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A strange, multi-colored Pacific Ocean species once thought lost to devastating disease has been found again in the waters off Northern California.

Scientists located 18 spiny sunflower sea stars – one of the largest sea star species on Earth, spanning over three feet in length – in the waters of the Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary last summer, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced this month.

“This is promising news, as sea stars suffered a massive die-off ten years ago as a result of sea star wasting disease during the largest marine epidemic ever recorded, which also devastated kelp forests,” the agency’s National Marine Sanctuaries said in a release.

Large and unpredictable Atlantic hurricanes are becoming more common due to climate change, with scientists increasingly relying on AI to improve forecasts, although many remain skeptical of the technology’s ability to better protect communities.

It takes humans a couple of hours to put together a traditional hurricane forecast - but AI can recognize patterns in a matter of minutes using decades of historical weather data.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the country’s premiere hurricane forecasters, has been testing AI models for several years now, with increasingly accurate results.

NOAA scientist Hiro Murakami, who works at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in New Jersey, told The Independent this week that incorporating AI into their “SPEAR“ model - which produces seasonal hurricane forecasts - has been a great success.

“It’s like a 20 percent improvement we see, I think … It’s a very significant improvement,” Murakami said.

Astronomers have finally solved an over 50-year mystery about the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

Most black holes produce wind or jets as they eat surrounding materials. Until now, no one could find the wind produced by Sagittarius A*, the one controlling our galaxy’s growth and evolution.

But the most detailed view of the black hole yet has provided a much clearer view of what they say is 20,000-year-old wind, helping scientists better understand the black hole's role in the cosmos.

“Unless a black hole exists in a perfect vacuum, it must blow a wind somehow,” Mark Gorski, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University who co-led the study, explained in a statement. “And there is no perfect vacuum in the universe.”

“With new observations, this is the first time we’ve had a clean enough view to see the wind’s imprint. We looked at the data and said, ‘There it is. There is the thing that everybody’s been looking for for 50 years,’” he said.

People who eat over two pounds of ultraprocessed foods like hot dogs and cookies a day are at a 58 percent increased risk of developing dementia and a 46 percent heightened risk for cognitive impairment, an alarming new study from researchers at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health shows.

Dementia has long been a major problem in the U.S. — one that is projected to worsen in coming years. The chronic condition affects people’s memory, personality and behavior, devastating both patients and their loved ones.

There are more than 7.2 million Americans living with Alzheimer’s disease, which is the most common form of dementia. That number could be close to 13 million by 2050, the Alzheimer’s Association says.

The findings could help explain how America got here, and inform future steps experts recommend to reverse course.

Around 70 percent of the American diet has become ultraprocessed over the last half century, according to the National Institute of Health, as companies edited their products’ flavor, color and shelf life. The products were designed to be more "hyperpalatble" to consumers, featuring tempting combinations of salts, fats and sugars, Kansas University researchers say.

Women taking popular GLP-1 weight loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy had a 30 percent reduced risk of developing breast cancer than people not on the drugs, according to a new study from the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.

The findings build on years of previous studies that tie GLP-1 use to improved outcomes for multiple types of the life-threatening cancer — although past research has also found the drugs have little effect on reducing the risk of obesity-related cancers like breast cancer.

Still, the school’s observations could help fight one of the most common cancers among women in the U.S. Breast cancer accounts for nearly a third of all cases and the American Cancer Society says about 42,140 women are expected to die from breast cancer this year.

And, the researchers say their study supports examining the medications’ abilities to improve overall cancer prevention.

“While our study was observational and does not definitively confirm an association between GLP-1 medications and reduced breast cancer incidence, it does add to the growing body of evidence suggesting that it’s worth investigating these weight-loss drugs as potential cancer prevention tools,” Dr. Elizabeth McDonald, a radiologist and professor at the school, explained in a statement.

Flu vaccines significantly reduce the number of illnesses in children, new research from Harvard Medical School shows.

For every 100 children aged 2-5 who get the shot or nasal spray, there are between 9 and 14 fewer cases, they found.

"In the United States, that's hundreds of thousands, if not a million cases of flu that we can avoid each year," Anupam Jena, the Joseph P. Newhouse Professor of Health Care Policy in the school’s Blavatnik Institute, said in a Monday statement. "That's a huge effect size."

The project targets human-biting female Aedes aegypti, also known as the Yellow Fever mosquito.

These aggressive mosquitoes are not native to the U.S., and can spread Zika, dengue, yellow fever and chikungunya.