James' World 2

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In the wee hours of 31 May 2025, billions of tons of charged particles erupted from the Sun and began to hurtle in our direction. Spacecraft tracked the liftoff of that huge burst of plasma, enabling U.S. officials to predict when the eruption would strike Earth, within a 12-hour window. But a new view of the Sun’s roiling outer atmosphere could have enabled scientists to peg the solar storm’s arrival time much more precisely—to within just half an hour.

That precision comes from PUNCH, a NASA mission keeping an eye on a part of space that’s been a blind spot for space weather. Like a sensitive 3D camera whose field of view covers half the sky, it watches everything escaping the Sun’s atmosphere and traveling toward us. “We can track space weather all the way across the inner Solar System,” says Craig DeForest, the mission’s principal investigator.

He and his colleagues have now shown that based on those observations, they could have forecast within minutes when the 2025 storm would have struck Earth’s magnetic field, threatening satellites, power grids, and other technologies. NASA announced the result today; the team will elaborate on the findings at the Committee on Space Research’s meeting on 7 August.

Today’s space weather forecasts extrapolate from observations near the Sun to predict solar storms’ arrivals. But how a giant blob of plasma will travel depends on the environment it interacts with along the way. Howard Singer, chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), likens the situation to observing a hurricane forming off Africa’s west coast and trying to predict when it might hit Florida. If our next observation is right before it hits Florida, instead of somewhere in between, our forecasts will provide only so much warning—and be only so precise. “That’s where we are now for something leaving the Sun,” he says.

Space weather forecasters would receive a major boost from the equivalent of the weather satellites that track weather systems moving across the globe, DeForest says. Enter PUNCH, launched in March 2025. It combines four synchronized satellites that orbit Earth some 620 kilometers up, taking pictures of a swath of sky 90° wide centered on the Sun. Its instruments remove 99% of background light to reveal the solar wind—streams of particles from the Sun—and the plasma bursts, or coronal mass ejections (CMEs), that scatter sunlight to create a visible glow. PUNCH provides “a massive increase in visibility around the Sun,” says Lisa Upton, solar physicist at the Southwest Research Institute.

DeForest and his colleagues wanted to test what all this extra visibility would do for forecasting. So in a proof of concept, they tracked the May 2025 CME as it left the Sun. Meanwhile, the team plugged PUNCH’s data into a model that uses the CME’s evolving size and shape—approximated as a “ludicrous ice cream cone,” according to the researchers’ paper—to predict its arrival time.

Traveling at an average of 1380 kilometers per second, the CME reached Earth after nearly 30 hours, causing a “G4” geomagnetic storm, severe enough to threaten infrastructure. Models using PUNCH observations could have pinpointed the arrival to between 5 and 5:30 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time on 1 June—enabling operators of satellites, electric utilities, and other systems to prepare 8 hours ahead of time. “We analyzed one event in a deliberately crude way and found this amazing result,” DeForest says.

Now comes the heavy lifting: analyzing dozens of other CMEs that PUNCH has tracked to see how precisely its data could have forecast arrival times. If PUNCH performs well, its data could be used in other research models for space weather. “You have lots of models all trying to forecast the same thing, but you need data sets to validate which is correct,” says Jamie Favors, who directs NASA’s Space Weather Program.

Already, forecasters are testing a prototype product called QuickPUNCH to gauge how much a steady stream of rapid-turnaround images of slightly lower quality can improve CME arrival time predictions. Forecasters have a winning streak they want to sustain: In 2011, modeling advances allowed SWPC to shrink its prediction error for solar storm arrival time from 15 hours down to six, according to Daniel Baker, a space physicist at the University of Colorado Boulder. “If PUNCH can help give better information about CME size and shape,” he adds, “I could imagine getting regular accuracy of
2 to 3 hours in arrival times.”

It’s not just arrival time that matters. The intensity of a geomagnetic storm depends partly on the orientation of the magnetic field embedded in the plasma. If that field’s orientation is aligned with Earth’s field, Upton says, the storm’s effects will be far milder than if they’re opposed. Where things stand today, “We don’t really have that information until 30 to 40 minutes before it hits,” Singer says. But by sensing both visible light and its polarization, PUNCH can capture the front of an approaching CME in 3D, allowing researchers to model the strength and orientation of the front’s magnetic field hours before impact.

DeForest likes to emphasize that PUNCH is not just a space weather sentinel. For him, one of the mission’s most satisfying early successes is among its most profound. As PUNCH has gazed out at what he calls a “dynamic ocean of solar storms”—even spotting a comet’s tail shuddering in the solar wind, like smoke from a blown-out candle—the mission has offered an unparalleled glimpse of where we sit within the Solar System. “For the first time,” he says, “we can see our neighborhood in space.”

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PUNCH’s four satellites in Earth orbit (seen here in an artist’s conception) observe the Sun’s atmosphere.NASA

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Several thousand people packed Linda Mar Beach, south of San Francisco, on Saturday to catch a glimpse of tail-wagging joy rides at the 10th annual World Dog Surfing Championships.

Competitors included Labrador retrievers, French bulldogs, a Cavalier King Charles spaniel, an Australian cattle dog and a miniature pinscher.

Some of the dogs wore goggles; others wore brightly colored life jackets. They balanced on foam boards that their owners pushed carefully into choppy waves. James Wall came to judge the competition, bringing along his 15-year-old pit bull, Faith, a retired legend of dog surfing and the pioneer of an 180-degree move known as the helicopter.

Mr. Wall said the sport had evolved from a novelty of “dogs in goofy costumes” into a not-uncommon sight at some California beaches.

About 30 top dogs in the United States compete in a circuit of events that often double as fund-raisers for animal centers and pet adoptions, Mr. Wall said. The dogs are scored on tricks, the size of the wave they catch, how long they can stay on the board and how much they seem to be enjoying it all.

The championship on Saturday, which awarded winners with medals and dog food, had no clear favorite in the pack.

“Any dog, any day, any wave,” Mr. Wall said.“Rippin” Rosie, a 5-year-old Labrador retriever, emerged as the winner of the extra large dog category and the overall “Surfing Spirit” award.

Her owner, Steve Drottar, said he had raised four Labrador retrievers, but Rosie was the first to take to riding the water instead of jumping in it. Mr. Wall said he found Faith as a puppy in a parking garage.

Her decade-plus surfing has netted him around $40,000, which includes free GoPro equipment and video licensing deals showing Faith surfing across menu tablets at Outback Steakhouse and Olive Garden restaurants.

He’s convinced any dog — be it a Chihuahua or Great Dane — can learn to surf with the right human teaching them.

Training a dog to surf is like training a dog to do anything, Mr. Wall said.

“It’s a matter of practice,” he said. “You make it rewarding. You show them it’s a friendly, fun time.” Interest in dog surfing has only grown, he added.

“Now it’s a viral thing,” Mr. Wall said. “How can you look at a dog having a good time and not smile?”

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Visuals by Jason Henry

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When it comes to animal intelligence, octopuses have few rivals. Some species of the cephalopods lug coconut shells around for mobile shelter; others radically transform their bodies to mimic deadlier creatures. Almost two decades ago in Germany, a particularly wily octopus named Otto short-circuited his aquarium’s electrical system by shooting jets of water at an overhead light that perhaps caused an objectionable glare.

Octopuses are as clever, in their own way, as such famously brainy animals as crows, dolphins or chimpanzees. But they’re endowed with a fundamentally different intelligence, one shaped by a separate evolutionary path and defined by a nervous system that’s distributed throughout their bodies rather than centralized like that of the brains of most animals.

Now researchers have discovered another surprise in octopuses’ biology: a mutation, never documented in any other animal, that makes their cells remarkably accurate at creating proteins and that appeared just as they began evolving large nervous systems. “We can’t make a direct relation [between] a slight change in the accuracy of protein synthesis and so-called advanced intelligence,” says Nicholas Bellono, a Harvard University molecular biologist. But he notes that the timing “maps perfectly” with the emergence of sophisticated behaviors in octopuses.

Bellono and his colleagues, who published their work today in Current Biology, stumbled upon this evolutionary innovation by accident. Co-lead author Richard Han, then a graduate student in the lab of Harvard Medical School cell biologist Amy Lee, was examining octopus RNA—the molecules that carry the genetic instructions that cells use to build proteins—when he noticed an unusual break in the genetic sequences that formed ribosomes, the cell’s protein-making machines. This stretch of ribosomal RNA (rRNA) is identical across every other animal that’s been studied, so the deviation jumped out at Han. “Finding a difference here was really unexpected for us,” he says.

To figure out how this break affected ribosome function, the researchers engineered it into Escherichia coli bacteria. The altered bacteria made fewer mistakes when building proteins, which lowered the risk of misfolded molecules clumping together into disease-causing toxic aggregates. Next, the researchers compared octopus and squid tissue and found that the former did, in fact, have fewer and smaller protein clumps.

Though the advantages are obvious, it’s unclear why octopuses alone evolved this rRNA break. It seems exclusive to shallow-water octopus species, which split off from their deep-water counterparts roughly 100 million years ago to colonize a highly complex environment. Faced with more predators, prey, and competition, their nervous systems rapidly ballooned to meet the new demands. And neurons, being long-lived, are especially vulnerable to protein clumps, according to the new study’s co-lead author Rishav Mitra, a postdoctoral fellow in Bellono’s lab. By preventing misfolded proteins, he says, the rRNA break “might help these neurons to work well.”

Other researchers say that a connection between the break and octopus intelligence is plausible, though it lacks direct evidence. “These associations are intriguing,” says Eli Eisenberg, a geneticist at Tel Aviv University, who wasn’t involved with the study, “but more proof is needed to support the hypothesis that they contributed to the evolution of neural complexity or cognitive capacity.” To truly establish that link, he says, you’d have to alter the rRNA break and test for changes in learning, sensory processing or problem-solving. “These experiments would of course be highly challenging,” Eisenberg adds.

The real value of this finding may lie in potential health care applications. In humans, protein clumps play a role in many neurological diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Lee hopes it will be possible to design drugs that target ribosomes to mimic the octopus’s useful trick for superaccurate protein synthesis, reducing the burden of misfolded molecules. If we “use nature as a guide to understand how that happens naturally,” she says, “then we can probably find ways to put it into human cells.”

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Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• Archaeologists discovered a silver amulet containing an 18-line text showing the oldest known devotion to Christianity north of the Alps.
• Computer technology helped unravel the mystery of the text hidden within a silver amulet from the third century A.D.
• The find rewrites the history of Christianity’s spread in the northern Roman Empire.

An 1,800-year-old silver amulet discovered buried in a Frankfurt, Germany, grave, still next to the chin of the man who wore it, has 18 lines of text written in Latin on just 1.37 inches of silver foil. That could be enough to rewrite the known history of Christianity in the Roman Empire.

The amulet—and the inscription—are the oldest evidence of Christianity found north of the Alps.

Every other link to reliable evidence of Christian life in the northern Alpine area of the Roman Empire is at least 50 years younger, all coming from the fourth century A.D. But the amulet, found in a grave dating between 230 and 270 A.D. and now known as “The Frankfurt Inscription,” was made to better decipher the inscription.

“This extraordinary find affects many areas of research and will keep science busy for a long time,” Ina Hartwig, Frankfurt’s head of culture and science, said in a translated statement. “This applies to archaeology as well as to religious studies, philology, and anthropology. Such a significant find here in Frankfurt is truly something extraordinary.”

The amulet was found in what was once the Roman city of Nida at an archaeological site outside of Frankfurt in 2018. During excavation of the area, crews uncovered an entire Roman cemetery wherein the plot designated as “grave 134,” a small silver amulet, known as a phylactery, was located right under the chin of the occupant’s skeleton. He likely wore it around his neck and was buried with it.

Following the find, the Archaeological Museum Frankfurt restored the silver amulet, which included a thin silver foil with an inscription, as seen by microscopic examinations and X-rays in 2019. The wafer-thin silver foil was too brittle to roll out.

In May 2024, a breakthrough came when using a state-of-the-art computer tomograph at the Leibniz Center for Archaeology in Mainz. “The challenge in the analysis was that the silver sheet was rolled, but of course after around 1,800 years it was also crumpled and pressed,” Ivan Calandra, laboratory manager for imaging procedures at the center, said in a statement.

“Using the CT, we were able to scan it in a very high resolution and create a 3D model.” The virtual object was then scanned piece by piece, slowly revealing the words, allowing experts to finally get a look at the inscribed text on the individual fragments from the scan.

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Douglas Sacha//Getty Images

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Key points

• Conflict plays an especially strong role in how people organize social relationships.
• After watching TV drama, brains begin distinguishing characters according to their rivalries and hostilities.
• Negative relationships appeared more clearly in the brain’s social map than friendships did.

Our minds constantly build maps of our relationships, and enemies seem to make a stronger impression than friends. We remember who trusts whom, who competes for influence, and who might turn against someone else. A new study suggests that antagonism may serve as one of the strongest landmarks on these internal maps.

The study followed 21 college students who had never watched the television drama “Suits.” Before viewing the show, they entered a brain scanner and looked at images of eight main characters. After watching six episodes, they returned for another scan and rated each character pair by relationship strength and whether the connection felt friendly or hostile.

The results suggest that a few hours of storytelling can reshape how the brain responds to unfamiliar faces. Antagonistic relationships left a clearer neural pattern than friendships.

The Mind Stores Relationships, Not Just People

Before watching the drama, participants knew nothing about the characters. But after six episodes, the same image carried a social biography, a history of loyalty, ambition, betrayal, or conflict.

Brain responses to the characters became more distinct after participants learned their stories. Each person seemed to gain a clearer position within an internal social map. This reflects how social knowledge works in everyday life. We rarely understand people in isolation, but as a friend, rival, ally, outsider, or threat.

For most of history, this ability helped people navigate small communities where survival depended on knowing the relationships in our social network. Modern life surrounds us with far larger networks, but the mind still tries to transform social complexity into a map it can use.

The study offers a glimpse into how the brain constructs that map. The clearest changes appeared when participants viewed characters linked by antagonistic relationships. Patterns in parts of the frontal and parietal regions of the brain increasingly reflected hostility after participants watched the drama. These areas help people interpret motives, consider another person’s perspective, evaluate social behavior, and think about the relationships between individuals. The findings suggest that they may also help organize negative social ties.

Why might hostility receive such special treatment? Conflict demands prediction. The mind may therefore give rivalry a sharper place in memory than friendships because hostility can change the meaning of an entire social network

How Stories Train the Social Brain

Yet these mental maps do not require direct experience. Participants never met the characters, yet their brains still formed detailed representations of their relationships.

Stories allow people to rehearse social life without living through every danger themselves. A drama presents an artificial society compressed into a few hours. Viewers watch alliances form, secrets spread, and rivalries escalate. The stakes belong to fictional characters, but the mental work belongs to the audience.

This may help explain why humans devote so much time to stories. Novels, television shows, theater, gossip, and mythology all simulate social reality. They teach us to track motives and anticipate betrayal. They also let us practice deciding whom to trust.

The brain also appeared to attach richer histories to the individual characters. Another brain area became more active after participants watched the drama. This region, called the precuneus, contributes to memory, reflection, and thinking about people’s inner lives. After viewers learned each character’s story, a face could retrieve scenes, intentions, choices, and emotional associations. Once a narrative gives someone a history, the brain begins treating the face as an entrance to a larger collection of knowledge

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William A. Haseltine, Ph.D., is the Chair and President of ACCESS Health International

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Mr. Trump is hardly the first U.S. president who has struggled to read Iran. Each of his predecessors since the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution has tried to decode Iran’s murky power structure and the mind-set of its political leadership.

Most have come up short; some have been burned badly. A rare exception is President Barack Obama, whose 2015 nuclear deal with Iran was a 20-month diplomatic effort. Mr. Obama considered it a major achievement, despite criticism from Republicans and some Democrats that Iran had lured him into a flawed deal by feigning moderation.

But Mr. Trump may be the president who “has least understood Iran’s leadership,” said Kenneth Pollack, a former C.I.A. analyst and National Security Council official who has studied Iran for decades.

“In many ways, Trump represents the epitome of America’s frustrations with Iran,” Mr. Pollack said. “He has been both the most desirous of making a deal with Iran, and the one who used the most force against it. He has found that neither got him what he wanted.”

Mr. Trump often speaks as though massive force will produce a quick deal.

After the war opened with a Feb. 28 airstrike that killed Iran’s supreme leader of nearly 40 years, Ali Khamenei, Mr. Trump called on Iran’s people to rise up and “take over” their government. He added that he would then “choose” Iran’s next leader.

More senior Iranian officials would also be killed in airstrikes. But no popular uprising emerged.

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Mourners gathered at Azadi Square in Tehran last month, holding flags during the funeral procession for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader killed by an airstrike at the beginning of the U.S.-Iran war in February. Credit…Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times

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When an atomic bomb detonates, it produces a unique chemical environment that’s nearly impossible to mimic in a lab—and amid its destruction, the explosion can create something completely new.

One of the most devastating explosions ever on the planet—the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima—created a metallic material that was never seen before in a lab or nature. Luca Bindi, an earth scientist at the University of Florence in Italy, found the alloy while collecting microscopic debris from along the beaches of Hiroshima Bay. “Even decades later, a grain only a few micrometers across can retain a detailed record of conditions that existed for only fractions of a second,” he says. “These particles are not simply melted debris. They are physical archives of the explosion.”

A nuclear explosion hits its environment like a lightning or meteor strike: The air gets surface-of-the-sun-level hot and then cools down quickly, and different materials vaporize and come together in ways they usually wouldn’t. Because this all happens so fast, vaporized metals don’t have time to stabilize as they typically would, and “every small droplet effectively [becomes] an independent experiment,” Bindi says.

In this case, one of thousands or perhaps millions of such “microexperiments” in the Hiroshima explosion formed a metallic alloy mainly made up of iron, chromium, nickel, manganese, molybdenum, silicon, and aluminum mixed in a homogeneous cubic lattice. The material and structural composition have never been seen before—typically, this mix of elements would stabilize into a simpler crystal structure with fewer ingredients, but here it retains a complex cubic form.

Scientists have found new substances that were formed by nuclear or other extreme conditions in the past. Among them is trinitite, a glassy material that was created by the Trinity nuclear bomb test in July 1945. Trinitite contains a novel, cagelike clathrate crystal and quasicrystals, rare materials, once thought impossible, that contain nonrepeating atomic structures. Quasicrystals have also been uncovered in meteorites. Though the alloy found in Hiroshima Bay is not a quasicrystal, its structure can help us understand them better, Bindi says, because it’s similar to some of the atomic arrangements within quasiperiodic materials.

This discovery, published on Wednesday in Science Advances, opens questions around what kinds of substances extreme events can create and whether they are “isolated curiosities” or part of a “more general class of materials,” Bindi adds. “If that broader pattern is real, then atomic-blast debris may help us discover principles of matter formation that also apply to meteorite impacts, lightning strikes and other violent events throughout nature.”

The finding reflects “a whole world largely untouched” of materials that are difficult to create under thermodynamically stable conditions—and difficult to find in places with mundane histories, says Michael Widom, a physicist at Carnegie Mellon University, who wasn’t involved in the study but has worked with Bindi in the past. “[Bindi] rightly recognizes that if you want to find new materials, they’re going to be in unusual places.”

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It’s easy to assume that you’ve got your hydration needs covered when you tote a water bottle around with you all day. But there’s a big difference between having water on-hand and drinking enough to meet your body’s needs.

The signs of dehydration can be subtle, making it important to at least be aware of them. After all, not being hydrated enough can have a big impact on your health—and no one is off-limits. “Anyone can suffer from dehydration, but certain people are more likely to have problems from it,” says Nicole McAllister, D.O., an emergency room physician at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.

Older adults and young people are especially vulnerable, she says, but hot weather and being active raise the risk of dehydration, too. “When we are sick with vomiting or diarrhea, we are also at increased risk of dehydration,” Dr. McAllister says. Even certain medications like antihistamines raise your risk of dehydration, she says. Basically, there are a lot of elements that can work against your goal to stay hydrated.

Not sure where things stand for you on the hydration spectrum? These are subtle signs of dehydration to keep in mind, according to doctors. While minor dehydration can typically be turned around by drinking more water, doctors point out that sometimes medical intervention is needed. Here’s what you need to keep in mind.

Signs of dehydration

These are some of the most common signs of dehydration, according to doctors.

1. You’re thirsty.

“Usually when thirst occurs, the person is about 2% dehydrated,” says Michael Seth Smith, M.D., a sports medicine physician at the Florida Orthopaedic Institute in Gainesville, FL. That means you don’t have to sprint to a water fountain immediately, but you should grab a glass of water soon. If you don’t listen to your body’s signals, you’ll slowly become more dehydrated, especially if you’re engaging in physical activity.

2. You have dry mouth.

Dry mouth is another way your body tells you it needs more total body water, per the National Library of Medicine. Your body can’t make sufficient saliva if it doesn’t have enough fluids. Watch out for bad breath, too, which can be caused by dry mouth. Grab a bottle of water before a piece of gum, because the culprit is often mild dehydration.

3. Your urine looks like tea.

The more total body water you have, the clearer your urine will be. If it’s a darker color, that means it’s more concentrated, and it’s a sign you should drink more water.

4. You’re peeing less than usual.

Water helps your kidneys remove waste from your blood in the form of urine. If your kidneys aren’t getting enough water to carry waste from your body, you simply won’t urinate as frequently. Instead, you’ll keep that waste in your body, and if you’re chronically dehydrated, it can cause more serious problems over time. When urine is too concentrated, waste minerals can stick together to create kidney stones, per the Mayo Clinic.

It’s not just your renal system that depends on water to function properly—just about every major system in your body does, including your heart, brain, and lungs, Dr. Smith says.

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Xavier Lorenzo//Getty Images

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Trump administration officials have struggled over the past few weeks with what to do about artificial intelligence.

In particular, a group that includes White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick have debated whether or not to take a far more interventionist approach to “open source” A.I. models, which are freely available to download and modify, said more than a half-dozen current and former tech and government officials and other people familiar with the matter.

Senior officials have considered a range of actions, including using sanctions, a trade blacklist against Chinese companies that make these open-source A.I. models, or even banning U.S. cloud companies from doing business with them, said five of the people, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private matters. But after an outcry from Silicon Valley, they appear to have changed their minds and instead are focused on promoting American A.I. models to be more competitive, the people said.

On Tuesday, the Trump administration’s A.I. plans may become clearer. The White House has invited U.S. tech companies to discuss a framework that would allow the government to review new A.I. models for cybersecurity issues before they are released publicly, according to three people with knowledge of the plans.

“This is all happening so fast,” said Senator Jon Husted, Republican of Ohio, last week after he met with the chief executives of Nvidia and OpenAI. “I don’t know that I have any definite conclusions about any of it.”

The whiplash is a sign of the Trump administration’s conflicting impulses when it comes to A.I. and the difficulties of handling such a quickly developing and powerful technology. The White House has aggressively intervened in swathes of the economy over the last 18 months, from media to computer chip manufacturing to mining. But A.I. is changing rapidly, and the government has scrambled to determine how to put its thumb on the scale.

President Trump began his second term as an unabashed A.I. booster, peeling back regulations and forging close relationships with A.I. companies and start-ups. But that changed in June when Mr. Trump issued an executive order that would give the government oversight over new A.I. models. Since then, the technology has continued to evolve quickly.The most recent debates were prompted by a surge in powerful new Chinese A.I. models, which are known as “open source,” where the public can see the underlying computer code, or “open weight,” where companies reveal the calculations used to generate answers to questions.

In Silicon Valley, the response to these Chinese A.I. models varied wildly. OpenAI and Anthropic, which generally do not share the underlying technology of their models, pushed the government to rein in their Chinese rivals, citing national security.

Other U.S. tech companies that produce open-source models, including Nvidia, pushed back. They argued that open-source models encourage innovation and could be used to defend computer systems from cyberattacks.

Which side comes out on top has taken on new significance in the long-running fight between Washington and Beijing over which nation will control critical technologies and win the A.I. race. Raising the stakes, Xi Jinping, China’s leader, is set to visit Washington in September for meetings that are expected to include some discussion of A.I. Industry executives and analysts said they believed the administration was unlikely to take action before that visit.

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Chinese open-source artificial models like Kimi, made by Moonshot AI, have added a new and urgent dimension to the fight between Washington and Beijing over who will control critical technologies. Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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Some people think that the newest trend of “protein maxxing” will help them live longer and healthier lives, but new research suggests the opposite: reducing protein intake could add years to your lifespan, not to mention dollars to your pocket.

The popularity of the protein maxxing craze on social media has coincided with a glut of protein-infused products on the market that have ranged from water to Starbucks drinks to Doritos. People may be buying those foods and drinks in the hope bulking up, but studies have shown the majority of Americans are already getting plenty of protein in their diets.

In a new review published on Friday in Cell Press Blue, researchers summarized findings from more than 350 previous studies and found widespread evidence that when it comes to protein, there can be too much of a good thing.

“Humans typically, on an average, roughly speaking, eat about 17 percent of their calories from protein,” says Dudley Lamming, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the paper’s co-author.

In summarizing previous research, Lamming says control groups of mice had diets that were about 20 percent protein, and mice that were given far lower amounts of protein, especially in the range of 5 to 8 percent, were found to have longer lifespans.

Part of the link between higher protein intake and lower lifespan arises from the role of essential amino acids in our diets. Dietary protein is our main source of essential amino acids because our bodies can’t make these molecules on their own. While we need these amino acids to live and grow, Lamming’s research has shown that they can also be harmful in excess. In a paper published on July 24 in Nature Aging, he and his colleagues demonstrated that by cutting down on the amino acid valine, the median lifespan of male mice increased by 23 percent, or half a year. These rodents showed fewer signs of frailty as they aged and less adipose tissue, and fewer of them developed cancer.

“You need the essential amino acids in protein,” acknowledges Steven Heymsfield, a professor at Louisiana State University, who wasn’t involved in the new review or Lamming’s July 24 study. But after metabolizing a sufficient amount to maintain your muscles, organs and other essential bits, “all the rest is just energy. If you’re eating a ton of protein beyond that essential amino acid need, it’s going to get either converted to something else like fat or … oxidized for calories. So I don’t see the massive protein intake [trend] being anything more than just BS.”

There have been countless studies showing a link between overall calorie restriction and longer life, but practically speaking, this is hard for people to do. Lamming and other researchers think that perhaps some of the same lifespan extension benefits could come from simply restricting protein. Most studies on the ties between longevity and a protein-restricted diet have been done with animal models such as mice rather than humans because of the challenges of following a person’s diet over the course of their entire life. Still, there are enough similarities between what a mouse and a human eat that the data collected by such studies can still apply. Both humans and mice need roughly the same proportion of protein and rely on the same nine essential amino acids to survive and thrive.

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