On Aug. 12, a total solar eclipse will cross Greenland, Iceland, and Spain — and NASA science will be there! ☀️🌑🔭

We're flying high-altitude jets and launching scientific balloons to study the Sun and the eclipse's effects on us: go.nasa.gov/4x5qvqP

Chinese researchers have revealed a new technology that could soon enable drones to charge mid-flight using high-powered lasers.

The scientists built a prototype of the system using a model of a drone and attached a receiver that works similarly to a solar cell. Fixed to the underside of the wing, the receiver successfully converted the energy from the laser beam into electricity to power the aircraft’s propellers.

"Previous studies largely focused on the materials or the device itself," study senior author Jianhua Han, a researcher at the Civil Aviation University of China, said in a statement. "We wanted to think beyond the laboratory, to how the system could actually be integrated into an aircraft, cooled during operation, and made compatible with flight. It isn’t just a materials science problem; it’s an engineering one."

New blood tests for Alzheimer's disease aim to catch the condition in its earliest stages. Scientists hope that, someday, by spotting very early signs of dementia and enabling earlier treatments, these tests could significantly improve patients' prognoses.

But how well do current blood tests work for that purpose?

At the Alzheimer's Association International Conference in London on July 12-15, Live Science spoke with researchers and clinicians who study and use blood tests for Alzheimer's disease. Here's their take on the current state of these tests and their practicality for real-world use

A new visualization of Earth looks nothing like the Blue Marble seen from space.

NASA has released a new geoid model showing the shape of Earth’s gravitational field. The slight, irregular bulges and depressions are caused by variations in the distribution of mass within the planet. It can also be imagined as the surface a global ocean would take if it were determined solely by Earth’s own gravity and rotation.

The visualization is an exaggerated geoid, with heights multiplied by a factor of 10,000 in order to show the variations in the gravitational field. NASA created this lumpy version of Earth using models and data from satellites, which can detect minute differences in gravity at different locations. The dataset stretches back 15 years and includes a billion observations. NASA also shared an interactive 3D model of the geoid that you can explore here, as well as a longer video.

One of the biggest misconceptions about solar eclipses is that enjoying them requires expensive solar gear. Telescopes, tracking mounts, cameras, telephoto lenses and solar filters are all part of the kitbag for serious eclipse photographers, but the reality is that many travel with surprisingly little equipment.

That will be especially true on Aug. 12, 2026. The total solar eclipse crossing Greenland, Iceland and Spain is the headline attraction that day — closely followed by a partial solar eclipse across Europe and in Canada and the U.S. Northeast — but it won't be the only celestial event worth seeing. Just hours later, the Perseid meteor shower reaches its peak beneath moonless skies. So any eclipse kit built for the Aug. 12 eclipse should therefore be designed with one eye on a night-shoot capturing "shooting stars."

Here's what to buy for your eclipse-meets-Perseids double-header, according to your budget.

Under $50: Keep it simple
If your budget is less than $50, the good news is that you're not excluded from the eclipse experience. In fact, you can assemble everything necessary for a memorable eclipse day without spending very much at all.

The first purchase should always be certified eclipse glasses. Find some safe suppliers that meet the ISO 12312-2 standard for solar viewers, and consider buying more than you need (somebody nearby will almost certainly forget theirs). A handheld solar viewer is a worthwhile alternative, offering a slightly larger and often more comfortable view than eclipse glasses alone.

With the remaining budget, I'd focus less on astronomy equipment and more on practicality. A compact power bank and a reclining lawn chair (handy for the eclipse and the Perseids) could all be within your budget. Eclipse day involves a great deal of waiting, but if you're standing in the path of totality — or primed to see a partial eclipse — eclipse glasses and a clear sky are all you really need to experience something extraordinary.

Under $200: The biggest upgrade you can make
Once your budget reaches around $200, I'd start thinking about binoculars. For many people, the single best upgrade is a pair of dedicated solar binoculars. You can get mini pairs, such as the Celestron EclipSmart 10x25 and Lunt 6x30 Mini Sunoculars, or more substantial pairs like the Celestron Eclipsmart 10x42 and Celestron EclipSmart 20x50. We've tried them all, and can tell you that the Lunt 8x32 SUNoculars are the best (and easiest to find the sun with, which beginners always find is surprisingly small in the sky)...

How and where did the first forms of life arise? These are the main questions driving research at the Institute of Molecular Evolution at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU). In a new publication in Science Advances, an international team led by Düsseldorf biologists uncovers pioneering insights into the network of chemical reactions that the very first cells used to make the building blocks of life and the energy sources they used to drive those reactions.

They retraced the origin of enzymes during life's earliest divergence into bacteria and archaea and found evidence for two independent origins of life for free-living cells.

If we could go back 4 billion years in time and watch as the first cells emerged on Earth, what would we see? "We would see two very different kinds of cells emerging, pioneer bacteria and pioneer archaea, making their first attempts at life outside the confines of a hydrothermal vent," says Natalia Mrnjavac, a biologist at the University of Düsseldorf and lead author of the new publication.

There, Mrnjavac and an international team of scientists report investigations of genomes, protein structures and chemical reactions that probe the earliest phases of microbial evolution before there were free-living cells.

"These comparisons are giving us unprecedented insights into the phase of evolution when metabolism catalyzed by enzymes was arising from spontaneous reactions catalyzed by metals in the Earth's crust," says Düsseldorf biologist William Martin, senior author of the study.

New images captured by the world's most powerful solar telescope have revealed something that was hiding in plain sight on the sun for 150 years: thousands of tiny whirlpools twisting across our star's surface. The ultra-detailed observations could help to explain some of the sun's most violent behavior as well as hint at the answer to a long-standing solar mystery.

The new time-lapse footage offers the first direct proof of a long-predicted phenomenon called Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. The effect itself isn't new to science; it's named for physicists Lord Kelvin and Hermann von Helmholtz, who described it in the 19th century. The physicists found that whenever two fluids slide past each other at different speeds, the friction between them, or shear, rolls into spiraling patterns. However, this is the first time this effect has been seen on the sun, where that shear plays out between neighboring streams of solar plasma.

Researchers captured the swirls using the U.S. National Science Foundation's Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii and then compared the images against computer simulations of the sun's visible surface, called the photosphere. The findings were published Aug. 5 in the journal Nature.

The resulting time-lapse footage from the telescope is unlike anything solar physicists have captured before. It shows dozens of tiny vortices clustering along the edges of magnetic regions, some accompanied by delicate, dark stripes known as striations, according to a statement from the National Science Foundation. The telescope's resolution is sharp enough to pick out structures just tens of miles across — a scale so fine that the vortices had gone completely undetected until now.

Combination of data from the NASA/SDO satellite, the Inouye Solar Telescope VBI instrument, the MPS camera, and the HAO MuRAM simulation. This demonstrates the high detail obtained by the Inouye Solar Telescope. In the last part of the movie, the HAO MURaM simulation data is overlaid for both the synthesized intensity and the vertical magnetic field component that is finally displayed in three dimensions.

A bank of fog might seem gloomy. But that mist may carry an unexpected community of environmental helpers. Ground-dwelling clouds can house bacteria that clean the air, a new study finds.

Microbes can find air a harsh place, notes Kathleen Weathers. Temperatures can fluctuate broadly. And even in fog, there can be a high risk of drying out. A fog scientist, Weathers works at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y. But, she adds, fog hosts many things needed for those microbes to “make a living.” These include moisture, nutrients and comfortable temperatures.

Yet until now, scientists hadn’t known microbes could actually live there, says Weathers, who did not take part in the new work.

It took Thi Thuong Thuong Cao, a chemist who loves hiking on foggy mountainsides, to show microbes not only can live in fog, but also grow and reproduce.

For the first time, an artificial intelligence system has created a series of previously unknown viruses capable of infecting and eliminating certain types of bacteria. This breakthrough opens up new possibilities for combating bacterial resistance. However, it also raises concerns about the potential misuse of this technology to design biological weapons.

For several years now, scientists have been able to synthesize viruses from scratch; these are typically used to develop and evaluate antiviral drugs and vaccines, as well as to expand our understanding of how these microorganisms behave. However, the production of these viral genomes has primarily relied on replicating previously known pathogens or variants.

In contrast, a new study conducted by scientists at Stanford University and the Arc Institute succeeded in having an AI design simple, functional, and previously unseen viruses based on information contained in the genetic sequences of millions of animals, plants, microbes, bacteria, and viruses found in nature.

The researchers worked with bacteriophages—microorganisms characterized by relatively small genomes, which are relatively easy to synthesize and manipulate under controlled conditions. These viruses infect only bacteria, making them a tool with enormous biotechnological potential and a promising alternative to antibiotics for combating resistant bacterial infections.

The creation of these entirely new viruses was based on Evo 1 and Evo 2, foundational AI models developed for computational biology applications. Both algorithms were trained on millions of genomes from all domains of life, with the goal of identifying and learning complex evolutionary patterns, including how genes are typically organized, which sequences are conserved, and the biological constraints that allow an organism to remain functional.

The experimental design used the bacteriophage Phi X-174—which is capable of infecting the bacterium Escherichia coli (E. coli)—as a reference. The goal was not to reproduce this virus, but rather to use it solely as a guide for the algorithms to generate thousands of completely new genomes with a genetic architecture compatible with infecting E. coli.

In other words, the viruses derived from the genomes created by the AI retained the functional organization essential for recognizing the bacterium, inserting their DNA, replicating it, producing new viral particles, and assembling them correctly. However, the specific DNA sequences differed considerably from those observed in naturally occurring bacteriophages.

Fruit, honey and other naturally sweet foods may have helped fuel the evolution of the human brain, according to new research from the University of Sydney and the University of Glasgow.

Published in Science, the study modeled the glucose needs of humans and their ancestors from 4 million years ago until recently, finding natural sugars may have supplied the energy needed to support growing brains before the advent of cooking made starch-rich foods like tubers and grains easier to digest.

"Raw starch does not release glucose, meaning early humans likely relied on naturally sweet foods long before grains became a regular part of the diet," said lead author Jennie Brand-Miller, a professor of human nutrition at the University of Sydney Charles Perkins Center and School of Life and Environmental Sciences.

The findings offer a different perspective on the longstanding scientific view that meat consumption was a key driver of human evolution. They may also offer insight into why we often crave sweet food.

"While animal foods were important, the brain's need for glucose has received little attention from anthropologists," Brand-Miller said.

Over a period of 4 million years, human brain size increased from around 300 grams in early hominins to about 1,500 grams in modern humans. As brains grew, so did demand for glucose, which is required by other tissues, including red blood cells, kidneys and reproductive organs.

"The human brain is unusually large for our body size and requires substantial amounts of energy," Brand-Miller said.

"Glucose is the brain's primary energy source, and for much of human evolution, would have come from carbohydrates found in foods such as fruit and honey."

With the help of 3-D printers, even hobbyists can make model rockets or gaming accessories out of seemingly nothing. What if that printer could make new body parts, such as an ear, lung or skin? This may sound like science fiction. But scientists are already using living cells to “ink” prototypes of these tissues. 

This 3-D bioprinting uses the same basic strategy now used to print toys, sculptures, metal pieces or even basketballs. Specialized printers just swap out plastic or metal for living cells.

Actually, there’s a bit more to it than that. In most cases, you can’t use the same devices to make tissues. And you can’t just spew cells onto a surface, layer by layer, and expect them to link up into working organs. The cells have to be mixed with some soft, gel-like materials to make them unite with their neighbors.

Although still experimental, some devices have already printed skin, cartilage and even early-stage blood vessels. In 2025, researchers in Australia used an experimental robot to bioprint ink made from a patient’s own skin cells directly onto her burn wounds.

Scientists have made a surprising finding about how an asexually reproducing stick insect has evolved. Research led by Dr. Darren Parker, lecturer in evolutionary biology at Bangor University, studied the genes of several species of Timema (a type of stick insect), which have not engaged in sexual reproduction for 1 million years—the longest known asexual period for any insect.

The wingless stick insects are native to the far western United States and reproduce by a form of virgin birth in which an embryo develops from an unfertilized egg, bypassing the need for male fertilization. This phenomenon, known as parthenogenesis, occurs naturally in some animal species.

Because some species of Timema have reproduced without sex for so long, the scientists behind the study, published in PNAS, expected that the system that evolved to balance gene expression on the sex chromosomes would have eroded over time. But that was not the case.

Parker explained, "Males and females have a different number of X chromosomes; males have one (XY), and females have two (XX). As a result, gene expression needs to be balanced equally between them. Species have evolved a wide range of mechanisms known as 'dosage compensation' to do just this. But what happens when these mechanisms for equally sharing male and female genes are no longer needed? That's the question we set out to answer.

"This is the precise situation found in asexually reproducing stick insects. Because the females reproduce without fertilization from males, there is no need to equalize gene expression. By investigating gene expression in rare males, our study found that rather than decaying away as we expected, dosage compensation mechanisms remained fully functional despite not being needed for over a million years."

The findings challenge long-standing assumptions about how quickly biological systems decay when they are no longer under strong evolutionary pressure and offer a reminder that evolution does not always discard what it no longer needs.

Scientists are preparing for an interstellar rescue of humanity's most distant spacecraft, Voyager 1, after fixing up its twin from billions of miles away.

According to a NASA statement released Aug. 4, a clever power-saving maneuver known as the "Big Bang" helped the agency avoid having to shut off another one of the Voyager 2 probe's three remaining science instruments later this year. The Big Bang procedure involves selectively shutting off some high-power instruments on the Voyager probes while switching on lower-power alternatives, all while keeping the spacecraft warm enough to operate in the frigid environment of interstellar space.

"The idea is to swap out a group of powered devices all at once — hence the nickname — turning some things off, and replacing them with lower-power alternatives, to keep the spacecraft warm enough to continue gathering science data," representatives from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the mission, wrote in an April blog post.

NASA carefully ran tests on Voyager 2 before implementing the procedure in May and June. Now, sharing the results of those tests in the Aug. 4 statement, NASA reports a successful power transfer that should keep Voyager 2 running a while longer.

"The savings should provide power to keep its three instruments operating for at least an extra year," NASA wrote of the Big Bang.

In a laboratory 2 kilometers underground, a crane lowers Matt Depatie, a detector technologist, through a hatch into a white-walled cavern filled with about 7,000 tons of ultrapure water that glows as blue as wiper fluid in the light. “Splashdown,” Depatie says over a radio as he steps into an inflatable raft waiting below.

Normally, the cavern is one of the darkest places on Earth, but today, it is lit up for maintenance, offering us a rare chance to see inside. I peer through the hatch at Depatie as he paddles over to examine the submerged experiment. He’s inspecting a house-size detector built to catch some of the most elusive particles known to physics: neutrinos.

This is the SNO+ neutrino experiment, buried deep within the Creighton mine at Snolab, an underground physics laboratory in Sudbury, Canada. SNO+ consists of an acrylic sphere lined with nearly 10,000 sensitive light detectors and filled with 780 tons of oily liquid scintillator, which flashes when lit up by energetic particles. The water around the device and the rock above it shield the detector from the glare of cosmic radiation, allowing the flickers of less common particle interactions to shine through.

Our whole journey down has been part of the crusade to maintain absolute darkness, even beyond the visible spectrum of light. As we descended the main shaft and walked through a rocky tunnel to the lab, our bodies and clothes collected minute amounts of radioactive radon dust. Before entering the main laboratory space, we tossed our mine clothes, showered, and changed into electric blue jumpsuits and hairnets to minimize the contamination we carried in with us. “The showers aren’t for you,” Depatie said as we changed, “they’re for the science.”

The dodo has been extinct for more than 300 years, wiped out within decades of humans arriving on its home island of Mauritius, but it lives on in the public imagination.

This famous flightless bird has become a symbol of extinction. Its demise is often portrayed as almost inevitable: a supposedly foolish creature that naïvely approached the sailors who killed it.

Early accounts even describe people holding a captured dodo and letting it cry out so others would wander over. In the 18th century, Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus dubbed the species Dodus ineptus after its reputation for dim wits and silliness.

But new research shows this image is misleading. The dodo was likely no less intelligent than any modern bird. It may also have possessed a rare and overlooked ecological trait: an adaptation to life in low light.

A closer look inside a vanished bird's head
With a team of collaborators across Canada, Australia, the United States, Europe and the UK, our new study looked in detail at the reconstruction of the dodo's brain.

There are only three completely preserved dodo skulls in existence. Using high-resolution CT scans of all three, we could reconstruct the shape of the dodo skull and get a detailed idea of the size and shape of its brain.

This also allowed us to digitally measure the structures associated with vision, smell and cognition (or "smarts"). These scans can also be shared with the research community.

The dodo was a member of the pigeon family, so its living relatives include the pigeons in our cities and the doves whose calls accompany mornings around the world. Pigeons are famous for their navigational skills and are widely used by scientists to study animal cognition.

Is there any indication that the dodo's brain was much different? When we compared the dodo's brain to that of pigeons, we found that the dodo's forebrain, linked to cognition and memory, was similar in proportion to that of other pigeons when compared to the rest of the brain.

In other words, there is no evidence the dodo was less intelligent than any other pigeon. This is also backed up by previous research suggesting that brain size relative to body mass was similar to that of other pigeons.

So we think the dodo's trusting behavior was because it simply had nothing to fear until humans arrived, as is common for island species with no predators.

A giant pigeon with an unexpected twist
Where the dodo does differ dramatically from other pigeons is in its sensory systems, particularly its vision. The dodo's optic lobes, the brain region that first processes visual information in the bird brain, are unusually small—not just compared to pigeons, but also compared to another extinct flightless relative, the Rodrigues solitaire.

In the past 20 years, an increasing number of bacterial infections caught by children have been resistant to antibiotics, a new study finds.

The research, published in July in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, looked back at the past two decades, as well as looked forward, to predict how resistance rates might change in the decade to come. By 2035, some critical antibiotics will be met with "steep increases" in resistance among common bacteria, such as Acinetobacter baumannii and Klebsiella, the analysis found.

Antibiotic resistance contributed to 840,000 deaths among children under 5 in 2021, global estimates suggest, so if resistance continues to increase, that number could grow.

"These forecasts are warning scenarios, not inevitable outcomes," said study co-author Dr. Yanhong Jessika Hu, a clinical epidemiologist and public health researcher at Murdoch Children's Research Institute (MCRI) in Australia. "The projections broadly assume that historical patterns continue without a major change in direction," Hu told Live Science in an email.

If significant action is taken, that trajectory could be altered, she said.

"Resistance increased across all regions"
Antibiotic resistance is sometimes called "a silent pandemic," as it poses a formidable threat without stirring as much concern as other health crises, such as viral outbreaks. Resistance has gained attention in recent years, but the data on how it has affected children is patchy, said study co-author Dr. Penelope Bryant, a clinician-researcher at MCRI, Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne, and the University of Melbourne.

"It's perceived as being a lesser problem in children," Bryant told Live Science. "It's not a theoretical problem; it's real, and it's happening. But I think the visibility is just substantially less than in adults."

In a global first, researchers at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in China have found experimental evidence to confirm the presence of a glueball, a new form of matter. The research findings were made at the Beijing Spectrometer III (BESIII) experiment, as part of an international collaboration headed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). 

The Standard Model of physics states that the building blocks of our universe, atoms, are made up of matter particles and force carriers. Matter particles, or fermions, named quarks, build up protons and neutrons, the positively and neutrally charged particles inside the atomic nucleus. A force carrier holds the quarks together; this carrier is called a gluon. 

Physicists have long held that gluons can also attract each other and bind together to form a glueball, an entirely new form of matter that is composed only of a force carrier. For the past five decades, multiple experiments have been carried out to prove the existence of a glueball. However, it was only in 2011 that scientists in China spotted a potential glueball candidate in the experiments conducted at the Beijing Spectrometer III (BES III). 
...
Why is it important? 
More recently, the researchers also found many new decay modes of X(2370) while also determining its ‘flavor-singlet’ nature, where they lack quark flavor signatures. This is the most important and defining characteristic of a glueball and establishes a complete chain of experimental evidence for a pseudoscalar glueball. 

This confirms the theoretical prediction that gluons can bind to each other and form an entirely new kind of matter. The discovery is also a direct test of the non-Abelian gauge structure in quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which also states that gluons are capable of attracting and binding each other, without the involvement of quarks. 

This is important, since it also helps establish that QCD is a correct theory and it has been validated at low energies. As the clearest experiment in over 50 years to have found the evidence for glueballs, the finding also demonstrates the importance of the BEPC II in studies of strong interactions.