Years before that, he sat down and described the world we live in now — the screens, the vanishing jobs, the crowds — and almost nobody listened, because he wrote science fiction, and we decided that meant he was making things up. He wasn't.
Asimov was a scientist who read the present harder than anyone else and refused to blink at where it was heading.
This video walks through three of his warnings that came true with unsettling precision:
a society that comes to worship its own ignorance,
a world where machines take the work and hand us nothing back,
and a planet so crowded that a single human life slides toward worthless.
He saw all three forming decades ago, said them plainly, and watched us march toward each one anyway. The thread running through all of them is a single race he spent his life pointing at — our power growing faster than our wisdom. He didn't warn us to frighten us. He warned us because he thought we could still turn the wheel.
Solar flares are huge eruptions of radiation that blast out of the Sun – sometimes several times a day – and at their strongest, they can release the energy equivalent of a billion hydrogen bombs.
Our planet's magnetic field and atmosphere, together with tens of millions of miles of space, protect us from these bursts and other space weather.
However, distant stars similar to the Sun have generated so-called superflares, hundreds or thousands of times more energetic than what's been observed in our Solar System.
Could those superflares also potentially erupt from our own Sun – and have they been occurring throughout Earth's history, in the billions of years before we had the instruments required to measure them?
Some Sun-like stars produce a superflare about once a century.
That's the question researchers led by a team from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany wanted to ask.
In a new study published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, the researchers analyzed the 300 strongest solar flares measured between 2010 and 2016, and the energy they produced.
"Of course, we knew that no superflares had occurred during the observation period, but the statistical relationship we found between the released energy and the size of the active region should hold true for more powerful events as well," says astrophysicist Natalie Krivova, from MPS.
By studying the corresponding active regions on the Sun for each flare – the intense magnetic disturbances that eruptions emerge from, which often include dark sunspots – the researchers were able to calculate how energy corresponded to active region size.
They then went back to some of the largest sunspots recorded on the Sun – records that go back much further, around four centuries. One sunspot stands out: the giant sunspot observed in 1947, which covered around 0.6 percent of the visible solar disk.
A sunspot that size, with a diameter some 40 times that of Earth, could theoretically produce a flare reaching the lower end of the superflare range seen on other stars.
A historical hand-drawn illustration of the 1947 sunspot.
(Mount Wilson Observatory)
"Our Sun has superflare potential," says Krivova.
"It can produce massive sunspots that, in principle, can serve as the starting point for the most extreme bursts of radiation."
This fits with the evidence we have of extreme solar particle events (ESPEs), storms of radiation way beyond anything that's been directly observed in history. We haven't seen these events, but there are signs of them in tree-ring records.
We therefore know Earth has been hit by ESPEs – and the new study suggests that superflares may well have caused them.
Krivova is also the senior author on another related study, also recently published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, which looks in more detail at the relationship between ESPEs and superflares. The prevailing hypothesis is that superflares can trigger ESPEs, but only if conditions are right for energetic particles to escape into space.
Returning to the first paper, the researchers say the relationship between ESPEs and superflares is something for future studies to build on. More detailed modeling, investigating how sunspots can combine together and the magnetic field conditions that keep superflares confined, will be important here.
While the direct impact on human health would be limited, future solar storms have the potential to cause significant disruption to the technology and infrastructure we rely on in the modern day, which means understanding when and how our Sun might ramp up to a superflare level is an important field of research.
"Our goal was to provide constraints on the maximum possible flare energies that could arise from the most extreme sunspot groups in the historical record," write the researchers in their published paper.
"We emphasize that this analysis does not address the probability or expected frequency of such events."
India’s savannas shrunk from 100 million acres in 1880 to 60 million acres in 2010, according to one estimate.
Credit: Ashish Nerlekar
Even centuries after disturbance, recovering grasslands can remain dominated by a different kind of plant than the old-growth ecosystems they replaced.
Even after centuries of recovery, a grassland can still support a noticeably different plant community from an ancient landscape that was never plowed.
A global analysis of 742 plant species found that secondary grasslands, those regrowing after farming or other disturbance, tend to favor taller, faster-growing plants. Old-growth grasslands, by contrast, are more likely to support slow-growing, long-lived perennials with traits that help them withstand drought, fire, and grazing.
The pattern appeared across six continents despite enormous differences among the grasslands themselves. “Our analysis indicates that differences between old-growth and secondary grasslands are remarkably consistent around the globe,” said Lars Brudvig, a Michigan State University professor and co-author of the new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The findings help explain a puzzle scientists have documented for years: grassland vegetation can return after land is plowed or otherwise converted without fully recovering the biological character of the ecosystem that was lost.
Previous work by lead author Ashish Nerlekar, a postdoctoral researcher at Michigan State University, found that secondary grasslands can take decades to regain the biodiversity of ancient grasslands. Even after centuries of regrowth, some plant species remain missing.
The Cerrado of Brazil is considered the most biodiverse savanna in the world. But because so little of it is protected, tens of thousands of acres are cleared each year for agriculture.
Credit: Angeladepaula, Wikimedia Commons
Recovery favors faster-growing plants
The new study investigated why recovery can be so slow. Nerlekar, Brudvig, Michigan State professor Lauren Sullivan, and a global group of collaborators compared old grasslands that had never been plowed or converted to farmland with younger grasslands at different stages of recovery.
They found that disturbance tends to favor a different kind of plant.
When old-growth grasslands are plowed, the species that disappear are often tough, slow-growing perennials with leathery leaves. “These traits help them deal with stressful situations like droughts, or being eaten by herbivores, or burned,” Brudvig said.
Those same survival strategies can become a disadvantage after the landscape is disturbed.
Many of the plants characteristic of old grasslands “are also very slow-growing,” Nerlekar added. “And that prevents them from competing in the post-destruction grasslands.”
White-top aster flowers in a longleaf pine savanna in the Econ River Wilderness Area, near Orlando, Florida.
Credit: Nash Turley, Pennsylvania State University
Instead, recovering grasslands tend to fill with species built for speed. They grow rapidly, reproduce more quickly, and are better able to capture resources.
The contrast shows up in individual species. Wiregrass (Aristida stricta), a tough, drought-tolerant perennial characteristic of pine savannas in the southeastern United States, was not a defining feature of secondary grasslands. Regrowing sites were more associated with fast-reproducing annuals such as white goosefoot (Chenopodium album), which is better able to compete for water and nutrients.
Plants in secondary grasslands also tended to grow taller, giving them an advantage in the competition for sunlight.
“When they reproduce the next generation does the same and they quickly take over,” said Nerlekar, who is currently at the Indian Institute of Science Education & Research-Pune.
Plant differences can persist for centuries
Those differences can persist for remarkably long periods. In one case, plants in secondary grasslands remained taller than their old-growth counterparts even after 300 years.
That matters because grasslands are far more than open land without trees. Their extensive root systems can reduce runoff and erosion, and grasslands store roughly a third of Earth’s terrestrial carbon.
They also support livestock and distinctive communities of plants and animals, from American bison and African wildebeests to Asia’s great bustards. Grasslands cover nearly a quarter of Earth’s land and help support the livelihoods of more than a billion people.
They include some of the planet’s most expansive landscapes, from the roughly 5,000-mile Eurasian steppe stretching from Hungary to China to the prairies of North America’s Great Plains and the African savanna.
Old-growth savannas of western Maharashtra, India.
Credit: Ashish Nerlekar
Ancient grasslands are disappearing worldwide
But many ancient grasslands have been converted to cropland, tree plantations, and urban development over the past two centuries. Brazil’s species-rich Cerrado, for example, loses an area the size of London every three months. India’s savannas shrank from 100 million acres in 1880 to 60 million acres in 2010, according to one study, while less than half of North America’s historical grassland acreage remains.
At the same time, millions of acres of farmland are being abandoned worldwide, creating opportunities for secondary grasslands to develop.
That raises an increasingly important question: if grass returns, does the original ecosystem return with it?
The findings suggest that the answer is often no, at least when judged by the kinds of plants that characterize the recovering landscape.
“But these findings clearly show that secondary grasslands are really different from old-growth grasslands,” Brudvig said.
Researchers still do not know exactly what those lasting shifts mean for functions such as removing heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or cycling nutrients through ecosystems. More research is needed to determine whether secondary grasslands perform those functions differently from old-growth systems.
Grassland recovery may need intervention
The results nevertheless have practical implications for restoration. Allowing previously cultivated land to recover on its own may not recreate the plant community that existed before disturbance.
“What these findings suggest is that we need to be taking an active hand in grassland recovery — doing things like sowing seeds and transplanting — if we want secondary grasslands to function like the old-growth ones,” Brudvig said.
The findings also underscore the importance of protecting ancient grasslands before they are lost.
“Preserving and conserving existing old-growth grasslands matters because you don’t quickly get back what is lost,” Nerlekar said.
Harvest has been a little poorer this year, from rats eating seedling early to excess rain through summer. As usual conditions are great for some and not so good for others. My world has gone from winters shades of grey to summer's green and spots of flower colour. Now fall begins and colour will change massively to reds' yellows, oranges and browns till once again shades of grey and sparkles and shapes of ice and frost.
Variety is a spice of Life.
Asters in the mountains at Rachelle's
Some red oak we got as bare root plants this spring, doing well ready for planting into the ground now or next spring.
a wild flower in Rachelle's garden.
The change of colour begins in the mountains
food for bees as the season ends.
the mountain asters are small but fully flowered, compared to those here in Cardinal
Autumn joy sedum has done well.
Black eyed susans, so bright.
Joyfull success at making seed for another year.
not a spiders web, a thistle come to fruition
waiting for the ferry for my drive into the mountains
morning out the office window highlighting fall colours, the nut trees are the first to change.
the sun is getting up later and later as am I, lol
These hot peppers are out hanging on the front porch now.
The apple tree has done well and apple butter making has begun.
Wild asters here in Cardinal
The Jalapeno peppers I grow are hot , the only way to go. This is almost the last of this years garden.
The new tomato (and other things) mill in operation.
Geologists have discovered that the African continent will split apart sooner than we thought. An active rift has reached a "critical threshold" and will soon break apart, forming a new ocean.
That said, 'soon' is a relative term – it'll still take a few million years more, but that's a blink of an eye on a geological scale.
"We found that rifting in this zone is more advanced, and the crust is thinner, than anyone had recognized," says Christian Rowan, a geoscientist at Columbia University.
"Eastern Africa has progressed further in the rifting process than previously thought."
The most intriguing thing about the find is its implications for our own history. The Turkana Rift Zone in Kenya is rich in early hominin fossils, which implies it was a key location for human evolution.
But the new find suggests the region may not necessarily have been more important to our ancestors than anywhere else in Africa – instead, it may just be that these geologic processes created very favorable conditions for fossilization.
A diagram illustrating how the Turkana Rift region's geological processes led to higher sedimentation rates around 4.6 million years ago (red line), which in turn increased fossil preservation.
(Rowan et al., Nat. Commun., 2026)
Earth's current arrangement of continents feels like a constant to us, but they're always moving – albeit extremely slowly.
More than 200 million years ago, they were all smushed together in one supercontinent, and it's predicted that in the distant future, they'll (mostly) end up getting back together again.
Where two tectonic plates meet, mountains form. Where they drift apart, oceans are born.
The East African Rift System is a clear example of the latter. The African plate is currently splitting into two: the massive Nubian plate to the west, which contains most of the continent; and the smaller Somali plate, which contains much of the eastern coast and the island of Madagascar.
For the new study, scientists focused on a specific part of that system: the Turkana Rift, which stretches for hundreds of kilometers through Kenya and Ethiopia. The team analyzed seismic measurements previously taken in the region, and calculated how thick the crust is there.
It turns out that it's much thinner than expected: only around 13 kilometers (8 miles) thick in the center of the rift. For comparison, the crust is more than 35 kilometers thick along the edges of the rift region.
And when crust in a rift zone becomes thinner than about 15 kilometers, that means it's entered a phase called 'necking.' After it reaches that point, a continental breakup is all but inevitable.
"The thinner the crust gets, the weaker it becomes, which helps promote continued rifting," says Rowan.
In a few million years, it will complete this phase and enter the next: oceanization. As the name suggests, this is how a new ocean forms.
The crust will stretch so thin that magma erupts from beneath, which then pools and cools to form a basin. This will become a new seafloor, as water begins to rush in from the Indian Ocean.
This process is already beginning in the Afar Depression, which lies in northeast Africa near the Red Sea.
The researchers estimate that the Turkana Rift entered its current necking phase around 4 million years ago, after an extended period of volcanic activity. Intriguingly, this lines up with the age of the earliest hominin fossils and evidence found in the area.
This is probably no coincidence, the team suggests. As the rift began necking, sedimentation began accumulating faster, making it perfect for capturing a detailed record of the life that lived there at the time.
"The temporal coincidence between this tectonic transition and the onset of continuous, thick fossil-bearing strata suggests that the necking phase provided critical conditions for fossil preservation," the researchers write.
"We propose that these tectonic changes played a fundamental role in shaping the Turkana Rift Zone's exceptional paleoanthropological record."
The researchers say that future work could investigate this connection.
Wildfires that ravage developed areas of the US tend to hit a particular kind of neighborhood: suburban, owner-occupied, and relatively well-off, new research has found.
Wildfires in the US aren't just a problem for communities near remote forests – they are literally in people's backyards, especially for people who live on hillsides near wildlands on the outskirts of urban areas – which is exactly where rich neighborhoods tend to be.
"These urban fires consistently occur in suburban, high-income, owner-occupied development," says co-author Dion Kucera, an urban ecologist at the University of California, Riverside (UCR).
"That hasn't changed in more than 40 years."
Kucera and UCR landscape ecologist Darrel Jenerette analyzed 141 fires that intersected urban areas across the US between 1984 and 2025.
The number of fires each year did not increase significantly.
But the larger fires have been getting larger, with fires burning at least 0.5 square kilometers (0.2 square miles) showing an upward trend in total area burned – though that trend is driven largely by a handful of extreme fire years, and isn't statistically robust under every test.
Meanwhile, more people are living in the path of these fires.
The proportion of the US population living in fire-exposed census tracts has remained remarkably stable, at around 0.9 percent, but the absolute number of people in those areas rose from about 2.1 million in 1990 to 2.8 million in 2023.
The researchers say population growth in general, rather than a major shift of people into increasingly fire-prone areas, appears to explain much of that increase.
Locations of and temporal trends for all assessed urban-intersecting fires between 1984- 2025.
The fires also weren't necessarily preceded by the kind of prolonged drought that might seem like an obvious warning sign. Instead, they tended to occur after relatively short-term drying – a recent drop in moisture that can arrive after a wetter period.
"That suggests three- to six-month moisture measures may be more important for city managers trying to identify periods of heightened risk, rather than longer-term drought assessments," Kucera says.
In roughly 4 out of every 10 fires examined, the researchers found evidence of this abrupt transition from wetter to drier conditions. That kind of "hydroclimate whiplash" may become more common as weather grows more variable, but it also provides a shorter-term warning signal to watch for.
But the most striking part of the study looked at what happened after the flames were long gone.
Using satellite measurements of vegetation and land-surface temperature, the researchers found that severely burned areas lost substantial greenness and became hotter.
High-severity burn areas warmed by about 2.4 °C in the first three months after the fire.
And recovery was slow: five years later, nearly three-quarters of highly burned areas had still not returned to their pre-fire level of greenness, while about 78 percent had not returned to their previous thermal conditions.
A neighborhood can look green again without necessarily being ecologically back to normal. Vegetation that replaces burned woody plants may be shorter-lived or less structurally complex, potentially providing less shade and carbon storage and altering the local microclimate and future fire risk.
And this is where money comes back into the picture.
Although the neighborhoods exposed to these fires tended to be richer, those higher-income areas showed faster long-term recovery of land-surface temperature.
The researchers suggest that resources for debris removal, rebuilding, irrigation, and landscaping could help explain the difference – creating a kind of second layer of inequality after the fire.
The findings don't mean wealthier residents are uniquely endangered by urban wildfire, nor that poorer neighborhoods are unaffected.
The study looked at census-tract patterns rather than individual households, and its analysis focused on fires large enough to meet its study threshold, potentially missing smaller but highly destructive urban fires.
Kucera also argues that scientists need to stop treating fires that reach developed areas as simple extensions of wilderness fires.
"The urban fire problem isn't just structured by climate like it is in wildlands," Kucera says.
"Adapting to the growing intensity of urban fires requires looking beyond the forest and into the social fabric of our cities."
It's not every day that a new species is discovered.
Nope, that figure is closer to 44 new species per day, on average, as science identifies over 16,000 new organisms per year.
Many of these may be insects, arthropods, plants, or fungi, which are all fantastic.
But now, we've all been privileged to witness a potentially once-in-a-lifetime discovery: a new cat.
Its scientific name is Leopardus tilcayo, and it's the first new living wild cat species described in more than 100 years – since the Uruguayan pampas cat (Leopardus colocola) was formally identified in 1923.
The evidence is fluffy and irrefutable: a 10-year-old cat nicknamed 'Tigrino'.
Intriguingly, this firstling has been right under science's nose since 2017, living at the Senda Verde Wildlife Sanctuary in the Bolivian Yungas, the cloud forest ecoregion where the Andes Mountains slope down into the Amazon River basin.
It's here due to its kitten-like cuteness, as it was previously 'adopted' by a family that failed to turn Tigrino into a house cat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qU43pSf7qc
They, and the whole world, finally know why.
This newly famous felid – who is being begrudgingly swarmed and presumably pspsps'ed at by scores of gawking visitors – is only 46 centimeters (18 inches) in length from its tiny head to the base of its swishing tail.
It also only weighs 1.4 kilograms (3 pounds), making it smaller than your average house cat and effectively infinitesimal in chonker culture.
A large, international team of researchers and conservationists has recently described this cat and its "tiger cat" relatives, both genetically and ecologically, in a paper published in the journal Current Biology.
The researchers analyzed the complete genomes of 38 individuals from the Leopardus genus, comprising 30 modern cats, including 12 previously published genomes, and eight specimens from museums.
They also included two more distantly related "outgroup" species as a reference: the larger, less-leopard-y-looking jungle cat (Felis chaus) and puma (Puma concolor).
These Leopardus tiger cats, except L. tilcayo, of course, have been known for well over a century – their taxonomic namesake, the oncilla (Leopardus tigrinus), was identified in 1775.
"In combination with ecological studies, we ultimately hope to understand how anthropogenic activities will impact the conservation of tiger cats," the researchers explain, which were "once considered a single, broadly distributed species and now understood as five distinct species, each of which is likely adapted to a distinct environment."
The researchers calculated that the earliest split among tiger cats occurred over 2.3 million years ago, following the Great American Biotic Interchange – an evolutionary swap meet between North America and South America as the Isthmus of Panama rose from the seas to connect the two continents.
Additionally, the researchers also identified a new subspecies, the Peruvian Leopardus tigrinus antisuyo, which differs from L. tilcayo by its shorter fur, less bushy tail, and different markings – such subtle phenotypical features set the tiger cats apart.
Leopardus tilcayo.
(Juan Karita/AP Photo)
Alas, the tiger cats have generally faced long-term population decline (up to 80 percent) over the past two epochs, spanning up to 2.58 million years of deep time.
Yet none of the researchers' new samples show high levels of inbreeding, which has occurred in other isolated or declining populations, including historical felids like the famed saber-toothed cats.
Although, at the moment, "We really don't know how many cats are still in the wild," notes Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, a National-Geographic-sponsored conservationist and study co-author who helped identify L. tilcayo at the sanctuary.
So, importantly, L. tilcayo is raising awareness. First, through its name, which derives not from a discoverer but from the local name given to it by the communities of the cloud forest, who have known this tiny tiger for generations.
A graphical abstract displaying the cats and regions explored in this work.
(Lescroart et al., Curr. Biol., 2026)
Secondly, "Tigrino has become, in just a few days, an ambassador for conservation," says Marcelo Levy, the co-founder of the sanctuary where Tigrino resides.
"He's such a tiny animal, and he has become something so important."
As a result of this work, the researchers have shown the value of genomic analyses for disentangling similar species and their unique needs.
Each type of tiger cat must be protected in a unique, informed way, "implying major changes in current strategies employed to determine challenges, goals, and priorities for ensuring their long-term survival," the researchers conclude.
Researchers found that each breath may carry a distinctive neural signature, with changes in inhalation, exhalation, and pauses mirrored in brain activity. The discovery could provide a new framework for studying dangerous conditions in which breathing suddenly fails.
Credit: Shutterstock
A UC San Diego study reveals a precise link between breathing and brain activity that could improve understanding of disorders in which breathing becomes dangerously disrupted.
Breathing is often measured in simple terms, such as how many breaths a person takes per minute. But new research suggests that this misses something important: the detailed shape of each breath is closely associated with the shape of neural activity in the brain.
Researchers led by the University of California San Diego found that subtle differences from one breath to the next correspond with changes in electrical activity across brain regions involved in cognition, emotion, and memory. Variations such as a longer inhale, slower exhale, or brief pause were reflected in the pattern of neural activity.
“Every single breath is different,” said the paper’s first author Eena Kosik-Rose, a PhD student in the UC San Diego School of Social Sciences’ Department of Cognitive Science. “You can pause your breathing for several seconds, take a super deep breath, or have a shallow exhale. What we’re showing is that those differences in the shape of each breath are reflected in the shape of brain activity.”
Each breath leaves a distinct brain pattern
To examine that relationship, the researchers looked beyond breathing rate. They represented each breath as a wave, with rises and falls reflecting changes in airflow during inhalation and exhalation, then compared the shape of that wave with electrical activity recorded directly from the brain.
The study included 16 people undergoing clinical monitoring for treatment-resistant epilepsy. Researchers compared invasive brain recordings with measurements of breathing, including nasal airflow and movement of the chest and abdomen.
This allowed the team to test whether subtle changes in the timing, intensity, and shape of individual breaths were mirrored by corresponding changes in neural activity.
“Our results show that the coupling between breathing and neural activity is much richer than previously appreciated,” said Bradley Voytek, study coauthor and professor and chair of the Department of Cognitive Science.
Breathing and cognition are more tightly connected
The findings build on previous evidence that breathing can influence cognition. Earlier research has shown, for example, that people can perform slightly better on a memory task depending on whether information is encountered during inhalation or exhalation. Controlled breathing is also used to help calm people experiencing symptoms of PTSD.
The new study adds another layer by showing that the relationship is not limited to the timing of a breath. The detailed form of each inhale and exhale is also associated with the pattern of ongoing brain activity.
Dangerous breathing failures raise a new question
That raises an important question for future research: whether this close breathing-brain relationship changes in conditions where breathing can suddenly fail.
One of the study’s coauthors, Brian Dlouhy, a neurosurgeon at the University of Iowa, studies sudden unexpected death in epilepsy, or SUDEP, in which people with epilepsy can die suddenly.
Voytek said future studies could examine whether the relationship identified here becomes disrupted in SUDEP or sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, and whether changes in breathing might provide an early warning before breathing stops.
“Future research could investigate whether the breathing pattern provides a warning that breathing is about to stop in SUDEP or SIDS, said Voytek, who has affiliations in the School of Medicine’s Neurosciences Graduate Program and the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute in the Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing.
The current study does not show that breathing patterns can predict SUDEP or SIDS. Instead, it provides a framework for testing whether the normal relationship between breathing and neural activity becomes disrupted in these conditions.
“Now that we know that there is this incredibly tight and rich coupling between the shape of each breath and the shape of each brainwave, there’s a whole new world of options that we can explore,” Voytek said.
A newly identified mammal relative suggests that Tanzania’s possible early dinosaur fossils may be younger than previously thought.
Dinodontosaurus isiyavamanda, a newly identified plant-eating relative of mammals from Tanzania, may change the age assigned to some of the world’s oldest possible dinosaur fossils. The animal lived around 240 million years ago during the Triassic period, and its remains come from the same rocks as those dinosaur candidates.
An international team led by the University of Bristol identified the animal as a species of Dinodontosaurus, a genus previously known only from South America. Its presence on both continents gives researchers a new way to compare the ages of fossil-bearing rocks, with implications for when and where dinosaurs first evolved.
Tanzania’s dinosaur candidates may be younger
The age previously assigned to the Tanzanian deposits rested partly on comparisons with South African rocks. Researchers thought the two locations shared some fossil genera, or groups of closely related species, and considered the South African rocks to be Middle Triassic in age.
The connection with South America points to a younger age for the Tanzanian deposits. Recent radiometric dating, which estimates age by measuring the decay of radioactive elements, suggests that the South American rock sequences are up to 10 million years younger than the South African ones. The finding adds evidence against treating the Tanzanian dinosaur candidates as the oldest known.
Hady George, the study’s lead author and a PhD student in the University of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences, said: “Our discovery marks the first confirmed record of the genus Dinodontosaurus outside South America. The finding links the Tanzanian and South American fossil-bearing rocks, showing they are of equivalent age.
“This helps confirm that the oldest dinosaur candidates from Tanzania are probably no older than those from South America, refining the timeline of dinosaur origins. Forthcoming research projects will examine the remaining fossil material and explore the biomechanics and ecology of Triassic dicynodonts.”
Front of cranium and the lower jaw.
Credit: Jonathan Jackson and Hady George
Museum fossils reveal Dinodontosaurus in Africa
The evidence behind that reassessment includes a skeleton collected more than six decades ago. A British expedition to what is now Tanzania brought back an extensive collection of synapsid fossils in 1963. Synapsids are vertebrates in the mammal lineage that flourished before the rise of dinosaurs. The fossils were housed at the Natural History Museum in London, but the collection remained only partly studied, leaving some specimens unidentified.
For the new study, published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, researchers examined a previously undescribed skeleton from that collection alongside a fragmentary skull discovered more recently. Both belonged to dicynodonts, a group of plant-eating synapsids.
The anatomical evidence placed the Tanzanian fossils within Dinodontosaurus, while differences showed that they represented a previously unknown species. The researchers named it Dinodontosaurus isiyavamanda in reference to the land of the Wamanda people, who inhabit the region where the fossils were found.
Dr. Mike Day, curator of non-mammalian tetrapods at the Natural History Museum in London, said: “This fossil specimen from Tanzania has been in our care for over 60 years, and it’s wonderful that its identity has now been brought to light. By revealing that Dinodontosaurus lived in South America and eastern Africa, it offers a glimpse of our planet 240 million years ago.
“It goes to show how revisiting museum collections can change our understanding of the past just as much as finding new fossils in the field, showing the importance of looking after these invaluable records of life on Earth.”
Paleontologist and study co-author Nigel Larkin, a visiting research fellow in the University of Reading’s School of Biological Sciences, said: “I studied this dicynodont skeleton for my MSc thesis at University College London back in 1994 and judged it to be a species new to science, but it took me nearly 30 years to start the process of writing it up for publication. I’m glad I waited, as the international team we put together, headed by Hady George, has done an amazing job of fleshing out this story in much more detail and depth than I could have achieved on my own.
“Techniques have improved vastly over the last 30 years too—we can do so much more with Micro CT scanning etc to examine such specimens than we ever could have imagined in the 1990s, and international collaboration is so much easier. And what’s 30 years? It’s the blink of an eye compared to the age of this prehistoric specimen.”
Much of the Tanzanian Dinodontosaurus material still awaits examination, particularly the postcranial skeleton, meaning the bones other than the skull. Researchers plan to study that anatomy and compare it with South American specimens. They will also investigate the biomechanics of Dinodontosaurus and related dicynodonts, examining how their bodies functioned to better understand how several large plant-eating species could coexist in Triassic ecosystems.
Your brain doesn't create consciousness. It receives it.
The Nobel Prize-winning theory that rewrites everything we know about what you are. --- What if everything you've been told about consciousness is backward?
Roger Penrose — the mathematician who won the 2020 Nobel Prize and worked alongside Stephen Hawking — asked one question that broke the entire neuroscience model:what if the brain CAN'T compute consciousness?
Together with anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, he built a theory so radical it was dismissed for decades. They called it Orch-OR — Orchestrated Objective Reduction. The claim: consciousness doesn't emerge from neurons firing. It happens inside microtubules — tiny protein structures inside your brain cells — at the quantum level.
And in 2024, a team at Wellesley College ran an experiment that changes everything. They gave rats a drug that stabilizes microtubules. Under anesthetic gas, those rats stayed conscious longer. The microtubules were keeping the quantum process alive.
This is the hard problem of consciousness — and the first framework that might actually solve it.
Statue of Meritamen (meaning “Beloved of Amun”, a major Egyptian deity), a queen consort who lived circa the 13th century BCE.
(Kurohito/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0)
Numerous women ruled ancient Egypt in some form or another throughout its storied history, not to mention some action-movie-worthy princesses.
Notable names include Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, and Cleopatra – seven Cleopatras, in fact.
Sifting back through the sands of time, the first queen of Egypt was Sobekneferu, who ruled almost 4,000 years ago. Or so the conventional chronology goes.
But Egypt's first woman sovereign may have ruled more than a millennium earlier, potentially making her the earliest in recorded history.
Her name was Meretneith, meaning "beloved of Neith," the goddess of war and motherhood, a combination that either makes more or less sense the more you think about it.
Now, new research published in the journal Prague Egyptological Studies reveals some previously hidden (in plain sight) evidence of Meretneith's sovereignty status, and describes her versatile, decades-long rulership in unexplored detail.
Egyptologist Sue Kelly at Charles University in Prague, and digital archaeologist Crystal Miller at the University of Bucharest in Romania, used a custom digital-imaging technique – isolating the hieroglyphs, inverting the colors, and converting the image into a high-contrast vector graphic – to reveal Meretneith's name inscribed on "serekhs," or royal seals.
Such devices were afforded to Egyptian rulers.
The serekhs adorn a set of 13 mud stoppers – plugs used to seal pottery jars and other vessels – discovered 80 years ago in the mummy-infested Saqqara necropolis (interestingly, this is not where Meretneith was buried).
The digital transformation of the ancient serekhs.
(Kelly & Miller, PES, 2026)
"In our opinion, the result identifies Meretneith with the primary mark of rulers in this period," Kelly explains.
"This means she really was a female king (not simply a 'queen', but a true equivalent to a male ruler, hence 'king') during the First Dynasty, and the second female ruler of ancient Egypt whose name was recorded in the royal serekh emblem."
It's a complicated, contested situation. Despite her name appearing across many media, including tombs at both the esteemed royal necropolises of Abydos and Saqqara, her status has remained ambiguous and much debated.
But multiple lines of evidence support Meretneith's prominence, including her royal tomb at Abydos, an "unequivocal ruler's burial," loaded with hundreds of large wine jars and nearly 50 subsidiary graves and chambers, used to inter servants and courtiers.
Her name also appears to have been inscribed on a monumental stone stela, of a kind afforded to rulers – one of a pair recovered from her tomb, though the second was too damaged for its inscription to be confirmed.
Meretneith's tomb complex, including her burial chamber at center, partially surrounded by funerary chambers of servants and courtiers.
(EC Köhler)
Across a career that may have spanned at least 30 years of rulership in some form or another, the researchers suggest that Meretneith began her political trajectory as a co-regent who ruled alongside her possible father, Djer, the third king of Egypt, whose name also appears on the mud-stopper serekhs.
This conclusion builds on an earlier proposal that she'd first served as a crown princess, or heir apparent.
Later, Meretneith may have become regent when her son, Den, was a minor.
Intriguingly, a still-mysterious seal impression found in Den's tomb may list a chronology of rulers, or ancestors for a mortuary cult, with Meretneith's name featured last, with the title of "king's mother."
Additionally, "Egyptians acknowledged her political status by naming her on the tomb seal of a subsequent ruler, Semerkhet," suggesting she was respected after her reign, Kelly explains.
"Other texts indicate that she held authority over the treasury and officials, governing as a ruler without a political title."
Her political versatility likely stemmed from her gender and her position in the ruling family at the time; she adopted numerous, distinct ruler roles as the political environment evolved.
"We suggest Meretneith had the advantage of stepping in and out of the political domain as necessitated by the needs of the political environment," Kelly concludes, "unlike male rulers who succeeded her, reigned, died, and were buried by their successors."
