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 Julius Caesar tried to conquer in 52 B.C. The ancient walls show evidence of a violent fire, seemingly confirming the claim that the Celtic group who lived there, known as the Gauls, burned down their own town so that it wouldn't fall into Caesar's hands.

"The wall's architecture, with its large blocks and interlocking beam system, immediately led us to believe it was a wall of Gallic tradition," Dorothée Chaoui-Derieux, chief curator of heritage at the Île-de-France Regional Archaeology Service, said in a translated statement. Traces of fire and first century B.C. artifacts further suggested the archaeologists had finally found material evidence of Lutetia, a Celtic settlement mentioned in Caesar's Gallic Wars.

In the first century B.C., Lutetia was a Celtic pre-Roman settlement, known as an "oppidum", in what is now Paris. Lutetia was the capital city of the Parisii tribe, who lived along the River Seine. As part of the Gallic Wars, which ran from 58 to 50 B.C., Julius Caesar and his troops fought the Battle of Lutetia in 52 B.C. The Romans won a decisive victory, but the Gauls burned Lutetia and cut the bridges so that Caesar could not take the town. As a result, the ancient fort had never been found.

But in February, a team of archaeologists began excavating in the courtyard of the Hôtel-Dieu, which is Paris's oldest working hospital. On the small Île-de-la-Cité island in the middle of the Seine, close to Notre-Dame, the archaeologists discovered a 65-foot (20-meters) stone and timber wall typical of Celtic fortifications. Charred facing, burnt seeds and a burned wooden building discovered nearby suggested the site had been destroyed by a fire.

"The initial results of carbon-14 dating of the wooden elements suggest a date range between 200 and 10 B.C. Furthermore, a Gallic spearhead was found at the foot of the wall," Chaoui-Derieux said.

These new discoveries provide solid archaeological evidence that Lutetia was indeed centered on the island in the Seine and that its occupants burned it down, as Caesar noted in his Gallic Wars more than two millennia ago.

"This discovery fills an archaeological gap. For centuries, the location of Lutetia has been debated," Stéphane Deschamps, regional curator of archaeology at Île-de-France Regional Archaeology Service, said in the statement. "Today, with this wall and its context, we may hold the key to the mystery."

But the remains of the wall and other artifacts are extremely fragile because of their exposure to fire, according to the statement. The wall cannot be fully preserved, so archaeologists will create a replica using 3D photogrammetry to ensure the discovery is accessible to everyone.

See how much you know about the Celts with our Celtic quiz!

'> Missing Celtic fort annihilated by Julius Caesar finally found under Paris hospital . But astrophysicists are still very excited about this discovery.

"Astronomers have been looking for radio signals from exoplanets for some time," Suzanne Aigrain, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. "There have been tentative, indirect detections before, but this is the first truly convincing direct detection, and it hopefully paves the way for many more."

Artificial radio signals are a key focus in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), which involves scanning the cosmos for signs of alien life. Such "technosignatures" could suggest advanced technologies built by intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations. However, radio signals can be emitted by natural sources, too.

"There are two natural processes that can produce radio emission in exoplanets," Aigrain said. "One is magnetic reconnection, when the planet orbits really close to the star and its magnetic field interacts directly with that of the star. The other is aurorae (like those we have on Earth and on other solar system planets like Saturn, but much stronger), when energetic charged particles streaming from the star interact with the upper atmosphere of the planet."

"This second effect is what the authors of the paper believe they have detected," Aigrain added.

In the study, a research group led by Kevin Ortiz Ceballos, a graduate student at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, turned MeerKAT, a radio telescope array in South Africa, toward a massive gas giant called Beta Pictoris b, an exoplanet that's 64 light-years from Earth and has a mass roughly 10 times that of Jupiter, according to NASA. They picked up rapid, repeating bursts of radio signals coming from the planet.

At first, it wasn't clear whether the signal was coming from the planet or the star it orbits (named simply Beta Pictoris). However, after comparing the radio images of both the planet and the star with the positions of distant background quasars (bright, active galaxies that act as fixed reference points), the team confirmed that the radio bursts were indeed emanating from the gas giant.

"No radio detection has previously been unambiguously localized to an extrasolar planet rather than its host star," they wrote in the study, which has not been peer-reviewed yet.

Aigrain emphasized that "this is definitely not aliens!" The signals are consistent with what would be expected from auroras, and this finding offers insight into the planet itself. From these measurements, the team calculated the planet's magnetic-field strength, which they estimated to be roughly 1,250 gauss. For comparison, Jupiter's magnetic-field strength is only about 4.3 gauss and Earth's is a measly 0.5 gauss, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com.

Magnetic-field measurements like these are important because we don't fully understand how planets' magnetospheres are generated and what controls how strong they are, Aigrain said. The ability to measure a planet's magnetic field could also help in our search for potentially habitable exoplanets.

"[A] planet's magnetic field shields its atmosphere from the 'wind' of charged particles from [its] star, which might otherwise carry material away from the atmosphere," Aigrain said. "On Earth, for example, the magnetic field has played a key role in retaining the atmosphere and shielding life on the planet from harmful high-energy radiation.

"The planet in this paper is quite massive and has a thick atmosphere, so even without a strong magnetic field it could probably hold on to its atmosphere, and it is not expected to host life," Aigrain added. "But in the future we might be able to make similar measurements for smaller planets, for which this shielding effect would be more important."

MeerKAT is a pathfinder instrument for a new large telescope called the Square Kilometre Array, which is expected to come online in the next few years. This observatory "will be significantly more powerful," Aigrain said, "so there will be many more systems where we can look for this type of signal."

'> Astronomers detected radio signals coming from an exoplanet for the first time. Spoiler alert: It's not aliens.

The study used satellite data to map freshwater trends across the globe between 2002 and 2025. Thanks to a high-resolution rendering method, researchers revealed regional gains and reductions in terrestrial water storage that were 33% more marked, on average, than in previous studies. The amount of fresh water lost was much higher than the gains overall, highlighting the urgent need for better water management to stave off a global water crisis.

"It has become very dire in a lot of places," Hrishikesh Chandanpurkar, a hydrologist and the co-founder of the nonprofit Evergreen Resilience Institute, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science.

The study also attributed the changes in freshwater storage to different human and climate drivers, said first author Mary Michael Forrester O'Neill, a researcher at the University of Maryland's Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center and the Hydrological Sciences Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

"Earlier studies could see broad patterns of long-term freshwater loss or gain but couldn't reliably tell how much was due to human activity versus climate swings, in part due to resolution limitations," Forrester O'Neill told Live Science in an email. "This study sharpened the picture and used geostatistical methods to rank the impacts of human causes, like irrigation and dam building, against climate factors, like rainfall and drought."

The researchers found 94 regions with above-background shifts in freshwater storage, 40 of which were influenced mainly by human land or water use, rather than climate variability and global warming. The team then focused on these 40 hotspots to pinpoint exactly where people can act to conserve water.

"Water managers and downstream communities need to know which aquifer, reservoir, or irrigation district is responsible for a given trend in large-scale freshwater storage, not just that 'somewhere in this country, water is being lost,'" Forrester O'Neill explained.

Freshwater gains in 22 regions were due to rain-fed agriculture, irrigation with surface water, reservoir impoundment and deforestation, which decreases evapotranspiration and plants' groundwater consumption, according to the study. In contrast, freshwater losses in the remaining 18 hotspots were caused by irrigation with groundwater and the construction of canals, diversions and other water infrastructure.

The findings, published Sept. 14 in the journal PNAS, show that human water use is a significant driver of water storage changes on every continent except Australia and Antarctica, where climate factors are more influential, O'Neill said. Local freshwater gains and losses may cut freshwater availability downstream or in the surrounding region, she and her colleagues noted in the study.

One example of a region that gained fresh water in the study is the area of central Russia that hosts the Boguchany Reservoir, a giant artificial lake that was filled in 2012 after the construction of a hydroelectric dam. And three stark examples of places that lost fresh water are northern India, southern Iran and the southern High Plains (a region at the intersection of Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas), because these regions host major breadbaskets that tap aquifers for irrigation, O'Neill said.

The results are concerning because the places with the worst groundwater depletion overlap with areas that irrigate crops unsustainably, O'Neill said. Previous research shows that critical food-producing regions ‪—‬ such as the U.S. High Plains, California's Central Valley, northern India, Pakistan, North China and the Fertile Crescent ‪—‬ consistently overuse groundwater. "Within these regions, we found the pace of depletion is considerably more severe than earlier estimates suggested, reinforcing food security concerns," she said.

One of the novelties of the paper is its very high resolution, said Chandanpurkar, who last year led a study describing "mega-drying" regions across the world and co-authored a report on continental drying. The new study used data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission and its Follow-On successor (GRACE-FO), which have measured subtle redistributions of mass on Earth. But unlike previous studies, the new research resolved the data in high resolution, he said, like correcting blurry vision with glasses.

"This is not a brand-new method, but it's the first time they're applying it to these regional hotspots and then trying to figure out what they mean," Chandanpurkar said.

Scientists already knew that groundwater depletion and other human water uses are "quite staggering," and this study is a reminder that continental drying is "a very big deal," Chandanpurkar said. "Water is really undervalued," he said. "Giving it its proper dues would be essential for this [freshwater loss] to really be acknowledged by leaders and economists."

It's impossible to say exactly how many years or decades humans can go on consuming this much fresh water before it runs out, partly because the climate can be unpredictable and partly because it's hard to tell how much water remains in Earth's reservoirs, Forrester O'Neill said.

"GRACE satellites measure the rate of change in water mass, not the total volume stored in an aquifer, so we have no independent basis for estimating time to depletion or a timeline for systems to collapse," she said.

However, there will come a point when the cost of pumping groundwater, for example, will be too high to pay in some regions. Water table declines of just a dozen feet (a few meters) or so can cause a substantial share of wells to run dry, research shows, and the expense of drilling deeper will affect at-risk communities most of all, Forrester O'Neill said.

"We are most concerned about the rising cost and inequity of continuing to reach water that keeps retreating deeper underground, paired with strain on existing surface water resources," she said. "Of course, water-scarce regions exhibiting acute groundwater depletion are at risk, like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Türkiye, Iraq, and Libya. Another one to keep an eye on would be Mexico, simply because of the documented, progressively increasing well depth paired with the observed terrestrial water storage loss."

'> 'It has become very dire in a lot of places': New map reveals exactly where humans are adding and removing precious fresh water on Earth AlphaGenome Atlas, which contains data on 9 billion possible changes to the human genetic code and estimates how these changes will affect different tissues and cellular processes. What's more, the tool spits out a simple score to help scientists quickly weigh the knock-on impacts of these changes.

How a sequence of 3 billion or so letters of chemical code is packaged, delivered and read to create a human life is a major question in genetics research. Last year, DeepMind announced a tool that could propel researchers toward an answer. The tool, called AlphaGenome, predicts how changes to a DNA sequence alter proteins, cells and, ultimately, the human experience.

Now, one year later, DeepMind has released AlphaGenome Atlas, which the tech giant hopes will make AlphaGenome accessible to more researchers.

"It looks like a great resource," Greg Findlay, a group leader at the Francis Crick Institute in London who isn't involved with AlphaGenome Atlas, told Live Science. However, other experts said that, although the tool is a step forward, it still can't answer all of the big questions in genetics.

"It's not this holy grail," Tuuli Lappalainen, a professor in genomics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and a senior associate faculty member at the New York Genome Center who isn’t involved with AlphaGenome Atlas, told Live Science.

Reading the future of genetic variants

Lappalainen's lab has been using AlphaGenome to study the effects of variation in genomes over the past year. She pointed out that this technology is not new. However, according to Google DeepMind, AlphaGenome outperforms previous models in the resolution at which it can predict the impact of changes to the genome. Around 98% of our DNA is noncoding, meaning cellular machinery doesn't directly read it to make the proteins that keep our cells functioning.

Geneticists now appreciate that this code, once thought to be "junk" DNA, is instead needed to manage how and when to read the parts of the genome that do encode our molecular building blocks, or coding genes. However, evolution hasn't produced an ordered genome. Instead, some regulatory instructions are distributed widely throughout the code.

AlphaGenome allowed researchers to explore how changes in a single pair of DNA "letters" could influence up to 1 million pairs of surrounding code ‪—‬ a far greater spread than previous models were capable of and one that captured much of each gene's regulatory network.

But this power came at a price. Until the release of Atlas, AlphaGenome required users to have enough bioinformatics experience to access and use the models' automated programming interface ‪—‬ an area of expertise not all geneticists have. What's more, calculating the effects of each change was a strenuous workout for academics’ computing resources.

To create AlphaGenome Atlas, DeepMind researchers computed every possible base ("letter") change and made the resulting data ‪—‬ totaling 1 petabyte, or 1 million gigabytes, of information ‪—‬ freely available. This takes the load off academics' overworked personal computers. What's more, the technology is now wrapped up in an easy-to-access, user-friendly web portal.

"You really do not need to be an expert in these methods to be able to go there and look something up in a browser," Lappalainen said.

Another simplification is the AlphaGenome Variant Impact score, a metric that predicts how much biological effect a change will have. In an accompanying preprint paper, DeepMind showed that the score could separate disease-linked mutations from harmless ones in a clinical dataset. While the score's simplicity might make it harder to interpret in certain cases, Lappalainen said, it would be useful for researchers who want to investigate a list of gene variants.

Clouds in the crystal ball?

The tool still isn't a perfect predictor, however. A Sept. 11 preprint study from a research team led by Katie Pollard, director of the Gladstone Institute of Data Science and Biotechnology and a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, suggested that while AlphaGenome was adept at finding causal mutations, it persistently underestimated their impact.

Pollard's team found that the model couldn't always link changes in regulatory elements to the genes they controlled, especially when they were not close together on the genome. "My perhaps naive hope would be that people take these predictions with an appropriate grain of salt," Lappalainen said.

Despite these limitations, Lappalainen said advances like AlphaGenome Atlas are part of a wider move toward more collaborative, data-led genomics. But she warned that the field would need to give equal focus to "wet-lab" experiments, which work out the accuracy of variant predictions.

Although these tests are tedious and consume much more time than a search on AlphaGenome Atlas' interface, she said, they are essential for generating the data that AI models need to improve their predictions.

"We're still very much data-limited in biology, and that data needs to be created," Lappalainen said.

'> Google DeepMind's latest AI tool promises a new era for genetics research, but experts warn to take its predictions with caution