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Rather than creating art just for galleries and museums, artist Judy Baca has made her home city her canvas, turning walls and riverbanks into works of art. Baca transforms these public spaces into giant, colorful murals inspired by her Chicana heritage and home city of Los Angeles, California.

Baca came of age in Los Angeles amid the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, also known as the Mexican-American civil rights movement. As a result, her artwork frequently blends history, culture, and activism for social change.

Beginning in 1974, Baca undertook what is now considered to be one of the biggest community mural projects in the world: the Great Wall of Los Angeles. This public mural is currently half a mile long (nearly 1 kilometer) and runs along the concrete banks of a river. 

The mural depicts scenes stretching back thousands of years to prehistoric California and leading up to trailblazing Olympic athletes of the mid-20th century. The heroes of this visual story are predominantly civil rights leaders and groups, along with individuals who broke through barriers to equality. Some historical figures highlighted in the mural include Mary Ellen Pleasant, the first Black self-made millionaire, and Big Mama Thorton, a musician who influenced the birth of rock and roll. 

“The story I wanted to tell was the story that wasn’t recorded in history books: the history of people of color, the history of women, of Indigenous people,” said Baca in a PBS News Hour interview. “[I wanted] to look at what was missing from the story of America…and teach it to the young people who would begin to learn about each other.”

To paint the mural, Baca employed hundreds of people from the local community. Baca says that creating public art alongside the people who live in those places makes them “sites of public memory.” 

Baca’s public art program, called the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), continues working on the Great Wall and other public art projects. In her lifetime Baca has been involved in the creation of hundreds of murals, making monuments out of places and figures that have frequently been overlooked.

“Essentially the thread was always looking at the conditions of my community and the people I loved and worked with and cared about and telling their stories,” said Baca. “I really believe that art has amazing [abilities] to be transformative.”

Imagine going on a long sea voyage with no modern navigational tools. About 30,000 years ago, a group of people traveled on rough seas from Taiwan to an island in Japan with no instruments, landmarks, or maps to guide them. To find out how they did it, scientists decided to re-create the journey.

When a team of researchers from Japan and Taiwan set out to determine how ancient people traveled 140 miles (225 kilometers) from Taiwan to the southern Japanese island of Yonaguni, they knew two things: First, the settlers must have traveled by sea, as there was no other way to reach an island. Second, they would have had to battle the area’s powerful Kuroshio current, which is notoriously difficult. 

This summer, more than 120 Native American teens and young adults completed a historic kayaking trip that hadn’t been possible for more than 100 years. The Indigenous youth paddled 310 miles across 30 days to honor the restoration of the Klamath River, which runs from southern Oregon to northern California in the United States. This event was a celebration honoring the removal of four hydroelectric dams that had previously blocked the river.

Many Indigenous peoples of the U.S. Pacific Northwest region have historically relied on rivers for food, transportation, and cultural connection. For the people of the Klamath River basin, salmon are critical—the Klamath was once the third highest salmon-producing river in the contiguous United States. After 1918, dams blocked the annual salmon migration and thus severed the Indigenous communities’ historic ties to the river.

Since then, these Indigenous communities have been advocating for dam removal and the return of the salmon. Recently, efforts to remove several dams succeeded, and as of 2024 much of the Klamath flows continuously again.

“It’s just a big moment in history, and in everybody’s lives,” Isqotsxoyan Scott, one of the kayakers, told Oregon Public Broadcasting. “All of our families have been fighting for dam removal. Everybody’s been fighting for us to be able to reach different parts of the rivers that we haven’t been able to in over 150 years.” 

Kayakers like Scott spent years learning to kayak and navigate whitewater rapids in anticipation of this event. A program called Paddle Tribal Waters taught the Indigenous youth the kayaking skills they would need to be the first to paddle the river from its headwaters to the sea. The Klamath River group included young people from many Indigenous groups, including the Yurok, Klamath, Hoopa Valley, Karuk, Quartz Valley, and Warm Springs—all of which have historic connections to the river valley.

The first generation of salmon to be spawned since the dams were built can now make the return trip up the river.

“The river remembers,” said Susan Masten, a member of the Yurok Tribe. “The fish are coming back to spawn where they haven’t been able to be in a hundred years plus. The fish remember. We, as this river system, are healing.”

Click through the slideshow for more photos from this historic journey!

It’s hard to imagine that a rock could ever be worth $5 million—unless that rock comes from another planet. A large meteorite from Mars recently sold at auction for $5.3 million. But while the Martian meteorite made headlines in the days leading up to the auction, another item ended up selling for a lot more money.

According to Sotheby’s auction house, a meteorite hunter discovered the rock in the Sahara Desert in the African country of Niger in 2003. The meteorite had traveled 140 million miles (225 million kilometers) to Earth after an asteroid hit the Red Planet and the force of the impact blew the rock off the Martian surface. The meteorite has been named NWA 16788 because it is the 16,778th meteorite to be found in northwestern Africa.

“This remarkable meteorite provides a tangible connection to the Red Planet—our celestial neighbor that has long captured the human imagination,” Cassandra Hatton, vice chair of science and natural history at Sotheby’s, said in a statement.

Meteorites have been discovered all over the world, but NWA 16788 is special for two reasons. First, at 54 pounds (24.5 kilograms) and about the size of a school backpack, it’s one of the largest Mars meteorites ever discovered on Earth. Second, it’s rare. More than 77,000 meteorites have been discovered on Earth, but only about 400 of them came from Mars.

Still, the Martian meteorite wasn’t the highest-valued item at the Sotheby’s auction. That honor belonged to another rare item—the skeleton of a juvenile (young) dinosaur, which sold for more than $30 million. Found near Laramie, Wyoming, in 1996, the skeleton is of a carnivorous species called Ceratosaurus nasicornis, which looked like a smaller version of Tyrannosaurus rex. It’s one of four known C. nasicornis skeletons and the only one from a juvenile C. nasicornis. 

It might seem as if artificial intelligence (AI) knows everything. But AI bots have only the data people have given them, and that can lead to incomplete, inaccurate, or biased search results. Now, tech companies are working to expand AI’s knowledge, by partnering with libraries around the world.

Companies like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI (which owns ChatGPT, a well-known chatbot) are working with Harvard University, public libraries, and other institutions to digitize, or put online, parts of their book collections and feed them into the banks of data used to “train” AI. The book subjects range from law to the sciences to literature. 

Expanding AI

The tech companies are eager to expand what AI “knows.” When AI bots, like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overview, were first developed, the companies fed information into them from various online sources, from scanned books to Wikipedia to social media. Since not all of these sources are reliable, AI search results aren’t always accurate. Moreover, some of the sources that were fed into AI bots were copyrighted, meaning it was illegal to copy them without permission from the author or copyright holder. This has led to numerous lawsuits against the big tech companies. 

There’s also plenty that’s missing from AI’s data collection, including much of the information on library bookshelves. Under the new partnerships with institutions, books will be added only if they are in the public domain, meaning their copyright has expired. In the United States, many copyrighted works enter the public domain once they are 95 years old. 

A massive pink diamond ring with ties to French royalty has broken an auction record, selling for nearly $14 million. Estimates had indicated the ring would sell for between $5 and $7 million.

The ring’s pink gemstone has a historic and intriguing legacy, having once belonged to Marie-Antoinette of France, the country’s last queen before the French Revolution of 1789. How the gem survived the Revolution is still a mystery, but it went to Marie-Antoinette’s daughter, Marie-Thérèse. As a result, the diamond is called the Marie-Thérèse Pink.

Marie-Antoinette was the queen consort of King Louis XVI. In the years leading up to the Revolution, there was growing unrest and anger with the royals and aristocracy for extravagant spending and restricting the rights of the people. With the start of the Revolution on July 14, 1789, the people sought to change the country, set up a constitution, and restrict the monarchy’s rule. Marie-Antoinette urged her husband to resist these changes, which made her deeply unpopular among the common people. This is part of the sentiment behind the infamous legend that when Marie-Antoinette was told the people had no bread to eat, she responded, “Let them eat cake!”

Eventually Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were imprisoned and executed in Paris.

While the sequence of events surrounding the diamond is uncertain, experts think Marie-Antoinette sent the diamond and other jewels with a trusted coiffeur, or hairdresser, one night when the royals had tried to escape Paris before imprisonment. The escape attempt failed, but the pink jewel made its way out. It was reunited with Marie-Antoinette’s only surviving child, Marie-Thérèse, after the Revolution.

Marie-Thérèse passed the diamond on to other family members before it was sold in 1996. The buyer had the gem turned into a ring by well-known jewelry designer Joel Arthur Rosenthal, who is known as JAR. The diamond stayed out of public view until Christie’s New York’s Magnificent Jewels auction this summer.

“It has everything you could want in a piece of jewelry,” says Rahul Kadakia, Christie’s international head of jewelry. “The stone—likely from the prized Indian region of Golconda—has several shades of soft colors, flashing purple and pink from different angles. And it’s been transformed into a masterpiece by JAR, all while carrying the splendor of royal provenance.”

Conservationists in Mexico are celebrating the early success of a program that may help save one of Earth’s rarest salamanders, the axolotl. The axolotl (ak-SUH-lah-tul) is a salamander with frilly gills and a mouth that appears to be smiling. This cute amphibian is considered critically endangered, and wildlife experts are racing to protect the wild population from extinction.

Axolotls once thrived in the abundant lakes and wetlands in the area that became Mexico City, Mexico. At that time, the area was the center of the powerful Aztec empire and the location of a body of water called Lake Texcoco. The Aztecs built a city in the middle of Lake Texcoco called Tenochtitlán. The people of this island city utilized and developed the natural waterways for transportation, food, and fishing. But after the Spanish took over Tenochtitlán in the 1500s, they drained the lake and, with it, much of the axolotl’s habitat. Urbanization of Mexico City and the surrounding area has further degraded the remaining wetlands.

Today, wild axolotls can be found only in the city’s Lake Xochimilco, where there may be as few as 50 to 1,000 individuals. Conservationists like Alejandra Ramos are hoping to save this rare animal from extinction with a captive breeding program that releases captive axolotls into the wild. Ramos leads a team of researchers who are breeding axolotls in captivity with the hopes of reviving the wild population.

When you hear the term “lab rat,” you may picture a rat running through a maze while scientists in lab coats take notes for research. Specially trained lab rats in Tanzania and Mozambique have a different job. They help their human colleagues detect a deadly infectious disease.

The African giant pouched rat isn’t just the largest rat species in the world. It also has a keen sense of smell, which people have realized could be useful for detecting things that humans and machines cannot. An organization called APOPO has trained some of these rats to detect tuberculosis (TB), a bacterial disease that affects the lungs and causes coughing, difficulty breathing, and chest pains.

TB spreads quickly and can be deadly if left untreated. The World Health Organization says that 10 million people around the world get sick with TB each year. Fortunately, medicine and antibiotics can treat TB if it is caught in time. This is where the helpful lab rats, which APOPO calls HeroRATs, come in.

An area of Alberta, Canada, is so rich with fossilized dinosaur bones that it’s been named Dinosaur Provincial Park. The park has been a key location for fossil hunters for about 100 years. But in a recent study, drones and GPS technology helped to reveal that the method scientists have been using to estimate the age of the bones isn’t always accurate.

Paleontologists had been dating the park’s fossils by measuring their location relative to a boundary where two sedimentary rock layers meet. Since this type of rock forms in layers, scientists often conclude that the fossils found in lower layers are older than those found in upper layers. 

To test this method, scientists at McGill University in Canada had drones fly over a section of the park and take about 1,000 high-resolution images. Using the images and GPS coordinates, scientists were able to create a 3D model of the landscape. They learned that the rock boundary they’d been using to date fossils fluctuates, or varies, in elevation by up to 39 feet (12 meters) within a short distance, suggesting that it doesn’t give very accurate information.

“We’ve essentially shown that the dating method used for decades in Dinosaur Provincial Park may not be as reliable as previously thought,” Alexandre Demers-Potvin, the study’s lead author, told McGill University.

You may have heard the phrase “don’t judge a book by its cover,” but what if you discovered a rare and magical story being used as the cover for a completely different book? This is what happened at the Cambridge University Library in England: researchers pulled a rare manuscript depicting the magical tale of King Arthur from the binding of another book. 

The manuscript, called Suite Vulgate du Merlin, was written about 700 years ago in Old French and is one of about 40 copies that have survived to this day. It depicts part of the legend of King Arthur, a story that comes from Wales in the United Kingdom and is about a king and his magician, called Merlin, as well as his Knights of the Round Table.

As the story goes, Arthur becomes king when he pulls an embedded sword from a stone. With help from an advisor named Merlin, the king leads a group of warriors called the Knights of the Round Table. The legend has captured imaginations since it first appeared in the 9th century.