Victoria Arbour, manager of research and collections at the Royal B.C. Museum in Canada. Arbour was not involved in the new work.

Nodosaurids are armored dinosaurs covered in bony plates. They are closely related to ankylosaurids, but they lack the heavy tail clubs ankylosaurids used to protect themselves from predators. Nodosaurid fossils have primarily been found in North America and Europe, though a few have been uncovered in Asia.

In the new study, a team of researchers revisited one such fossil specimen originally discovered in 1995 on Hokkaido, the northernmost main island of Japan. The scientists performed computed tomography (CT) scans of the fossils, which are somewhere between 93 million and 100 million years old, and include the back of the skull, part of the lower jaw, and several teeth and bony plates.

CT scanning enables researchers to make digital 3D models of specimens, and "lets you just get more information than you'd be able to have otherwise, because you can look inside without breaking [the fossil]," Arbour told Live Science.

Based on the CT scans and an anatomical analysis, the team determined that the fossils represented a new species of nodosaurid, which they dubbed Nipponopelta yezoensis. "Nippon" refers to Japan, and "pelta" means "shield" in Greek. "Yezo" is the traditional name for Hokkaido.

N. yezoensis is closely related to North American nodosaurids, the team found. The dino's ancestors may have migrated from North America to Asia via a land bridge in what is now the Bering Strait 100 million to 110 million years ago.

Coastal dinosaur?

A separate team of scientists originally uncovered the N. yezoensis specimen in marine sediments — rocks that formed under ancient seas. Nodosaurids didn't live in the ocean, so the findings suggest that after the animal died, its corpse may have been swept out to sea along a river or estuary and eventually sank to the ocean floor.

Several other nodosaurid fossils have been found in similar marine deposits, suggesting the creatures lived along coastlines. That may have helped them migrate along the Bering Land Bridge and disperse by following the coast, study co-author Darla Zelenitsky, a dinosaur paleobiologist at the University of Calgary, told Live Science.

But just because nodosaurids are most commonly found in coastal environments doesn't mean that they couldn't have lived further inland as well, said Jordan Mallon, a paleontologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature who was not involved in the research. Upland and mountainous regions tend to produce few fossils because erosion wears down rocks in these biomes, Mallon told Live Science. So it's possible nodosaurids lived there, even if there's no fossil record of these armored dinosaurs at these locations.

"The nature of the fossil record is that it's patchy and incomplete," Mallon said. "It's very hard to tell a comprehensive story when you've only got a few pages out of a phone book's worth of time."

It's also not clear from the fossil record why so few nodosaurid species have been found in Asia compared with North America, Zelenitsky said. While several ankylosaurid species have been found further inland in Asia, few nodosaurid fossils have been unearthed on the continent.

"It could be the rock record, or just that [nodosaurids] weren't able to diversify as much in Asia," Zelenitsky said.

In future studies, "I hope that we find more of this animal," Mallon said. "It incites us to keep digging so that we can learn more about this animal and test some of our ideas about just what it is."

'> Rare armored dinosaur found in Japan may have ancestors that migrated across a land bridge 100 million years ago intelligent alien technology, even though 3I/ATLAS behaved like a natural comet. However, according to the astronomers who are studying its mysteries in the data collected by dozens of telescopes and spacecraft, the ancient object may still have lessons to teach us about life in the cosmos.

3I/ATLAS is likely a preserved fragment of a planetesimal — a building block of a planet — from a distant system, Martin Cordiner, a researcher in astrochemistry and planetary science at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told Live Science. Therefore, the comet's composition could offer clues to the prevalence of life's building blocks around distant stars. Some astronomers even hope this cosmic interloper will help constrain how likely life is elsewhere in our galaxy.

Blast from the past

Comets like 3I/ATLAS are important because scientists think they help "seed" planets with carbon-containing chemicals, Darryl Seligman, an assistant professor of astronomy at Michigan State University, told Live Science in an email. Some of these chemicals, like methanol, have simple structures. Others, like amino acids, are more complex. Together, these carbon-containing, or organic, compounds form the basis for biomolecules, like proteins and nucleic acids, that interact to produce life.

Samples returned from space rocks in our neighborhood strongly support the idea that they transported such molecules within the solar system. For instance, fragments from the solar system asteroid Bennu obtained during NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission contain all five nucleotide bases, the building blocks of nucleic acids. Matthew Belyakov, a postdoctoral researcher in planetary science at Caltech, noted that the Bennu samples also contained 14 of the 20 amino acids that form naturally on Earth.

Inferences about such deliveries are possible only because the rocks are like time capsules: They emerge from the same swirling disk of gas and dust from which planets are born, and the chemical compositions of asteroids and comets don't change much after that. So, by studying space rocks that originate in other exoplanetary systems, "we can learn if they also contain the building blocks of life and could have helped to start life in exoplanetary systems," Seligman said.

Simulations suggest that comets that circle one planet before moving to another could similarly deliver such prebiotic molecules to baby exoplanets. However, there was no supporting observational data to back up this claim.

A chemical potpourri

To figure out which chemicals 3I/ATLAS contains, astronomers have been recording the comet's light intensity across a range of frequencies, using more than a dozen instruments on Earth and around the solar system. This was possible because the comet spewed tons of gas and dust to create a fuzzy bright halo, or coma, after the sun warmed it. Observations of this coma have turned up an eclectic group of chemicals essential for life as we know it.

One is hydrogen cyanide (HCN), which was detected by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Despite its notorious reputation as a poisonous gas, HCN is important for creating life. A commentary noted that laboratory experiments dating back to the 1950s ‪—‬ including the famous Miller-Urey experiment, which attempted to recreate the conditions of primordial Earth ‪—‬ have found that HCN is involved in building molecules like amino acids.

The list of ingredients goes on. ALMA data also revealed that 3I/ATLAS released gigantic amounts of formaldehyde and methanol. Additionally, observations from the James Webb Space Telescope showed 3I/ATLAS spewing the greenhouse gas methane. This is important because, assuming the methane formed on planets in the comet's home system, it could have trapped heat on those planets, thus warming them and making them more hospitable to life.

The presence of all these molecules is significant, Cordiner said, because they are "heavily implicated in terrestrial prebiotic chemistry studies as key carbon and nitrogen feedstocks [raw materials] for helping build life's molecular precursors," he said. 3I/ATLAS is proof that these "feedstocks" also exist in pastures far beyond our solar system's fences.

These findings are especially important because astronomers couldn't study the previous two interstellar objects to the same extent, Seligman said. He noted that 1I/'Oumuamua, the first interstellar object ever detected in the solar system, was observable for only a few weeks.

"The second interstellar comet 2I/Borisov was discovered right before COVID, so a lot of observations were canceled because of that," Seligman added. (Cordiner noted that the few observations conducted on 2I/Borisov showed that it, too, appears to contain HCN.) In comparison, researchers had almost a year to study 3I/ATLAS with telescopes. These observations have shown that "3I/ATLAS is unique in terms of the *measured* chemical inventory," Cordiner said.

Not indicative of life

All of the chemicals that 3I/ATLAS appears to possess give us data about just one planetary system. But when combined with observations of other astronomical phenomena, 3I/ATLAS shows that the chemical building blocks of life are abundant across our galaxy. For instance, giant molecular clouds — dense regions of gas and dust that give rise to stars — contain nitriles and sugar acids that can form amino acids. The stuff of life, it seems, is plentiful in space.

Ingredients aside, these findings don't prove that life itself has developed in 3I/ATLAS' home system (or anywhere else). All of the organic molecules that 3I/ATLAS appears to contain have simple chemical structures. Cordiner said mixtures of such molecules in the lab have transformed into more complex ones via processes like ice irradiation. However, such compounds have not been found on 3I/ATLAS, despite the billions of years the comet likely spent exposed to the unabated radiation of interstellar space.

Most of the chemicals 3I/ATLAS released while zipping past the sun come from the comet's radiation-exposed upper layers and not from its pristine interior, a January study found. This would mean that what astronomers have measured may not be present in the comet's home system.

Nonetheless, many astronomers, including Seligman's group, are continuing to study 3I/ATLAS' composition. There is also the exciting possibility of future interstellar visitors, which are all but guaranteed to make an appearance, thanks to the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which is expected to spot dozens more. The elements and isotopes found in these objects will help in "building a map of where bio-precursors reside, across the history of the Galaxy," Cordiner said.

Help us improve Live Science Pro: We're always trying to make our content better. Leave us feedback about Pro here.

'> Could comet 3I/ATLAS teach us about life beyond Earth? Scientists say the story's not over yet.

The team behind the new machine plans to integrate it into an existing shared supercomputing facility to create a quantum-GPU hybrid computing center.

Quantum computers: Powerful but impractical

Unlike traditional, or "classical," computers, quantum computers operate according to the strange laws of quantum physics. In quantum systems, qubits — in the form of superconducting circuits, trapped ions or photons (among other modalities) — represent the fundamental building blocks of quantum information. These can exist as a 1, 0, or a "superposition" of both states at once.

However, qubits are notoriously fragile. Even minor environmental interference can destabilize or destroy the information they contain, making accuracy an ongoing challenge in the world of quantum computing. The error rate in qubits is thought to be roughly 1 in 1,000, compared with around 1 per billion or even 1 per trillion operations in classical computing bits.

It's why a huge amount of research is dedicated to quantum error correction. This field seeks to alleviate this inherent unreliability by building redundancies into the way information is encoded in qubits so that small errors don't scrap entire computations.

The broad aim is to create higher-quality qubits and then scale up the number of qubits in a system so quantum computers can finally compete with the world's fastest supercomputers.

This thorny issue, combined with quantum systems' need for elaborate cooling systems to keep them operational, makes them impractical outside of finely tuned lab environments.

A more reliable quantum system?

Shunkai, named after 17th-century Japanese astronomer Harumi Shibukawa, shirks at least some of those constraints. Rather than using supercooled circuitry, Japan's new system incorporates neutral atoms as qubits, captured and suspended using "optical tweezers."

These tightly focused laser beams capture atoms and arrange them inside a vacuum chamber, while microwaves or laser light are used to manipulate the atoms' quantum states and perform calculations. The results are then read by observing the fluorescence from each individual atom with a camera.

Importantly, Shunkai's use of neutral atoms as qubits instead of superconducting circuits means it can operate at room temperature. Because the arrangement of qubits in neutral-atom systems can be fine-tuned during calculations, researchers can also adjust which qubits interact with each other and create entanglement — a bizarre state of information sharing between particles over time and space — between different pairs.

This could help overcome two of the biggest obstacles facing practical quantum systems: scaling machines to large numbers of qubits, and correcting the errors that inevitably creep into quantum calculations.

To that end, Shunkai will be partially opened to external researchers to develop applications and test and improve the system's quantum error correction capabilities, representatives from Japan's National Institutes of Natural Sciences said in the statement.

The quantum system will initially operate with around 50 qubits before expanding to roughly 500. The longer-term goal is considerably more ambitious: By March 2031, the team aims to scale Shunkai into a "large-scale, high-performance neutral-atom fault-tolerant quantum computer, with 10,000 physical qubits and quantum error detection and correction capabilities." Doing so would place it comfortably above the 6,100-qubit, neutral atom array demonstrated by Caltech researchers in October 2025.

"Neutral atom-based quantum computers have recently been rapidly attracting attention around the world as a new modality that could exceed the limits of the superconducting modality," Ohmori said. "I think it is extremely significant that now we have developed Japan's first full-stack quantum computer in this cutting-edge modality and started its operation."

Can you match these ancient devices to their pictures? Find out with our computing quiz!

'> Japan switches on its first full-stack room-temperature quantum computer — and scientists plan to scale it up to 10,000 qubits

A Pacific cyclone dubbed Polo exploded from a tropical storm into a powerful Category 5 hurricane in less than 24 hours on Tuesday (Sept. 22), with winds reaching speeds of 180 mph (290 km/h). The storm, drifting off the southwest coast of Mexico, was downgraded to a Category 4 storm on Wednesday (Sept. 23) but intensified back to Category 5 as of Thursday (Sept. 24) morning, according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC).

As Polo moves northwest, it is expected to drive torrential rainfall on parts of Mexico's southwest coast, with up to 8 inches (20 centimetres) in some areas. Although the storm is not predicted to make direct landfall, the NHC has warned that heavy rain may produce life-threatening flooding and mudslides, as well as extremely hazardous ocean conditions.

Polo is one of the strongest hurricanes on record in the Eastern Pacific, second only to Hurricane Patricia in 2015, according to Accuweather. But what causes a hurricane like Polo to intensify so rapidly? And what role has the "super" El Niño played in the storm's development?

How El Niño contributed

"Rapid intensification of tropical cyclones is something we see several times per year across the globe," Julian Heming, an environmental scientist and researcher at the U.K.'s Met Office, told Live Science in an email. "The main requirements are high sea temperatures, low wind shear and upper air conditions which allow air to escape quickly from the top of the hurricane."

Hurricane Polo intensified rapidly as it moved over exceptionally warm Pacific waters associated with an extremely strong "super'" El Niño that has taken hold off the Pacific since June.

El Niño is a naturally occurring climate pattern that develops in the tropical Pacific Ocean, typically every two to seven years. It begins when waters in the eastern tropical Pacific become unusually warm. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration identifies El Niño conditions when these waters are at least 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit (0.5 degrees Celsius) above average, alongside changes in winds, surface pressure and rainfall that are consistent with the phenomenon.

El Niño events are then classified by strength, ranging from weak to very strong. Although "super El Niño" is not a scientific term, it refers to a very strong El Niño, where the warming of sea surface temperatures is higher than 2C above normal.

The unusually warm ocean supplied Hurricane Polo with abundant heat and moisture, while very moist air and weak winds higher in the atmosphere allowed thunderstorms to organize and strengthen without being disrupted, Hemming said.

Polo also developed a compact, well-defined core, which concentrated the storm's energy into a relatively small area and enabled it to intensify extremely quickly. Together, these conditions created an efficient atmospheric "heat engine" that allowed Polo to strengthen at an exceptional rate.

"Polo's rapid and sudden growth is testament to the dominance of this year's so-called super El Niño, which set a record on Monday as the most extreme on record and has amplified a number of extreme weather events globally," Heming said.

The latest data from the World Meteorological Organization suggests that the current El Niño could be the strongest on record and last until at least February 2027. This will lead to more extreme weather, pushing some areas into drought while others experience stronger storms, rainfall and flooding.

If the system moves northward, Southern California could see intense rainfall and coastal regions may experience hazardous rip currents and large swells. As of Thursday morning, the NHC reports the core of the storm is expected to stay offshore and move towards the northwest. However, "There is currently a lot of uncertainty in the long term as to whether Polo will move further out to sea or turn north-eastwards towards Mexico," Heming said.

'> Hurricane Polo exploded in intensity in just 24 hours. Is the 'super' El Niño to blame? Sonja Vernes, a professor and head of the Neurogenetics of Vocal Communication Research Group at the University of St Andrews in the U.K., told Live Science in an email. "Get the tree right, and everything else about bat evolution starts to fall into place."

The study included members of all 21 recognized bat families, as well as some of the most remarkable bat species known on Earth. For example, the dataset contained the bumblebee bat (Craseonycteris thonglongyai, also called the Kitti's hog-nosed bat), which, at about 1 inch, or 2.5 centimeters, long, is thought to be the smallest mammal on Earth; and the Madagascar's sucker-footed bat (Myzopoda aurita), which has suction cups on its wrists and ankles to help it cling to smooth surfaces.

The research team — which comprised 137 scientists affiliated with Bat1K, an international project to map the genomes of all living bat species — used advanced DNA sequencing and computational techniques to identify individual genes and redraw the bat family tree.

"The value we bring is in innovative methods and unparalleled data that together yield an evolutionary tree that includes all these key fossils," study co-author Liliana Dávalos, a professor of phylogenetics and tropical deforestation at Stony Brook University in New York, told Live Science in an email.

Among other discoveries, the researchers found that a 50 million-year-old fossil from southern France of the extinct species Vielasia sigei, which shows signs of advanced echolocation, sits within the oldest branch of the bat family tree, indicating that echolocation predates the diversification of modern bats. This finding, together with the result that true flight appeared early in bats, helps to explain why this lineage has been so successful and evolved into more than 1,500 species worldwide today, according to the study.

After emerging in Europe, bats quickly dispersed into Africa, establishing a Europe-Africa hub from which they expanded into Asia, the Americas and Australia, the results suggest. Bats are the only mammals capable of true flight, meaning they flap their wings and don't simply glide or parachute. Throughout their evolution, they have acquired longer lifespans than other mammals of similar body size, surviving eight to 10 times longer than might be expected and showing few signs of aging and cancer, according to the study.

"Some bat species live remarkably long lives for their size, and can shrug off diseases that would make us seriously ill," Vernes said. "Until now, we didn't have a solid enough foundation to properly understand how bats evolved their most extraordinary traits, from flight and echolocation to their remarkable lifespans and resistance to disease. Now we do."

The genomic resource built for the study lays the foundation for future research into bats' longevity and disease resistance, with potential benefits for humans, Vernes said. "If we can understand how they do this at the genetic level, it could eventually help us design bat-inspired approaches to improve human health," she said.

The findings could also aid bat conservation through genomic methods. Protecting bats is important because they help to maintain healthy ecosystems by pollinating plants, dispersing seeds and consuming huge numbers of insect pests, Vernes said. There is also more work to be done to identify the ancestor of all living bats, whose genome the researchers took a first stab reconstructing.

"For me, this isn't the end of the story," Vernes said; "it's just the first chapter."

'> Earth's first bats didn't come from where we thought, landmark genetic study reveals