It's unclear who won this stellar stare-down. If the bird appeared to blink, that's only because its eye is really the triple-star system HD 53367, a flickering trio of very young and energetic stars actively shaping the cloud around them.

The Rubin Observatory, meanwhile, had to avert its gaze quickly; this image is just one of about 16,000 exposures taken of the night sky between Oct. 24 and Dec. 11, 2024, according to the National Science Foundation, which co-manages Rubin along with the U.S. Department of Energy. Taken with the aforementioned Commissioning Camera (ComCam), the deep-space photos served as an early test of the observatory's hardware, software and image-processing capabilities.

ComCam's test image is remarkably crisp — but what's even more impressive is that Rubin has since upgraded to a camera with more than 20 times the field of view. The Legacy Survey of Space and Time Camera currently mounted on the observatory's Simonyi Survey Telescope takes 3,200-megapixel images of the night sky every 30 seconds, completing a full scan of the entire southern sky every few nights, Tony Tyson, Rubin's chief scientist, previously told Live Science.

Now that the Legacy Survey of Space and Time has officially begun, Rubin will spend the next 10 years photographing the sky night after night, creating a time-lapse movie of the universe that is expected to reveal millions of cosmic wonders, from exploding supernovas to newfound comets and exoplanets. Perhaps it will even spot another bird.

Like what you see? Take a look at the hidden details in the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's debut images here.

'> Cosmic 'seagull' locks eyes with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in long-awaited test image

It's "very difficult to say with any certainty, as we have no direct evidence documenting interactions between Gigantopithecus and human ancestors," Renaud Joannes-Boyau, director of higher-degree research training at Southern Cross University in Australia and an archaeologist who has conducted extensive research into human evolution, told Live Science in an email.

"That said, if we look at the broader pattern of human evolution, our lineage [Homo] has consistently behaved as an apex predator," Joannes-Boyau said. "Humans and our ancestors have shown a remarkable tendency to explore, exploit and, at times, eliminate large animals that shared their environment. I think it is reasonable to imagine that those interactions may have involved a mixture of indifference, curiosity and violence, depending on the circumstances."

Friedemann Schrenk, a professor of paleobiology at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany, thinks Gigantopithecus would have likely tried to avoid humans. "Humans were and are the most aggressive primates ever on earth using tools and weapons and were probably encroaching on Gigantopithecus habitats," he told Live Science in an email. Homo erectus made use of hand axes and possibly hafted spears.

Schrenk envisions the hypothetical interactions as similar to those between modern-day humans and orangutans, which has resulted in humans encroaching on orangutan habitats and the apes' populations declining. "After all, Gigantopithecus was a gigantic orangutan," he said, noting that if there was hostility in a direct encounter, early humans would have been the aggressors.

Different environments?

Yet it's also possible that Gigantopithecus and hominins lived in different environments in Southeast Asia, which would have minimized the number of interactions they had, said Hervé Bocherens, a professor of biogeology at the University of Tübingen in Germany.

The "carbon stable isotopic ratios measured on some teeth of both taxa suggest a different habitat, closed forests for Gigantopithecus and open savannah for Homo erectus," Bocherens told Live Science in an email. However, because of limited data, "we cannot exclude that some hominins were also present in more forested environments," he added. Grinding patterns in their teeth suggest that Gigantopithecus' diet was essentially plant-based and may have included bamboo.

In a 2024 study, scientists investigated the demise of Gigantopithecus and found no evidence that hominins contributed to Gigantopithecus' extinction. Instead, they determined that the main cause was environmental change that resulted in a reduction in the forested environment where Gigantopithecus lived and foraged. In fact, hominins and Gigantopithecus may not have encountered each other at all, Yingqi Zhang, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and first author of the paper, told Live Science in an email.

We can only imagine what hominins would have thought when they glimpsed these gigantic creatures. It’s not clear how hominins and Gigantopithecus would have interacted, if they ever did, said Frido Welker, a professor of biomolecular paleoanthropology at the University of Copenhagen. He thinks they would have avoided each other but they may have "been in awe when they did happen to run into each other."

See how much you know about early humans with our human evolution quiz!

'> What happened when humans encountered Gigantopithecus? government healthcare website. If we are not careful, it's only a matter of time before one of these incidents causes large-scale, real-world harm, like shutting down an electricity grid or municipal water system, or a mass misdiagnosis in a health system. If this trend continues, the entire industry could become tarnished.

But there is a blueprint for self-regulation in a risky business: the nuclear industry, which has built up layers of oversight, controls and self-scrutiny over decades.

Frontier AI may require something similar: private regulation among competitors that do not trust one another but have a mutual interest in preventing outcomes that could damage them all. This does not appeal to the better angels of human nature — it's self-preservation for the industry itself.

There is a historical precedent for this kind of arrangement. The nuclear sector did not become safe because every actor suddenly became benevolent. It became safer through a layered system of peer scrutiny, technical standards, information-sharing and external oversight. International organizations such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which was established in 1957, emerged to coordinate monitoring and verification, while national regulators and industry bodies gradually built professional norms around catastrophic risk.

The result was not perfect safety, as the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 clearly attests. But nuclear governance architecture is designed around the recognition that in high-risk technological systems, one actor's failure can become everyone's problem. This was seen following Chernobyl: global nuclear safety increased significantly after the disaster, with upgrades to reactor designs, improved training and international monitoring networks.

And this movement to self-regulation also occurred in the U.S. nuclear sector, following the Three-Mile Island nuclear accident near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1979. The reactor suffered a partial meltdown after a relatively minor cooling malfunction. Investigations later revealed design flaws in instruments and alarms, along with inadequate emergency response training, were the root cause of the incident.

The event nearly killed the nuclear energy industry in the U.S., causing public support to fall from a record high of 69% in 1977 to 46%t in 1979. The entire industry suffered because of failures at one facility. In response, the U.S. nuclear industry established the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO) in December 1979 to improve operational safety.

The analogy to AI should not be overstated. Nuclear materials are easier to count than algorithms, and nuclear facilities are harder to hide than model weights. The outcomes of a catastrophic AI blunder are also less existential, although its use in weapon systems is not without risk. In September, an AI hallucination almost led to the U.S. intercepting a Chinese ship suspected of carrying nuclear material to Iran.

Yet the comparison remains useful because the core governance problem is similar. In both cases, competitors operate in an environment where the downside risk of unchecked rivalry is borne by society while the upside is private gain for these firms. The challenge is to create institutions that make restraint the rational default — even when no actor fully trusts the others, and the inner workings of the industry are not readily visible to outsiders.

For AI, that could mean reciprocal evaluation of frontier models before deployment, secure mechanisms for sharing safety information, agreed red lines around certain capabilities, and independent third parties empowered to audit compliance. Such mechanisms would not replace government regulation. They would instead serve as an intermediate layer: stronger than voluntary ethics statements but more adaptive and technically informed than legislation alone can often be in fast-moving domains. The state would act as a background enforcer.

AI executives appear willing to look for solutions too, with Elon Musk recently suggesting a peer-review system before advanced model release, and Demis Hassabis, co-founder and chair of Google DeepMind, putting forward a framework for an AI Standards Body, similar to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.

Skeptics will object, with reason, that industry-led governance can become cartel behavior or public-relations theater. Companies may use "safety" language to entrench incumbency, slow rivals or deflect binding regulation. Those are real dangers. The lesson from nuclear history is not that private coordination works automatically. It is that private coordination works only when nested inside a broader system of transparency, verification and public authority. Without those elements, private regulation becomes little more than trust-me rhetoric.

Still, dismissing private regulation altogether would be a mistake. Governments do not yet possess the technical capacity, speed or international alignment needed to oversee frontier AI on their own. And if the leading labs already see themselves as bound together by shared exposure to catastrophic risk, that recognition can become the basis for institutional design. The question is how to turn mutual fear into durable rules.

That is where the nuclear analogy is most powerful. It reminds us that industries facing existential hazards do not need perfect trust in order to cooperate. They need mechanisms that make cooperation preferable to defection. In practice, that means inspections, peer review, incident reporting, professional norms and a state-backed enforcement perimeter. AI governance is often discussed as if the only choices were laissez-faire innovation or heavy-handed state control. History suggests a third path: structured private coordination under public shadow.

The real opportunity, then, is not to celebrate the newfound (apparent) prudence of technology executives, it is to recognize what their comments reveal. When even fierce rivals begin to argue for mutual scrutiny, they are admitting that competition alone cannot govern the frontier. That admission should be treated not as reassurance but as evidence that the risk has become collective.

The policy task now is to build institutions that fit that reality. Governments should push for mandatory reporting, independent evaluation and legal backstops. But they should also encourage enforceable forms of peer oversight among the handful of firms whose systems may shape the trajectory of the technology. Frontier AI is becoming an industry in which the leading actors are hostages of one another. The nuclear age showed that such conditions can produce serious governance. The hope is that AI firms learn that lesson before they learn the cost of ignoring it at the peril of the public at large.

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'> AI giants are one big mistake away from catastrophe. They could learn a lot from the nuclear industry.

Although it officially turns full at 12:11 a.m. EDT on Monday (Oct. 26), the Hunter's Moon will appear almost perfectly full as it rises on both Sunday (Oct. 25) and Monday evenings, giving skywatchers two opportunities to observe it.

October's full moon is nicknamed the Hunter's Moon because it was traditionally a signal for hunters to prepare for the coming cold winter by hunting, slaughtering and preserving meat, according to Time and Date. That's an Anglo-Saxon name; Native American names for October's full moon include the Drying Rice Moon, the Falling Leaves Moon and the Freezing Moon.

The first chance to see the Hunter's Moon comes just before sunset on Sunday, when the almost-full moon will rise in the east. The second opportunity comes on Monday, when the moon — still essentially 100% illuminated — will again rise just after sunset. Because it will be in a slightly darker sky, Monday's moonrise will likely be more dramatic.

As it rises Sunday, the moon will appear in the constellation Aries, and Saturn will be to its upper right. On Monday, it will rise above the Pleiades open cluster (M45).

For the best view on either evening, find somewhere with a clear view low to the eastern horizon and be in position shortly before moonrise where you are. An elevated viewpoint, open field or coastline is ideal because buildings, trees and hills can delay the moment the moon becomes visible.

Although the full moon will look magnificent with the naked eye, a backyard telescope or good stargazing binoculars can help you zoom in on various lunar features.

The Hunter's Moon may appear unusually large thanks to the "moon illusion," which makes the moon seem bigger when it's seen beside familiar objects, such as trees and buildings, near the horizon. The illusion stems from the fallacies of how our brains use distance to perceive size.

October's Hunter's Moon isn't a supermoon, but it comes immediately before a notable sequence of four consecutive supermoons. The first will be the next full moon, the Beaver Moon, on Nov. 24, followed by full moons in December, January and February. A supermoon occurs when a full moon happens while the moon is relatively close to Earth in its slightly elliptical orbit, making it appear somewhat larger and brighter than average.

How much do you know about the moon? Test your lunar smarts with our moon quiz!

'> Watch the full 'Hunter's Moon' rise next to Saturn this weekend Nazca Lines there are, but they number in the thousands, with new geoglyphs continuing to be discovered with the help of AI.

But why were the Nazca Lines built?

Scientists have been debating this question since the lines were first formally investigated in the early 20th century. Although the definite answer remains unknown, experts have proposed various reasons for the famous geoglyphs.

There "are many ideas out there about their function and meaning," Ana Nieves, a professor of art history at Northeastern Illinois University, told Live Science in an email. "If you look at the area's geoglyphs closely, though, there are different styles of geoglyphs, some are relatively larger and some smaller, some are on hillsides while some are on the pampas. It is not likely that a single explanation would apply to all."

Different perspectives

A vast array of theories for the lines' uses have been proposed over the years, with the most outlandish of these suggesting that they were sites for aliens to land spaceships.

More grounded theories link the lines to cultural and religious practices.

"The question of why the geoglyphs exist is difficult to answer, given that we lack any type of preserved oral or written testimony," Karsten Lambers, an art history professor at the University of Augsburg in Germany, wrote in an essay published in the book "Los geoglifos: imágenes y escenarios en el desierto de Nazca y Palpa [The Geoglyphs: images and settings in the desert of Nazca and Palpa]" (University of Augsburg, 2017). It's possible that the uses for the geoglyphs changed over time, he added.

One suggestion is that they were initially used to mark routes for travelers and caravans and later became places for gathering and feasting.

In a 2026 study, researchers noted that some of the earlier Nazca geoglyphs were constructed on hillsides, seem to be located on trails, and "were visible from considerable distances." This means the geoglyphs may have been used to mark travel routes and indicate areas that were good for temporary camps. The team suggested that the markings became places for gathering and feasting.

Another idea is that the geoglyphs were used to match astronomical alignments to serve as a kind of calendar. In December 1941, historian Paul Kosok examined the lines and determined that they had astronomical alignments. Mathematician Maria Reiche followed up on Kosok's work, examining the Nazca Lines for more than 40 years to identify many geoglyphs she believed have an astronomical relationship to various celestial bodies, a research team noted in a 2021 paper. Yet after analyzing the geoglyphs, the modern-day team found that only a relatively small number had a possible alignment to a star or solar event such as a solstice.

"The results suggest that the geoglyphs, as a whole, certainly cannot be interpreted as a calendar system," the team wrote. However, this doesn't discredit the idea that the Nazca Lines had an astronomical significance, Christiane Richter, a researcher at the University of Applied Sciences in Germany and first author of the 2021 paper, told Live Science in an email.

Since the paper's publication, Richter and her team's research has indicated that around 8% of the geoglyphs have some form of lunar alignment. It is "highly probable that celestial bodies played a role in the creation of the drawings," Richter said in an email.

Offerings such as ceramics, crabs, corn and earrings made from Spondylus shells (a genus of bivalves known as thorny oysters) were also placed on low rock platforms near some of the geoglyphs, especially those shaped like trapezoids, Lambers noted in his paper. Spondylus shells are normally found farther north, in Ecuador, but during El Niño events, they can appear farther south, in Peru. These shells, alongside crabs and corn, tend to be associated with water and fertility, Lambers noted.

Another idea is that the geoglyphs themselves may have been used for ritual processions. Some of the geoglyphs are made with a single, uninterrupted line," Nieves said. "Those are the ones that would lend themselves for processions since people could walk them in a single file."

Some of the activities at the Nazca Lines may have helped foster a sense of community and equality, said Darryl Wilkinson, a professor of religion at Dartmouth University who has written about the geoglyphs. For instance, "walking the lines was a group activity, and participating in such processions would have likely created a feeling of community among those involved," Wilkinson told Live Science in an email. "I interpret the Nasca lines as geared towards the realization of a relatively more equal expression of community."

Whatever the reasons for their construction the Nazca Lines are awe inspiring today. Lambers wrote in his essay that the Nazca people who built them "succeeded in transforming one of the driest deserts in the world, over the course of many centuries, to serve the region’s inhabitants as an expression of their cultural ideas and a setting for their social activities."

'> Why were the Nazca Lines built?