigments in his shell. The chances of finding an orange lobster like Luigi in the wild are about one in 30 million. He can also be viewed near a rare blue lobster (one in 200 million). Happy growing, crustaceans!

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Don’t expect a dramatic, AI-assisted sci-fi encounter if humanity ever definitively detects evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life. Scouring the stars for signs of aliens is less about waiting for giant unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) to fly into view, and more about pouring through mountains of complex data looking for delicate biosignatures. 

In recent years, many researchers—including some at NASA—have advocated incorporating machine learning and artificial intelligence in their search for organisms beyond Earth. Some of these approaches may show promise, but new research indicates much of today’s AI is even more easily duped by false positives than their human operators. 

“No matter what sequence of commands we started with, we were able to fool the AI 100 percent of the time,” Ankit Gupta, a Michigan State University (MSU) computer science engineer, said in a statement.

Gupta and colleague Christoph Adami recently ran an experiment to assess a specially designed AI program’s ability to identify hypothetical signs of biosignatures. To do this, they relied on a computer program developed at MSU called Avida, which simulates evolutionary processes with digital organisms. Avida treats replicating biological molecules like DNA as computer code, then uses these command strings to repeatedly copy themselves inside a “virtual Petri dish.” Importantly, each coding iteration is imperfect or contains fundamental changes—similar to how biological organisms reproduce.

Gupta and Adami then trained a neural network on tens of thousands of digital organisms inside Avida, some of which included the command to copy itself while others did not. After tasking their AI to classify the two organism types, the program achieved a nearly perfect accuracy rate. However, the AI quickly met its match once the researchers presented new examples it hadn’t previously encountered. In as few as 150 tiny shifts in organisms’ computer code, the AI began mistakenly identifying signs of life.

“AI has an Achilles’ heel. It can see a pattern and completely misclassify it,” Adami explained. “It’s a very serious vulnerability.”

Unlike here on Earth, it could be much harder to ensure a second set of (human) eyes on AI’s work aboard the next Mars rover or planetary probe. But similar AI false positives already affect far more than future space missions. Facial recognition software, self-driving cars, and medical scanners all rely on various machine learning programs to make their decisions. Putting too much faith in the technology’s reliability goes beyond misidentifying new lifeforms—it undermines existing life.

According to Adami, their findings aren’t an indictment of AI, but a reminder that people are still vital to any new field of scientific discovery.

“You need an independent way of checking [AI’s] work,” said Adami. “There needs to be a human in the loop.”

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Almost a decade ago, I finished my doctoral degree in archaeology with a thesis that investigated the hunting and gathering behavior of early Homo sapiens and our extinct relatives, the Neanderthals. 

To my non-archaeologist family members and friends, I was the Stone Age Expert, to whom all questions about anything Paleolithic should be directed. I developed some strong opinions about the viral “ancestral” or “Paleo” diet. I did my part to contribute to the rebranding of the Neanderthals’ image as a type of human and not a bunch of backwards, hairy brutes. To this day, my mom still emails me a link to any news article she finds on Neanderthals, Denisovans (another Paleolithic relative), or other ancient humans. 

When I explain my research interests to new acquaintances, I’m often asked questions like “what would you do if you met a Neanderthal?” or “do you think we’ll ever find a perfectly preserved frozen Neanderthal?” And, inevitably, “Could we clone a Neanderthal?” 

On the surface, that last question seems exciting. Considered more deeply, though, would we really want to bring back a species of human that hasn’t existed on Earth for tens of thousands of years? What gives us the right to decide? Would it be ethical to do so?

What even is “de-extinction?” 

In recent years, the idea of “de-extinction,” the re-engineering or cloning of extinct species, has gained a lot of media buzz. 

Colossal Biosciences, a biotechnology and genetic engineering firm, made headlines in 2024 claiming they had achieved the first de-extinction of the dire wolf. These are large, extinct canines (scientific name Aenocyon dirus) related to modern gray wolves (Canis lupus). 

Tens of thousands of years ago, dire wolves roamed grassland habitats in what is today North and South America. Visit the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles and you can see an entire exhibit wall lined with dire wolf skulls excavated from their sticky graves, their bones stained a glossy walnut from the tar. 

A case of 404 dire wolf skulls are on exhibit at The La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. It is thought that packs of dire wolves attempted to feed on animals trapped in the asphalt and became mired themselves. Image: Contributor / Getty Images / Mel Melcon

Dire wolves have been extinct for around 10,000 years, dying out around the same time as the mastodons, giant sloths, and other megafauna that once lived in the Americas. Colossal’s initial “de-extinction” claims received a lot of backlash from the scientific community. 

A project summary on the company website reads: “[Colossal Biosciences] produced three living dire wolves: Romulus and Remus, born October 1, 2024, and Khaleesi, born January 30, 2025, marking the first successful de-extinction of a large apex predator in scientific history.” A few lines further down the page, though, the summary states:

 “Colossal Biosciences brought back the dire wolves by making 20 targeted edits across 14 genes in the common gray wolf genome.” 

The gray wolf genome contains around 19,000 genes. Colossal Biosciences edited 14 of those genes, a minuscule 0.073 percent change in the whole package of wolf DNA. Compared to a standard gray wolf, Colossal’s experimental pups are a bit larger, and their coats are white instead of patterned gray. However, dire wolves are still a totally different species and genus from gray wolves. 

In other words, these groups last shared a common ancestor about 5.7 million years ago—far more distant than the relationship between wolves and dogs. Put another way, wolves and dire wolves are no more closely related than wolves and African jackals, or bison and gazelles. 

The two species are so genetically different from one another that they wouldn’t likely be able to have offspring together. Despite their bold claims, Colossal hasn’t done much more than to make a gray wolf dressed in a dire wolf overcoat.

How does cloning work? 

In 1996, a team of scientists at the University of Edinburgh took DNA from the nucleus of a cell from a sheep’s udder and implanted it in a different sheep’s egg cell. 

Normally, an egg or sperm cell contains only half of an animal’s chromosomes, i.e. half of their total genetic code. When the sperm fertilizes the egg, the two sets of half-chromosomes merge, creating a new, unique combination. A cell from any other part of the animal’s body, called a somatic cell, contains the full chromosomal complement. 

By swapping a somatic cell’s nucleus into an egg cell, the research team created an embryo that would develop exactly as a fertilized egg normally would but without any genetic contribution from a male parent. The resulting lamb, named Dolly, was an exact genetic copy of the sheep that the original udder-cell nucleus came from.

Dolly, the first-ever cloned mammal, shares a pen with twin sheep, Megan and Morag, the first mammals successfully cloned from differentiated cells. Image: Contributor / Getty Images / Mathieu Polak

After Dolly’s birth, cloning became a hugely exciting field of study, and it wasn’t long before people were asking questions like “if we can clone an existing animal, can we clone an extinct species?” 

Unfortunately, the answer is no, even with the leaps and bounds that genetic engineering has taken over the past decades. The issue is that to clone an extinct species requires a complete, intact DNA sample from that species, and that is something we don’t yet have. 

What would we actually need to create a true clone of a Neanderthal?

The Human Genome Project, an international effort to map out the individual genes on all 23 pairs of human chromosomes, formally kicked off in 1990. The project officially ended in 2003, but the final complete map of the human genome wasn’t finished until in 2022, with the Y chromosome completed in 2023.

DNA fragments from Neanderthal remains have also been pieced together and stitched into a genome map over the past couple of decades. DNA is a surprisingly stable, robust molecule for something that looks so thin and fragile, but DNA that sits in the ground for tens of thousands of years is still susceptible to damage from its environment. 

Barring any miraculous Encino Man-style discoveries of frozen Neanderthal remains, a complete genome would have to be engineered in a lab, not extracted from bone. 

Puzzling out the Neanderthal genome is a huge accomplishment, but knowing the locations of all of the genes is only part of the picture. It’s still not completely clear how many of those genes work with one another, and how environmental factors might affect them. 

To clone a Neanderthal by engineering the genome on a molecular level, scientists would need to recreate all the same kinds of complex relationships that allow our genes to tell every cell in our body what to do. 

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There are big ethical concerns

We Homo sapiens have been the only species of human on Earth for tens of thousands of years, and as a population, we’re quite used to the idea. But go back 60,000 years or so, and there were multiple members of the genus Homo living in different parts of the world. 

Neanderthals were one type of human. We know this because remnants of Neanderthal DNA still exist in our genome, meaning that our respective populations crossed paths and mingled gene pools in the past. Thus, the idea of cloning a Neanderthal raises the same kinds of ethical concerns that come along with the prospect of cloning humans today. 

Currently, the mortality rate for experimentally cloned animals is exceptionally high. Even when a cloned animal is born successfully, severe health problems often emerge. Would we allow a human infant to undergo these stresses for the sake of scientific curiosity?  

Human cloning also raises the issue of what happens when we challenge individuality. Would a cloned human always see themselves as a shadow of their cell donor? We can’t know for sure. This is why, whenever anyone asks me if I think we could clone a Neanderthal, I say no. For the time being, Paleolithic archaeologists will continue to ask and answer questions about the past by investigating the myriad materials that our early human relatives left behind. 

In Ask Us Anything, Popular Science answers your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the everyday things you’ve always wondered to the bizarre things you never thought to ask. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.

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Air quality is linked to a wide range of health issues including respiratory problems, cardiovascular complications, and cancer, and that list of concerns only continues to grow. According to researchers presenting this week at the 42nd Annual Meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE), common pollutants may be fundamentally disrupting human sperm genetics—and these alterations may affect far more than male fertility.

One of the largest studies of its kind, the project took place from 2013 to2017 and included over 2,000 men in Salt Lake City, Utah. Volunteers provided researchers with semen samples initially after signing up, and then at two, four, and six month intervals. The researchers were particularly focused on examining changes to sperm DNA methylation. These chemical shifts regulate genetic activity without actually rewriting the DNA itself. Changes in methylation are already linked to genes utilized during chromosomal organization, cellular maintenance, and overall sperm development.

At the same time, the team also used regional data to estimate the men’s exposure to outdoor air pollutants during the roughly three-month window of sperm production known as spermatogenesis. These included common concerns like nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, fine particulates, and ozone. Although past studies already discovered evidence linking air pollution to semen quality, geneticists still do not fully understand how these adverse results occur at the molecular level.

The researchers flagged ozone and nitrogen dioxide as some of the most influential pollutants. The pair are frequently recorded at higher levels in urban areas like Salt Lake City due to natural gas combustion and traffic emissions.

“Our findings suggest that air pollution exposure during key stages of sperm development may be associated with changes in sperm DNA methylation, including in genes involved in spermatogenesis and early developmental processes,” Carrie Nobles, a study co-author and University of Massachusetts Amherst environmental health scientist, said in an accompanying statement.

Researchers pinpointed 39 DNA methylation changes associated with air pollution, especially in GNAS—an imprinted gene linked to poorer semen quality and fetal development. However, Nobles explained the GNAS implications are “particularly important.”

“Because imprinted genes can persist through early embryonic development, this raises important questions about whether fathers’ environmental exposures may influence not only fertility, but pregnancy and offspring health,” she said.

Since these are preliminary findings, Nobles stressed that it’s vital that researchers now work to replicate their results in future studies. She also explained that further investigations into measurable effects on men’s fertility and pregnancies are needed, as well as looking into other pollution sources.

“We know that couples exposed to air pollution often have difficulties becoming pregnant, and this may be one of the explanations amongst the myriad ways that pollution impacts our reproductive health,” former ESHRE chair Karen Sermon said of the study.

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