Popular Science

Broadly speaking, our solar system is simply a collection of planets, their moons, and other cosmic objects like asteroids existing in gravitational orbits around the sun. There are countless systems out there like it, too. But one stellar system about 72 light-years from Earth isn’t quite like anything else researchers have ever seen. In fact, astronomer Kevin Hoy would go so far as to describe CD-35 2722 as “super weird” compared to our corner of the galaxy.

“The system is somewhat hard to define using solar system-based words like ‘planet’ and ‘moon,’” the astronomer from Chile’s Universidad Diego Portales and the Millennium Nucleus of Young Exoplanets and their Moons (YEMS) recently said in a statement.

The system is detailed in a study co-authored by Hoy and recently published in the journal Nature.

Hoy and colleagues recently aimed the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) at the young oddball system CD-35 2722 that centers on a star about half the mass as the sun. Orbiting this star is a brown dwarf, which is a type of gas giant that is larger than a planet, yet smaller than a star. In this case, the brown dwarf is about 30 times more massive than Jupiter—but it’s not alone. Orbiting that object is yet another entity with a mass equivalent to Jupiter itself. 

“The exosatellite is clearly massive enough to be a planet, but it does not orbit a star, though it orbits an object that orbits a star,” said Hoy.

So is it a moon, or not?

“We have a clear delineation between the planets and the sun in the solar system, so defining things like moons is simple,” added YEMS director and study-coauthor Alice Zurlo. “In the CD-35 2722 system, where we are blurring the lines between stars, planets, and moons, the whole thing becomes more complicated to describe.”

According to their study, Hoy, Zurlo, and their team suspect their mystery may be an exosatellite or exomoon. These are naturally occurring planetary satellites located outside the solar system. Although researchers have documented over 6,000 exoplanets throughout the cosmos, the handful of exomoon candidates still lack enough evidence to prove their identities. If true, it would be the first of its kind ever confirmed by astronomers. For now, more observations are needed before astronomers can definitively classify the strange entity—but it’s also a matter of scientific semantics.

“Being the third wheel in this system makes us want to call it a moon, even if it is nothing like the small, rocky moons we have in our system.”

Regardless, the latest exomoon suspect marks a major moment in exploring the universe.

“As exotic as it is, this system is truly unique and represents a breakthrough: the first plausible detection of an exosatellite,” said Zurlo.

The post ‘Super weird’ object may be space’s first confirmed exomoon appeared first on Popular Science.

About 5,000 years ago, avocados went on an excellent adventure. Humans migrating north towards Nicaragua from parts of South America brought avocado seeds and then planted the fruit in Central America’s humid lowlands. The avocados then hybridized with the native varieties, producing a wide range of avocados that are large with smooth skin, and still enjoyed in the region today. 

While they may look like the avocados we love in our guacamole, these are genetically distinct from the commercially grown fruits found at your local grocery store. This genetic difference and migration is detailed in a study published today in the journal Plants, People, Planet, and shows the vast diversity of these delicious green fruits.

“What’s pretty fascinating about Nicaraguan avocados is that they look pretty darn similar to ones you might find in supermarkets in humid areas across the globe, like in Florida or the Caribbean,” Kevin Wann, a study co-author and archaeologist with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, tells Popular Science. “Despite their apparent similarity to other tropical avocados, the ones that I collected comprise a completely different genetic lineage.”

That guac is made of clones

Avocado trees (Persea americana) naturally extend from Mexico south to Peru. For over 10,000 years, humans have eaten the plant’s fruit that is loaded with vital nutrients and fats. Considered a “superfood,” avocados are now cultivated around the world. Growers produced more than 11 million metric tons of avocados in 2024 alone.

Over 80 percent of these avocados were a single variety known as the Hass avocado (Persea americana ‘Hass’). The large and long-lasting avocados are produced through a process called clonal grafting. A branch is removed from one Hass avocado tree and then attached to another tree to bear the same fruit. As a result of this cloning process, most avocados you see in a grocery store or restaurant are genetically indistinguishable. This lack of genetic diversity makes Hass avocados vulnerable to the same threats. One disease or change in temperature or rain patterns can wipe out an entire population of Hass avocados.

Increasing this genetic diversity of avocados is crucial to protect this multi-billion-dollar industry. To find genetically different varieties, Wann points to the muggy lowlands of Nicaragua and Honduras. Over thousands of years, traditional agricultural practices have fine tuned the region’s native avocado varieties, also known as landraces.

“As I began learning more about the interplay between culture and genetics as it pertains to domestication, it became increasingly obvious that our understanding was biased by only looking at commercial cultivars and ignoring the significance of landraces,” Wann explains. 

Food poisoning, a wasp sting, and an exciting first

Wann and a team collected leaf samples from several varieties in southern Mexico, Nicaragua, and coastal Honduras. And his work took dedication. Wann had bouts of food poisoning and was even stung in the face by a wasp during field work in southern Mexico. 

However, he also ate an avocado for the first time. A farmer giving the team a tour of a grove in Nicaragua offered him a piece of the fruit.

“I wanted to see how far I could go into my dissertation studying avocados without ever eating one,” he said. “I made it four years, but when one of the native farmers offered me one, I couldn’t turn him down.”

The team also interviewed local gardeners and rural farmers in Nicaragua and Honduras to learn more about the native avocado varieties they cultivate. This agricultural perspective was crucial, according to study co-author Logan Kistler.

“You can’t think about biodiversity without considering agriculture, because it’s one of the most impactful ecological activities we do,” Kistler, the museum’s curator of archaeobotany and archaeogenomics, said in a statement. “Traditional agricultural practices have shaped these plants for thousands of years.”

The local farmers confirmed that these lowland avocado landraces had not experienced root rot, which is the most common disease affecting commercial avocados. Some Nicaraguan farmers will also graft commercial avocado branches onto native avocado trees, since the native trees are better adapted to the local environment.

Researchers traverse a cloud forest next to a coffee farm near Jinotega, Nicaragua. The muggy lowlands of countries like Nicaragua and Honduras are rich in avocado diversity. Here, traditional agricultural practices have honed the region’s native avocado varieties for thousands of years. Image: Kevin Wann, 2024 Nejapa Archaeology Project. Genes point to a major migration

Back in the lab (and away from wasps), the team extracted and analyzed DNA from their harvested leaf samples. They collected DNA from 47 native avocado landraces (32 of which came from Nicaragua) and compared the DNA from the various landraces with available genetic data from more than 200 other avocado lineages.

The team found that the avocado samples collected in southern Mexico were closely related to the ancestral highland avocado populations found in other parts of Mexico and in commercial varieties. By comparison, the landraces found in Nicaragua’s lowlands were genetically tied to avocados that are found further south, including along the coast of Colombia.

This genetic data revealed that the local landraces in this part of Central America are planted from fruits originally grown in South America. The team believes that human populations brought their local avocado varieties with them as they migrated throughout the Americas. The avocado relocation likely occurred around 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, which is about when other South American crops, like chocolate and some maize varieties, appear in the Central American archaeological record.

“Interactions between cultures across Central and South America skyrocketed [at this time], mostly thanks to increased corn farming,” says Wann. “This sparks a mass exchange of plant resources throughout Latin America, and this is an ongoing process, not just a single movement. Unfortunately, Central America is an under-explored area archaeologically, mostly thanks to a tropical setting for poor artifact preservation and a scholarly preference for Mexico and South America.”

Protecting a popular fruit 

This ancient avocado diversity preserved in Central America’s lowlands could help protect today’s crops. Other clonal crops—those cultivated asexually from cuttings or grafting rather than from seeds—have been devastated by fungal pathogens. For example, bananas could go extinct from a fungal disease called Fusarium wilt of banana (FWB), which blocks the flow of nutrients and makes them wilt. The pathogen even made Gros Michel bananas functionally extinct in the 1950s. 

The region’s local landraces are also adapted to warmer and wetter climates, which are both increasing due to climate change. 

“A plant like the avocado, which is so important to our global diets, is always subject to climate change, particularly with a fruit whose main exports come from a single clone,” says Wann. “History has shown us that just one new disease is enough to devastate a plant’s entire market when there’s an over-reliance on such a small genetic diversity. Conservation of genetic resources is the best counter to unknown climatic threats, and its awareness is always a great first step.”

The post Humans packed avocados before migrating across the Americas 5,000 years ago appeared first on Popular Science.

You’d have to be living under a dumpster not to have heard of Jimothy, Seattle’s favorite raccoon and the internet’s newest folk hero. He’s inspired nicknames like ‘King Jimothy,’ as well as fan art, tattoos, and even his own meme, ‘Hot Jimothy Summer,‘ after racking up millions of views this month. Beyond the basic masked bandit cuteness of his species, Jimothy has become a sensation largely thanks to his compact, adorably round shape, the apparent result of a rare condition called short spine syndrome.

Jimothy first turned up near a Goodwill store in Ballard, Washington.

“I initially thought I saw a cat under a car and wanted to have a closer look,” Kiana Hall, the Seattle resident whose video introduced Jimothy to the world, tells Popular Science, “then realized it wasn’t the shape of a cat at all.” It wasn’t until Jimothy turned around that Hall noticed his telltale markings and realized he was a raccoon. As for the origin of his unusual name?   

“He just looked like a Jimothy to me,” says Hall.

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A post shared by Kiana (@c1vrgr1)

Online, commenters have since compared Jimothy’s unusual appearance to a cryptid, evoking everything from Bigfoot to the chupacabra.

It’s Jimothy’s world, and we’re all living in it, but his fame raises some real questions about what causes short spine syndrome, why it’s so rarely documented in wild animals, and what it might mean for Jimothy’s future. 

So what exactly is short spine syndrome, and how did it leave Jimothy with that unmistakable, highly lovable, no-neck silhouette?

What’s wrong with Jimothy? Why does he look like that?

Short spine syndrome is a rare genetic condition, says Julian D. Avery, an ecologist at Penn State University. A faulty recessive gene causes the condition, meaning an animal needs two copies, one from each parent, for the syndrome to actually appear.

“The odds of putting two individuals together that have it are generally pretty rare,” Avery says, “and probably rare in part because the animals with this condition will have significantly more challenges than a normally formed animal would have in any kind of context.”

Short spine syndrome is a condition that affects the formation of a developing spine, leaving an animal with a shortened, compressed, or fused set of vertebrae. Avery likens the process to rolling out a long tube of Pillsbury dough, then pressing down at regular intervals to pinch off individual segments, roughly how a developing spine differentiates into distinct vertebrae. “That does not unfold properly in animals that have these faulty genes,” he says.

The added challenges for animals with short spine syndrome likely explain why cases like Jimothy’s are so rarely seen at all. Jimothy, though, seems to be one of the lucky ones.

“He seems to have made it through this developmental process in a way that allows him to be pretty successful,” Avery says. “He or she. I don’t think anyone knows whether it’s male or female.”

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Will Jimothy the raccoon be okay?

Despite his unusual shape and the difficulties it might pose, Avery says animals with short spine syndrome generally have normal brain function and internal organs.

“There’s no reason to think the lungs are compromised or the brain is compromised,” he says. “I would expect that Jimothy would have a normal life.”

Given how Jimothy appears in his viral videos, actively foraging, climbing, and moving with apparent ease, there’s real reason for optimism. Raccoons as a species tend to come equipped with this kind of adaptability, Avery says.

“Raccoons are crazy resourceful,” he says. “They’re one of those species that is generalized enough that they can make a go in many kinds of situations and be successful.”

The bigger risk to Jimothy isn’t his condition, Avery points out. It’s how people react to him. 

“When people start feeding wild animals, then they start hanging around in unsafe ways,” he says. Habituated animals become more likely to be hit by cars, or removed by wildlife officials once they are viewed as too tame. 

“They’re not wary enough of those threats coming at them, and then they suffer,” Avery says. 

Raccoons generally live up to three years in the wild, but can live as many as 20 years in captivity. Image: Julian Avery How we can help Jimothy

When it comes to intervening in situations like Jimothy’s, Avery recommends a strict hands-off approach. “I’m always on the side of letting wild animals run their course,” he says. “You want natural variation in a population.”

That doesn’t mean you should stop admiring Jimothy’s adorably circular physique from a distance, though—quite the opposite.

“If more people are going to see Jimothy and doing so at a respectful distance, that’s awesome,” Avery says. “That’s more people that have seen a raccoon and are then going to get hooked on wanting to see a porcupine or robins nesting in their shrubs. Those sorts of things really get people invested and caring about what’s going wrong in the world around us.”

Washington’s own wildlife agency echoes Avery’s hands-off philosophy for Jimothy-watchers. In a written statement to CBC News, a spokesperson for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife said, “We do encourage folks to leave the animal alone as it does appear to be getting around fine, unassisted, with the apparent congenital defect.”

That said, his fandom shows no signs of slowing down. On July 26, Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck plans to present an official proclamation in Jimothy’s honor, commemorating what she’s calling ‘Jimothy Summer,’ complete with a community art competition.

Amid all the fanfare, Hall says her hope is simple: That Jimothy keeps bringing people joy, and that people, in turn, look out for him.

“It has been so fun watching Jimothy bring some joy and silliness to the world,” she says, “and I hope this encourages people to go out for walks in their neighborhood and observe the wildlife around them.”

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.

The post Jimothy the raccoon has a rare spinal condition. Here’s what that means. appeared first on Popular Science.

Few people know of its existence, but Bobcat Cave in Huntsville, Alabama, is one of the most unique ecosystems in the United States. With a mapped length of nearly 1,490 feet, the underground limestone network is only passable through low, water-filled tunnels and mud-slick crawlways. Despite these claustrophobic confines, researchers have spent nearly 40 years regularly monitoring Bobcat Cave for its rare resident, the Alabama cave shrimp (Palaemonias alabamae). The tiny, extremely endangered species of nearly translucent freshwater crustacean is only documented in cave systems stretching between Alabama and Tennessee, making them invaluable to conservationists.

But after recent expeditions into Bobcat Cave, researchers now say the small shrimp lives beside an unexpected neighbor. According to their recent study published in the journal Scientific Reports, biologists at Auburn University discovered a pale, eyeless fish measuring less than two inches long. Although diminutive, the new species now has an imposing name: the demon cavefish (Demogorgonichthys arcanus). What’s more, the subterranean dweller is so genetically distinct that it earned its own genus—and that likely makes it one of the rarest fish in the world.

“Most of the time when we discover new species, we are finding differences within organisms we already knew were there,” Jonathan Armbruster, a study co-author and curator of fishes at the Auburn University Museum of Natural History, said in a statement. “This was different. This was a new discovery that had not been seen before, and that is really rare.”

Distribution map, photos in life of ‘Demogorgonichthys arcanus’ gen. et sp. nov. and habitat. Distribution of D. arcanus gen. et sp. nov. from the type locality—Bobcat Cave—and occurrences of ‘Typhlichthys subterraneus’ in the Huntsville metropolitan area in north-central Alabama (A). The boundary of Redstone Arsenal is shown in red hatching. Photos of ‘Demogorgonichthys arcanus ‘sp. nov. in situ on 5 February 2025 at Bobcat Cave (B and D). Pools in the Shrimp Room at Bobcat Cave where ‘D. arcanus’ sp. nov. was discovered (C). Credit: M.L. Niemiller (B and D) / A. Hinkle (C)

The demon cavefish is related to the more common southern cavefish species (Typhlichthys subterraneus) as well as the harder-to-find Alabama cavefish (Speoplatyrhinus poulsoni). However, it possesses some key differences. Aside from its unique snout, body shape, and a lack of coloration, the demon cavefish lacks part of a key gene tied to light sensitivity.

“The Southern Cavefish clearly has some kind of response to light. With this fish, we don’t see that,” said Armbruster. “Part of the rhodopsin gene is missing, so it is no longer functional.”

The demon cavefish’s fearsome scientific name may recall the monstrous Demogorgon from Netflix’s hit series, Stranger Things, but the reference is actually even older. Study co-author and University of Alabama biologist Pamela Hart has long kept a running list of mythological, underground creatures as potential inspirations for future species names. The Demogorgon’s origins trace back not to 1980s Hawkins, Indiana, but to Ancient Greece. Seventeenth century poet John Milton even described it in Paradise Lost. 

Its specific name, “arcanus,” is Latin for “hidden” or “secret,” which is appropriate. So far, researchers have only seen around 20 demon cavefish at a time.

“It may have been living down in the aquifer and only recently made its way up,” Armbruster said. “Or it may have been there before, and we just never saw it.”

Like the Alabama cave shrimp, biologists are using the demon cavefish as another example of the importance of strengthening conservation efforts in these delicate and unique ecosystems.

“It may have been living down in the aquifer and only recently made its way up,” explained Armbruster. “Or it may have been there before, and we just never saw it.”

The post New eyeless ‘demon cavefish’ discovered in Alabama named after mythological Demogorgon appeared first on Popular Science.

The Ojai Raptor Center in Southern California is currently caring for Adult Bald Eagle 26-519, who is believed to be the internet-famous eagle mom named Jackie. On July 18, the San Dimas Raptor Rescue found the eagle weak, vulnerable, and unable to fly. The eagle was transferred to and is being evaluated by the Ojai Raptor Center’s veterinary team. 

The bird is underweight but alert, and is even perching and eating with assistance. Test results should come back within the next few days to confirm or rule out any suspected issues.

Adult Bald Eagle 26-519 is believed to be an eagle named Jackie. Image: Ojai Raptor Center.

“Wildlife medicine is different from working with domestic animals in many ways. Our patients don’t have owners or caretakers who can tell us what happened to them or what symptoms they’ve been experiencing in recent days,” the Ojai Raptor Center wrote. “Every case begins with many unknowns, and recovery depends on factors we’re still investigating, including bloodwork and toxicology results, which take time. Until we understand the full picture, we can’t responsibly predict a timeline or outcome. What we can promise is thorough, attentive care every step of the way.”

Millions around the world have watched the day-to-day lives of Jackie, her partner Shadow, and their current chicks Sandy and Luna via a 24/7 livestream of their nest. Shadow has been taking care of both Sandy and Luna in the meantime, ahead of their impending fledging. 

This story is developing and we will continue to monitor the situation. Viewers can continue to monitor Shadow, Sandy, and Luna via the eagle nest cam livestream.

Jackie and Shadow’s 2026 babies: Everything you need to know

It’s been another roller coaster nesting season for Jackie and Shadow, a pair of internet-famous bald eagle parents living in San Bernardino National Forest in Southern California. After two of their eggs were destroyed by ravens in January, Jackie and Shadow laid two new eggs that have successfully hatched.

Chick 1 hatched on April 4 at 9:33 p.m. PDT, while Chick 2 followed on April 5 at 8:30 a.m. Their large nest in Big Bear Valley east of Los Angeles is livestreamed 24 hours a day by nonprofit Friends of Big Bear Valley (FOBBV) and has captivated millions. 

On May 1, FOBBV announced the chicks’ names: Sandy and Luna.

How long will the chicks stay in the nest? 

Chicks usually stay in the nest until 10 to 14 weeks of age.

What challenges do the eaglets face?

Before leaving the nest, the chicks face threats from other birds of prey, including hawks, ravens, other eagles, and owls. Inclement weather can also present challenges for the chicks. In 2025, a March snowstorm resulted in the death of one of Jackie and Shadow’s three chicks.

During fledging, only 70 percent of eaglets survive. One of the greatest threats is from cars that can injure or kill the birds while they scavenge for food on roadkill. 

Who are Jackie and Shadow? 

The pair first got together in 2018 and successfully raised chicks in 2019 and 2022. However, their eggs failed to hatch in 2023 and 2024. Only 50 percent of eagle eggs successfully hatch, so this pair has already beaten the odds.

What happened to Jackie and Shadow’s 2025 eaglets?

In 2025, Jackie laid three eggs that all hatched in early March. On March 13, a strong snowstorm dumped up to two feet of snow and battered the nest with strong winds. Only two of the chicks were visible on the live cam when the storm passed by the next morning. FOBBV later confirmed the passing of one of the chicks. The two surviving chicks were later named Sunny and Gizmo after 54,000 names were submitted by fans.

What happens after chicks fledge? 

Young eagles usually fledge–or leave the nest and fly–when they can flatten their wings and have feathers capable of flight. This typically occurs when the birds hit 10 to 14 weeks of age. Males also tend to take their first flight a little sooner than females. 

According to FOBBV, fledglings from Southern California have been spotted as far south as Baja California, as far north as British Columbia, and as far east as Yellowstone National Park.

About 70 percent of bald eagles survive the fledgling stage. FOBBV does not tag their eagles, so it’s not possible to follow the chicks’ journeys after they flee the nest.

Can I help Jackie and Shadow?

Yes. Environmental groups are currently fundraising $10 million to protect Jackie and Shadow’s foraging area from development. Learn more at SaveMoonCamp.org.

You can also help the rescue organizations helping nurse the eagle that is likely Jackie back to health by donating to Ojai Raptor Center’s Bald Eagle Recovery Campaign.

Why isn’t Jackie in the nest?

On July 18, the San Dimas Raptor Rescue found an eagle weak, vulnerable, and unable to fly after a reported encounter with other eagles. The bald eagle is believed to be Jackie.

The post Bald eagle believed to be Jackie healing in Ojai appeared first on Popular Science.

Eight grass-woven sandal remnants tossed into a trash heap over 2,000 years ago are new treasured finds for a team of archaeologists in Spain. Based on their exceptionally well-preserved conditions, researchers are now learning more about Iron Age life in the Iberian Peninsula at the cusp of the Roman Empire’s arrival into the region.

The footwear is documented in a recently published study in the journal Pyrenae, and come from excavations at Urium, an ancient mining settlement located in southwestern Spain about 55 miles west of Seville. Archaeologists found the shoes near a metallurgical workshop complex dating back to the mid-first century BCE. During its operations, the extensive site encompassed four work areas, 10 furnaces, and another 16 rooms with still-unknown purposes. The team didn’t locate the sandals in the workshop itself, but within adjacent courtyard ash deposits. Based on the additional scattered discardings like furnace leftovers and everyday items, these likely served as general trash heaps.

The sandal soles are made from a sturdy grass called esparto (Stipa tenacissima), with grooved textures and parallel fiber groupings that differentiate them from other textile plants like hemp and flax. Most of the esparto was used raw instead of softened through multiple soaking cycles, with artisans weaving them into flat, narrow braids that they then shaped into sole frames. A combination of thick cables and thinner strandwork was also carefully arranged depending on their usages. The heftier cords formed the weight-bearing parts of the footwear, while the more flexible twine made the joints and bindings. Each sole measured between 6.7 and 9.8 inches in length, with at least four of them clearly for the left foot.

These weren’t new sandals abandoned or lost by their owners. Instead, signs of heavy use coincide with where archaeologists found them. Most of them were missing their foot-securing cords by the time they landed in the trash, while damage to their forefoot sections showed longtime wear.

Their age ranges particularly surprised researchers, too. Radiocarbon dating traced one sole to the early Roman period (around 28–124 CE), while another example was constructed during the late Iron Age (360–205 BCE). A third sandal’s dating produced a broader time window, about 175–56 BCE. This implies Urium was repeatedly home to local workers over nearly 500 years. That said, the two oldest artifacts could have originated in earlier deposits that Roman residents later disturbed or discarded. Regardless, the style of esparto sandals were clearly worn for decades before the area was fully absorbed by the Romans in 19 BCE.

Plant-based footwear typically breaks down quickly, leaving little left for archaeologists to study. But thanks to the sandal soles residing amid the ashy furnace heaps for centuries, they remained comparatively stabilized. The organic preservation also preserved ropes and baskets made from similar materials found by researchers in the sediment.

Based on their state at the time of their disposal, it’s clear these esparto sandals weren’t casual accessories, ceremonial costume components, or luxury items. Instead, their worn-down state, broken straps, and muddy soles show the preferred footwear of laborers. It’s rare that remnants of such ancient people endure for millennia—and it’s even rarer for items crafted using such short-lived organic resources.

The post 2,000-year-old grass sandals discovered in Iron Age ash heap appeared first on Popular Science.

Minnesota wildlife rehabilitator and ornithologist Foxfeather Zenkova trades sequins for imitation bird feathers when getting dressed up for a Saturday night. Recently, Zenkova donned an elaborate costume nicknamed “Ugly Mom,” all to care for an orphaned sandhill crane (Antigone canadensis). Outfits like Ugly Mom disguise human wildlife rehabilitators as adult animals, allowing them to care for orphaned animals and lessen the risk that the baby will imprint on a human before release.

“Many times a chick is found on its own, and a young sandhill should never be alone,” Zenkova, who runs Vulture Conservancy and Foxfeather and the Foxloft, tells Popular Science. “They stick like glue to their parents’ side, not straying more than a few yards from them until they’re basically full size and it’s time for migration in the fall.”

The puppets help cover up human hands during feedings. Image: Foxfeather Zenkova.

Sandhill cranes are one of the tallest birds in North America at nearly four feet tall with an impressive seven-foot wingspan. During the summer months, they are found in small bogs, marshes, and prairies across northern North America and the southeastern United States. During the winter, large flocks of sandhill cranes are found in Bosque del Apache, New Mexico, and Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge in Texas.

“They move with a prehistoric elegance, and their loud, bugling calls can travel for miles across wetlands, sounding like something you’d hear in Jurassic Park,” Zenkova says.

Sandhill cranes are also fast learners, highly observant, have a great memory, and are considered highly intelligent. However, this intelligence and innate social behavior can be a challenge in a rehabilitation setting.

“Craving strong social bonds and with eager minds, young cranes can become attached to people surprisingly quickly,” Zenkova explains. “Because they learn social behaviors from the adults around them, human imprinting can make it difficult, or even impossible, for them to live a normal life in the wild. That’s why rehabilitators go to extraordinary lengths to keep human interaction to a minimum, using crane costumes, puppets, mirrors, and captive surrogate foster cranes to help chicks identify with their own species instead of people.”

Another rehabilitation challenge is more physical—and can get uncomfortable in the summer. Cranes also move a lot and can walk mere hours after hatching. After a few days, they cover miles a day with their parents. This movement is critical to a young crane’s health and development and they can grow up to one inch per day. 

“This requires a lot of dedicated space and also time, and here during an uncommonly hot Minnesota summer this year it means me slogging around in the sun in full ‘Ugly Mom’ costume for hours a day, foraging and exercising different babies,” says Zenkova.

Currently, Zenkova’s clinic is caring for four orphaned sandhills, with a fifth on the way. Most chicks are orphaned after one or both parents are struck and killed by cars while crossing the road.  

Young sandhill cranes are rarely orphaned on purpose. It is usually because one or both parents have been struck by a car. Image: Foxfeather Zenkova.

If you believe that you have found an orphaned sandhill crane chick, it’s important to keep your distance at first. It is rare that a parent will abandon a chick and they may be hidden in vegetation or nearby but out of sight. 

“One of our orphaned cranes came in this year because it was parked under someone’s bird feeder for two weeks with no parents in sight,” Zenkova explains. “The homeowners [understandably] thought maybe the parents just visited occasionally like a mother deer or rabbit would, but it’s not normal for a baby crane to stay in one place alone like that and it did need help.”

Since these are wild birds, do not attempt to care for one yourself or turn to the internet for advice. According to Zenkova, it is full of misinformation that can end up harming the bird since rehabilitation is more than just feeding the animal. Reach out to a licensed animal rehabilitation center in your area as soon as possible, especially if the animal has obvious injuries or is constantly calling out. Animal Help Now can help you find licensed rehabilitators in your area. Animal rehabilitators are also always looking for volunteers to learn how to care for animals, as well as the public’s support through donations. 

After orphaned or injured cranes successfully heal, complete swimming therapy to strengthen broken legs, or learn how to be social with other cranes, they can be released. In Minnesota, where Zenkova works, rehabilitated sandhill cranes can be released in the fall.

“Rehabilitating cranes is a ton of work, but watching a crane chick heal and thrive is a great privilege for me,” Zenkova says. “There’s nothing better than the feeling of seeing them re-join their counterparts once again and get a second chance at a wild life at release.”

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The post Costumed ‘Ugly Mom’ helps orphaned sandhill cranes appeared first on Popular Science.

Walk your dog long enough and you’ll most likely see it: After peeing or pooping, you’ll see your trusty companion kick up a spray of grass and dirt with their back legs, sometimes in a real frenzy, then trot off. 

Some owners find it messy and tug their dog away. But the post-poop kick isn’t a bad habit to break or some quirky backyard dance. It’s a normal behavior, and there’s a real reason behind it.

It’s two signals in one

Dr. Carlo Siracusa, a veterinary behaviorist at the University of Pennsylvania, says that the exaggerated kick is actually a way for a dog to leave a signal, or mark, for other dogs. “It’s a form of communication.” 

But this post-pee mark isn’t only about claiming territory. It’s also about presence and timing, a way of saying “I was here.” When a dog sniffs where another dog kicked the dirt or leaves, they can read the (sometimes literal) tea leaves and know how recently or long ago that other dog came by. That’s why dogs keep topping up their marks. A scent that’s a few days old provides different information from one laid down an hour ago. 

The kicked up mark carries two different pieces of information. There’s the smell, and there’s the scratching itself, which Siracusa describes as a visual signal on top of the scent. The kicking spreads the odor over a wider patch of ground and pushes some of it into the air, and it leaves a scuffed spot another dog can see. 

“If you are around, you can see me,” he says, speaking from the dog’s perspective. “But for those of you that are not yet here, you would smell that I was here.” He compares it to the way a cat marks, with a visible display in the moment and a scent that stays behind.

This little fluff ball is marking their territory and leaving messages for other dogs when they kick their legs back after peeing. Video: DOG KICK UP GRASS AFTER PEEING, @GhighiVlogs

Courtney Sexton, a postdoctoral researcher at Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, lands on the same two-part explanation, though she notes that she hasn’t studied ground-scratching directly. Excrement and urine are loaded with information, she says, and the kick helps broadcast it. 

“If you’re kicking after you go, it’s just going to spread that scent around a larger surface area and increase the likelihood that someone [or, more likely, another dog] passing by is going to catch it.” Some of it drifts into the air, so a dog downwind catches it, too.

The habit goes back to wolves

Sexton traces this behavior to dogs’ wild relatives: wolves. For wolves, territory matters, and scent marks are how a pack signals that this is their turf and warns others to stay away. Other wolves can read stress hormones in a mark or work out what the other animal has been eating. 

Studies of free-ranging dogs show that dogs, like wolves, also leave marks to signal where their territory is. In a 2012 study of a free-ranging dog pack, researchers found the dogs used their marks, including ground-scratching, to set up something like a property line and to threaten rivals during fights. 

A 2024 study of free-ranging dogs found males were more territorial than females and reacted most strongly to the scent of males from neighboring groups.

Most dogs in the world aren’t household pets, Sexton points out. Many are free ranging, living in loose groups where territory still counts. For a dog asleep on your bed the stakes are lower, but it’s held onto the behavior anyway. Even your domesticated pup often will take the same walking route every day and at the dog park, leaving other dogs pee-mail in kicked up leaves.

For some dogs, it may be about nerves

Siracusa adds a second factor from his clinical work. Anxious dogs, especially in busy environments such as crowded cities, may mark as a way of reasserting themselves. The point, he says, is to get across a simple “I’m around,” so that the dog can avoid difficult encounters with other dogs. 

He doesn’t push the idea too far. There’s no data showing anxious dogs ground-scratch more than calm ones, he says, only a broader pattern he sees in the clinic that anxious dogs mark more in general. 

Ground-scratching is just one way dogs mark. Others include urine marking and overmarking, where a dog deliberately marks over another dog’s scent. 

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No one has studied what’s actually in the scent

Dogs also have scent glands in their feet, so scratching probably lets out some scent from their paws while also spreading the initial mark. But what those glands add to the message hasn’t been studied, according to Siracusa. 

“There are glands in the paws,” Siracusa says, but which pheromones they release, and what each one means, hasn’t been worked out. 

There is some research pertaining to the paw scent, though. A 2020 study found dogs can tell one dog’s foot gland scent from another’s, though it was unclear whether they can tell the depositor’s sex from it. 

When it’s worth paying attention

For owners, when your precious Lassie kicks up the dirt after peeing, it’s usually nothing to fret about. Siracusa says he can’t remember a single client who found it worrying, or even annoying. Not every dog does it, and a dog that does may not do it every time.

What’s worth watching is a change from your own dog’s usual pattern. A dog that always scratches and suddenly stops, or one that starts doing it in a strained, awkward way, could be dealing with pain, rather than sending a message, especially if it comes with other signs like whining during elimination. 

“I’m more interested in the change in the normal behavior of a dog,” Siracusa says, “rather than the individual behavior itself.”

For the vast majority of dogs, though, it’s nothing to fix. So, the next time your dog fires grass and dirt across the yard, let them. Just mind where you’re standing.

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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NASA’s asteroid-hunting Psyche spacecraft recently needed a little gravitational assist from Mars to keep speeding towards its intended target, but it didn’t leave the Red Planet empty-handed. While testing its various research instruments ahead of using them on the distant, metal-rich space rock 16 Psyche in 2029, the spacecraft snapped a travel album’s worth of flyby photos with its pair of identical cameras. 

NASA has released a compilation of the images taken during Psyche’s monthlong slingshot path in May. And unlike the thin crescent vantage point seen earlier, the stunning close-ups showcase the windswept surface, massive craters, and even the solar polar ice cap on Earth’s closest planetary neighbor.

“The imager performed brilliantly, delivering some rarely seen views of the Red Planet,” Jim Bell, Psyche’s imager instrument lead at Arizona State University, said in a statement.

In addition to the pictures themselves, the team successfully tested Psyche’s camera calibrations and scattered light sensitivity. These trial runs also included highlighting Martian moons Phobos and Deimos—a process that will be repeated at the asteroid to hopefully locate any potential orbital moonlets. Meanwhile, mission specialists tested Psyche’s neutron and gamma-ray spectrometer. Planetary bodies and asteroids emit neutrons and gamma rays while absorbing waves of high-energy cosmic rays. Researchers can then use these waves to match with known elements to determine the object’s chemical makeup. At its closest flyby altitude of 2,864 miles, Psyche remained too far away to pick up any Martian gamma rays, but the team hoped to possibly flag neutrons as they left the planet.

“Around the time of Mars’ closest approach, the neutron spectrometer detected a count-rate enhancement close to what we anticipated. It was very gratifying to see,” said spectrometer science lead David Lawrence.

Then there is Psyche’s magnetometer. The instrument will eventually analyze the asteroid’s core, whose metal composition will reveal if it’s a rocky planet building block known as a planetesimal. Psyche’s magnetometer will still be a very useful tool before it reaches its target. It has been running ever since the spacecraft’s launch in 2023 so that researchers can measure solar winds. As it approached Mars, the equipment relayed a huge increase in its magnetic field that aligned with an area of the planet that absorbs the most solar wind known as the bow shock region.

“We didn’t anticipate big discoveries, given how extensively the planet has been studied, but we did complement Mars science with the data we collected through Psyche’s unique perspective,” said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Psyche’s principal investigator at the University of California, Berkeley.

With Mars in the rear view mirror, Psyche is now continuing along its 2.2-billion-mile journey to its diminutive asteroid, with even more work to do.Next up is restarting its solar-electric propulsion system to supply sustained thrust, which specialists expect to handle later in the year.

The post Mars’ desolate desert landscape captured by asteroid-bound NASA spacecraft appeared first on Popular Science.

UPDATE, July 20, 2026, 3:21pm EDT: Friends of Big Bear Valley posted an update Monday afternoon confirming it was in contact with the rehabilitation center where Jackie is receiving treatment. In a Facebook post, they wrote: “Jackie is stable and they are waiting on diagnostic results that can take several days. When we have additional information, we will post it here. Jackie is a strong eagle and we as a community will get through this.

Meanwhile, Shadow is an excellent mate and father, he continues to care for Sandy and Luna while protecting the nest and territory.”

An adult bald eagle recently rescued by the Los Angeles County Parks San Dimas Raptor Rescue is likely an internet-famous eagle mom named Jackie. Millions around the world have tuned into the day-to-day lives of Jackie, her partner Shadow, and their current chicks Sandy and Luna via a 24/7 livestream of their nest. 

According to Friends of Big Bear Valley (FOBBV), they are in touch with the rescue organization and other facilities involved in the eagle’s care.

“She is in the best place she can be and getting the care she needs. We have not received any updates but were assured by the facility they will contact us when they have information,” FOBBV writes, while sharing video of the rescue from the County of Los Angeles Department of Parks and Recreation.

On July 17, an adult bald eagle was found on the ground near Dana Point Park. The same bird had been observed there the previous day as well. The eagle was also seen during a short altercation on the ground with two other subadult eagles. Cell phone video confirmed that the adult was able to fend off the other eagles by turning over and using its talons, but could not fly away. The LA County Parks San Dimas Raptor Rescue then picked up the eagle and it was transferred to an unnamed specialty care facility.

At the same time, FOBBV reported that it had not seen Jackie on their cameras for several days. However, it is not clear how many visiting eagles are currently in the area around Big Bear Lake and she is not banded, so it has been difficult to officially confirm if it is Jackie. 

This story is developing and we will continue to monitor the situation and provide updates. In the meantime, viewers can monitor Shadow as he cares for Sandy and Luna ahead of their impending fledging. 

Jackie and Shadow’s 2026 babies: Everything you need to know

It’s been another roller coaster nesting season for Jackie and Shadow, a pair of internet-famous bald eagle parents living in San Bernardino National Forest in Southern California. After two of their eggs were destroyed by ravens in January, Jackie and Shadow laid two new eggs that have successfully hatched.

Chick 1 hatched on April 4 at 9:33 p.m. PDT, while Chick 2 followed on April 5 at 8:30 a.m. Their large nest in Big Bear Valley east of Los Angeles is livestreamed 24 hours a day by nonprofit Friends of Big Bear Valley (FOBBV) and has captivated millions. 

On May 1, FOBBV announced the chicks’ names: Sandy and Luna.

How long will the chicks stay in the nest? 

Chicks usually stay in the nest until 10 to 14 weeks of age.

What challenges do the eaglets face?

Before leaving the nest, the chicks face threats from other birds of prey, including hawks, ravens, other eagles, and owls. Inclement weather can also present challenges for the chicks. In 2025, a March snowstorm resulted in the death of one of Jackie and Shadow’s three chicks.

During fledging, only 70 percent of eaglets survive. One of the greatest threats is from cars that can injure or kill the birds while they scavenge for food on roadkill. 

Who are Jackie and Shadow? 

The pair first got together in 2018 and successfully raised chicks in 2019 and 2022. However, their eggs failed to hatch in 2023 and 2024. Only 50 percent of eagle eggs successfully hatch, so this pair has already beaten the odds.

What happened to Jackie and Shadow’s 2025 eaglets?

In 2025, Jackie laid three eggs that all hatched in early March. On March 13, a strong snowstorm dumped up to two feet of snow and battered the nest with strong winds. Only two of the chicks were visible on the live cam when the storm passed by the next morning. FOBBV later confirmed the passing of one of the chicks. The two surviving chicks were later named Sunny and Gizmo after 54,000 names were submitted by fans.

What happens after chicks fledge? 

Young eagles usually fledge–or leave the nest and fly–when they can flatten their wings and have feathers capable of flight. This typically occurs when the birds hit 10 to 14 weeks of age. Males also tend to take their first flight a little sooner than females. 

According to FOBBV, fledglings from Southern California have been spotted as far south as Baja California, as far north as British Columbia, and as far east as Yellowstone National Park.

About 70 percent of bald eagles survive the fledgling stage. FOBBV does not tag their eagles, so it’s not possible to follow the chicks’ journeys after they flee the nest.

Can I help Jackie and Shadow?

Yes. Environmental groups are currently fundraising $10 million to protect Jackie and Shadow’s foraging area from development. Learn more at SaveMoonCamp.org.

The post Bald eagle Jackie rescued after fight with other birds appeared first on Popular Science.

Only a handful of species apart from humans are known to understand geometry. It’s considered so rare among other animals that most scientists have long assumed even our closest non-human primate relatives struggle to grasp the concept of shapes and space. But according to a new study published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, some monkeys may not only have a solid handle on geometrical ideas—they cognitively process them in the same way as humans.

“What surprised us wasn’t just that monkeys could do the task. It was that monkeys, children and adults seemed to think about geometric relationships in fundamentally the same way,” Jessica Cantlon, a study co-author, a cognitive neuroscientist at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), explained in a statement. “That suggests these intuitions are part of the basic architecture of the primate mind.”

Canton and colleagues designed an experiment focusing on olive baboons (Papio anubis) and Rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) living at the New York’s Seneca Park Zoo’s Primate Portal, an ongoing project overseen by CMU researchers and the Rochester Institute of Technology. There, primates are allowed to freely interact with a touchscreen offering various customizable cognitive-based tasks. Data, code, and video of those results are then made publicly available as open access information.

In this case, the baboons and macaques were offered fruit for participating in a two-dimensional geometric shape matching game. Cantlon said that although the concept may sound simple, it’s deceptively more difficult because the objects don’t feature particularly distinct attributes across form, size, and color.

“You’d get tripped up, too,” she warned.

To measure the primates’ results, the team then offered the same game to preschoolers, 21 American adults, as well as nearly 80 adults from the Tsimane’ people. The Tsimane’ are an Indigenous subsistence agrarian group living in the tropical lowlands of Bolivia, and do not receive formal education like most other present-day societies. This helped Cantlon’s team to better separate factors like age and culture.

“Sometimes when you’re trying to study something in children, it can be difficult to untangle whether their ability is developmental or something learned from education or experience,” she explained. “So if we want to understand how children learn geometry, we need to understand what they bring to the table before formal instruction begins.”

Including the Tsimane’ proved crucial. The range stretching from the two primate species to human children and adults from different educational and cultural backgrounds showed a clear spectrum of understanding when it comes to basic geometry. The study results strongly imply that human children are born with evolutionary intuitions around space and shape. Instead of structured geometry education beginning from nothing, the lessons are built on those existing and innate principles.

Some of humanity’s most ancient artifacts support the argument that our species (and our evolutionary relatives) have long grasped Euclidean geometry. Inside the Blombos Cave in South Africa, paleoarchaeologists previously discovered a 70,000-year-old stone engraved with multiple parallel lines, as well as a 40,000-year-old mammoth tusk’s rows of notches in Germany.

“It’s one of the first things that humans wanted to write down. And those kinds of intuitions feel automatic to us, because we’ve encoded them so deeply,” Cantlon said.

However, it now appears that this encoding didn’t begin with us.

“One of the baboons, named Kalamata, was the hardest working monkey that I’ve ever seen,” added study co-author and CMU cognitive scientist Jialin Li. “He would come up to the screen and wait for me to turn the computer on, and then he’d just sit there for two to three hours just doing all kinds of mathematical tasks.”

The post Monkeys are surprisingly good at geometry appeared first on Popular Science.

A deep-ocean coral reef presumed dead for nearly 60 years off the coast of Benin was recently rediscovered and is teeming with life. A team of oceanographers led by Gérard Zinzindohoué at the Institut de Recherches Halieutiques et Océanologiques du Bénin documented their findings in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, which highlights just how much is left to learn about West Africa’s underwater ecosystems.

Scientists first identified the possible location during the 1960s, while surveying potential fishing areas, but assumed that whatever reef resided along the seafloor was dead. After receiving grant funding to revisit the area, Zinzindohoué and his colleagues spent days searching over seven miles of the Gulf of Guinea using sonar equipment before finally flagging two signals large enough to match the potential reef remnants.

Mesophotic coral reefs live at deeper depths than typical, shallower coral. Credit: Gérard Zinzindohoué

“It was not an easy field campaign,” Zinzindohoué recalled in a statement. “It was a mix of long days at sea, technical problems, and a lot of uncertainty.”

Zinzindohoué’s team then deployed an underwater drone and the National Geographic Exploration Technology Lab’s Deep Sea Camera System to get a closer look. About 165 feet below the ocean surface, they spotted the unexpected—the reef was far from dead.

“I still remember seeing those first images. It was a mix of excitement and disbelief, because after all this time thinking about this reef, suddenly there was something real in front of us,” said Zinzindohoué.

Based on the depth, the team determined the formation to be a mesophotic coral ecosystem. These ecosystems generally exist in much deeper waters than typical shallow coral reefs. With more limited sunlight, mesophotic coral doesn’t necessarily grow as a single, continuous reef. Instead, it takes the form of patchier or more intermittent colonies.

However, that doesn’t mean there is little activity in mesophotic systems. The underwater survey positively identified eight coral types and eight different species of fish living among them, including Guinean angelfish (Holacanthus africanus), golden African snappers (Lutjanus fulgens), and the Monrovia doctorfish (Acanthurus monroviae).

Zinzindohoué believes their discovery is the first confirmed living mesophotic coral on the Gulf of Guinea continental shelf, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only one.

“I think what we found is probably not an exception. It is more likely a reflection of how little we still know about coastal regions in West Africa and elsewhere,” he added.

Much more research is needed to fully understand the rediscovered ecosystem. Credit: Gérard Zinzindohoué

At the same time, return visits are needed to better examine the delicate ecosystems and confirm their health, diversity, and size. Historical data indicates they only imaged a tiny portion of a continuous mesophotic reef spanning nearly 25 miles parallel to Benin’s coast.

“If I had all the grant money in the world, the first thing I would do is return to the site with a proper scientific diving and sampling program,” said Zinzindohoué. “These are ecosystems that are still poorly known in this part of the world, and every additional piece of information matters.”

The post ‘Dead’ coral reef found alive and thriving off West Africa appeared first on Popular Science.

Some more independent baby animals—from precocial species—hit the ground running almost as soon as they’ve popped or hatched out. Others—called altricial animals—need parental attention before venturing out on their own.

Echidnas are altricial animals, and their young (called puggles) need lots of attention. Staff members at Harter Veterinary Medical Center in San Diego, California are experiencing their neediness first hand. At the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, Kathryn the short-beaked echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus) has given birth to two puggles in one season, and one is being hand-raised. 

Echidnas are spiky, long-nosed animals native to New Guinea and Australia. Along with platypuses, they are one of two monotremes, or egg-laying mammals. An echidna egg hatches after around 10 days of incubation in the mother’s pouch.The puggle then emerges fur- and spine-less, and weighing approximately as much as half a miniature marshmallow. 

“Unlike a marsupial pouch, an echidna has a temporary “pseudo-pouch” that is only present when they are incubating an egg and raising a puggle,” Jennifer LeBeau, lead wildlife care specialist at San Diego Zoo Safari Park, tells Popular Science. 

The puggle then enjoys the pouch for around two months before the mother transfers it into the far end of a nursery burrow. Her work is far from over, however. For a few more months, the puggle will remain in the burrow, which the mother backfills with dirt. She will then return to the baby every few days to feed it. The puggle will start learning about the outside world once the mother stops backfilling the nursery.

One of the siblings was not gaining weight and is in the care of vets. Image: San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.

Kathryn is currently raising one of her babies in the burrow. Because the other sibling wasn’t gaining weight, it was transferred into human care at Safari Park’s Harter Veterinary Medical Center. Part of the puggle’s hand rearing included veterinarians taking regular ultrasounds of the puggle’s stomach, which enabled them to better understand the speed at which the puggle digested its formula. As a result, they came to a more precise decision of how often it needed to feed.

“The puggle that is being hand-reared is having daily checks by veterinarians and a minimum of twice daily checks by wildlife care specialists,” says Anthony Cerreta, a San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance clinical veterinarian. “Hand-rearing puggles from this age tends to have a lower success rate, so we will continue to closely monitor and intervene as needed should any further challenges arise.” 

The post Echidna ‘puggles’ weigh less than a mini marshmallow appeared first on Popular Science.

Anyone can mistake an identity, even astronomers. On August 28, 2025, researchers aimed their equipment towards an area of sky where they expected to find the asteroid 1998 SH2. Based on gravitational data collected during its previous 4.5 year orbits around the sun, the hopeful observers focused NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) planetary radar system in the space rock’s assumed location about two million miles from Earth. However, things didn’t go as planned—1998 SH2 was a no-show.

Astronomers knew some unexpected force was affecting its orbit, so they relied on optical telescopes to pinpoint the asteroid’s exact location. Once they actually found 1998 SH2, they quickly realized the mistake.

“After we measured the nongravitational perturbations affecting the motion of 1998 SH2 and recognized they weren’t compatible with the object being an asteroid, we suspected the object could be an active comet,” Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, explained in a statement.

The differences between asteroids and comets may sound minimal, but they’re crucial. Asteroids are large rocky objects infused with metals orbiting the sun as ancient leftovers from the solar system’s earliest formative stages. By comparison, comets are birthed at the outer edges of the solar system whose mixture of dust and ice vaporizes into a tail.

The last observations of 1998 SH2 took place in 2016, meaning the space rock had since completed two solar orbits. But after reviewing the available analyses once more, Farnocchia’s team determined the object could be generating minor amounts of thrust as it vented gas into space. These vents form when the sun’s radiation heats a comet’s dusty ice, creating a propulsive gas often visible as a bright tail and coma. But when a comet is much smaller, those telltale signs may become harder to find.

Knowing their mystery object’s approach would be its closest in years, Farnocchia connected with astronomers at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope near Mauna Kea, Hawaii, as well as the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Danish Telescope in La Silla, Chile. Meanwhile, researchers at the ESO’s Very Large Telescope on Chile’s Cerro Paranal mountain also gazed up at 1998 SH2. Their collective results, published in a recent study in the journal Nature Astronomy, proved their suspicions correct.

“The images we collected from these observatories showed a weak but clear tail, thus confirming that 1998 SH2 is, in fact, a comet,” said ESO astronomer and study co-author Olivier Hainaut.

Beyond rectifying the multidecade misclassification, the team’s findings are helping us better understand a subcategory of space objects called dark comets. These entities often have major irregularities in their orbits called pertubations, yet do not offer visible signs like outgassing, tails, or comas. Astronomers discovered the first dark comet in 2016, and have since located about a dozen more across the solar system. The study’s authors suggest that continuing to examine other faint, near-Earth objects with sufficiently powerful telescopes may even force further reclassifications of subjects that astronomers currently believe to be asteroids. Beyond respecting these space rock’s true identities, more accurate observations can also improve the safety of everyone living on this larger rock called Earth.

“Detecting these perturbations can be an important diagnostic tool for planetary defense that will help understand which objects may be comets rather than asteroids, how their orbits evolve, and how that influences their Earth impact risks,” said Farnocchia.

“That’s how science works—you form a hypothesis, and you set out to test it,” added Hainaut. “This data is exactly what was needed to confirm our hypothesis that 1998 SH2 was a comet.”

The post Near-Earth asteroid not an asteroid at all appeared first on Popular Science.

Feeding an animal that is clearly in need of help might be our first instinct. However, this feed-first approach might be more harmful than beneficial because different species have different dietary requirements.

Take baby skunks, for example. Recently, Raven Ridge Wildlife Center in Washington Boro, Pennsylvania, was taking care of 50 juvenile skunks. The wildlife center’s employees found themselves assembling highly diverse meals for the adorable mammals. 

The daily menu included 15 cups of fruit, 15 cups of vegetables, a dozen eggs, 15 cups of moistened dog food, 6 cups of meat, and 3 cups of mealworms in addition to Calcium and Taurine supplements. Yet, when very young skunks arrive at the center, the little kits need a species-specific formula that copies milk from their skunk mother. 

Rescued skunks chowing down on their daily smorgasbord. Image: Raven Ridge Wildlife Center.

Imagine trying to cook any of this up in your own kitchen! What’s more, a wild skunk in trouble is likely dehydrated, and requires at least two days of rehydration before it can start eating again. If a dehydrated animal eats before it should, it might lead to refeeding syndrome, which could prove deadly. 

“Often, well-meaning individuals who find abandoned wildlife turn to Google for guidance on how to care for them. However, while Google can be useful, it does not provide the best advice for wildlife rehabilitation,” Raven Ridge Wildlife Center writes. “Many mistakenly opt for puppy or kitten formula, which does not meet the specific dietary needs of baby wildlife. Others may feed skunks cat food, but this option is typically too high in fat and protein, leading to obesity and serious health issues.”

June is typically peak baby skunk season. Image: Raven Ridge Wildlife Center.

Similarly to humans, skunks need a balanced diet that includes fruits, veggies, and lean protein. The Raven Ridge Wildlife Center team frequently comes across Metabolic Bone Disease, which is caused by imbalanced levels of essential nutrients. 

“If you encounter any wildlife, regardless of its age, it is important not to offer any food, as this could harm its health,” writes the wildlife center. “The best approach is to gently place the animal in a box and keep it in a warm, dark, and quiet location, and then contact a licensed wildlife rehabilitator immediately.”

The post Found a baby skunk? Please don’t feed it. appeared first on Popular Science.

It’s the healthier choice, right? For those of us wanting to cut down on unhealthy treats, sugar-free candy might seem like the perfect alternative. You can have your cake and eat it too—guilt-free.

But is it possible to have too much of a good thing? Can you eat too much sugar-free candy?

The added sugars in regular candy are a dietary villain for two main reasons. First, they cause your blood glucose to spike, making your pancreas work overtime to produce insulin to clear it. This can contribute to high blood pressure, chronic inflammation, chronic inflammation, and over time increase the risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

Second, added sugars are empty calories, adding to your daily calorie intake without giving you any nutrients or making you feel full. This makes them a major contributor to obesity.

Sugar-free treats generally replace sugar with either artificial sweeteners or sugar alcohols. While sodas generally use sweeteners such as aspartame or saccharin, sugar-free candy more often uses sugar alcohols known as polyols, such as xylitol or sorbitol. These are digested very slowly and are not fully absorbed, so these sugar alternatives don’t raise blood glucose the way normal carbohydrates do.

According to dietician and gut health expert Dr. Emily Leeming, around three quarters of adults eat more than their recommended daily sugar intake. Given the known health impacts of excessive sugar consumption, she says that choosing a sugar-free alternative to prevent crossing the threshold is often a good idea. 

However, there are some caveats.

Why sugar-free candy can cause diarrhea

“The sugar alcohol causes an osmotic shift in the gut,” says Dr. Kait Brown, clinical managing director at America’s Poison Centers. “It’s drawing water out of your tissues and into the gut. So, you’re getting a lot more water in the system. On top of that, the sugar alcohol is also being fermented by gut bacteria.”

If eaten to excess, these effects can be unpleasant.

“It can cause a lot of gastrointestinal distress,” Dr. Brown explains. If you eat multiple servings of sugar-free candy in a sitting, she says, you get gas production and bloating and can get more muscle movement in the gut. “That accumulates in having watery, loose diarrhea.”

There are also some concerns about consuming large amounts of sugar substitutes over time. Some studies suggest that regular consumption of artificial sweeteners could have a negative effect on the gut microbiome or even increase the risk of some cancers. 

Diet sodas may be more dangerous than sugar-free candy. Image: NurPhoto / Contributor / Getty Images / Jakub Porzycki

However, these types of sweeteners are usually found in diet sodas rather than sugar-free candy, and the experimental data is not yet conclusive.

“It’s kind of early [stages of] looking into these [long-term] effects, and most of the studies seem to be on mice,” Dr. Leeming says. “The caveat with that, of course, is that mice are not humans.”

“The other thing that gets missed out of the conversation is that these studies are done at incredibly high doses,” she adds. “It’s not proportional to anything you would eat as a human being.”

Sugar-free candy is fine for most people—in moderation

Dr. Leeming and Dr. Brown both conclude that sugar-free candy can be a positive aid for many people to lower their sugar consumption, and most people are unlikely to eat an amount that would cause them problems.

“[The consumption] would have to be quite sizable,” says Dr. Leeming. “Like, if you’re spending all day chowing down on sugar-free sweets.”

The exception, she says, is that “if you have irritable bowel syndrome, then you’ve naturally got a kind of sensitivity to polyols [one type of sugar alcohol].”

This means that people with this condition should be more careful at checking the ingredient list when consuming sugar-free products, and experiment to discover their personal sensitivity to different types of sugar alcohol.

The FDA only requires products to display a label warning of laxative risks for products that could cause you to consume more than 50 grams of polyols daily, whereas some people with a polyol sensitivity might start to feel discomfort after eating 10 grams or less.

“It’s harder with food products [than medicines] because you don’t know the exact amount of a sugar alcohol that’s in there,” Dr. Brown says. “You might know that xylitol is number four on the ingredient list, but you don’t know” how much of the sugar alcohol is actually in the product you’re consuming.

But for most people, both doctors assure, there is no need to overthink it.

“I would always just recommend consuming in moderation,” Dr. Brown says. “If you notice your stomach starts to hurt, you’re probably eating too much, and you need to dial it back.”

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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Ancient Egyptians famously buried their royalty in ornate funerary complexes alongside prized jewelry, clothing, food, and even pets near the deceased, so that they could take these items with them into the afterlife. Weapons are also commonly discovered in these tombs, but not only next to royal men. In some cases, archaeologists have also found combat implements buried with ancient Egyptian women.

Historians and Egyptologists have debated the significance of these artifacts for decades. Did Egyptian women actually wield these weapons, or were they more symbolic objects? After careful physical analysis of six ancient princesses buried beneath the pyramids at Dahshur, researchers now have an answer. In short, these Egyptian women could fight and hunt with the men.

Other weaponry buried inside their tombs included bows and arrows. Credit: Zeinab Hashesh, et al.

“Members of the royal family, especially the women, were active participants in skilled, physically demanding activities such as archery and hunting,” Zeinab Hashesh, an archaeologist at Egypt’s Beni-Suef University, said in a statement.Hashesh and her colleagues detailed their findings in a study published today in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology. Their new paper focuses on a group of mummies previously lost for years. The women were originally excavated during the late 19th century from within the funerary complex at Dahshur, an ancient Egyptian necropolis featuring some of the oldest, largest, and best preserved pyramids in Giza. After rediscovering the mummies during a curation project at the Egyptian Museum in 2020, researchers finally examined them with advanced analysis techniques and equipment.

Four of the six women were sisters whose father was the pharaoh Amenemhat II. The third ruler of the 12th dynasty who reigned during Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, little is known about Amenemhat II other than his death around 1895 BCE. Each of the women were buried in matching underground chambers, with the princess Ita followed by Khenmet, Itaweret, and an anonymous woman assumed to be their sister Sathathormeryt. At the time of their excavation during the late 19th century, archaeologists found weapons including bows and arrows that were traditionally associated with men. Princess Ita even possessed an ornate dagger.

 Despite their exciting rediscovery, time had taken its toll on the mummies. Their soft tissue powderized ages ago, and some bones are now missing, including all of the princesses’ skulls. Despite this, enough skeletal sections remain in good enough condition so r archaeologists can assess their age, sex, height, and any notable illnesses or injuries. According to Hashesh, it soon became clear that these women hadn’t lived lives of constant idle luxury.

The four skeletons lacked skulls, preventing additional detail analysis. Credit: Zeinab Hashesh, et al.

“Princess Ita was a young woman aged between 28 and 34 with strong upper-body muscle attachments, suggesting she habitually used weapons like maces or daggers,” she explained.

Princess Khenmet (who died in her late 30s or 40s) exhibited thinning bones but strong ligament attachments, while her sister Itaweret displayed physical signs of skilled archery before dying sometime between the ages of 20 and 34. The sisters’ collective upper limb development also suggests high-intensity, repetitive actions like holding a heavy weapon or pulling a bowstring.

“This directly explains the presence of bows, arrows, and maces in the women’s tombs,” said Hashesh. “These were not just symbolic gifts, but tools they actively used.” 

However, the siblings weren’t necessarily always in top form. Princess Itaweret’s skeleton showed healed fractures to both her ribs and foot, while multiple individuals displayed nutritional deficiencies and infections. The sisters also shared rare spinal conditions, indicating closely related parents and family members.

“What is remarkable is that the injuries healed well, which suggests they had access to advanced medical care for their time,” added Hashesh.

Unfortunately, Hashesh’s team could not conduct additional analysis since the princess’ skulls were missing. Future stable isotope examinations could also better contextualize the family’s nutritional issues. Despite this, the discoveries made by Hashesh’s team prove that the weapons owned by some of ancient Egypt’s royal women weren’t simply ornamental decorations.

“Our dream would be to go far beyond simply identifying the Dahshur royals,” Hashesh said. “We would try to tell their full life stories, their families, health, and even their political roles, with as much detail as possible.” 

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Despite increasing pushback from the public and some lawmakers, there still isn’t much preventing tech companies from training their generative artificial intelligence programs on internet content without the author’s consent. So until meaningful legislation and oversight is introduced, people are largely on their own when it comes to guarding original their online material.

While designer Eric Lu’s Ghost Font isn’t necessarily the silver bullet needed to stop AI from completely devouring the internet, it’s still an ingenious proof-of-concept experiment that highlights human creativity. It also shows just how far AI has to go when it comes to parsing concepts like optical illusions.

Ghost Font’s underlying mechanisms are deceptively simple. Text is entered by a user and overlaid within hundreds of moving dots in a short video animation. The dots composing the words move up the screen while the rest of the pinpoints move downward, generating a visual opposition that the human mind can detect and discern. Pausing the video creates a stationary picture that allows the words to disappear amid the overall clutter. AI (or the human eye, for that matter) can’t decipher the message in the still image, but that’s also where people get the upper hand.

While the human brain interprets motion as a fluid pattern, multimodal AI still examines videos by their individual frames. Think of it like a flipbook.Humans will see the cumulative animation while running through the pages, but AI is still forced to look at the image on each individual page. As an added protection, Ghost Font files also include the static decoy message “written in Ghost Font,” which further confuses AI by making it seem like that’s the only actual text to scan.

Lu claims to have tested the program using Anthropic’s Claude Fable and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra, both of which failed to find the real text. Further trials conducted by Creative Bloq also appeared to best AI.

By Lu’s own admission, Ghost Font isn’t a cure-all to ongoing AI issues. It’s limited to extremely short messages, and may become obsolete if generative AI develops the ability to examine videos as optical flows instead of individual frames. It also only takes a few seconds of staring at a dizzying Ghost Font video to realize it’s not the easiest on the eyes, and probably is useless for anyone with visual disabilities. Regardless, it’s still a fun and free way to celebrate human ingenuity—and AI’s deficiencies.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Popular Science’s parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

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Several precious pieces of space history hit the auction block in New York this week. On July 15, Sotheby’s Space Exploration auction features several iconic artifacts, including a life-saving pen from Apollo 11 ($857,600), a Soviet flag flown in the icy vacuum of space ($102,400), and even a piece of the first cloth to wipe a window in space ($5,120). You can learn more about some of these historical objects in the gallery below.

The pen that saved Apollo II The broken circuit breaker switch that nearly ended Apollo 11, and the pen that saved the crew and the mission. Image: Sotheby’s.

On July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin collected rock and dust samples from the moon’s surface for about three hours. As the pair were climbing back into the Lunar Module to prepare to fly home to Earth, Aldrin hit the module’s circuit breaker switch with the life support backpack on his spacesuit. 

The switch broke off, and it would have killed all three Apollo 11 astronauts had it not been for Aldrin’s quick thinking. He wedged a pen into the board to create a makeshift switch.  

“He could’ve picked something that was not very important. But he banged into the circuit breaker that controlled the SM engine that got us back into orbit,” Armstrong later told ABC News. “It was just insurance. It’s nice to get a little insurance.”

This item sold for $857,600.

A flag from the first American spacewalk Jim McDivitt’s flown United States flag. Image: Sotheby’s.

Mission Commander Jim McDivitt flew this American flag during Gemini IV. The June 1965 mission was the second crewed mission of the Gemini series and included the first American spacewalk. 

Command Pilot Edward White concluded the spacewalk on June 3, 1965, and remained outside of the spacecraft for 21 minutes. McDivitt served as mission commander for Gemini IV and photographed the first American spacewalk, conducted by command pilot Edward White. The Gemini IV flag is a silk stars and stripes flag and is signed and inscribed by McDivitt on the two lower white bars. This item sold for $35,840.

In space, even windows need cleaning  Flown cloth from “The First Window Wiping in Space.” Image: Sotheby’s.

This nylon tab was exposed to the vacuum of space during Gemini XII in November 1966. The mission included a spacewalk by Buzz Aldrin. Aldrin used this cloth to wipe the spacecraft’s window to clean off a mysterious yellow substance. 

NASA later cut the fabric into small pieces and tested the substance in different laboratories. It  turned out to be propellant exhaust from the Titan II launch vehicle. Aldrin kept the nylon tab portion of the cloth as a keepsake. This item sold for $5,120.

Heat shield plug from the first trip to the moon An ablative heat shield plug flown on Apollo 8. Image: Sotheby’s.

Whether it’s 1966 or 2026, heat shields are crucial for space travel. This plug protected one of the 59 screws attaching the aft heatshield to the Apollo 8 command module in December 1968. The mission was humanity’s first trip to the moon and paved the way for a successful lunar landing one year later. Astronaut Bill Anders also took the famous Earthrise photo during this mission. 

When it was time to return home, the crew re-entered Earth’s atmosphere in the Command Module oriented aft-first. The bottom of the spacecraft faced the brunt of friction that is generated by its descent as it plunges out of space and towards the sea. To account for the friction, NASA created an ablative heatshield in a brazed steel honeycomb structure. The bolts attaching this structure to the bottom of the spacecraft were then covered by plugs protecting them from the friction of re-entry. This item sold for $8,960.

A symbol of diplomacy This USSR flag was flown to the moon on Apollo 11. Image: Sotheby’s.

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s footsteps on the moon on July 20, 1969 made it clear that the United States won the space race. In the spirit of diplomacy, Aldrin flew a USSR flag as well as the American flag, the Texas state flag, and the flag from his home state of New Jersey in his personal preference kit (PPK).

Buzz Aldrin’s provenance letter about the flag reads:

“This provenance letter certifies that the accompanying Apollo 11 Soviet Flag was flown to the Moon aboard the command module Columbia. In July of 1969, I landed on the Moon as part of the Apollo 11 crew. As an act of diplomacy and to help commemorate this historic milestone, I chose to personally carry the accompanying 4 by 6 inch Soviet Flag with me in my Personal Preference Kit (PPK). Carrying this flag was a gesture of goodwill between the United States of America and the Soviet Union, as well as a demonstration that Apollo 11 was a human achievement that transcended nations.”

This item sold for $102,400.

Gordon Cooper’s glove Apollo-era extravehicular glove made for Gordon Cooper. Image: Sotheby’s.

This A7-L glove was made for astronaut Gordon Cooper and was likely used in training.  The International Latex Corporation’s aerospace division (later called ILC Dover) has been the designer and producer of the space suit pressure garment for NASA since the Apollo program began. Every American astronaut to go into space since has traveled wearing an ILC Dover suit. Each full suit took about 5,000 hours to complete, and cost approximately $1,000,000 to produce.

Cooper was part of the first group of astronauts chosen by NASA as part of the Mercury Seven. He piloted the final Mercury mission (Mercury-Atlas-9) and became the first American to spend an entire day in space. This glove would have been used by him after he served as backup commander of Apollo 10. This item sold for $21,760.

Space’s favorite beagle Flown Sterling Snoopy pin presentation presented to Dr. George Mueller. Image: Sotheby’s.

Charlie Brown’s mischievous pup has been part of the U.S. space program from the very beginning. Snoopy joined NASA in 1968 as a mascot for the Manned Flight Awareness program and even served as the gravity indicator during Artemis I in 2022.  

Dr. George E. Mueller is credited with creating and leading the Office of Manned Spaceflight at NASA Headquarters. He guided the agency through the Apollo program and the early development of Skylab and space shuttle projects.

This Snoopy pin was flown in lunar orbit and was later presented to Mueller. This item sold for $12,160.

Buzz Aldrin’s very fly jacket This Apollo 11 jacket was worn by astronaut Buzz Aldrin. Image: Sotheby’s.

Following the Apollo 15 mission in 1971, Command Module Pilot Al Worden had worn out his flight jacket. To replicate his jacket and to keep “The Right Stuff” in the cultural consciousness, Worden co-founded a company called Still the Right Stuff in 2013. The goal was to produce museum-quality replica garments inspired by the iconic Apollo flight jackets.

This item is an Apollo 11 jacket from Still the Right Stuff from Buzz Aldrin’s personal collection. Aldrin’s flight jacket features the Apollo 11 mission patch as well as the NASA meatball.

Still the Right Stuff no longer crafts these legacy jackets, but this garment is a testament to the vintage flight jackets that inspired fashion around the world. This item sold for $20,480.

The post Pen that saved the Apollo 11 astronauts sells for over $800K at auction appeared first on Popular Science.

Eaglets Sandy and Luna could fully fledge any day now. They both hatched in the first week of April, putting them right on the upper end of the 10 to 14 week average for fledging. This means they could leave the nest for good any day now.

To practice for a more independent life, they have been spending more time tree hopping and eating the fish that their parents, Jackie and Shadow, deliver to the nest. 

On June 28, Sandy accidentally fledged, when she and Luna stepped onto the nest’s “front porch.” Luna then tried to jump over Sandy to get back into the bowl of the nest, but Sandy lost her balance and flapped down to the lower branches. She freed herself from the branches and landed elsewhere in another tree. 

Eaglets typically depend on their parents for two to three months after fully fledging. They will learn how to hunt and work on their flying skills. Last year’s eaglets Sunny and Gizmo left the nest at 90 and 91 days old, respectively. 

After fledging, Sandy and Luna may pop up on the nest cameras from time to time since they are expected to keep to Big Bear Valley for a bit. However, they are not banded, so their activity will not be fully tracked. 

Jackie and Shadow’s 2026 babies: Everything you need to know

It’s been another roller coaster nesting season for Jackie and Shadow, a pair of internet-famous bald eagle parents living in San Bernardino National Forest in Southern California. After two of their eggs were destroyed by ravens in January, Jackie and Shadow laid two new eggs that have successfully hatched.

Chick 1 hatched on April 4 at 9:33 p.m. PDT, while Chick 2 followed on April 5 at 8:30 a.m. Their large nest in Big Bear Valley east of Los Angeles is livestreamed 24 hours a day by nonprofit Friends of Big Bear Valley (FOBBV) and has captivated millions. 

On May 1, FOBBV announced the chicks’ names: Sandy and Luna.

How long will the chicks stay in the nest? 

Chicks usually stay in the nest until 10 to 14 weeks of age.

What challenges do the eaglets face?

Before leaving the nest, the chicks face threats from other birds of prey, including hawks, ravens, other eagles, and owls. Inclement weather can also present challenges for the chicks. In 2025, a March snowstorm resulted in the death of one of Jackie and Shadow’s three chicks.

During fledging, only 70 percent of eaglets survive. One of the greatest threats is from cars that can injure or kill the birds while they scavenge for food on roadkill. 

Who are Jackie and Shadow? 

The pair first got together in 2018 and successfully raised chicks in 2019 and 2022. However, their eggs failed to hatch in 2023 and 2024. Only 50 percent of eagle eggs successfully hatch, so this pair has already beaten the odds.

What happened to Jackie and Shadow’s 2025 eaglets?

In 2025, Jackie laid three eggs that all hatched in early March. On March 13, a strong snowstorm dumped up to two feet of snow and battered the nest with strong winds. Only two of the chicks were visible on the live cam when the storm passed by the next morning. FOBBV later confirmed the passing of one of the chicks. The two surviving chicks were later named Sunny and Gizmo after 54,000 names were submitted by fans.

What happens after chicks fledge? 

Young eagles usually fledge–or leave the nest and fly–when they can flatten their wings and have feathers capable of flight. This typically occurs when the birds hit 10 to 14 weeks of age. Males also tend to take their first flight a little sooner than females. 

According to FOBBV, fledglings from Southern California have been spotted as far south as Baja California, as far north as British Columbia, and as far east as Yellowstone National Park.

About 70 percent of bald eagles survive the fledgling stage. FOBBV does not tag their eagles, so it’s not possible to follow the chicks’ journeys after they flee the nest.

Can I help Jackie and Shadow?

Yes. Environmental groups are currently fundraising $10 million to protect Jackie and Shadow’s foraging area from development. Learn more at SaveMoonCamp.org.

The post How much longer will eaglets Sandy and Luna stay on the nest? appeared first on Popular Science.