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  • Archaeologists find musket balls and fort linked to the Battle of Bunker Hill

    BOSTON — Generations of Boston families played and picnicked on the grassy, sloping lawns of the Bunker Hill Monument.

    Musket balls and other artifacts from one of the American Revolution’s most consequential battles were buried just below their feet the whole time.

    Inspired by a centuries-old map, archaeologists have been digging in the park that sits on the site where American patriots hastily constructed an earthen fort to slow advancing British forces at what became known as the Battle of Bunker Hill.

    Ground-penetrating radar identified potential locations for the fort in Boston’s Charlestown section. Soon after digging the first trench, the team led by Joe Bagley, the city of Boston’s archaeologist, found definitive signs of a ditch constructed hours before the battle on June 17, 1775, one of the first of the American Revolution.

    “The part that’s really crazy to me is that we get to stand in the same ditch,” said Bagley, standing over one of the two dig sites, where soil is removed about 4 inches at a time, put in buckets and filtered through screens. Any items found are bagged up and identified.

    Tea cups and wig curlers

    So far, the dig has uncovered musket balls and parts of a musket from the battle. They also found objects likely left behind by British troops who occupied the area after the battle — including tea cups, tobacco pipes, sleeve buttons, and a wig curler. There were nearly 150 combatants who died there but no human remains have been found, though a forensic archaeologist is on site to identify any bones.

    “Everything about the ditch is from 1775. You’ve got musket balls, gun flints. It’s what you would expect to see,” Bagley said. “It’s pretty powerful because these things are being dropped in the middle of the battle.”

    The start of the American Revolution is often associated with the Battle of Lexington and Concord, skirmishes fought on April 19, 1775. But many scholars cite Bunker Hill and June 17 as the war’s first significant battle.

    Historic battle

    Rebels intended to hold off a possible British attack by fortifying Bunker Hill, a 110-foot-high slope in Charlestown across the Charles River from British-occupied Boston. But for reasons still unclear, they instead took a position on a smaller and more vulnerable ridge known as Breed’s Hill, where most of the fighting took place.

    The battle ended with the rebels in retreat, but not before the British had sustained more than 1,000 casualties. Bunker Hill is often portrayed as an American victory, since the British failed to win decisively and it served to galvanize the colonies against the British.

    Today, a 221-foot white obelisk atop Breed’s Hill memorializes the battle.

    On Wednesday, a church service in Charlestown will be followed by a procession that makes its way to the Bunker Hill Monument. A remembrance ceremony will be held there that includes a wreath-laying, moment of silence and musket firing demonstration. The dig also ends Wednesday.

    Musket balls tell stories

    At the dig site, Joel Bohy, a battlefield archaeologist who specializes in identifying American Revolution weaponry, marveled at what had been pulled from the dirt. One volunteer held in her hand two jagged stones — the gray one was an English gun flint while a beige one was a French gun flint. When the trigger on the musket was pulled, flint struck the steel, producing sparks that ignited the gunpowder.

    They also found eight marble-sized musket balls from both sides in the battle. The markings and shape of some bullets showed they had been fired from a distance but didn’t hit anyone. If they had, the balls would have been deformed.

    “You can see the ramrod mark from when the soldier rammed it down. You can the little ring on the top where it was pushed down,” Bohy said, adding that “marks on the edge of the ball” show that it had been fired.

    Where was the fort?

    Using pick axes and shovels, more than 1,000 provincials and residents dug through the night to construct a ditch that was 3 feet deep and over 6 feet wide. They shoveled the soil in front of the ditch to make a 6-foot-high wall or parapet that reached 150 feet long on each of the four sides.

    A map drawn by Henry Pelham two months after the battle showed a square redoubt on Breed’s Hill. But it wasn’t until the dig that anyone had confirmed the shape in the map was accurate. Previous digs in the 1990s had found items related to the battle and some evidence of the ditches.

    “If you come to the site, we have the monument, we have a lot of maps on display, and the landscape is beautiful. But you can’t really see the fort, the fortifications that were built,” Bagley said. “Very little of what’s here visibly is from 1775. So, this trench is the reason why all of this is here.”

    History comes alive

    Beyond locating the fort, the dig also provides visitors a chance to hold “a piece of the battle in their hand,” Bohy said. “In a way, it makes the history more dimensional when you look at these objects from the battle itself.”

    Several tourists from Colorado stopped by to watch the dig. One visitor, Greg Nockleby, who had spent a week in Boston learning about American history, said watching the archaeologists at work was a “wonderful surprise.”

    “A live dig happening right now to uncover our nation’s history is amazing,” he said. “To see that there has been people here who have died for our freedom and our nation is very immersive.”

  • ‘A million years isn’t enough’: Victims’ relatives confront Gilgo Beach serial killer at sentencing

    RIVERHEAD, N.Y. — After decades waiting for justice, relatives of women murdered by New York’s Gilgo Beach serial killer laid into him Wednesday before he was sentenced to life in prison. He told them: “I am responsible” for the crimes.

    “The words I would say would have no meaning,” added Rex Heuermann, the Long Island architect who lived a secret life of violence for years before admitting he killed eight women.

    The sentencing capped an extraordinary investigation that solved one of New York’s most perplexing mysteries. The seemingly unconnected and largely overlooked disappearances of young women became the focus of true-crime documentaries, books, and podcasts after police began discovering the victims’ skeletal remains in the sandy scrub along a coastal parkway.

    Heuermann, 62, will have no possibility of parole.

    But “a million years isn’t enough,” Jasmine Robinson, a cousin of victim Jessica Taylor, said. “Nothing will ever make this right.”

    “You fill me with so much repugnance, I can’t stand it,” Robinson said.

    Judge calls Heuermann ‘despicable’

    As a series of victims’ kin spoke, Heuermann sat with his hands on the defense table, looking straight ahead and lightly tapping his fingers. Then Amanda Funderburg, victim Melissa Barthelemy’s sister, urged Heuermann to look at her.

    He glanced in her direction, but his eyes were slightly downcast.

    “I hope you suffer,” said Funderburg, who recounted getting a taunting phone call from him days after Barthelemy disappeared, when Funderburg was 15 years old.

    JoAnn Mack, the mother of victim Valerie Mack, told the killer that her daughter “had dreams, and you took them all away from her.”

    “Justice has been done, but it can’t replace what has been taken,” Mack said. Valerie Mack had worked as an escort in Philadelphia.

    Heuermann pleaded guilty in April to charges that he murdered seven women: Barthelemy, Mack, Taylor, Megan Waterman, Amber Lynn Costello, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, and Sandra Costilla.

    Heuermann also admitted in court to killing an eighth victim, Karen Vergata, though he was never charged in her death. He said he strangled his victims, many of them sex workers, and dismembered some of their bodies.

    “Are you at least a little sorry?” Judge Timothy Mazzei asked him Wednesday in a loud, indignant voice.

    Heuermann nodded and appeared to mouth “yes.”

    “You are disgusting — a despicable man, if you are a man at all,” the judge said, his voice rising. “And you are a coward.”

    As Heuermann was led away in handcuffs, spectators in the packed courtroom seemed to jeer.

    Victims’ children recount a confounding loss

    Most of the women disappeared between 2000 and 2010, and most of their remains were found on a parkway not far from Long Island’s Gilgo Beach, some 50 miles from Manhattan.

    Costilla’s remains were found in 1993, more than 60 miles away in the Hamptons, while Vergata’s remains were found in 1996 on Fire Island, more than 20 miles east of Gilgo Beach.

    Brainard-Barnes’ two children, who were 7 and 1 when she disappeared in 2007, underscored Wednesday how her absence shaped their lives and how she never got to know the adults they grew up to be. Her sister, Melissa Cann, said she lived with “survivor’s guilt” for decades, wondering whether she could have done something more to protect Brainard-Barnes.

    “It was a weight I carried everywhere,” Cann said, sobbing deeply. But, she said, that guilt is “not mine to carry. It is for Rex and Rex alone.”

    Liliana Waterman was 3 when her mother, Megan Waterman, vanished. The daughter said she didn’t fully understand what had happened until she was about 9.

    “In an instant, my world was shattered,” she said. “Was she in pain? Was she scared?”

    How the Gilgo Beach serial killer was caught

    The case spilled into view in 2010, when investigators started to find remains along Ocean Parkway while looking into the disappearance of another sex worker, Shannan Gilbert, whose death was ultimately ruled an accidental drowning.

    The case went cold until 2022, when detectives linked Heuermann to a pickup truck that a witness reported seeing when one of the victims disappeared in 2010.

    Eventually, they matched DNA from a pizza crust Heuermann discarded in a Manhattan trash can to genetic material extracted from highly degraded hair fragments found on the women’s remains.

    Investigators amassed other evidence, including cell phone and tracking data showing Heuermann arranged meetings with some victims shortly before their disappearances.

    After Heuermann’s 2023 arrest, prosecutors recovered what they described as a “blueprint” for the killings from his computer files. Among the documents was a series of checklists with reminders to limit noise, clean the bodies and destroy evidence.

    Calling the man “a monster,” Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney declared there was nothing Heuermann could say to mitigate his deeds.

    As part of his guilty plea, Heuermann agreed to cooperate with the FBI’s behavioral analysis unit to help catch other serial killers.

    Heuermann spent the last three years alone in a segregated cell at the Suffolk County jail, reading crime novels, occasionally being visited by his lawyers or family, and striking up a brief correspondence with the infamous “Happy Face Killer,” according to Sheriff Errol Toulon.

    Through their lawyers, Heuermann’s ex-wife and two grown children said they did not attend the sentencing out of respect for the victim’s families.

  • There’s a bit of good news for coral reefs

    There’s a bit of good news for coral reefs

    NAIROBI, Kenya — As spiking ocean temperatures are devastating reefs around the world, a handful of scientists have found a reason for cautious optimism. They’ve used artificial intelligence to detect sheltered pockets where cool currents, reduced exposure to sunlight, and locations outside cyclone paths mean corals are more likely to survive.

    The study, led by the Wildlife Conservation Society and presented on Tuesday at the Our Ocean Conference in Mombasa, Kenya, is currently undergoing peer review for publication in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

    Five scientists identified 42 factors that create the conditions for the coral havens, called refugia, and then ran those through a program with nearly 38,000 human observations of coral cover and composition gathered over 65 years. The program identified more than 5,800 square miles of climate-resilient ocean in 72 countries.

    The work found three times as many refugia as a landmark 2018 assessment known as the 50 Reefs Study, the first paper to systematically identify areas around the globe where coral might still be saved. Scientists and environmentalists said the new assessment offered a more nuanced picture of the state of the world’s reefs and could help fine tune conservation priorities.

    “This study sharpens decades of work on reef resilience to climate change,” said David Obura, a former chairperson of IPBES, the global intergovernmental scientific panel on biodiversity, who was not involved in the new research. “It focuses attention on the critical question: Will climate refuges comprise 10%, 1%, or even less of the former extent of coral reefs?”

    Coral reefs are crucial ecosystems. They nurture an estimated quarter of ocean species at some point during their life cycles, supporting fish that provide protein for millions of people and protecting coastlines from storms.

    They are also vulnerable to bleaching, which occurs when heat causes corals to lose the algae they need to survive. Bleached corals can recover, but if the water they live in stays too hot for too long, they die.

    “Every tenth of a degree warming drives reefs to the limit,” Obura said.

    According to Australian researchers who study ocean heat, the demise of the Great Barrier Reef could occur within a generation unless humanity acts with far more urgency to rein in climate change. A study published in 2025 found that virtually all the corals in the Atlantic Ocean will stop growing and could succumb to erosion by the end of the century if global temperatures continue to rise.

    The newly identified refugia are not evenly spread around the world. More than half are in five countries: the Bahamas, Cuba, Australia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Others cluster around small islands in places like Vanuatu, American Samoa, Christmas Island, and the Chagos Archipelago.

    These havens can protect coral from the effects of warming, but their concentration makes them vulnerable to other threats like overfishing and pollution. Although most are found in nominally protected zones, lack of funding means many of those areas are only “paper parks” lacking practical protections.

    The research is expected to fuel a central conservation debate: How much funding should go to protect refugia, some of which may eventually fail as the oceans heat further; how much into restoration work; and how much into halting greenhouse emissions and pollution?

    Despite warnings from scientists and pledges from world leaders, countries are burning more fossil fuels than ever and greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.

    Traditionally, reef research has focused on areas that have avoided the worst overheating. Such reefs are usually dominated by large branching corals like Acropora, an expansive genus incorporating species like the staghorn and the flamethrower; or plating corals like Montipora, whose delicate whorls spiral out from a central stem. Globally, their numbers are crashing.

    But the new research broadened the focus to corals that could also resist and recover: the helmet-shaped towers of the Porites lutea or the luminous ridges and bumps of Echinopora. Coral communities dominated by fast-growing weedy varieties, such as the lime and flamingo pink Pocillopora, are also often more resilient.

    They will need to be. Subsurface conditions across the tropical Pacific are already significantly warmer than average, according to the World Meteorological Organization. And, an El Nino weather pattern that recently formed in the Pacific could exacerbate those hot conditions.

    “It’s not to say the maps are perfect, but they are better than starting with nothing,” said Joseph Maina, an associate professor at Macquarie University in Sydney, who helped coordinate the data analysis. “Governments shouldn’t use the maps blindly, but get their own experts to look here first.”

    This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

  • Why the stress building on California’s faults could result in a major quake

    Why the stress building on California’s faults could result in a major quake

    California is no stranger to earthquakes, but the Los Angeles area may be at an increased risk of a more substantial quake in the years ahead.

    A recent study in the journal Advancing Earth and Space Sciences found seismic stress is accumulating on key faults near the greater Los Angeles metro area, in some sections reaching peak levels. And the findings reveal what researchers are calling an “earthquake gate” lurking just northeast of the city.

    While swarms of smaller quakes have rattled Los Angeles over the past century and a half, the last devastating quake to strike the city was on Jan. 9, 1857. Known as the Fort Tejon quake, the violent magnitude-7.9 tremor ruptured a 225-mile stretch on the southern part of the San Andreas Fault.

    But that portion of the fault has since remained largely dormant, with stress continuing to build elsewhere along the fault, as well along the neighboring San Jacinto Fault.

    Researchers analyzed 1,000 years of paleoseismic data, or a reconstruction of past tectonic activity. They found that stress along multiple portions of the faults is the highest it has been in at least a millennium, including along the Mojave South segment of the San Andreas Fault and the San Jacinto Bernardino segment of the San Jacinto fault.

    The San Andreas and San Jacinto fault systems are the largest in California, and run parallel to each other east of Los Angeles. They meet at a point called Cajon Pass, an “earthquake gate” of sorts.

    “The simplest way to think about an earthquake gate is a junction in a road network,” Liliane Burkhard, the study’s lead author, said in an email. “Most of the time, traffic follows one road and stops when it hits the junction. But under certain conditions, it can cross over and continue down a second road, covering much more ground. At Cajon Pass, the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults approach each other closely but do not directly connect at the surface.”

    That means seismic activity on one fault can cross the pass and affect the other.

    “Whether a rupture on one fault crosses over to the other appears to depend on how similarly stressed the two systems are at the time,” wrote Burkhard, who is also a researcher at the University of Bern in Switzerland. “When their stresses rise together in concert (not necessarily at the same level), the gate tends to open and the rupture can propagate across both faults. When their stress levels are mismatched, the rupture tends to stop at the junction.”

    During the 1857 Fort Tejon quake, the rupture did not cross Cajon Pass. But Burkhard referenced the 1812 Wrightwood earthquake, which ruptured both faults. Now, concern is increasing that a similar event could unfold again.

    “Right now, both systems are highly stressed and their levels are converging, which makes the current situation worth paying attention to,” Burkhard cautioned.

    Both the San Andreas and San Jacinto are “strike-slip” faults, with segments of the Earth’s crust sliding horizontally. Others may be “normal,” “reverse,” or “thrust” faults; the last of these is the most effective at producing tsunamis.

    While a significant quake may be overdue, the extent of any future rupture, and subsequent quake magnitude, is impossible to predict. But the researchers’ findings indicate that, when one fault ruptures, both will.

    “The stress conditions we model suggest that a joint rupture of both systems is likely and maybe more than at any point in the past millennium, which is the more important and less well-understood dimension of the hazard,” Burkhard said.

    The tricky part about predicting earthquakes is that there’s no magic stress threshold that results in a quake.

    “You can think of it less like a light switch and more like a pressure gauge that has historically tended to trigger in a certain range,” Burkhard said. “What we can say with confidence is that current stress levels are at or above the high end of those ranges, which tells us that the system is in a state we have not seen in the past 1,000 years.”

    But is 1,000 years of data enough to draw conclusions?

    Harold Tobin, the director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network and a professor at the University of Washington, says yes.

    “I think this 1,000-year simulation spans enough time to support a meaningful and useful conclusion,” Tobin, who was not involved in the recent study, said in an email. “[The] record is really short in North America, so paleoseismic evidence — geologic sleuthing — has to be used. The thousand-year paleoseismic record for the Southern California San Andreas and other faults that they use in this study (the “MRM”) is already a phenomenal achievement. … [It’s] enough to capture quite a few earthquake recurrence cycles on the relevant segments of the San Andreas fault system.”

    So when might the next big quake occur? Tobin said the complex nature of California’s fault systems makes for limited predictability.

    “Major quakes on major fault systems tend toward some degree of periodic recurrence, but that’s variable,” he wrote. “For example, evidence tends to favor more regular periodicity of recurrence for the truly giant subduction zone earthquakes, or for very straight, geometrically simple faults (an example is the Alpine Fault in New Zealand).”

    But in Southern California, he said, the complex of interacting faults “may exhibit a more chaotic recurrence pattern.”

  • WNBA to expand to 50-game schedule for next season

    NEW YORK — The WNBA is expanding its schedule to 50 games per team next season — the most in the league’s 30-year history.

    The new collective bargaining agreement that was ratified earlier this year allows the league to play up to 50 games for the next two seasons. There can be up to 52 regular-season games in 2029 and for the rest of the CBA.

    “Demand for the WNBA has never been greater, and expanding to a 50-game regular season reflects the extraordinary momentum we are seeing across the league,” WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert, a Collingswood native, said in a statement.

    “This move reflects our commitment to growing the game and creating more opportunities for fans to watch the best players in the world and experience the extraordinary talent and competition that define the WNBA.”

    Ex-Villanova star Lucy Olsen continues her growth with the WNBA’s Washington Mystics

    The league is playing 44 games again this season. Over the next few seasons, the WNBA is adding three new teams through expansion. Cleveland is joining in 2028, Detroit in 2029, and Philadelphia in 2030. Connecticut is moving to Houston next year.

    When the league first started in 1997, teams only played 28 games. That’s grown over the past three decades with the exception of 2020 and 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Engelbert has said she’d love to play games overseas starting next season. The league expanded its footprint to Canada this year with the addition of the Toronto Tempo — the first WNBA franchise outside of the United States.

    The WNBA has added a lot of new TV and streaming partners over the past few years including ION, USA Sports, NBC, and Amazon to go along with ESPN and CBS.

  • Russia’s war in Ukraine comes back into Trump’s focus with no end in sight

    President Donald Trump met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the Group of Seven summit in France on Tuesday and expressed exasperation as Russia’s war in Ukraine crept back into Washington’s focus with no end in sight.

    “It’s sort of the same thing,” Trump told reporters at the summit. “They just keep going fighting, losing soldiers. They lose so many soldiers.”

    “Not since World War II has anything like this happened,” Trump said, before invoking his exaggerated claims as a global peacemaker.

    “I settled eight wars,” he said. “This was the one I told you was going to be the easiest to settle, but they just, there’s a lot of dislike between the two leaders.”

    During his campaign, Trump said he would end the war within 24 hours. In France on Tuesday, he voiced unhappiness with the number of deaths but said that the United States is ultimately not affected.

    “We have nothing do with it,” he said. “We sell weapons to them. … The European Union pays us full price for weapons. … This has no impact on us other than we sell weapons. We’re thousands of miles away.”

    For four months, the conflict largely dropped off the White House agenda as Trump and his team focused on their own war against Iran.

    Trump meetings with Zelensky on Tuesday followed a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday. Trump urged Putin to make a deal but said there was little sign of one. “I don’t like to see 25,000 young people die every month. They go to this front and get blown up.”

    He added, “The whole thing is ridiculous.”

    Zelensky, who attended the summit at the invitation of French President Emmanuel Macron, is hoping to reengage Trump, and European leaders have urged the president to break the impasse by hosting direct talks between Zelensky and Putin in the United States.

    Ukraine officially opened negotiations with Brussels this week over its bid for European Union membership. That step marks the start of a long and complex path in Ukraine’s ambition to join the EU, a process that Kyiv has urged the bloc to fast-track.

    Zelensky is expected to join leaders of the EU’s 27 nations at a summit in Brussels on Thursday.

    Since U.S.-led negotiations to end the Ukraine war fell by the wayside in recent months, Zelensky has been pushing to revive talks with a more prominent role for his European backers, led by France, Germany, and Britain.

    Some European nations have conveyed that they are willing to engage with Moscow in negotiations, while also warning of new Russia sanctions and sending military aid to Ukraine.

    At the summit, Zelensky also briefed G7 leaders on the damage to the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra church complex, one of the holiest sites in Eastern Orthodoxy, which caught fire last week following a Russian airstrike, according to local officials.

    The briefing came amid a broader escalation in the war. Ukraine has knocked out key Russian energy facilities, causing fuel shortages across multiple regions, while Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities have endured some of the war’s deadliest missile and drone strikes.

    The United Nations reported last week that at least 274 civilians were killed and nearly 1,800 injured in Ukraine in May, more than in any month since April 2022.

    Zelensky promised retaliation after visiting the church complex Monday. On Tuesday, Moscow officials reported shooting down dozens of Ukrainian drones approaching the capital. Ukraine also hit a key oil refinery in Kapotnya in the Moscow region, setting of a major fire.

    The extent of the damage was unclear, but the facility supplies up to 40% of the capital’s gasoline needs and about 50% of its diesel and could compound fuel shortages already affecting multiple Russian regions.

    Several of Russia’s largest gas stations are rationing fuel sales following months of sustained damage to major refineries that process crude oil, local media reported Tuesday.

    Zelensky is also hoping to step up pressure on Putin to hold direct, face-to-face talks, which have not occurred since Russia’s invasion began in 2022.

    Putin and other senior Russian officials, however, have dismissed such talks as pointless unless Zelensky is prepared to sign a final deal meeting Russia’s maximalist demands. They have also invited him to Moscow, which Zelensky has rejected, accusing Russia of “playing games” and insisting that any meeting take place in a neutral country.

    During their phone call Sunday, Putin congratulated Trump on his 80th birthday, according to the Kremlin.

    Trump called for an end to the war in Ukraine, and the two leaders agreed that U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner would visit Russia again in the near future.

    Putin had repeatedly offered help mediating between the United States and Iran given the close cooperation Moscow forged with Tehran in recent years, but Trump rebuffed those offers, telling Putin he should focus on resolving his own war.

    The recent deal to end the war against Iran could hinder Russia’s efforts to shore up its wartime budget, which has partly benefited from disruptions to Middle Eastern fuel supplies. In March, the Trump administration temporarily lifted sanctions on Russian oil exports seeking to keep global fuel prices in check.

    On Tuesday, during a bilateral meeting with the president of the United Arab Emirates, Trump appeared to suggest the U.S. could let the sanctions waiver lapse when it expires on Wednesday, though he stopped short of giving a timeline.

    “Soon, we’ll be able to do that because the oil is now flowing,” Trump said when asked whether the U.S. planned to tighten sanctions on Russia. “We took sanctions off because obviously we’re not looking to impede the oil, but we’re in a position to do that soon.”

  • Is it bad to sleep with my pet?

    Is it bad to sleep with my pet?

    Q: I let my dog sleep in bed with me, but some of my friends say it’s unhygienic and possibly bad for my sleep. Is it?

    A: When Shelby Harris, a sleep psychologist in New York City, starts working with patients who are having trouble sleeping, she always asks if they have pets. “The first thing they say to me is: ‘I have a dog. You’re going to tell me not to sleep with the dog,’” she said.

    That’s not necessarily the case, Harris said. Some people experience great joy from sleeping with their pets, and not everyone suffers from sleep disruptions. But if the pet is the source of the problem, Harris said, that’s good for everyone to know.

    In an online survey of about 2,000 U.S. adults published in 2022, nearly half said that they slept in the same bed as their pet. If you’re one of them but are not sure whether you ought to be, here are some things to consider.

    Pets can sometimes transmit disease.

    Pets can expose us to a variety of bugs and germs, like ticks, fleas, parasites, and bacteria, said Josh Daniels, a veterinarian and microbiologist at Colorado State University’s veterinary school. Having them in the bed only increases your exposure, he said. And in some cases, they can make us sick.

    In 1991, for instance, an 81-year-old woman was hospitalized in Finland with a fever and signs of a bacterial skin infection in her leg. Scientists reported that she had an ulcer between her toes, and was infected with a type of bacteria commonly found in the mouths of dogs and cats. She regularly slept with her cat, who had a habit of licking her feet and toes. Another case, published in 2000, described a 69-year-old man who had slept with his dog before and after hip surgeries and developed an infection around the surgical site. The bacterium was a type found in the mouths of cats and dogs and transmitted through bites and scratches. There have also been reports of dog owners who caught plague, which can be transmitted by fleas, after sleeping with their pets.

    Such cases are rare, however. And unless you’re susceptible to infection or have a weakened immune system, the risk of actually getting sick from sleeping with a pet is generally low, said Bruno Chomel, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis, Weill School of Veterinary Medicine.

    Ticks and fleas are the most common bugs people are exposed to when sharing a bed with a pet, Daniels said, so be sure to use flea and tick prevention methods as recommended by a veterinarian. Ticks can transmit Lyme disease and other serious illnesses.

    Routine deworming will also kill common and potentially dangerous intestinal parasites, such as roundworm.

    If your pet recently came from a shelter, or is a puppy or kitten, watch out for skin problems like ringworm, which spreads easily through touch, said Daniels (who sleeps with his dog).

    When deciding whether to sleep with a pet, Chomel said, it comes down to your appetite for the risk of getting sick — it’s small, he said, but real.

    Your sleep may suffer (though you may not notice).

    There isn’t much research on how sharing a bed with a pet affects sleep, said Brittany Lancaster, an assistant professor of clinical psychology at Mississippi State University. But a few limited studies suggest that sleeping with a pet can make sleep worse, she said.

    In a study published in 2017, for instance, 40 dog owners (mostly women) wore activity monitors while sleeping for seven nights. The researchers found that when the dog was on the bed, the participants slept less efficiently than when the dog was in the room but not on the bed.

    Some evidence suggests that people may not know they’re being disturbed. In a 2020 study of 12 women who slept with their dogs, researchers saw that the dogs disrupted their owners’ sleep, but the participants rarely reported those disruptions afterward. Scientists have also found that some people perceive their pets as being beneficial to their sleep.

    Douglas Wallace, a sleep physician and clinical neurology professor at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, has noticed this in his own research and in his clinic.

    He theorized that the emotional support of sleeping with a pet might somehow outweigh any negative effects the pet has on sleep quality.

    Pets offer wellness benefits that may improve sleep, Wallace said. Owners who walk their dogs every morning get regular exercise and may have to wake up at the same time every day, both of which promote good sleep.

    If you think sharing a bed with a pet is interfering with your sleep, Harris recommended taking the animal out of bed for a few nights and seeing if you notice a difference. If you don’t, “I’m fine with it being there,” she said.

    Lancaster, on the other hand, prefers a more conservative approach: “I do not sleep with my cats, if that tells you anything,” she said.

    This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

  • Lionel Messi ties Klose’s World Cup scoring record with unforgettable hat trick for Argentina

    KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Lionel Messi delivered his first World Cup hat trick while matching Miroslav Klose’s career tournament scoring record Tuesday night, giving thousands of Argentina fans packed inside of Arrowhead Stadium for a match against Algeria a moment they will never forget.

    Messi scored his first goal in the opening minutes off a nifty feed from Inter Miami teammate Rodrigo De Paul, the second early in the second half, and the third moments before subbing out to a standing ovation.

    The goals came 20 years to the day that Messi made his World Cup debut for Argentina in a match against Serbia and Montenegro — he scored in that one, too — and made him only the second player to score in five editions of the tournament.

    The USMNT-Paraguay game was the most-watched soccer broadcast in U.S. history

    Messi has 16 goals in his six World Cup appearances, and it seems inevitable that Klose’s record will fall in the coming weeks. The hat trick was the 61st of his career and his 11th while playing with the national team.

    It was the fifth straight World Cup game in which Messi has scored.

    The hat trick also upstaged two of soccer’s other big stars — Kylian Mbappé of France and Erling Haaland of Norway — who had big games Tuesday. Mbappé scored twice in France’s 3-1 win over Senegal earlier in the day and is tied for fourth on the World Cup scoring list with 14, while Haaland scored twice for Norway in its 4-1 win over Iraq.

    Messi, who turns 39 next week, had been dealing with a minor hamstring injury with Inter Miami that slowed him in the lead-up to the World Cup. But the eight-time winner of the Ballon d’Or, which honors global soccer’s best player, had no problems in a tuneup last week with Iceland, scoring on a penalty kick while playing 20 minutes.

    Messi’s appearance against Algeria was the 200th of his international career, which began in 2005 at the age of 18. The only players with more are Portugal’s Ronaldo, who will play in his 229th on Wednesday, and Bader al-Mutawa, who played in 202 for Kuwait.

    Argentina is among four teams making their base camp in the Kansas City metro, and much as it has the rest of the world, Messi-mania has swept through the area ever since La Albiceleste’s arrival about two weeks ago.

    A USMNT history lesson is a reminder: The win over Paraguay was big, but it was only one game

    On match day, thousands of fans wearing his No. 10 jersey trekked into the home of the NFL’s Chiefs on the outskirts of Kansas City, singing odes to their hero from Rosario. Meanwhile, during a watch party at the downtown Power & Light District, a goat accompanied by former NFL quarterback-turned Fox broadcaster Jameis Winston came on stage wearing an Argentina jersey.

    The humorous moment seemed to have foreshadowed a big night for Messi when he scored an hour later, and the argument that he is soccer’s GOAT — the greatest of all time — is becoming no argument at all with every World Cup goal he scores.

  • How parents can talk to their kids about vaping as FDA authorizes some flavored e-cigarettes

    Ricky Resendez first tried e-cigarettes in eighth grade. By the time he got to high school, he was vaping daily.

    “It was just kind of normal,” said Ricky, a 17-year-old recent graduate in Superior, Wis. “Kids were vaping in class, in the bathrooms, wherever.”

    Nationally, nearly 6% of middle and high school students — amounting to 1.63 million kids — reported using electronic cigarettes in 2024, federal figures show. Although that is down from previous years, e-cigarettes remain the most commonly used tobacco products among teens, and nearly 9 out of 10 of kids choose flavored products.

    Some doctors are concerned that youth vaping rates may rise again. The Food and Drug Administration recently announced its first authorization of fruit-flavored vapes intended for adults interested in quitting or cutting back on more harmful traditional cigarettes. The policy shift came after months of appeals to President Donald Trump from the vaping industry. An FDA memo released this week said these fruit-flavored e-cigarettes are not significantly better at helping smokers quit than tobacco-flavored e-cigarettes.

    “I understand the goal of giving adult smokers a less harmful off-ramp, but fruit and sweet flavors are precisely what draw young people in,” said Scott Hadland at Mass General Brigham for Children and Harvard Medical School. “I worry this could erode the hard-won progress that brought teen vaping to its lowest level in roughly a decade.”

    Experts say there are ways parents can counteract the allure of e-cigarettes, teach kids about the dangers of vaping, and help them quit.

    Vaping poses many dangers to kids

    Devika Rao, a pediatric pulmonologist at Children’s Health in Dallas, sees lots of kids with respiratory problems caused by vaping, including coughing, worsening asthma, bronchitis, and more severe types of lung disease.

    Studies show teens who vape report higher rates of wheezing, shortness of breath, and a reduced ability to tolerate exercise. Gaby Cuadra of Miami, who vaped for nine years starting at age 15, remembers how it hurt her high school track-and-field performance.

    “As the years kept going on and I would keep vaping, the distances that I used to be able to run, I, like, couldn’t do them anymore,” said Cuandra, 25. “I would run out of breath.”

    While an e-cigarette’s aerosol doesn’t contain most of the 7,000 chemicals in tobacco smoke, most vapes “emit numerous potentially toxic substances,” according to a comprehensive 2018 consensus report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. Researchers said the long-term health effects of e-cigarettes are not yet clear.

    One of the biggest dangers of vaping is nicotine addiction, which can disrupt the developing brain and affect attention, learning, and mood.

    “The addiction factor cannot be overstated enough,” Rao said. “Adolescent brains are primed for addiction.”

    How to talk to your child about vaping

    Start by asking questions, experts advise. You can raise the issue by, for example, pointing out a new vape shop.

    “Start open-ended conversations,” Rao said.

    Ask what your child knows about vaping and its harms, whether they’ve seen e-cigarettes and if their friends are using them.

    Even if your kid is already vaping, Rao said, take a deep breath and don’t yell. Be nonjudgmental.

    Consider what your child may see on social media, where some influencers call nicotine a “hack” for stress relief. Some studies show that many people misinterpret the curbing of nicotine withdrawal symptoms as stress or anxiety relief and that quitting reduces stress. A 2025 study in the journal Tobacco Control said vaping may be linked to adverse mental health outcomes and that those who quit “experience fewer urges to vape, reduced anxiety, and stabilized mood.”

    Teens’ decisions are often based on their peers and what’s cool, said Anthony Alberg of the University of South Carolina, a member of the expert committee that produced the National Academies vaping report. Tell your teen they don’t have to succumb to peer pressure and that their friends should want to be friends whether they vape or not.

    Younger children, Alberg said, may be more likely to listen to arguments about health effects, such as comparing vaping to “putting poison in your system.”

    Arming kids with information is better than simply trying to limit access to vapes, experts said, since age restrictions often don’t keep them out of kids’ hands.

    “Most teens get e-cigarettes from friends, older peers or online sellers rather than buying them in a store,” Hadland said.

    A teen’s journey through vaping and quitting

    When Ricky first tried e-cigarettes, he used an older cousin’s vape. Later, an older friend bought e-cigarettes for him and his friends. He particularly liked the flavors blue raspberry, strawberry, watermelon, and kiwi.

    In the early days, he thought vaping helped him with his ADHD.

    “What I didn’t realize is that because I was addicted to nicotine, when I didn’t have it, I’d be anxious and really couldn’t focus,” he said. “Instead of being something that helped me, it just made things worse.”

    Vaping also sapped his stamina, made it harder to sleep, worsened his asthma and compromised his performance as a football player and wrestler.

    Eventually, he got into trouble with his school and parents for vaping and selling vapes to others. He began meeting with a school social worker and joined the American Lung Association’s Not On Tobacco program, which helps teens to quit.

    The first couple of weeks were extremely difficult. But eventually, he stopped thinking about vaping as much. He quit for good in 2022.

    Like Ricky, most middle and high school students who vape want to quit, researchers have found.

    Parents can help them by first seeing their doctor, who can connect them with counseling or free text-message quit programs for young people.

    For kids who vape heavily, Hadland said doctors may consider medications like Chantix or nicotine replacement therapy as part of a supervised quitting plan.

    Cuandra quit after giving up e-cigarettes for Lent, assisted by a free program developed by Truth Initiative and Mayo Clinic called EX, which provides text message support, advice, and encouragement.

    “The best thing I ever did for myself was quit vaping,” said Cuandra, who has shared her story on social media.

    Since Ricky gave up vaping, he’s also shared what he learned. Usually, he asks his peers what triggers their vaping and how they can avoid those situations, as he did.

    “I tell them, like, ‘I’m not here to judge you,’” he said. “‘I’m here to help you.’”

  • France striker Kylian Mbappé scores 13th and 14th World Cup goals, moving into tie for 3rd all time

    EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — Kylian Mbappé scored the 13th and 14th World Cup goals of his career Tuesday, moving the France forward past Pelé, Lionel Messi and countryman Just Fontaine and into a tie for third most in tournament history.

    He also set a scoring record for France’s national team.

    Mbappé first scored in the 66th minute of France’s 3-1 victory over Senegal after having several good scoring chances denied earlier by goalkeeper Édouard Mendy, including in the second half. He scored again from long range in stoppage time, giving him two in the game and 58 in international play to break a tie with Oliver Giroud for the national team record.

    Playing in his third World Cup, the 27-year-old Mbappé is now tied with Germany’s Gerd Müller and one behind Brazil’s Ronaldo. Germany’s Miroslav Klose has the record with 16 World Cup goals.

    Mbappé helped France win the World Cup title in 2018 and reach the final in 2022, when he was awarded the Silver Ball as the second-best player. Joined up front by Désiré Doué and reigning Ballon d’Or winner Ousmane Dembélé, France went into this year’s tournament as the co-favorite along with Spain.

    Mbappé had little trouble finding room between Senegal defenders several times in the first 14 or so minutes. But he was sloppy with the ball for much of the rest of the first half before he and his teammates started to mesh.

    Mbappé scored 25 goals this past season with Real Madrid.