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Live Science
21 órája ezelőtt · 🌍 Friss Hírek
Are some people wired to see ghosts? A psychologist explains what makes paranormal experiences more likely
Is my brain wired to never see a ghost? A psychologist on three factors that make a paranormal experience more likely
Around 1 in 5 Americans say they'...
Is my brain wired to never see a ghost? A psychologist on three factors that make a paranormal experience more likely
Around 1 in 5 Americans say they've seen a ghost. I'm not one of them, and I probably never will be. I blame my brain.
Let me explain. No one can say definitively that ghosts exist, but many people believe they do. Roughly three-quarters of Americans believe in some form of paranormal activity — not only ghosts, but psychic abilities, precognitive dreams, mediums and anything else that conventional explanations can't account for.
As a psychology professor, I often think about the subjectivity people use when interpreting experiences. I wonder, then, if there are perfectly ordinary explanations for seemingly extraordinary experiences. Maybe a perfect storm of everyday factors can converge and trigger the sensation of a paranormal experience.
In my new book, "Science of the Supernatural," I explore the idea that the human brain might be creating an experience of the supernatural by misinterpreting the external world. Here are three factors that might trick your brain into creating a fake ghost:
Anyone who's ever watched a ghost hunting show has seen the paranormal investigator mutter something like "The EMF's going crazy" when there's purported supernatural activity afoot. Electromagnetic fields, or EMFs, are invisible areas of energy created by electrically charged particles.
At present, there is no direct evidence that humans can consciously sense EMF the same way we can touch, see or hear things in our environment. But with a handheld device purchased at a local hardware store, you can measure them anywhere. An EMF detector picks up electrical or magnetic activity, whether human-made or otherworldly. But do EMF fluctuations relate to paranormal activity?
A handheld EMF detector can tell you where electromagnetic fields are strong or weak, but not what’s causing them.
The scientific method might help answer this question. In one study, conducted in the South Street vaults underneath Edinburgh, Scotland, EMFs fluctuated more in areas with a history of ghostly happenings. Another study found greater variability of EMFs in the more "haunted" areas of Hampton Court Palace in England.
People might unknowingly be detecting changes in environmental stimuli, like electromagnetic fields. The question then becomes: Did the ghost cause the EMF, or did the EMF cause the ghost?
To date, only one research group has attempted to experimentally manipulate environmental factors, including complex EMF, and measure subsequent perceptions of the paranormal.
Participants did report many peculiarities, ranging from feeling dizzy to feeling like they were detached from their bodies and even sensing a presence — but these experiences didn't correspond to how the researchers varied environmental conditions, like EMF intensity. Interestingly, the people who described anomalous experiences were the same people who believed more strongly in the paranormal.
Do environmental factors like EMF lead to perceptions of the paranormal? On the one hand, there is a correlation between reportedly haunted places and EMF variability. And there are some indications that humans can detect magnetism. On the other hand, experimental manipulation of EMF did not relate to weird perceptions in a lab setting.
I think we need to look into other haunted factors.
By applying a small electrical current to the side of the head, usually to evaluate a patient for a clinical procedure, researchers have observed some strange effects. One case study described a patient who experienced an "illusory shadow figure" that was mimicking, and even interfering, with their movements. Other people have reported out-of-body experiences.
Experimental evidence suggests that this brain area, the temporoparietal junction, is probably crucial for the feeling of embodiment — that you inhabit your own body. Disrupting this brain area seems to trigger a sensation of disembodiment.
The temporoparietal junction is on each side of the brain; this region helps you feel that you are within your own body.
Neuroscientists aren't completely sure how the sense of embodiment is built in the brain. The brain probably integrates bodily senses, like balance and position, with other internal processes, like a sense of self and agency. When this integration is altered, a person will experience very strange sensations.
Sometimes, misinterpretation of sensations from the body can happen during sleep, when your brain shuts out the external world. During rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep, when most vivid dreams occur, the brain sends messages that prevent movement of skeletal muscles. This inhibition causes complete paralysis during REM sleep. It is a neurological safeguard; without it, you would be likely to act out your dreams.
Some people, though, wake up during REM sleep and find that they cannot move. They may simultaneously experience rich hallucinations — the remnants of their dream. This experience passes quickly. But in that moment of sleep paralysis, the neural signals that control skeletal muscle movement are inhibited, resulting in a mismatch of feedback from the body to the brain. Most people respond to the missing sensory information with fear, which makes them more likely to experience the sights and sounds from their dreams as reality.
Living through a paranormal encounter requires that a person label their experience as such. If a believer were exposed to fluctuating EMFs, for example, they might be quick to categorize the strange sensation as paranormal. A skeptic might note they felt weird or off, but probably not point to a paranormal explanation.
There's a growing body of research that suggests people with certain personality traits are more likely to believe in the paranormal.
For instance, some people are hyperaware of unconscious perceptions and ideas, which then permeate their consciousness. Often, these traits are associated with magical thinking, distorted or unusual thoughts, disorganized behavior and, sometimes, trouble forming close relationships.
A perfect storm of factors can make a ghost seem like the only explanation.
Psychologists refer to this set of traits as schizotypy. They're related to schizophrenia, although being high in schizotypy doesn't mean you will be diagnosed with the disorder of schizophrenia. People with high levels of schizotypy are more likely to believe in the paranormal. They're also more likely to experience disembodiment and spontaneous sensory perceptions and have trouble discriminating between self and others.
All of these traits relate to the function of the temporoparietal junction — the brain area that helps you know you're located within your own body.
While I cannot say for sure whether ghosts exist, I can propose a plausible explanation for why some people might be more prone to apparent paranormal experiences than others.
Consider a person who believes in paranormal phenomena who experiences a natural change in electromagnetic fields or an episode of sleep paralysis. Those experiences induce unusual sensations that this person cannot explain. Searching for meaning in ambiguity, this person distorts their distinction between internally and externally generated sensations. They settle on the only explanation that makes sense to them — that this strange feeling they experienced was a ghost.
My guess is that belief in the paranormal is the glue that holds the haunted factors together to create the (mis)perception of a ghost.
One experiment asked participants to walk through a disused theater in Decatur, Illinois. Some were told that the theater was haunted, and some were not. Several participants noted weird sensations that they attributed to paranormal activity — but only those who believed that the theater was haunted reported these sensations.
Belief alone might not create a ghost, but belief combined with at least one haunted factor — environmental stimuli, neurological hiccups or psychological conditions — might be enough to make a ghost real.
This becomes a chicken-or-the-egg riddle — or in this case, the ghost or the EMF. Someone who is more likely to be sensitive to environmental factors or who experiences sleep paralysis might create belief from their experiences. When someone cannot explain these experiences with any "natural" explanation, a supernatural explanation might be the only one that makes sense.
I've never noticed EMF. I've never experienced sleep paralysis. I'm pretty sure I don't have personality traits like schizotypy. I don't believe in the paranormal. And I don't think I'll ever see a ghost.
This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Melissa Maffeo is a teaching professor of psychology at Wake Forest University
#science
Around 1 in 5 Americans say they've seen a ghost. I'm not one of them, and I probably never will be. I blame my brain.
Let me explain. No one can say definitively that ghosts exist, but many people believe they do. Roughly three-quarters of Americans believe in some form of paranormal activity — not only ghosts, but psychic abilities, precognitive dreams, mediums and anything else that conventional explanations can't account for.
As a psychology professor, I often think about the subjectivity people use when interpreting experiences. I wonder, then, if there are perfectly ordinary explanations for seemingly extraordinary experiences. Maybe a perfect storm of everyday factors can converge and trigger the sensation of a paranormal experience.
In my new book, "Science of the Supernatural," I explore the idea that the human brain might be creating an experience of the supernatural by misinterpreting the external world. Here are three factors that might trick your brain into creating a fake ghost:
Anyone who's ever watched a ghost hunting show has seen the paranormal investigator mutter something like "The EMF's going crazy" when there's purported supernatural activity afoot. Electromagnetic fields, or EMFs, are invisible areas of energy created by electrically charged particles.
At present, there is no direct evidence that humans can consciously sense EMF the same way we can touch, see or hear things in our environment. But with a handheld device purchased at a local hardware store, you can measure them anywhere. An EMF detector picks up electrical or magnetic activity, whether human-made or otherworldly. But do EMF fluctuations relate to paranormal activity?
A handheld EMF detector can tell you where electromagnetic fields are strong or weak, but not what’s causing them.
The scientific method might help answer this question. In one study, conducted in the South Street vaults underneath Edinburgh, Scotland, EMFs fluctuated more in areas with a history of ghostly happenings. Another study found greater variability of EMFs in the more "haunted" areas of Hampton Court Palace in England.
People might unknowingly be detecting changes in environmental stimuli, like electromagnetic fields. The question then becomes: Did the ghost cause the EMF, or did the EMF cause the ghost?
To date, only one research group has attempted to experimentally manipulate environmental factors, including complex EMF, and measure subsequent perceptions of the paranormal.
Participants did report many peculiarities, ranging from feeling dizzy to feeling like they were detached from their bodies and even sensing a presence — but these experiences didn't correspond to how the researchers varied environmental conditions, like EMF intensity. Interestingly, the people who described anomalous experiences were the same people who believed more strongly in the paranormal.
Do environmental factors like EMF lead to perceptions of the paranormal? On the one hand, there is a correlation between reportedly haunted places and EMF variability. And there are some indications that humans can detect magnetism. On the other hand, experimental manipulation of EMF did not relate to weird perceptions in a lab setting.
I think we need to look into other haunted factors.
By applying a small electrical current to the side of the head, usually to evaluate a patient for a clinical procedure, researchers have observed some strange effects. One case study described a patient who experienced an "illusory shadow figure" that was mimicking, and even interfering, with their movements. Other people have reported out-of-body experiences.
Experimental evidence suggests that this brain area, the temporoparietal junction, is probably crucial for the feeling of embodiment — that you inhabit your own body. Disrupting this brain area seems to trigger a sensation of disembodiment.
The temporoparietal junction is on each side of the brain; this region helps you feel that you are within your own body.
Neuroscientists aren't completely sure how the sense of embodiment is built in the brain. The brain probably integrates bodily senses, like balance and position, with other internal processes, like a sense of self and agency. When this integration is altered, a person will experience very strange sensations.
Sometimes, misinterpretation of sensations from the body can happen during sleep, when your brain shuts out the external world. During rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep, when most vivid dreams occur, the brain sends messages that prevent movement of skeletal muscles. This inhibition causes complete paralysis during REM sleep. It is a neurological safeguard; without it, you would be likely to act out your dreams.
Some people, though, wake up during REM sleep and find that they cannot move. They may simultaneously experience rich hallucinations — the remnants of their dream. This experience passes quickly. But in that moment of sleep paralysis, the neural signals that control skeletal muscle movement are inhibited, resulting in a mismatch of feedback from the body to the brain. Most people respond to the missing sensory information with fear, which makes them more likely to experience the sights and sounds from their dreams as reality.
Living through a paranormal encounter requires that a person label their experience as such. If a believer were exposed to fluctuating EMFs, for example, they might be quick to categorize the strange sensation as paranormal. A skeptic might note they felt weird or off, but probably not point to a paranormal explanation.
There's a growing body of research that suggests people with certain personality traits are more likely to believe in the paranormal.
For instance, some people are hyperaware of unconscious perceptions and ideas, which then permeate their consciousness. Often, these traits are associated with magical thinking, distorted or unusual thoughts, disorganized behavior and, sometimes, trouble forming close relationships.
A perfect storm of factors can make a ghost seem like the only explanation.
Psychologists refer to this set of traits as schizotypy. They're related to schizophrenia, although being high in schizotypy doesn't mean you will be diagnosed with the disorder of schizophrenia. People with high levels of schizotypy are more likely to believe in the paranormal. They're also more likely to experience disembodiment and spontaneous sensory perceptions and have trouble discriminating between self and others.
All of these traits relate to the function of the temporoparietal junction — the brain area that helps you know you're located within your own body.
While I cannot say for sure whether ghosts exist, I can propose a plausible explanation for why some people might be more prone to apparent paranormal experiences than others.
Consider a person who believes in paranormal phenomena who experiences a natural change in electromagnetic fields or an episode of sleep paralysis. Those experiences induce unusual sensations that this person cannot explain. Searching for meaning in ambiguity, this person distorts their distinction between internally and externally generated sensations. They settle on the only explanation that makes sense to them — that this strange feeling they experienced was a ghost.
My guess is that belief in the paranormal is the glue that holds the haunted factors together to create the (mis)perception of a ghost.
One experiment asked participants to walk through a disused theater in Decatur, Illinois. Some were told that the theater was haunted, and some were not. Several participants noted weird sensations that they attributed to paranormal activity — but only those who believed that the theater was haunted reported these sensations.
Belief alone might not create a ghost, but belief combined with at least one haunted factor — environmental stimuli, neurological hiccups or psychological conditions — might be enough to make a ghost real.
This becomes a chicken-or-the-egg riddle — or in this case, the ghost or the EMF. Someone who is more likely to be sensitive to environmental factors or who experiences sleep paralysis might create belief from their experiences. When someone cannot explain these experiences with any "natural" explanation, a supernatural explanation might be the only one that makes sense.
I've never noticed EMF. I've never experienced sleep paralysis. I'm pretty sure I don't have personality traits like schizotypy. I don't believe in the paranormal. And I don't think I'll ever see a ghost.
This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Melissa Maffeo is a teaching professor of psychology at Wake Forest University
#science
L
Live Science
21 órája ezelőtt · 🌍 Friss Hírek
How many generations of humans have there been?
Modern humans have been around 300,000 years. How many generations is that?
Whether using family records, DNA tests or genealogy websites, many people can t...
Modern humans have been around 300,000 years. How many generations is that?
Whether using family records, DNA tests or genealogy websites, many people can trace their family histories back generations. The world-record holder for the longest family tree is Chinese philosopher Confucius (551 to 479 B.C.), whose family tree extends more than 80 generations from his ancestors in the eighth century B.C. to his living descendants. That's almost 3,000 years.
But our species has been around for 300,000 years, based on scientific dates of the oldest known fossils. So how many generations do we go back as a species?
To find out, you need to know how long modern humans (Homo sapiens) have existed and the length of a generation, according to Matthew Hahn, a population geneticist at Indiana University Bloomington. The number of human generations that have lived would be equal to the time since H. sapiens emerged as a species divided by the length of a generation, also called the generation interval.
Sign up for our weekly Life's Little Mysteries newsletter to get the latest mysteries before they appear online.
The generation interval is typically defined as the average age at which humans have children, Hahn said. It tends to be longer for men than for women because men can have children later in life, Hahn explained.
There are many estimates of our species' generation interval, each of which produces a different answer to the question of how many human generations have come before us.
For example, a 2003 study of Icelanders published in the American Journal of Human Genetics based generation interval estimates on the country's extensive records from churches and other sources. Using these records, researchers at the company deCODE Genetics created a genealogical database of the country's entire population. They found that the average generation interval in Iceland over the past 300 years was 30.3 years.
A 2005 study used data about the average age at which European women had children between 1960 and 2000 and estimated the generation intervals for men to arrive at an average generation interval of 29.1 years.
Over the past 250,000 years, the length of a human generation has gone up and down, according to research led by Matthew Hahn. The researchers estimated that our generation time was 26.9 years, on average.
But those are estimates of the generation interval in the recent past. A study led by Hahn and published in the journal Science Advances in 2023 estimated the generation interval over the past 250,000 years. Hahn's study put together data from two others. A 2017 study of Icelanders, also led by deCODE Genetics and published in the journal Nature, found that as parents age, the blend of mutations that arise in their children changes. Using this data, Hahn and colleagues built a model of the mix of new mutations that you would expect to find in a group of people according to the generation interval at the time.
"If you know the types of mutations that individuals leave to their children according to their age, if you have a collection of mutations, you can try to estimate how old the mixture of individuals was," Hahn said.
A 2020 study in the journal PLOS Biology estimated when millions of mutations found in humans today first arose. Hahn and colleagues grouped the mutations from the 2020 paper according to when they arose and then determined the blend of new mutations that popped up during each time period. With that information, they could estimate the generation interval for each time span. While the generation interval varied over the course of an estimated 250,000 years, it was an estimated 26.9 years, on average. Using that generation interval, there would have been an estimated 11,152 generations of humans over 300,000 years, Hahn said.
One of our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, has a generation time of about 25 years.
Moisès Coll Macià, an evolutionary biologist and population geneticist who works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, Spain, told Live Science that while a generation interval of 26.9 years is "not unimaginable," he prefers to give a range of possible generation intervals.
In Coll Macià's view, the lower bound would be the generation interval for one of our closest living relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Because humans and chimps share a common ancestor that lived during the Miocene epoch (23 million to 5 million years ago), you would expect that past human generations would have had a generation interval somewhere between that of contemporary humans and that of contemporary chimps, Coll Macià said. Chimpanzees have an estimated generation time of about 24.6 years, according to a 2012 paper in the journal PNAS.
As for the upper bound in modern humans, Coll Macià suggested 26 to 30 years. That's based on a 2016 PNAS study that analyzed fragments of Neanderthal DNA found in ancient and contemporary human genomes to estimate the human generation interval across the past 45,000 years.
Based on Coll Macià's upper-bound generation interval of about 30 years, there have been at least 10,000 generations of humans. Based on the lower-bound generation interval of 24.6 years, there have been at most 12,195 generations. These numbers attest that the human family tree is pretty tall, however you look at it.
See how much you know about early humans with our human evolution quiz!
Ashley P. Taylor is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York. As a science writer, she focuses on molecular biology and health, though she enjoys learning about experiments of all kinds. Ashley's work has appeared in Live Science, The New York Times blogs, The Scientist, Yale Medicine and PopularMechanics.com. Ashley studied biology at Oberlin College, worked in several labs and earned a master's degree in science journalism from New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program.
#science
Whether using family records, DNA tests or genealogy websites, many people can trace their family histories back generations. The world-record holder for the longest family tree is Chinese philosopher Confucius (551 to 479 B.C.), whose family tree extends more than 80 generations from his ancestors in the eighth century B.C. to his living descendants. That's almost 3,000 years.
But our species has been around for 300,000 years, based on scientific dates of the oldest known fossils. So how many generations do we go back as a species?
To find out, you need to know how long modern humans (Homo sapiens) have existed and the length of a generation, according to Matthew Hahn, a population geneticist at Indiana University Bloomington. The number of human generations that have lived would be equal to the time since H. sapiens emerged as a species divided by the length of a generation, also called the generation interval.
Sign up for our weekly Life's Little Mysteries newsletter to get the latest mysteries before they appear online.
The generation interval is typically defined as the average age at which humans have children, Hahn said. It tends to be longer for men than for women because men can have children later in life, Hahn explained.
There are many estimates of our species' generation interval, each of which produces a different answer to the question of how many human generations have come before us.
For example, a 2003 study of Icelanders published in the American Journal of Human Genetics based generation interval estimates on the country's extensive records from churches and other sources. Using these records, researchers at the company deCODE Genetics created a genealogical database of the country's entire population. They found that the average generation interval in Iceland over the past 300 years was 30.3 years.
A 2005 study used data about the average age at which European women had children between 1960 and 2000 and estimated the generation intervals for men to arrive at an average generation interval of 29.1 years.
Over the past 250,000 years, the length of a human generation has gone up and down, according to research led by Matthew Hahn. The researchers estimated that our generation time was 26.9 years, on average.
But those are estimates of the generation interval in the recent past. A study led by Hahn and published in the journal Science Advances in 2023 estimated the generation interval over the past 250,000 years. Hahn's study put together data from two others. A 2017 study of Icelanders, also led by deCODE Genetics and published in the journal Nature, found that as parents age, the blend of mutations that arise in their children changes. Using this data, Hahn and colleagues built a model of the mix of new mutations that you would expect to find in a group of people according to the generation interval at the time.
"If you know the types of mutations that individuals leave to their children according to their age, if you have a collection of mutations, you can try to estimate how old the mixture of individuals was," Hahn said.
A 2020 study in the journal PLOS Biology estimated when millions of mutations found in humans today first arose. Hahn and colleagues grouped the mutations from the 2020 paper according to when they arose and then determined the blend of new mutations that popped up during each time period. With that information, they could estimate the generation interval for each time span. While the generation interval varied over the course of an estimated 250,000 years, it was an estimated 26.9 years, on average. Using that generation interval, there would have been an estimated 11,152 generations of humans over 300,000 years, Hahn said.
One of our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, has a generation time of about 25 years.
Moisès Coll Macià, an evolutionary biologist and population geneticist who works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, Spain, told Live Science that while a generation interval of 26.9 years is "not unimaginable," he prefers to give a range of possible generation intervals.
In Coll Macià's view, the lower bound would be the generation interval for one of our closest living relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Because humans and chimps share a common ancestor that lived during the Miocene epoch (23 million to 5 million years ago), you would expect that past human generations would have had a generation interval somewhere between that of contemporary humans and that of contemporary chimps, Coll Macià said. Chimpanzees have an estimated generation time of about 24.6 years, according to a 2012 paper in the journal PNAS.
As for the upper bound in modern humans, Coll Macià suggested 26 to 30 years. That's based on a 2016 PNAS study that analyzed fragments of Neanderthal DNA found in ancient and contemporary human genomes to estimate the human generation interval across the past 45,000 years.
Based on Coll Macià's upper-bound generation interval of about 30 years, there have been at least 10,000 generations of humans. Based on the lower-bound generation interval of 24.6 years, there have been at most 12,195 generations. These numbers attest that the human family tree is pretty tall, however you look at it.
See how much you know about early humans with our human evolution quiz!
Ashley P. Taylor is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York. As a science writer, she focuses on molecular biology and health, though she enjoys learning about experiments of all kinds. Ashley's work has appeared in Live Science, The New York Times blogs, The Scientist, Yale Medicine and PopularMechanics.com. Ashley studied biology at Oberlin College, worked in several labs and earned a master's degree in science journalism from New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program.
#science
L
Live Science
21 órája ezelőtt · 🌍 Friss Hírek
Astronomers gaze into the 'Crystal Ball Nebula' and see a vision of our dying sun — Space photo of the week
The Crystal Ball Nebula has captivated astronomers for more than 200 years, and it offers a bittersweet glimpse of a dying star system similar to our own.
W...
The Crystal Ball Nebula has captivated astronomers for more than 200 years, and it offers a bittersweet glimpse of a dying star system similar to our own.
What it is: NGC 1514, the Crystal Ball Nebula
Where it is: About 1,500 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Taurus
When it was shared: May 21, 2026
Hidden in the night sky, just above the hump of Taurus, is a giant crystal ball that shows both the past and the future.
This is the Crystal Ball Nebula (NGC 1514). To look at this orb's gauzy, white light is to see 1,500 years into the past, since that's about how long it's taken the nebula's light to reach Earth. But if you peer a bit deeper into the ball's bright center, you'll see the fiery ghost of a dead star system — and a vision of what awaits our stellar neighborhood about 5 billion years from now.
This view, captured with the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Gemini North telescope in Hawaii, is one of the clearest images ever taken of an object known to science for more than 200 years. Astronomer William Herschel (best known for discovering Uranus, as well as infrared radiation) was the first to spot the Crystal Ball Nebula, in 1790.
Herschel called these types of objects "planetary nebulas," because their spherical shapes looked like planets through his early telescopes. In reality, no planets are involved. Nebulas like these form when stars measuring between roughly one and eight times the mass of the sun reach the ends of their lives and shed their outer layers of gas into space, according to the European Space Agency. As the gas blooms outward, the star emits a final burst of radiation, charging the gas and making it glow — with reliably spectacular results.
While Herschel initially thought the Crystal Ball's glow was powered by a distant cluster of stars, modern telescopes show a single, tight-knit binary star system at its center. These doomed siblings swirl around each other once every nine years, according to an NSF statement, making this the longest-period binary system within a planetary nebula. Their slow dance spews stellar wind asymmetrically through the gas cloud, carving the nebula into the lumpy, popcorn-ified shape we see today.
Long after humanity has likely disappeared, the sun will face a similar fate. As it exhausts its nuclear fuel, our star will swell into a red giant — likely consuming Earth and the other inner planets in the process — before finally ejecting its outer layers into interstellar space.
If any intelligent alien astronomers happen to be watching from across the galaxy, they'll see our solar system disappear inside a glorious planetary nebula and become a new landmark in their sky. Hopefully, they memorialize us with a suitably cool name.
'Human minds should not go through this'
The Artemis II crew recalls the unreal moment when Earth disappeared
Hidden structure in 1st Vera Rubin image
First-light images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory reveal a 163,000-light-year stream of stars emanating from a nearby galaxy.
JWST peeps the 'Eye of God'
A spectacular James Webb telescope image reveals intricate structures inside the Helix Nebula.
Brandon is the space / physics editor at Live Science. With more than 20 years of editorial experience, his writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Reader's Digest, CBS.com, the Richard Dawkins Foundation website and other outlets. He holds a bachelor's degree in creative writing from the University of Arizona, with minors in journalism and media arts. His interests include black holes, asteroids and comets, and the search for extraterrestrial life.
#science
What it is: NGC 1514, the Crystal Ball Nebula
Where it is: About 1,500 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Taurus
When it was shared: May 21, 2026
Hidden in the night sky, just above the hump of Taurus, is a giant crystal ball that shows both the past and the future.
This is the Crystal Ball Nebula (NGC 1514). To look at this orb's gauzy, white light is to see 1,500 years into the past, since that's about how long it's taken the nebula's light to reach Earth. But if you peer a bit deeper into the ball's bright center, you'll see the fiery ghost of a dead star system — and a vision of what awaits our stellar neighborhood about 5 billion years from now.
This view, captured with the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Gemini North telescope in Hawaii, is one of the clearest images ever taken of an object known to science for more than 200 years. Astronomer William Herschel (best known for discovering Uranus, as well as infrared radiation) was the first to spot the Crystal Ball Nebula, in 1790.
Herschel called these types of objects "planetary nebulas," because their spherical shapes looked like planets through his early telescopes. In reality, no planets are involved. Nebulas like these form when stars measuring between roughly one and eight times the mass of the sun reach the ends of their lives and shed their outer layers of gas into space, according to the European Space Agency. As the gas blooms outward, the star emits a final burst of radiation, charging the gas and making it glow — with reliably spectacular results.
While Herschel initially thought the Crystal Ball's glow was powered by a distant cluster of stars, modern telescopes show a single, tight-knit binary star system at its center. These doomed siblings swirl around each other once every nine years, according to an NSF statement, making this the longest-period binary system within a planetary nebula. Their slow dance spews stellar wind asymmetrically through the gas cloud, carving the nebula into the lumpy, popcorn-ified shape we see today.
Long after humanity has likely disappeared, the sun will face a similar fate. As it exhausts its nuclear fuel, our star will swell into a red giant — likely consuming Earth and the other inner planets in the process — before finally ejecting its outer layers into interstellar space.
If any intelligent alien astronomers happen to be watching from across the galaxy, they'll see our solar system disappear inside a glorious planetary nebula and become a new landmark in their sky. Hopefully, they memorialize us with a suitably cool name.
'Human minds should not go through this'
The Artemis II crew recalls the unreal moment when Earth disappeared
Hidden structure in 1st Vera Rubin image
First-light images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory reveal a 163,000-light-year stream of stars emanating from a nearby galaxy.
JWST peeps the 'Eye of God'
A spectacular James Webb telescope image reveals intricate structures inside the Helix Nebula.
Brandon is the space / physics editor at Live Science. With more than 20 years of editorial experience, his writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Reader's Digest, CBS.com, the Richard Dawkins Foundation website and other outlets. He holds a bachelor's degree in creative writing from the University of Arizona, with minors in journalism and media arts. His interests include black holes, asteroids and comets, and the search for extraterrestrial life.
#science
L
Live Science
21 órája ezelőtt · 🌍 Friss Hírek
'Astonishing': James Webb telescope spots the most chemically primitive galaxy in the ancient universe
The James Webb telescope peered into an ancient spot of light, and found it to be the most metal-poor galaxy in the early universe.
One of the greatest achi...
The James Webb telescope peered into an ancient spot of light, and found it to be the most metal-poor galaxy in the early universe.
One of the greatest achievements of the James Webb Space Telescope is how it has allowed scientists to push the boundaries of astronomy by observing galaxies that existed during the early universe, less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang. This period, known as the Epoch of Reionization, coincides with what astronomers have nicknamed the "Cosmic Dark Ages." During this time, 380,000 to 1 billion years after the Big Bang, the universe was filled with neutral hydrogen, and any sources of light visible today are redshifted beyond the limits of conventional telescopes.
Thanks to Webb's advanced infrared instruments and spectrometers, scientists can now peer behind this veil and see how galaxies have evolved since the earliest cosmological epochs. In a recent discovery, an international team of astronomers used Webb and the gravitational lensing technique to capture a rare look at LAP1-B, an ultra-faint galaxy that existed 800 million years after the Big Bang. Using Webb's spectrometers, the team was able to definitively characterize this galaxy, revealing it to be the most metal-poor galaxy in the early Universe observed to date.
The team was led by Associate Professor Kimihiko Nakajima of Kanazawa University. The study describing their research appeared on May 13th in the journal Nature.
In the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, the universe contained only light elements such as hydrogen and helium, while the elements necessary for life (carbon, oxygen, etc.) were absent. These elements were forged in the interiors of the first generation of stars (Population III), which were then dispersed when these stars went supernova and blew off their external layers. For decades, astronomers have been hoping to find these stars so they could witness the moment they began seeding the Universe with heavier elements. This has been problematic since the earliest galaxies that hosted Population III stars appear so small and faint.
A timeline of the universe's evolution after the Big Bang.
As a result, determining their chemical makeup through spectroscopy was thought to be nearly impossible until now. The work of Nakajima builds on initial detections of LAP1-B by adding JWST spectra to the picture, revealing a record-low oxygen abundance (1/240th that of the sun). When combined with an elevated carbon-to-oxygen ratio and a dominant dark matter halo, these findings suggest that LAP1-B is a progenitor to the fossil galaxies found near the Milky Way. Astronomers have been searching for these "ancestor" galaxies, making LAP1-B a historic window into the earliest stages of galaxy formation.
Usually, we act like 'cosmic archaeologists,' trying to guess the past by looking at old stars in our own neighborhood. But now, we can analyze the gas directly from the original scene 13 billion years ago.
The team was assisted by the presence of an intervening galaxy cluster, which acted as a gravitational lens, magnifying the light from LAP1-B by a factor of 100. After 30 hours of observations and deep spectroscopy, the team was finally able to characterize the chemical abundance of this galaxy. In addition to being chemically primitive, the galaxy's carbon-to-oxygen ratio closely matches theoretical predictions for the material dispersed by Population III star explosions.
Said Associate Professor Nakajima in a Kanazawa University press release: "I was instantly thrilled by the extreme lack of oxygen revealed in the data. Finding a galaxy in such a primitive state is astonishing. It's a chemical signature that clearly indicates a primordial galaxy caught in the moments shortly after its formation.."
The team also discovered that LAP1-B is incredibly light (less than 3,300 Solar masses), implying that most of the galaxy consists of dark matter in the form of a halo.
Along with its unique chemical makeup, this makes it a near-perfect match for the "Ultra-Faint Dwarf galaxies (UFDs)" found near the Milky Way today. Said Professor Masami Ouchi (NAOJ/University of Tokyo), a member of the research team: "UFDs are not only the faintest galaxies; they are composed of ancient stars over 12 billion years old and are often described as 'fossils of the universe.' Astronomers suspected they might be the remains of the universe's earliest galaxies because they lack heavy elements, but astronomers never had a direct link — until we found LAP1-B. It is a profound surprise to find that LAP1-B looks exactly like the 'ancestor' we had only imagined in theories. This helps us solve the mystery of why these cosmic fossils have survived in their current form to the present day."
The team's findings present astronomers with a new way to map the birth of heavier elements in the Universe and the formation of its oldest structures. The next step will consist of the team using JWST data to search for even more chemically primitive objects, including the very first ever formed.
As Nakajima indicated: "We hope this discovery marks a historic step in understanding how the elements that make up our own bodies were first born and accumulated across the Universe."
See how much you know about the world's most powerful telescope with our James Webb Space Telescope quiz!
Matt Williams is a science communicator, journalist, writer, and educator with over 20 years of experience in education and outreach. His articles have appeared in Universe Today, Interesting Engineering, HeroX, Phys.org, Business Insider, Popular Mechanics, and other notable publications. He is the host of Stories from Space, a weekly podcast about the past, present, and future of spaceflight, and a science fiction author with multiple published titles.
#science
One of the greatest achievements of the James Webb Space Telescope is how it has allowed scientists to push the boundaries of astronomy by observing galaxies that existed during the early universe, less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang. This period, known as the Epoch of Reionization, coincides with what astronomers have nicknamed the "Cosmic Dark Ages." During this time, 380,000 to 1 billion years after the Big Bang, the universe was filled with neutral hydrogen, and any sources of light visible today are redshifted beyond the limits of conventional telescopes.
Thanks to Webb's advanced infrared instruments and spectrometers, scientists can now peer behind this veil and see how galaxies have evolved since the earliest cosmological epochs. In a recent discovery, an international team of astronomers used Webb and the gravitational lensing technique to capture a rare look at LAP1-B, an ultra-faint galaxy that existed 800 million years after the Big Bang. Using Webb's spectrometers, the team was able to definitively characterize this galaxy, revealing it to be the most metal-poor galaxy in the early Universe observed to date.
The team was led by Associate Professor Kimihiko Nakajima of Kanazawa University. The study describing their research appeared on May 13th in the journal Nature.
In the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, the universe contained only light elements such as hydrogen and helium, while the elements necessary for life (carbon, oxygen, etc.) were absent. These elements were forged in the interiors of the first generation of stars (Population III), which were then dispersed when these stars went supernova and blew off their external layers. For decades, astronomers have been hoping to find these stars so they could witness the moment they began seeding the Universe with heavier elements. This has been problematic since the earliest galaxies that hosted Population III stars appear so small and faint.
A timeline of the universe's evolution after the Big Bang.
As a result, determining their chemical makeup through spectroscopy was thought to be nearly impossible until now. The work of Nakajima builds on initial detections of LAP1-B by adding JWST spectra to the picture, revealing a record-low oxygen abundance (1/240th that of the sun). When combined with an elevated carbon-to-oxygen ratio and a dominant dark matter halo, these findings suggest that LAP1-B is a progenitor to the fossil galaxies found near the Milky Way. Astronomers have been searching for these "ancestor" galaxies, making LAP1-B a historic window into the earliest stages of galaxy formation.
Usually, we act like 'cosmic archaeologists,' trying to guess the past by looking at old stars in our own neighborhood. But now, we can analyze the gas directly from the original scene 13 billion years ago.
The team was assisted by the presence of an intervening galaxy cluster, which acted as a gravitational lens, magnifying the light from LAP1-B by a factor of 100. After 30 hours of observations and deep spectroscopy, the team was finally able to characterize the chemical abundance of this galaxy. In addition to being chemically primitive, the galaxy's carbon-to-oxygen ratio closely matches theoretical predictions for the material dispersed by Population III star explosions.
Said Associate Professor Nakajima in a Kanazawa University press release: "I was instantly thrilled by the extreme lack of oxygen revealed in the data. Finding a galaxy in such a primitive state is astonishing. It's a chemical signature that clearly indicates a primordial galaxy caught in the moments shortly after its formation.."
The team also discovered that LAP1-B is incredibly light (less than 3,300 Solar masses), implying that most of the galaxy consists of dark matter in the form of a halo.
Along with its unique chemical makeup, this makes it a near-perfect match for the "Ultra-Faint Dwarf galaxies (UFDs)" found near the Milky Way today. Said Professor Masami Ouchi (NAOJ/University of Tokyo), a member of the research team: "UFDs are not only the faintest galaxies; they are composed of ancient stars over 12 billion years old and are often described as 'fossils of the universe.' Astronomers suspected they might be the remains of the universe's earliest galaxies because they lack heavy elements, but astronomers never had a direct link — until we found LAP1-B. It is a profound surprise to find that LAP1-B looks exactly like the 'ancestor' we had only imagined in theories. This helps us solve the mystery of why these cosmic fossils have survived in their current form to the present day."
The team's findings present astronomers with a new way to map the birth of heavier elements in the Universe and the formation of its oldest structures. The next step will consist of the team using JWST data to search for even more chemically primitive objects, including the very first ever formed.
As Nakajima indicated: "We hope this discovery marks a historic step in understanding how the elements that make up our own bodies were first born and accumulated across the Universe."
See how much you know about the world's most powerful telescope with our James Webb Space Telescope quiz!
Matt Williams is a science communicator, journalist, writer, and educator with over 20 years of experience in education and outreach. His articles have appeared in Universe Today, Interesting Engineering, HeroX, Phys.org, Business Insider, Popular Mechanics, and other notable publications. He is the host of Stories from Space, a weekly podcast about the past, present, and future of spaceflight, and a science fiction author with multiple published titles.
#science
L
Live Science
21 órája ezelőtt · 🌍 Friss Hírek
Bronze Age 5-year-old's skull found in Uzbekistan is the oldest known evidence of surgery in Central Asia
A child's 4,000-year-old skull found in Uzbekistan has signs of trepanation, making it the oldest evidence of surgery in Central Asia on record.
The 4,...
A child's 4,000-year-old skull found in Uzbekistan has signs of trepanation, making it the oldest evidence of surgery in Central Asia on record.
The 4,000-year-old skull of a Bronze Age child buried in what's now Uzbekistan bears scars from a cranial surgery known as trepanation. It is the oldest documented evidence of surgery in Central Asia and one of the oldest examples of surgery in all of Asia, the researchers report.
The skeleton of the child, who died at about age 5, was unearthed in April. The body had been buried in a single grave alongside the body of a child who died at about 3 years old, researchers said in a translated statement.
The 5-year-old's skull has "clear signs of cranial trepanation" involving stone or bone tools, according to the statement. Trepanation was commonly performed in ancient times, perhaps in attempts to treat maladies like epilepsy, migraines or behavioral problems. But the researchers noted that the "frontier between medicine and ritual" would have been far less defined at that time than it is now.
A research team from Italy and Uzbekistan made the discovery in the Northern Bactria region, near the border with Afghanistan.
The excavations focused on the site of the prehistoric settlement of Djarkutan, and the researchers dated the grave to the late third millennium B.C. At that time, Djarkutan was an urban center of the Oxus civilization, an Early Bronze Age culture that dominated Central Asia from about 2500 to 1500 B.C. The ongoing project to investigate the site and other aspects of the Oxus civilization began in 2024.
The grave was discovered during excavations at the Djarkutan archaeological site in the south of Uzbekistan, near the border with Afghanistan.
Archaeologists sometimes call the Oxus civilization the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex, or BMAC. It was centered along rivers and in oases in the region, and it is renowned for its advanced agricultural economy and rich material culture. The demise of the Oxus civilization is thought to have been triggered by climatic changes that caused important rivers to dry up.
While evidence of ancient trepanations is relatively common in some places, the fact that this surgery was performed on a young child is perplexing, the researchers said.
"Djarkutan continues to surprise us," Enrico Ascalone, an archaeologist at the University of Salento who led the excavation, said in the statement. "A cranial trepanation on a child, four thousand years ago, in Central Asia: until yesterday it was unthinkable. Today it is in our data."
Yet the discovery also leaves mysteries. "Which group of 'specialists' within the town could have practiced such an intervention? What anatomical and surgical knowledge did such an operation presuppose? And why a five-year-old?" the team wrote in the statement. They hope to answer those questions in further investigations in the coming months.
Tom Metcalfe is a freelance journalist and regular Live Science contributor who is based in London in the United Kingdom. Tom writes mainly about science, space, archaeology, the Earth and the oceans. He has also written for the BBC, NBC News, National Geographic, Scientific American, Air & Space, and many others.
#science
The 4,000-year-old skull of a Bronze Age child buried in what's now Uzbekistan bears scars from a cranial surgery known as trepanation. It is the oldest documented evidence of surgery in Central Asia and one of the oldest examples of surgery in all of Asia, the researchers report.
The skeleton of the child, who died at about age 5, was unearthed in April. The body had been buried in a single grave alongside the body of a child who died at about 3 years old, researchers said in a translated statement.
The 5-year-old's skull has "clear signs of cranial trepanation" involving stone or bone tools, according to the statement. Trepanation was commonly performed in ancient times, perhaps in attempts to treat maladies like epilepsy, migraines or behavioral problems. But the researchers noted that the "frontier between medicine and ritual" would have been far less defined at that time than it is now.
A research team from Italy and Uzbekistan made the discovery in the Northern Bactria region, near the border with Afghanistan.
The excavations focused on the site of the prehistoric settlement of Djarkutan, and the researchers dated the grave to the late third millennium B.C. At that time, Djarkutan was an urban center of the Oxus civilization, an Early Bronze Age culture that dominated Central Asia from about 2500 to 1500 B.C. The ongoing project to investigate the site and other aspects of the Oxus civilization began in 2024.
The grave was discovered during excavations at the Djarkutan archaeological site in the south of Uzbekistan, near the border with Afghanistan.
Archaeologists sometimes call the Oxus civilization the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex, or BMAC. It was centered along rivers and in oases in the region, and it is renowned for its advanced agricultural economy and rich material culture. The demise of the Oxus civilization is thought to have been triggered by climatic changes that caused important rivers to dry up.
While evidence of ancient trepanations is relatively common in some places, the fact that this surgery was performed on a young child is perplexing, the researchers said.
"Djarkutan continues to surprise us," Enrico Ascalone, an archaeologist at the University of Salento who led the excavation, said in the statement. "A cranial trepanation on a child, four thousand years ago, in Central Asia: until yesterday it was unthinkable. Today it is in our data."
Yet the discovery also leaves mysteries. "Which group of 'specialists' within the town could have practiced such an intervention? What anatomical and surgical knowledge did such an operation presuppose? And why a five-year-old?" the team wrote in the statement. They hope to answer those questions in further investigations in the coming months.
Tom Metcalfe is a freelance journalist and regular Live Science contributor who is based in London in the United Kingdom. Tom writes mainly about science, space, archaeology, the Earth and the oceans. He has also written for the BBC, NBC News, National Geographic, Scientific American, Air & Space, and many others.
#science
L
Live Science
21 órája ezelőtt · 🌍 Friss Hírek
'We were being bullied in our own home': How 'authoritarian' HOAs are contributing to the insect apocalypse
In the book "Bitter Honey," writer and researcher Jennie Durant explores how industrial agriculture is destroying bees — and what can be done to st...
In the book "Bitter Honey," writer and researcher Jennie Durant explores how industrial agriculture is destroying bees — and what can be done to stop them.
There's an army of tiny workers buzzing around our fields, helping our food grow. But over the past few decades, populations of bees and other insect pollinators have dropped precipitously. This looming "insect apocalypse" has many causes, from climate change to habitat loss, and it is already fueling malnutrition in some parts of the world.
One of the biggest factors in bee declines is industrial agriculture. "Big Ag" — with its emphasis on vast fields planted with a single crop, its heavy reliance on powerful pesticides, and its intensive use of commercial bee colonies to pollinate crops like almonds — reduces pollinator populations by killing and disorienting the insects, reducing their natural food sources, and leaving colony bees overworked and, therefore, prone to parasites like Varroa.
But industrial agriculture isn't the only force driving down bee populations. In her new book, "Bitter Honey: Big Ag's Threat to Bees and the Fight to Save Them" (Princeton University Press, 2026), writer and environmental researcher Jennie Durant takes a look at one surprising factor that may be hurting bees — and how new laws could protect these pollinators.
It's midsummer in Columbia, Maryland, and Janet Crouch's garden is in full bloom. It began in spring, when deep purple violets and bright yellow ragwort blossomed in April and early May. By midsummer, pink and purple-hued garden phlox emerged alongside scarlet bee balm, eventually giving way to Turk's cap lilies with their curled-back orange petals that dangle gracefully like bells. Pollinators creep and flutter throughout the garden, including bees and hummingbirds, moths and butterflies — and a host of other birds and insects.
It wasn't always like this. The yard was barren back in 1999, when Janet and her husband, Jeff, first bought their home. A solitary maple stood in the front yard, and a few nonnative barberry bushes flanked the house. Each property had a private lawn, but without fences, the yards blended into a seamless green expanse that bordered a fifty-acre county park forest. Over the years, the couple transformed their lawn into a lush pollinator garden.
Over time, the Crouches' yard became a sanctuary, especially for Jeff, a practicing therapist. "He'd come home from work, drop his keys, and head outside to see who was around," Janet said. "He'd check to see what new flower had bloomed, what butterfly or moth was in the yard, or spot a bird we hadn't seen before. It's become a huge, huge part of our lives." Sometimes, kids would even walk by and take an interest in the garden, and Jeff would pick them a flower.
Jennie Durant is a bee researcher, science writer, and the author of "Bitter Honey: Big Ag's Threat to Bees and the Fight to Save Them" (Island/Princeton University Press). She has spent more than a decade working with beekeepers, scientists, and policymakers, including time at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and University of California, at both Davis and Berkeley. Her writing has appeared in Literary Hub, Grist, Glamour, HuffPost, and the "San Francisco Chronicle." She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family. You can read more about her work at www.jenniedurant.com
But everything changed in 2017. The Crouches received a letter from their homeowners association (HOA), which they paid into biannually, that threatened to undo all the work they had poured into their garden. HOAs govern housing communities, from condominium complexes to suburban neighborhoods, and set rules for property maintenance and aesthetic standards.
An elected board of homeowners typically runs the HOA and collects fees to cover shared expenses like landscaping, common areas, and building maintenance. The first letter seemed harmless. It simply asked them to practice seasonal maintenance: mow the grass, trim overgrown plants, and tidy up. The Crouches worked with Janet's sister Nancy — a native plant gardener and advocate — to craft a response, explaining that the lawn was already mowed, and they were gardening ecologically, which meant things might look more natural than the typical lawn-centric yard.
Weeks passed without a reply. Then, just before Thanksgiving, the Crouches received a cease-and-desist notice from the HOA's attorney. They were given ten days to tear out their garden and replace it with turf grass or face legal action. By this point, the Crouches had tended their garden for seventeen years, so the thought of tearing it all out was gut-wrenching.
Instead, they hired an attorney, who argued that they hadn't broken any HOA rules because the community guidelines didn't address the type of garden they'd installed. Despite their tight deadline to get an attorney and craft a response, the Crouches heard nothing from the HOA for six months, leaving them in anxious limbo. When the HOA finally responded, it ignited a legal battle that drew the attention of state legislators and eventually changed Maryland law.
The Crouches were stunned by the HOA's reply: The board didn't just want them to do maintenance, they wanted them to pull out everything, including their pollinator gardens in the front and back. The Crouches were baffled — they'd never had any complaints about their garden until now.
Established in the 1970s, HOAs have a significant footprint in the United States: They govern millions of residential acres and house more than seventy-five million Americans, representing nearly 30 percent of the country's housing stock. HOAs offer a range of benefits for house and condo owners: They enforce rules and community standards; maintain shared amenities like parks, gyms, pools, and clubhouses; and foster a sense of community. Homes in HOA-governed communities often sell at a premium as well.
But the appeal of an HOA home is far from universal. The perks come with restrictions that often stifle a homeowner's freedom to manage their property as they wish. HOA boards can turn authoritarian, sparking conflicts with residents or fueling tensions between neighbors. Sky-high fees can trap homeowners, making it difficult to sell the house or keep up with payments, sometimes leading to legal trouble. It's no surprise that homeowners have mixed feelings about HOAs: A 2024 survey reported that nearly 60 percent of members had a negative view of their HOA.
Pollinator gardens can help support populations of bees and other insects that are essential to our food supply.
While overtly abusive HOAs have made the news, their role in stifling pollinator gardens is less understood. It comes down to aesthetics: Many HOAs mandate manicured lawns and turf grass and dismiss pollinator gardens or wildflower meadows as messy, unruly, or unattractive. They tend to favor nonnative ornamental plants over native species to maintain a uniform, tidy look. The ornamentals are often chosen to match a landscaping style, signal status (nothing says wealth like a perfect row of hydrangeas), or simply because they're easier for the HOA's landscaping company to maintain.
But that manicured perfection comes at a cost. For pollinators, the mowed lawn is a food desert. Regular mowing prevents weeds like dandelions and clover from flowering and providing food. Lawns also replace diverse landscapes filled with wildflowers, shrubs, and native plants — the forage that pollinators evolved with over thousands of years and rely on for survival.
Lawns don't just deprive pollinators of food; they also eliminate their homes. More than 70 percent of native bee species nest in the ground, but manicured turf prevents bees from finding the loose, sandy soil they need to burrow. Mowing and trimming tall grass also strips away shelter for insects like butterflies and beetles. In pursuit of neatness, homeowners typically remove brush piles, leaf litter, tall grasses, or fallen logs — spaces pollinators might use as nests. Neighborhoods dominated by lawns fragment forage corridors and force pollinators to travel greater distances to find food, making survival even harder.
The pursuit of a pristine lawn also involves an arsenal of chemicals. Many of the same bee-toxic substances used in industrial agriculture — like neonics, organophosphates, and carbamates — are also sprayed on home lawns, gardens, and HOA common spaces. These chemicals affect plants, seep into the soil, and disrupt ecosystems. Healthy soil supports wild plants, insects, and fungi that benefit pollinators, but chemical lawn treatments can kill those beneficial insects and degrade soil health.
The Crouches received not only a cease-and-desist notice from their HOA but also threatening letters warning them not to garden in ways that might attract birds, as if birds were some kind of nuisance.
They soon discovered the HOA's attacks were driven by a complaint from their next-door neighbor. Instead of complaining to the Crouches directly so they could find a solution, he'd gone straight to the HOA. In September 2018, the Crouches and their neighbor had a contentious hearing before the HOA board, where the HOA's attorney argued that landscaping should only be for decoration, not wildlife habitat.
Many more months went by without a resolution, and then in 2019, the legal fight began in earnest. The Crouches sued the HOA board in August, citing a lack of actual violations, and the HOA countersued in November.
For many, this kind of fight might have soured the gardening experience altogether. But for Janet and Jeff, it only reinforced what they already knew: Their garden was about more than just aesthetics. It was a space of purpose, resilience, and joy. This helped fuel them throughout their ordeal.
Bees thrive when they feed on pollen from native plants and flowers, but homeowners' associations often ban pollinator gardens or any plants that attract birds.
The months that followed were rife with anxiety. As the lawsuit progressed into 2020, people drove by and took photographs of their lawn and garden, which made Janet feel exposed and overwhelmed. But still, it didn't deter them. "I don't like bullies, and we were being bullied in our own home," Janet said. "I just kept thinking about all the people who didn't have the capacity or resources I did, like my sister, who could provide suggestions and be an ear. I was more determined than ever to keep going."
Janet cast a wide net for support, turning to social media, local newspapers — anyone who could offer ideas or help spread the word. She attended environmental events to share her story and discuss the legal battle with her HOA.
Then, in October 2019, things started to turn in their favor. They got a call from Mary Catherine Cochran, the legislative assistant to their state representative, Terri Hill. Mary Catherine had an idea: Would Janet be interested in helping craft a law to stop HOAs from requiring turf grass lawns? By January of 2020, just months before the pandemic shut everything down, Nancy and several environmental groups joined Janet in Annapolis to provide testimony. The pandemic delayed their progress, but the bill eventually moved through both houses with overwhelming support — only two people voted against it.
On October 1, 2021, Maryland House Bill 332 was passed into law. Thanks to the bill, Maryland HOAs can no longer prohibit low impact landscaping, including pollinator gardens, rain gardens, and other environmentally beneficial practices. It was a massive victory for native plant and pollinator advocates throughout the state, and homeowners who hope to follow in the Crouches' footsteps.
The Maryland law set a precedent for other states as well: Maine passed a similar law in 2023 to create habitat for wildlife and pollinators by protecting low-impact landscaping. Illinois enacted the Garden Act in 2022 to support local gardens, followed by a Homeowners Native Landscaping Act in 2024 to allow gardeners in HOAs to plant native gardens.
The Maryland law's passage didn't happen in time to help the Crouches, who chose to settle with the HOA in December of 2020 rather than take the case to trial. Fortunately, the only concession they had to make — in addition to a jaw-dropping $60,000 in attorney's fees — was to keep their garden within a six-foot setback from the front property line and three feet from the neighbor's, the latter of which they'd already done.
Now that Janet and Jeff's battle is over, they can enjoy their yard and extend their efforts beyond their neighborhood. But their story highlights a simple truth: Individual actions can sometimes drive systemic change.
As the Crouches have shown, anyone, whether they have a sprawling yard, a small patch of land, or just a balcony, can take steps to support pollinators. A single garden might feel insignificant but small changes can rewrite laws, shift local norms, and transform ecosystems. If we rethink what a garden can be, we open the door to new possibilities — not just for pollinators, but for our landscapes and our connection to the natural world.
In "Bitter Honey," Jennie Durant takes readers behind the scenes to reveal the human and ecological cost of industrial farming for bees, beekeepers, and all of us who depend on them. Bees today face a gauntlet of threats: parasites and disease, pesticide exposure, and climate extremes—all magnified by Big Ag. Beekeepers, meanwhile, endure grueling practices just to survive, often losing half their hives each year.
Jennie Durant is a bee researcher, science writer, and the author of "Bitter Honey: Big Ag's Threat to Bees and the Fight to Save Them" (Island/Princeton University Press, 2026). She has spent more than a decade working with beekeepers, scientists, and policymakers, including time at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and University of California, at both Davis and Berkeley. Her writing has appeared in Literary Hub, Grist, Glamour, HuffPost, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.
#science
There's an army of tiny workers buzzing around our fields, helping our food grow. But over the past few decades, populations of bees and other insect pollinators have dropped precipitously. This looming "insect apocalypse" has many causes, from climate change to habitat loss, and it is already fueling malnutrition in some parts of the world.
One of the biggest factors in bee declines is industrial agriculture. "Big Ag" — with its emphasis on vast fields planted with a single crop, its heavy reliance on powerful pesticides, and its intensive use of commercial bee colonies to pollinate crops like almonds — reduces pollinator populations by killing and disorienting the insects, reducing their natural food sources, and leaving colony bees overworked and, therefore, prone to parasites like Varroa.
But industrial agriculture isn't the only force driving down bee populations. In her new book, "Bitter Honey: Big Ag's Threat to Bees and the Fight to Save Them" (Princeton University Press, 2026), writer and environmental researcher Jennie Durant takes a look at one surprising factor that may be hurting bees — and how new laws could protect these pollinators.
It's midsummer in Columbia, Maryland, and Janet Crouch's garden is in full bloom. It began in spring, when deep purple violets and bright yellow ragwort blossomed in April and early May. By midsummer, pink and purple-hued garden phlox emerged alongside scarlet bee balm, eventually giving way to Turk's cap lilies with their curled-back orange petals that dangle gracefully like bells. Pollinators creep and flutter throughout the garden, including bees and hummingbirds, moths and butterflies — and a host of other birds and insects.
It wasn't always like this. The yard was barren back in 1999, when Janet and her husband, Jeff, first bought their home. A solitary maple stood in the front yard, and a few nonnative barberry bushes flanked the house. Each property had a private lawn, but without fences, the yards blended into a seamless green expanse that bordered a fifty-acre county park forest. Over the years, the couple transformed their lawn into a lush pollinator garden.
Over time, the Crouches' yard became a sanctuary, especially for Jeff, a practicing therapist. "He'd come home from work, drop his keys, and head outside to see who was around," Janet said. "He'd check to see what new flower had bloomed, what butterfly or moth was in the yard, or spot a bird we hadn't seen before. It's become a huge, huge part of our lives." Sometimes, kids would even walk by and take an interest in the garden, and Jeff would pick them a flower.
Jennie Durant is a bee researcher, science writer, and the author of "Bitter Honey: Big Ag's Threat to Bees and the Fight to Save Them" (Island/Princeton University Press). She has spent more than a decade working with beekeepers, scientists, and policymakers, including time at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and University of California, at both Davis and Berkeley. Her writing has appeared in Literary Hub, Grist, Glamour, HuffPost, and the "San Francisco Chronicle." She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family. You can read more about her work at www.jenniedurant.com
But everything changed in 2017. The Crouches received a letter from their homeowners association (HOA), which they paid into biannually, that threatened to undo all the work they had poured into their garden. HOAs govern housing communities, from condominium complexes to suburban neighborhoods, and set rules for property maintenance and aesthetic standards.
An elected board of homeowners typically runs the HOA and collects fees to cover shared expenses like landscaping, common areas, and building maintenance. The first letter seemed harmless. It simply asked them to practice seasonal maintenance: mow the grass, trim overgrown plants, and tidy up. The Crouches worked with Janet's sister Nancy — a native plant gardener and advocate — to craft a response, explaining that the lawn was already mowed, and they were gardening ecologically, which meant things might look more natural than the typical lawn-centric yard.
Weeks passed without a reply. Then, just before Thanksgiving, the Crouches received a cease-and-desist notice from the HOA's attorney. They were given ten days to tear out their garden and replace it with turf grass or face legal action. By this point, the Crouches had tended their garden for seventeen years, so the thought of tearing it all out was gut-wrenching.
Instead, they hired an attorney, who argued that they hadn't broken any HOA rules because the community guidelines didn't address the type of garden they'd installed. Despite their tight deadline to get an attorney and craft a response, the Crouches heard nothing from the HOA for six months, leaving them in anxious limbo. When the HOA finally responded, it ignited a legal battle that drew the attention of state legislators and eventually changed Maryland law.
The Crouches were stunned by the HOA's reply: The board didn't just want them to do maintenance, they wanted them to pull out everything, including their pollinator gardens in the front and back. The Crouches were baffled — they'd never had any complaints about their garden until now.
Established in the 1970s, HOAs have a significant footprint in the United States: They govern millions of residential acres and house more than seventy-five million Americans, representing nearly 30 percent of the country's housing stock. HOAs offer a range of benefits for house and condo owners: They enforce rules and community standards; maintain shared amenities like parks, gyms, pools, and clubhouses; and foster a sense of community. Homes in HOA-governed communities often sell at a premium as well.
But the appeal of an HOA home is far from universal. The perks come with restrictions that often stifle a homeowner's freedom to manage their property as they wish. HOA boards can turn authoritarian, sparking conflicts with residents or fueling tensions between neighbors. Sky-high fees can trap homeowners, making it difficult to sell the house or keep up with payments, sometimes leading to legal trouble. It's no surprise that homeowners have mixed feelings about HOAs: A 2024 survey reported that nearly 60 percent of members had a negative view of their HOA.
Pollinator gardens can help support populations of bees and other insects that are essential to our food supply.
While overtly abusive HOAs have made the news, their role in stifling pollinator gardens is less understood. It comes down to aesthetics: Many HOAs mandate manicured lawns and turf grass and dismiss pollinator gardens or wildflower meadows as messy, unruly, or unattractive. They tend to favor nonnative ornamental plants over native species to maintain a uniform, tidy look. The ornamentals are often chosen to match a landscaping style, signal status (nothing says wealth like a perfect row of hydrangeas), or simply because they're easier for the HOA's landscaping company to maintain.
But that manicured perfection comes at a cost. For pollinators, the mowed lawn is a food desert. Regular mowing prevents weeds like dandelions and clover from flowering and providing food. Lawns also replace diverse landscapes filled with wildflowers, shrubs, and native plants — the forage that pollinators evolved with over thousands of years and rely on for survival.
Lawns don't just deprive pollinators of food; they also eliminate their homes. More than 70 percent of native bee species nest in the ground, but manicured turf prevents bees from finding the loose, sandy soil they need to burrow. Mowing and trimming tall grass also strips away shelter for insects like butterflies and beetles. In pursuit of neatness, homeowners typically remove brush piles, leaf litter, tall grasses, or fallen logs — spaces pollinators might use as nests. Neighborhoods dominated by lawns fragment forage corridors and force pollinators to travel greater distances to find food, making survival even harder.
The pursuit of a pristine lawn also involves an arsenal of chemicals. Many of the same bee-toxic substances used in industrial agriculture — like neonics, organophosphates, and carbamates — are also sprayed on home lawns, gardens, and HOA common spaces. These chemicals affect plants, seep into the soil, and disrupt ecosystems. Healthy soil supports wild plants, insects, and fungi that benefit pollinators, but chemical lawn treatments can kill those beneficial insects and degrade soil health.
The Crouches received not only a cease-and-desist notice from their HOA but also threatening letters warning them not to garden in ways that might attract birds, as if birds were some kind of nuisance.
They soon discovered the HOA's attacks were driven by a complaint from their next-door neighbor. Instead of complaining to the Crouches directly so they could find a solution, he'd gone straight to the HOA. In September 2018, the Crouches and their neighbor had a contentious hearing before the HOA board, where the HOA's attorney argued that landscaping should only be for decoration, not wildlife habitat.
Many more months went by without a resolution, and then in 2019, the legal fight began in earnest. The Crouches sued the HOA board in August, citing a lack of actual violations, and the HOA countersued in November.
For many, this kind of fight might have soured the gardening experience altogether. But for Janet and Jeff, it only reinforced what they already knew: Their garden was about more than just aesthetics. It was a space of purpose, resilience, and joy. This helped fuel them throughout their ordeal.
Bees thrive when they feed on pollen from native plants and flowers, but homeowners' associations often ban pollinator gardens or any plants that attract birds.
The months that followed were rife with anxiety. As the lawsuit progressed into 2020, people drove by and took photographs of their lawn and garden, which made Janet feel exposed and overwhelmed. But still, it didn't deter them. "I don't like bullies, and we were being bullied in our own home," Janet said. "I just kept thinking about all the people who didn't have the capacity or resources I did, like my sister, who could provide suggestions and be an ear. I was more determined than ever to keep going."
Janet cast a wide net for support, turning to social media, local newspapers — anyone who could offer ideas or help spread the word. She attended environmental events to share her story and discuss the legal battle with her HOA.
Then, in October 2019, things started to turn in their favor. They got a call from Mary Catherine Cochran, the legislative assistant to their state representative, Terri Hill. Mary Catherine had an idea: Would Janet be interested in helping craft a law to stop HOAs from requiring turf grass lawns? By January of 2020, just months before the pandemic shut everything down, Nancy and several environmental groups joined Janet in Annapolis to provide testimony. The pandemic delayed their progress, but the bill eventually moved through both houses with overwhelming support — only two people voted against it.
On October 1, 2021, Maryland House Bill 332 was passed into law. Thanks to the bill, Maryland HOAs can no longer prohibit low impact landscaping, including pollinator gardens, rain gardens, and other environmentally beneficial practices. It was a massive victory for native plant and pollinator advocates throughout the state, and homeowners who hope to follow in the Crouches' footsteps.
The Maryland law set a precedent for other states as well: Maine passed a similar law in 2023 to create habitat for wildlife and pollinators by protecting low-impact landscaping. Illinois enacted the Garden Act in 2022 to support local gardens, followed by a Homeowners Native Landscaping Act in 2024 to allow gardeners in HOAs to plant native gardens.
The Maryland law's passage didn't happen in time to help the Crouches, who chose to settle with the HOA in December of 2020 rather than take the case to trial. Fortunately, the only concession they had to make — in addition to a jaw-dropping $60,000 in attorney's fees — was to keep their garden within a six-foot setback from the front property line and three feet from the neighbor's, the latter of which they'd already done.
Now that Janet and Jeff's battle is over, they can enjoy their yard and extend their efforts beyond their neighborhood. But their story highlights a simple truth: Individual actions can sometimes drive systemic change.
As the Crouches have shown, anyone, whether they have a sprawling yard, a small patch of land, or just a balcony, can take steps to support pollinators. A single garden might feel insignificant but small changes can rewrite laws, shift local norms, and transform ecosystems. If we rethink what a garden can be, we open the door to new possibilities — not just for pollinators, but for our landscapes and our connection to the natural world.
In "Bitter Honey," Jennie Durant takes readers behind the scenes to reveal the human and ecological cost of industrial farming for bees, beekeepers, and all of us who depend on them. Bees today face a gauntlet of threats: parasites and disease, pesticide exposure, and climate extremes—all magnified by Big Ag. Beekeepers, meanwhile, endure grueling practices just to survive, often losing half their hives each year.
Jennie Durant is a bee researcher, science writer, and the author of "Bitter Honey: Big Ag's Threat to Bees and the Fight to Save Them" (Island/Princeton University Press, 2026). She has spent more than a decade working with beekeepers, scientists, and policymakers, including time at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and University of California, at both Davis and Berkeley. Her writing has appeared in Literary Hub, Grist, Glamour, HuffPost, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.
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