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bottlenose dolphins

Dolphin Named Bubbles Filmed Chasing Fish Until They Vomit, Then Eating Their Food

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A wild bottlenose dolphin off Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has been caught on camera using an unusual feeding strategy — chasing fish until they vomit, then helping himself to their partially digested meals.

Researchers studying the dolphin, nicknamed Bubbles, documented 20 instances of the behavior, with 11 successful attempts. Their findings, published September 13 in the journal Ecology and Evolution, describe a hunting technique never before documented in bottlenose dolphins.

Study co-author Asia Armstrong first became aware of Bubbles in 2017 after watching footage of his unusual feeding behavior. She later recruited other researchers to investigate the adult male, who locals had nicknamed Bubbles. The team used GoPro cameras to document his feeding activities between June 2021 and October 2025.

Researchers observed the behavior near Lady Elliot Island, a coral cay at the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef, where Bubbles regularly encounters schools of bigeye trevally. Footage shows him approaching a school, singling out a fish and separating it from the group before giving chase. Once the distressed fish regurgitates its stomach contents, Bubbles promptly devours them.

And one meal apparently isn’t always enough. Scientists observed Bubbles repeating the process several times during a single feeding session, sometimes launching as many as 10 pursuits within half an hour.

The behavior represents an unusual variation of kleptoparasitism, a feeding strategy in which an animal steals food another animal has already obtained. Although the practice is well documented among numerous species, particularly birds such as frigatebirds, the findings represent one of the first detailed accounts of food stealing in cetaceans, the marine mammal group that includes dolphins, whales and porpoises.

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One previously documented example involved a dolphin stealing fish from cormorants, as described by Georgetown University marine biologist Janet Mann. Bubbles, however, takes a different approach, extracting another animal’s last meal rather than stealing prey it has captured.

Researchers are particularly interested in how Bubbles identifies his targets and whether sound plays an important role in the technique. Before approaching schools of fish, researchers filmed him producing clicking sounds while moving his head from side to side, suggesting he might use echolocation to identify trevally with fuller stomachs.

“Echolocation does allow dolphins to discriminate small differences in their targets’ shape, size and structure, so the dolphin potentially uses echolocation to decide which fish to target to get the best reward,” Armstrong, a marine scientist at the University of the Sunshine Coast, told Scientific American.

During his pursuits, Bubbles also produced repetitive clicks and low-frequency sounds that researchers suspect might further distress his targets and contribute to their vomiting. Alternatively, the fish may regurgitate as a defensive tactic, using their discarded stomach contents to distract a predator and escape.

However, additional research is needed to establish whether Bubbles deliberately selects fish based on their stomach contents. Outside experts have also cautioned against assuming that the dolphin understands precisely how his actions produce a meal.

“I would be cautious, though, about assigning intention,” Jason Bruck, a dolphin behavioral scientist at Stephen F. Austin State University who was not involved in the research, told Scientific American. “We can’t yet say the dolphin is pursuing the fish because it expects it to regurgitate.”

Another unanswered question is how Bubbles acquired the technique. He may have discovered it independently, learned it by observing other dolphins, or initially pursued trevally with the intention of eating them before discovering that their regurgitated meals provided another food source.

“It’s very possible that other species use this tactic. Dolphins and whales use a variety of unique foraging tactics, which is reflective of their intelligence, adaptability and ability to learn and pass information to one another socially.”

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Researchers also have several theories about why the technique might be advantageous. The bigeye trevally schools Bubbles targets reliably gather in approximately the same location almost every day, providing a recurring opportunity to obtain food.

The size of his targets may offer another incentive. Bigeye trevally can grow up to 33 inches long, making them potentially demanding prey. Vivienne Foroughirad, a Texas A&M University marine biologist who was not involved in the study, suggested to Science that eating regurgitated food could require considerably less time and energy than capturing and consuming the fish themselves.

“I’d speculate that the trevally vomit provides an easy snack on days when Bubbles hasn’t been as successful with hunting,” lead author Romney Edwards-Francis, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of the Sunshine Coast, told Discover Wildlife.

Bubbles has also displayed an intriguing behavior after successfully obtaining a meal. Study co-author Jacinta Shackleton, an independent marine biologist and underwater photographer, told BBC Wildlife Magazine that he sometimes turns directly toward her and produces a prolonged clicking sound after eating, almost as though he is showing off his accomplishment.

Whether Bubbles is the only dolphin employing this strategy remains unclear. Researchers believe unconventional feeding behaviors may be more common among cetaceans than existing scientific observations suggest, but documenting them is difficult because scientists rarely have the opportunity to follow marine mammals underwater for extended periods.

Edwards-Francis suggested that combining drone technology with underwater surveys could help researchers capture a broader range of behaviors and determine how widespread such techniques actually are.

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Elon Musk Wants To Build A City On The Moon, Scientists Are Not Convinced 

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Elon Musk announced earlier this year that his aerospace company, SpaceX, will be shifting its focus to “building a self-growing city on the Moon.” However, scientists recently released a report that laid out how this would be difficult due to the fact that there would not be a sufficient water supply to sustain a city for very long.

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Modern Human DNA Reveals Traces of Two Previously Unknown ‘Ghost’ Ancestors

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Two mysterious branches of the human family tree, neither of which has yielded ancient DNA for scientists to study directly, have been detected through genetic traces still carried by people living today.

Using a new computer-based technique to work backward through modern human genomes, researchers identified evidence of two previously unknown ancestral lineages. One appears to have mixed directly with Homo sapiens in Africa more than 50,000 years ago. The other was far older, contributing DNA to Denisovans hundreds of thousands of years ago before some of that genetic material eventually made its way into modern humans.

The findings, published July 30 in the journal Science, offer a new way of investigating human relatives that have effectively become genetic “ghosts” — populations whose existence can be inferred from genetic evidence even though scientists have not been able to sequence their genomes directly.

“The super-archaic finding is particularly exciting because it reveals genetic contributions from a human lineage that lived over a million years ago, despite the absence of any sequenced DNA from that population,” said Arjun Biddanda, a postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University and a co-first author of the study, in a statement.

Researchers have known for years that Homo sapiens interbred with extinct relatives, most famously Neanderthals and Denisovans. Ancient DNA recovered from fossils has allowed scientists to identify genetic material those groups contributed to modern humans.

Other ancient populations, however, have been much harder to pin down. Previous research has found hints that humans inherited DNA from unidentified hominins, but scientists could not confidently determine when those groups mixed with human ancestors or how long ago they diverged from other branches of the human evolutionary tree.

The new study attempts to fill in some of those gaps using a method the researchers developed called TRACE. The computer-based technique reconstructs genealogies showing where sections of DNA originated and how those genetic segments were inherited over generations, allowing researchers to search for unusually old branches that could point to previously unknown populations.

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“Our genomes are mosaics of little bits of DNA from all our ancestors, and so in different parts of our genome we have a different family tree,” said Priya Moorjani, study coauthor and an associate professor in the department of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Some sections of those genetic family trees trace back relatively recently, while others extend much deeper into humanity’s evolutionary history. DNA inherited from Neanderthals, for example, appears on older branches. By comparing these family trees across the genome, TRACE can identify lineages that cannot be explained by populations already known to scientists.

The researchers applied the method to more than 500 modern human genomes representing populations across Africa, Europe and Asia. Their analysis uncovered evidence of the two ghost lineages and allowed the team to estimate when the groups separated from other hominins and when interbreeding took place.

Traces of the younger lineage appeared in every modern population included in the study, indicating that it likely mixed with the ancestors of Homo sapiens in Africa before the major migration that carried modern humans out of the continent.

Modern humans began moving out of Africa around 50,000 years ago, eventually encountering and interbreeding with Neanderthals and Denisovans in Eurasia. The newly detected ancestry suggests Homo sapiens had already exchanged genes with another hominin population before those encounters occurred.

The discovery of the younger ghost lineage “places the time of mixture well before the mixture with Neanderthals, and shows that it affects all populations living today,” said John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who was not involved in the study.

The researchers estimate that DNA inherited from this unidentified lineage now accounts for roughly 0.5% to 1% of modern human genomes. That is close to the proportion of Neanderthal ancestry found in many people alive today.

Based on where the lineage falls on the evolutionary tree, researchers believe it could have belonged to a Middle Pleistocene Homo population in Africa. One possible candidate is Homo heidelbergensis, according to the study.

Homo heidelbergensis lived in Africa and Europe from approximately 700,000 to 200,000 years ago. However, because no DNA sequence is available for the species, the proposed connection remains speculative.

The second ghost lineage reaches considerably further back in human evolution.

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Researchers described it as “super-archaic,” estimating that its branch split from other human ancestors approximately 1.8 million years ago. Rather than mixing directly with modern humans, this population appears to have interbred with Denisovans in Eurasia more than 200,000 years ago.

Later, after Homo sapiens encountered Denisovans, portions of that ancient DNA were passed into our own species. In other words, modern humans may carry fragments of genetic material inherited indirectly from a population that lived more than a million years ago.

The researchers suggest the lineage could potentially have been related to Eurasian Homo erectus. That identification, like the possible connection between the younger lineage and Homo heidelbergensis, cannot yet be confirmed.

Exactly which populations the two ghost lineages represent therefore remains uncertain. Researchers can use estimated divergence dates, patterns of inheritance and other genetic clues to narrow down where the groups may fit on the hominin family tree, but those clues cannot establish their identities on their own.

“The most fundamental question that most of us have is, ‘Why are we here? Where do we come from?’ And these genealogies really allow us to look into the past in a way that we have not been able to do before.”

The findings also add to a growing picture of human evolution as a history shaped not simply by one population replacing another, but by repeated encounters and genetic exchanges among different hominin groups.

“If you think about going even beyond humans, gene flow and mixing across groups is pretty pervasive across all populations, and so it’s not very surprising that we harbor DNA from different hominin groups,” Moorjani said. “It’s just that until recently, it’s not been feasible to extract this DNA from people who lived in the past.”

Studying those exchanges may eventually provide clues about why certain hominin populations survived while others vanished. Moorjani said identifying the genetic material different ancestors contributed could also help scientists better understand how modern humans adapted to different environments and why people are susceptible to certain diseases today.

Modern human genomes are overwhelmingly similar to one another, but some of the differences among individuals can be traced to these ancient ancestral branches, Hawks explained.

“Today we have a tendency to focus on differences between people that seem large, but are actually superficial — like skin color or facial appearance,” Hawks told CNN in an email.

“These differences among living people are actually very tiny compared to the ancestors we all evolved from, and those ancestors found ways to interact and survive with each other. That’s our heritage, and it’s one that matters even more than ever.”

Researchers hope TRACE could eventually reveal additional hidden lineages, both within human evolutionary history and among other species.

But computational reconstructions have limits. The strongest evidence for the identities of these ghost populations would ultimately come from recovering and sequencing DNA directly from ancient remains—as scientists have previously done with Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Until fossils containing usable DNA are found, the genetic material inherited by living humans may provide the clearest surviving record of these populations.

“Randomly, two people from the world might inherit the same piece of DNA from an ancestor who we didn’t have an idea of before, but now we actually know,” said the study’s co-first author Yulin Zhang, a doctoral student of computational biology at UC Berkeley. “From this mysterious ancestor, we have something in common from another angle.”

Bill Gates Says World Isn’t Prepared For The Impact Of AI, Calls For ‘Human-Reserved’ Jobs

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Billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates recently published a 6,000-word essay in which he expressed major concern over artificial intelligence and how unprepared the world’s governments are regarding how much the technology will impact us in the future.

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Scientists Create First Viruses Designed By AI, What Does This Mean For The Future Of Medicine?

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Scientists have created the first viruses that were designed using artificial intelligence. This feat is being highly debated within the scientific community as both a major milestone advancement for medicine, and a potential threat if this technology isn’t protected. 

Dr. Brian Hie is a chemical engineer at Stanford University in California, who utilized genome language models to design functioning genomes for bacteriophages. The models are the genetic equivalent to the language models used for AI chatbots, and bacteriophages are the specific viruses that only infect bacteria, so they’re used to treat patients with persistent infections. 

The viruses were then made in the laboratory and specifically put against E. coli in a dish, according to the research recently published in the journal Science. “The ability to rapidly design genomes and tune them for specific bugs while overcoming resistance could transform phage therapy and expand biotechnological toolkits,” the researchers wrote. 

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On the other hand, the scientists have also stated that the new work raised “important biosafety, biocontainment, and biosecurity consideration,” telling other people who are designing whole genomes to “consult both safety and security professionals throughout the project.”

Professor Tom Inglesby and Dr. Mori Hanke at the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University wrote an accompanying article in which they emphasized the researchers safety warnings: 

“Although this is promising for life sciences applications, it also raises urgent biosafety and biosecurity questions. The ability to compose viral genomes using generative AI now exists; the governance to safely steer it does not.”

Dr. Hie and his colleagues mapped out in their article how they used AI models named Evo1 and Evo2 to design the new viral genomes. The models were specifically trained with genetic data from 2 million bacteriophages.

To keep the focus on the bacteriophages that can be utilized in medicine, the scientists made sure to carefully exclude any genetic codes for viruses that can infect living beings so the AI training doesn’t design any dangerous viruses. 

The AI worked to generate thousands of potential genomes, and the researchers chose about 300 to then make in a lab. Those genomes were then dropped into bacteria which read the genetic code and created the new bacteriophages. 

Only 16 bacteriophages were viable, however, the makeup of them were able to overcome resistance in two different strains of E. coli. 

Professor Inglesby and Dr. Hanke said that although only 16 out of the 300 were viable, the work proves that generative AI can create viral genomes, and there should be safeguards put into place to ensure that the technology can never be used to create pathogens that can infect plants, animals, and especially humans. 

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“Such genomes might encode new pathogens that … cannot be contained by existing countermeasures,” they wrote. 

Tom Ellis, a professor of synthetic genome engineering at Imperial College London, stated that this work was very impressive, but when it comes to creating more complex genomes, there’s a lot more work to actually be done. 

“This is literally the smallest and easiest genome to make,” he said. 

“An AI trained on the genetic code of dangerous bugs could be used to design more harmful viruses,” the Guardian reported that Ellis said. 

“But controlling access to genetic data and having restrictions on making genomes that look dangerous would help. Governments are working hard to do this already,” he added.

“But honestly, the threat from full AI design and writing of a genome of a virus or bacteria is very overblown when we consider that just taking existing pathogens and making gain-of-function changes to their genomes is so much easier and much more likely to be a real pathogenic threat.”

Dr. Filippa Lentzos, a reader in science and international security at King’s College London, stated that one of the biggest things to now look out for with this type of work is making sure no scientific groups try to manufacture anything involving DNA. 

“It’s important to see the bigger governance picture and not focus regulation solely on the AI model,” she said. 

“A layered approach makes more sense: safeguards around model development and access, responsible research review, synthesis screening, and established laboratory biosafety and biosecurity.”

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Europe’s Wildfire Weather Is Being Fueled By The Climate Crisis 

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Major wildfires have been spreading throughout Europe, specifically in Spain and France. According to a scientific analysis, the extreme heat and drought that is fueling these fires is only being exacerbated by the climate crisis. 

Experts from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) consortium calculated that global heating has made hot, dry, and windy weather 20 times more likely in Spain and twice as likely in France. Constant and increased burning of oil, gas, and coal has warmed the planet making extreme weather events such as wildfires much more common in recent years. 

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The end of June saw a major heatwave spread throughout Europe, and has caused an estimated 20,000 deaths. This heat, according to another WWA study, could not have accumulated without the extra heat that has been trapped in the atmosphere from climate change. 

Another study from the group also found that the climate crisis is causing soils to become extremely dry, leading to major drought throughout the continent as well. 

Between the heatwaves and dry lands, a perfect storm was created for wildfires. Studies performed last year also showed that the 2025 wildfires were fuelled by the climate crisis. 

Europe also experienced a wet winter and spring, which allowed extra vegetation to grow, and eventually dry out from the summer’s intense heat, and further allowing wildfires to spark and spread. 

Dr Clair Barnes, a research associate at Imperial College London and part of the WWA study team, said: 

“We’ve seen repeatedly how climate change increases hot, dry, flammable conditions that are extremely conducive to wildfires.”

“What’s unique about [the July fires in Spain and France] is that it’s still early in the season – and with another heatwave looming, these findings are extremely scary. What we’re seeing is a clear sign of the escalating impacts of [human-caused] warming.”

“What we are seeing now in Spain and France goes well beyond what we would expect from past events,” said the director of programs at Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center, Julie Arrighi. 

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Dr. Augustin Colette at the French National Institute for Industrial Environment and Risks stated: 

“The smoke increased particulate [pollution] peak levels up to 20 times above what is considered ‘fair air quality’, and extremely poor air quality was felt up to 400 km away from the fires.” 

Since early July, severe wildfires have been burning across Spain and France. More than 300,000 people were forced to leave their homes with thousands being destroyed. The WWA specifically analyzed the seven-day period in which the highest daily severity ratings for each country was recorded. 

They used weather records to establish statistical methods to estimate how much more likely a week of extremely high DSR is in today’s world when compared to the world before mass fossil-fuel burning raised the global temperature, according to the Guardian. 

The UN’s climate chief, Simon Stiell, said: 

“These European mega-fires show how fast climate-driven extreme heat and dry landscapes can turn wildfires into devastating national disasters.”

“Humanity continuing to burn colossal amounts of coal, oil and gas is making these conditions more dangerous, and these megafires more deadly and destructive. But the solutions are equally clear: all countries must move faster from fossil fuels to renewables and protect people from worsening climate impacts, from wildfires, to megastorms and floods, to droughts hitting food production.”

pollinators

One Entomologist’s Mission To Show That Insects Aren’t Nature’s Villains

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“I strongly feel that we don’t have a ‘right’ as one species to wilfully oversee the extinction of another. Are we creating conditions where host-switching might become more common? This has ramifications for our own health and that of endangered species.”

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Robotic Elephants Are Replacing Live Ones In Temples And Festivals Around The World 

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Elephants are revered across India and many religions as manifestations of the divine, and they’re often used in many temple rituals and festivals. Now, robotic elephants made from fiberglass, iron, and rubber are taking the place of live ones in temples around the world as an effort to further protect the species.

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International Space Station

NASA Wants To Dump The International Space Station In The Ocean

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NASA is planning to deorbit the International Space Station (ISS) in the coming years, however, their proposed strategy for doing so is causing a lot of controversies among international governments and ocean conservation groups. This is because NASA is planning to deorbit the ISS by having it come back into Earth’s atmosphere and dumping it into the ocean.

NASA has blueprinted that they will take a series of actions leading up to, and into, 2030 to accomplish the ISS’s deorbiting. In early to mid-2028, the ISS will begin to be lowered through a combination of Earth’s natural atmospheric drag and re-entry measures by Russia’s segment of the station, according to reports from Space.com.

Then, a year later in mid-2029, NASA is planning the launch of a SpaceX-supplied US Deorbit Vehicle that will attach to the ISS and fire 46 Draco thrusters to push the station further down and into the ocean. 

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This plan has ecology experts very concerned, specifically The Ocean Foundation. The foundation is headquartered in Washington D.C., and has an overall mission of improving global ocean health and the relationship humans have with our world’s waters. 

Mark Spalding, the president of the foundation, said that NASA’s plan to deorbit the ISS “raises serious concerns for ocean health that the space community has not adequately grappled with.”  

A recent report from the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) was released to discuss the main problems with NASA’s plan to deorbit the ISS and transition it to commercial space stations. 

The report explained that at the end of 2030 or early 2031, the US Deorbit Vehicle will perform the re-entry burn which will push the ISS through the Earth’s atmosphere and into Point Nemo, also known as the pole of inaccessibility as it’s the furthest point from any landmass in the world. 

“As part of the reentry process, NASA expects portions of the ISS and deorbit vehicle to break up and fall into the remote part of the ocean to minimize the risk to populated areas,” the GAO report says. 

Spalding told Space.com that “there is a troubling structural gap in international law that the ISS deorbit throws into sharp relief,” when it comes to using Point Nemo as the dumping ground for the ISS.

He also pointed out that under the Space Liability Convention of 1972, if space debris falls on another nation’s territory or damages property, the nation that launched the space craft in question owes compensation without “needing to prove fault. But no equivalent protection exists for the ocean.” 

“As a result, when space agencies have control over where debris falls, they aim for the high seas, and in doing so, they incur no legal obligation to pay for cleanup or environmental remediation,” he said. 

While Spalding explained that he understood the rationale for targeting Point Nemo for this mission, considering it’s the furthest point away from any populated area, it doesn’t negate the damage that can be done to the ocean’s ecosystem and marine life. 

“The ocean’s remoteness from human infrastructure should not be mistaken for a lack of value or vulnerability. The ocean and its creatures deserve the same protection that international law affords to national territories.”

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When speaking with Space.com, Spalding begged the question about what will happen to marine ecosystems and life on the seafloor where ISS leftovers end up. Speaking vulnerably, he said there’s no way to truly know until it actually happens, which is problematic.

“The honest answer is, we don’t fully know. That is deeply troubling for a structure the size of a football field. We do know that not everything burns up on reentry. Denser components will survive and reach the seafloor.”

Spalding explained that there hasn’t been enough research put into the specific pieces of the ISS and what would be destroyed upon reentry, what would enter the ocean, and how it would directly impact marine life and the ocean’s ecosystem. This “has not been adequately studied or disclosed. That uncertainty is itself the problem.

What environmental harm may begin before the debris hits the water is worrisome. As the largest reentry in history, the cumulative atmospheric impact of down-falling ISS hardware deserves serious study.”

As a part of his argument regarding the lack of proper research, he cited a newly negotiated High Seas Treaty that is relevant to the deorbiting of the iSS. The Treaty requires parties involved to conduct environmental impact assessments for any activities that may impact marine environments and life that goes beyond the national jurisdiction, especially when the effects are unknown. 

“It is fair to ask whether the ISS deorbit – the largest such reentry in history, targeting the high seas – should trigger that obligation,” he explained. 

The Ocean Foundation laid out what discussions and research should be conducted before the downing of the ISS into the ocean. They revealed that they want a full environmental impact assessment of the anticipated debris that will sink to the seafloor, as well as the atmospheric impact in the air above the ocean. 

The foundation also wants all the materials that will survive the reentry and reach the ocean floor to be disclosed publicly and not kept confidential. 

The foundation also cited obligations and analysis legally required under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, the London Protocol of 1996. This protocol maps our an international standard for nations to both individually and collectively protect and preserve our oceans from pollution that is caused by the dumping of waste. 

“The high seas have no sovereign who can demand accountability. We believe this gap in international law needs to be closed, and the ISS deorbit is a vivid illustration of why,” Spalding concluded.

New Research Finds Nearly Half Of All Dementia Cases Could Be Delayed Or Prevented 

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In a new study from some of the world’s leading experts in dementia, it was found that almost half of the global cases of the disease could be prevented or delayed, specifically pointing out 14 risk factors that exist throughout a patient’s life.

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