Researchers found that taking 2,000 IU (international units, a standard measure for vitamins) of vitamin D daily helped preserve telomeres — the tiny protective caps on our DNA that function like the plastic tips on shoelaces, preventing damage each time a cell divides.

Why Telomeres Matter

Each of our 46 chromosomes is capped with a telomere that becomes shorter every time a cell replicates. When these structures get too short, cells stop dividing and eventually die.

Shortened telomeres have been linked to major age-related diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and osteoarthritis. Factors like smoking, chronic stress, and depression can speed up this shortening process, while inflammation in the body also contributes to it.

More Than Just Bone Support

Most people know vitamin D for its essential role in building strong bones by helping the body absorb calcium. Children, teenagers, and those with darker skin or limited exposure to sunlight especially need sufficient levels to maintain bone strength.

Vitamin D also supports the immune system. Evidence shows that supplements can reduce the risk of respiratory infections, particularly in people who are deficient. Early research indicates that it might even help prevent autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and multiple sclerosis, though more studies are needed to confirm this.

Because inflammation can accelerate telomere damage, vitamin D’s anti-inflammatory properties may help explain its apparent protective effects.

Inside the Study

The recent research, conducted at Augusta University in the United States, followed 1,031 adults with an average age of 65 over five years. Participants were randomly assigned to take either 2,000 IU of vitamin D daily or a placebo. Their telomere lengths were measured at the beginning, after two years, and again after four years.

Results showed that those taking vitamin D maintained their telomeres by 140 base pairs compared with the placebo group. Considering that telomeres naturally shorten by roughly 460 base pairs over ten years, this preservation could be significant.

This study adds to previous research suggesting similar benefits. Diets rich in anti-inflammatory foods, such as the Mediterranean diet, have also been linked to longer telomeres.

What Scientists Still Don’t Know

Despite the promising results, experts caution against jumping to conclusions. Some scientists note that overly long telomeres might actually raise the risk of certain diseases, suggesting there could be an ideal range that remains unclear.

There is also no universal agreement on the right dosage. The 2,000 IU used in the Augusta study is much higher than the recommended daily intake of 600 IU for adults under 70 and 800 IU for older adults. Other studies have suggested that even 400 IU per day may help prevent common infections such as colds.

Specialists emphasize that the optimal dose likely depends on individual factors like current vitamin D levels, diet, and how other nutrients interact in the body.

A Balanced Approach to Healthy Aging

While these findings are intriguing, researchers agree it’s premature to rely on high-dose vitamin D supplements as an anti-aging strategy. The strongest evidence for maintaining long-term health still points to the basics: eating a balanced diet, exercising regularly, getting enough sleep, avoiding smoking, and managing stress — all of which support telomere health naturally.

However, for those who are vitamin D deficient or at risk of bone problems, supplementation remains a well-supported and practical choice. As scientists continue to explore how aging works at the cellular level, vitamin D may turn out to be one important factor in a much larger picture of how to stay healthy as we grow older.

“It’s kind of hard to exaggerate what a M9 earthquake would be like in the Pacific Northwest,” says Dr. Chris Goldfinger, a paleoseismologist at Oregon State University and lead author of the new study. “And so the possibility that a San Andreas earthquake would follow, it’s movie territory.”

Two Powerful Fault Systems on the Move

The Pacific coast of the United States sits at the boundary of several massive tectonic plates. North of Cape Mendocino, California, the Juan de Fuca plate dives beneath North America along a megathrust subduction zone known as Cascadia. To the south, the Pacific and North American plates grind past each other along the San Andreas Fault, occasionally producing devastating earthquakes such as the 1906 San Francisco event.

If both of these enormous fault systems were to rupture in close succession, it would redefine the seismic threat facing the entire western United States.

A Lucky Mistake at Sea

The discovery linking the two fault zones happened by accident. During a 1999 research cruise, scientists planned to collect sediment cores off the Pacific Northwest to study ancient Cascadia earthquakes. However, a graduate student accidentally entered an incorrect latitude, sending the ship roughly 90 kilometers south of the intended site — outside the Cascadia margin and into San Andreas territory.

“We wound up off northern California,” says Goldfinger. “When I woke up, I was pretty hot. But, once we were there, I thought, ‘well, let’s take a core here.'”

Strange Layers in the Sediment

The core retrieved from the submarine Noyo Canyon near Fort Bragg revealed something unexpected. Over the past 3,000 years, it contained a repeating pattern of turbidites — sediment layers deposited by underwater landslides known as turbidity currents. Normally, these deposits show a simple pattern with coarse grains at the bottom and finer grains on top. Yet many of the layers in both the Noyo Canyon and Cascadia cores appeared in distinctive pairs.

“There were these big, thick, sandy doublet events where it had a fine-grained element, and on top of it was a very coarse grained sandy unit. And we were just scratching our heads,” says Goldfinger.

Evidence of Linked Megaquakes

Radiocarbon dating revealed that many of these paired deposits north and south of Cape Mendocino formed at nearly the same time, within the limits of dating accuracy. That synchronicity was too frequent to be coincidental. After excluding other possible explanations, the researchers concluded that the first deposit in each pair likely resulted from a major earthquake on the Cascadia megathrust, while the second was caused by movement along the nearby San Andreas Fault.

“A lightbulb went on and we realized that the Noyo channel was probably recording Cascadia earthquakes, and that at a similar distance, Cascadia sites were probably recording San Andreas earthquakes,” says Goldfinger. “Well, what if? What if Cascadia went off and triggered a weak turbidity current near the San Andreas, and then the San Andreas went off some time later and triggered a very coarse, sandy deposit to come down. It would create this upside-down doublet stratigraphy.”

Could Two Quakes Strike Within Hours?

Exactly how much time might separate these linked events remains unclear, since later activity may have eroded some sediment between layers. However, in several cores, the second deposit appears to have formed within minutes or hours of the first. If that interpretation is correct, it suggests that a Cascadia megathrust quake could quickly trigger a massive San Andreas event, shaking nearly the entire Pacific coast in rapid succession.

Such a cascading sequence would pose a severe threat to lives, infrastructure, and emergency preparedness across the region.

“I’m from the Bay Area originally,” says Goldfinger. “If I were in my hometown of Palo Alto, and Cascadia went off, I think I would drive east. There looks to me like a very high risk the San Andreas would go off next.”

For about a century, astronomers have known that the Milky Way’s stars orbit its core, and Gaia has precisely tracked their speeds and trajectories. Since the 1950s, scientists have also recognized that the galactic disc is not flat but warped. Then in 2020, Gaia uncovered that this warped disc slowly oscillates over time, similar to the motion of a spinning top.

Now, researchers have identified an enormous wave that moves through the Milky Way, influencing stars tens of thousands of light-years from the Sun. The phenomenon is like a rock dropped into a pond, where the resulting ripples spread outward — only here, the “ripples” are made of stars, stretching across the galaxy’s outer regions.

The newly revealed wave is illustrated in the figure above. Thousands of bright stars, shown in red and blue, are overlaid on Gaia’s detailed map of the Milky Way.

In the image on the left, we see our galaxy from a top-down perspective. The right panel shows a side view, cutting vertically through the galactic plane. From this angle, the left portion of the galaxy curves upward while the right side bends downward (this is the warp of the disc). The red and blue regions mark the newly discovered wave: red areas indicate stars located above the warped plane, while blue areas show stars lying below it.

Although no spacecraft can venture beyond the galaxy, Gaia’s remarkably precise measurements — covering all three spatial dimensions (3D) and three components of motion (toward and away from us, and across the sky) — allow scientists to construct these top-down and edge-on views of the Milky Way.

These maps reveal that the wave extends over a vast section of the disc, affecting stars located about 30,000 to 65,000 light-years from the galactic center (the Milky Way itself measures about 100,000 light-years across).

“What makes this even more compelling is our ability, thanks to Gaia, to also measure the motions of stars within the galactic disc,” says Eloisa Poggio who is an astronomer at the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) in Italy, and led the team of scientists that discovered the wave.

“The intriguing part is not only the visual appearance of the wave structure in 3D space, but also its wave-like behavior when we analyze the motions of the stars within it.”

In the edge-on view of the Milky Way linked below (“The Milky Way’s great wave in motion”), white arrows show how the stars move. The vertical motion of the stars (represented by these arrows) is slightly shifted sideways compared to the pattern of their positions (shown by the red and blue colors).

“This observed behavior is consistent with what we would expect from a wave,” Eloisa explains.

She compares the phenomenon to a stadium crowd performing a wave. If we could freeze that moment in time, some people would be standing upright, others would just have sat down (after the wave passed), and some would be about to stand (as the wave approaches). Galactic timescales are far longer, but the principle is similar.

In this comparison, the people standing upright correspond to the red regions in Gaia’s maps, while those about to rise — moving upward with the greatest vertical speed — are represented by the longest white arrows pointing up, just ahead of the wave’s crest.

Eloisa and her team detected this remarkable motion by carefully studying young giant stars and Cepheid stars, both of which vary in brightness in predictable ways that make them easy for Gaia to observe across large distances.

Because these stars seem to move with the wave, the researchers suspect that gas in the galactic disc may also participate in this large-scale motion. Newly formed stars could retain information from the gas they were born from, preserving a kind of “memory” of the wave.

The cause of the galaxy’s vast oscillations is still uncertain. One possibility is that the Milky Way experienced a past encounter or collision with a smaller, dwarf galaxy, but further analysis is needed to confirm this.

This newly found “great wave” might also have some link to a smaller undulating structure known as the Radcliffe Wave, which lies roughly 500 light-years from the Sun and extends about 9,000 light-years across.

“However, the Radcliffe Wave is a much smaller filament, and located in a different portion of the galaxy’s disc compared to the wave studied in our work (much closer to the Sun than the great wave). The two waves may or may not be related. That’s why we would like to do more research,” Eloisa adds.

“The upcoming fourth data release from Gaia will include even better positions and motions for Milky Way stars, including variable stars like Cepheids. This will help scientists to make even better maps, and thereby advance our understanding of these characteristic features in our home galaxy,” says Johannes Sahlmann, ESA’s Gaia Project Scientist.

Researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder found that female common dolphins are living an average of seven years less than they did in 1997. The team warns that this decline threatens not just the species but also the ocean ecosystems they help sustain.

“There is an urgent need to manage the population better,” said Etienne Rouby, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR). “Otherwise, there is a risk for decline and, ultimately, extinction.”

Dolphins of the Bay of Biscay

Roughly 6 million common dolphins inhabit tropical and temperate waters worldwide, making them the most numerous members of the cetacean family, which includes whales and porpoises. One of their key winter gathering spots is the Bay of Biscay, off the coast of France, where nutrient-rich waters attract anchovies, sardines, and other small fish that serve as food for the dolphins.

However, this same region is also one of Europe’s busiest fishing zones. While dolphins are not the intended catch, many become accidental victims of fishing operations. Known as “bycatch,” this phenomenon causes thousands of dolphin deaths each year. In 2021 alone, bycatch was estimated to have killed about 6,900 dolphins out of the bay’s winter population of 180,000.

Despite such figures, past surveys suggested that dolphin numbers in the area were stable.

A New Way to Measure Decline

Traditional monitoring methods rely on counting dolphins spotted from ships or aircraft. Because the animals are constantly moving, these surveys can overlook population changes until they become severe. For species like dolphins, which reproduce slowly and live for decades, that delay can make recovery extremely difficult once the decline becomes visible, Rouby explained.

To better track survival trends, the research team took a different approach by examining stranded dolphins that had washed ashore along the Bay of Biscay. Dolphins usually beach themselves when sick, injured, or disoriented, and most do not survive. Although stranded animals represent only about 10% of total deaths, their condition over time can reveal important patterns in population health.

The researchers analyzed 759 stranded common dolphins collected between 1997 and 2019.

“We wanted to capture changes in the population’s survival and fertility rates. These are more sensitive indicators of population health, and they enable us to identify the problems before they become irreversible,” Rouby said.

Evidence in the Teeth

By studying the growth layers in dolphin teeth, the scientists determined the ages at which the animals died. Their findings showed that the average lifespan of female dolphins in the Bay of Biscay fell from 24 years in the late 1990s to only 17 years by 2019. This decrease has also resulted in fewer calves being born, signaling a broader reproductive decline.

The study found that population growth has slowed by 2.4% since 1997. Under ideal conditions, common dolphin numbers can increase by about 4% per year, meaning that growth in 2019 was likely only around 1.6%.

“The numbers are likely to be lower in reality,” Rouby said. He warned that if this trend continues, growth could eventually turn negative, marking the beginning of an overall population decline.

Policy Changes and Future Action

Since 2024, the French government has implemented a one-month annual fishing ban in the Bay of Biscay each January to protect dolphins. Although initial reports show the measure may be helping, Rouby suggested that adjusting the ban’s timing based on dolphin migration patterns could make it more effective. Because dolphins do not always arrive at the same time each year, matching the closure to their movements would offer better protection.

Other North Atlantic cetaceans, including harbor porpoises and bottlenose dolphins, may be facing similar pressures. Understanding these patterns could help strengthen marine protection policies such as the US Marine Mammal Protection Act and the European Marine Strategy Framework Directive.

Why Dolphins Matter

“Dolphins are the top predators in the Bay of Biscay, and they play a very important role in the ecosystem,” Rouby explained. “Without these predators, fish populations could become out of control, and they would in turn consume too much plankton and vegetation until the system collapses.”

He emphasized the need for swift, informed action. “As humans, we should make conscious decisions to protect the living and non-living things around us. Facing evidence of viability loss, we need to act before it is too late.”