Here’s a science story that sounds straight out of Greek mythology, except it’s real, and it’s about us. A new study by researchers at Lund University and the University of Sussex suggests that humans, along with every other creature with a backbone, may descend from a tiny worm-like animal that had just one eye, sitting right on top of its head, much like a cyclops.

And that’s not even the strangest part. According to the research, remnants of this ancient “third eye” may still be sitting inside our brains today, in the form of the pineal gland, the organ that helps control our sleep cycle.

Meet Our Cyclops Ancestor

Nearly 600 million years ago, long before dinosaurs or even fish existed, a small, worm-like creature lived in the ocean. It didn’t move around much, instead, it stayed in one spot and filtered plankton from the water for food.
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Scientists believe this creature originally had two eyes, or at least two light-sensing patches, like most animals need to judge distance and direction. But because it lived such a still, stationary lifestyle, it simply didn’t need that kind of vision anymore. Over generations, those two eyes faded away.

What it kept instead was a single patch of light-sensitive cells right in the middle of its, a simple “median eye.” This wasn’t sharp enough to see actual images, but it was enough to tell day from night, and which way was up.

So How Did We End Up With Two Eyes Again?

Here’s the twist: millions of years later, descendants of this creature started swimming actively again. Suddenly, spotting food, dodging predators, and sensing direction mattered a lot more, and vision became valuable again.According to the study, evolution didn’t build a fresh pair of eyes from scratch. Instead, it repurposed parts of that old central “cyclops eye” to construct a brand-new pair of image-forming eyes, the ancestors of the eyes humans and other vertebrates use today.

This, researchers say, is why our eyes are built so differently from those of insects or squid. Dan-E Nilsson, professor emeritus in sensory biology at Lund University, explains that our retina actually develops from brain tissue, while in insects and squid, eyes grow from skin cells on the head, a completely different evolutionary path.

The Real Twist: Part of That Ancient Eye Is Still Inside You

Perhaps the most fascinating claim in the study is this: the original cyclops eye never fully disappeared. Researchers believe it survives today as the pineal gland, a small structure deep inside the vertebrate brain.

We no longer use it to see, but it hasn’t stopped reacting to light and dark. The pineal gland produces melatonin, the hormone that makes us feel sleepy at night and alert during the day, helping to regulate our internal body clock.

In many animals, the pineal gland can sense light directly. In humans, our eyes handle that job instead, sending light signals to the brain so melatonin levels can rise and fall on schedule.

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Nilsson sums up the discovery as genuinely startling, noting how strange it is that the part of our brain regulating sleep today can be traced back to a single primitive eye from a creature that lived some 600 million years ago.

This research doesn’t just rewrite a chapter of biology textbooks, it reshapes how scientists understand the origins of the eye and even parts of the brain itself. It suggests that evolution doesn’t always move forward in straight lines; sometimes it takes detours, loses features, and later repurposes old leftover parts for entirely new jobs.

So the next time you feel sleepy after sunset, you might just have a one-eyed ancestor from the ocean floor to thank for it.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump told a Pentagon ceremony on Friday that the United States would “never, ever forget” the dead of Sept. 11, 2001, as the country marked 25 years since hijackers flew four airliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.

“In 25 years, a generation has passed since the terror attacks,” Trump said, reading from teleprompters at the Defense Department memorial for the 184 people killed when American Airlines Flight 77 struck the building. “Yet time has not dimmed the honour of that day our country came face-to-face with true evil.”

Nearly 3,000 people died that morning. About 2,700 were killed in New York when two planes hit the Twin Towers. Forty passengers and crew died on United Airlines Flight 93 after they fought the hijackers and the jet crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Families, first responders and officials gathered at all three sites. In Lower Manhattan, bells and silences marked the times the South Tower fell (9:59 a.m.), Flight 93 went down (10:03 a.m.) and the North Tower collapsed (10:28 a.m.).

Trump tied remembrance to current fighting. “We were all New Yorkers that day,” he said. “But we’re also all Americans.” He praised troops “working right now to ensure the world’s number one sponsor of terror, the Islamic Republic of Iran, will never, ever have a nuclear weapon.”

“Today we renew the sacred oath that we first swore in their names a quarter of a century ago,” he said. “We will never, ever forget. That’s why we fight today.” On days like Sept. 11, he added, “we learn what a country is truly made of. We’re learning right now what we’re made of, and we have to be strong and we have to be smart.”

He closed by saying the attacks “reminded us of the terrible power of hate” and also showed “the power of the American spirit.” “No one can ever prepare for a day like 9/11. But we can always choose to be the kind of nation the world saw in those days after,” he said. “We can raise our children to know that their country is good, that their fathers are brave, and that our flag is a symbol of justice and freedom.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was in ROTC at Princeton when the planes hit, spoke first at the Pentagon and made the same link more bluntly. “Twenty-five years later, America is stronger than ever before,” he said in remarks previewed in ceremony coverage. He described post-2001 wars as “a generation of sacrifice, of valor, selfless and steadfast.” “Even if imperfect, those conflicts were our retribution,” he said.

“There are still enemies who hate us,” Hegseth said. “Every day, enemies plot to curb our power and kill our citizens, including from Islamic terrorists abroad and at home. But we are ever vigilant, especially this place.” Of the campaign against Iran he said: “Over the past six months, we have laid waste to the world’s most prolific state sponsor of terrorism. Our warriors have fought an Islamic theocracy that has wished us death for nearly half a century.”

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser on the day of the attacks, recalled the first report as a possible accident. “I was at my desk at the White House that day when my executive assistant, a young army officer, told me that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. What a strange accident, I thought.” After the second impact she was moved to a bunker and could not reach Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after the Pentagon was hit.

“Behind every name that we recite, there is a story, a life that mattered, a future unfulfilled, a void, a vast empty space in the heart of a husband, a wife, a son, a daughter, a sibling, a colleague, or a friend,” Rice said. “We come together today to say that they will never be forgotten, and to honour their memory.”

In New York, former President Bill Clinton and former Vice President Kamala Harris issued statements and Clinton attended the ceremony. Harris said a generation has grown up since the attacks “but our responsibility to remember has not changed.” “We remember the people who went to work that morning and never came home, and we remember the families who have carried their memories every day since,” she said. Clinton said the nightmare cannot be erased, “but we can support the people who have given and lost so much by treating one another with respect.” He also noted those later sickened by toxic dust.

The names of the dead were read again at the National September 11 Memorial, a ritual now older than many of the Americans who watched it. BBC correspondent Nada Tawfik reported that nearly a third of the country is too young to remember the day itself. Clouds blocked the “Way of Light” inside the Oculus transit hall, where two ceiling slits are designed to throw twin beams onto the floor between the first impact and the second collapse. An inscription there reads: “Here the Sun stands at 10:28 am on September 11, completing a wedge of light.”

John Ryan, a retired court officer who lost friends in the towers and the firehouses, sat across the street from the memorial and looked at empty sky. “It was the day that changed the world. The day that changed my life,” he said. He remembered a Friday vigil that week: “That night, everybody stood still. All the cars stopped. Nobody moved. You know, Manhattan, they don’t stop for anything.”

Rich Baktis, who was in high school on Long Island in 2001, said the aftermath — not the morning — is what he wants younger people to know. “Everybody came together, and everybody helped everybody,” he said. That togetherness, he added, was the “best part that came out of that terrible day.”

Gunter Engels, visiting from Belgium, lost a former brother-in-law who worked in the towers and was never found. “The world has never been the same after 9/11,” he said.

At Shanksville, a white marble wall of names faces the flight path of Flight 93, whose passengers are credited with stopping a strike on Washington. The three ceremonies ran on the same clock they have used for a quarter century: impact, collapse, crash, silence. The political overlay was new. The names were not.

Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary has refused to apologise to a rape crisis centre which criticised him for describing rival airlines as “high-fare rapists”.

Speaking to journalists, O’Leary said some people were “desperate to get to Ryanair’s low fares because they can’t afford to fly with the high-fare rapists around Europe”.

O’Leary doubled-down on his choice of words when asked about them at the time, and later refused to apologise when the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre (DRCC) wrote to him asking for apology, in a letter seen by the BBC.

Ireland’s deputy premier Simon Harris said it was “clearly an inappropriate use of language” and that O’Leary “should have moved to rectify it”.

Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander told UK radio outlet LBC that victims of rape are “not going to be rushing to book tickets with him, let’s be honest”.

O’Leary made the comments on Thursday while talking to journalists ahead of Ryanair’s yearly meeting with shareholders.

Asked by a reporter from the Press Association whether the language was appropriate, he said: “Absolutely.”

“British Airways, Lufthansa, and everybody else’s high fares, I’ll happily offend them on a regular basis,” he added.

Asked whether it would offend sexual assault victims, he said rape was “a terrible crime”.

Following O’Leary’s comments, the DRCC’s chief executive Rachel Morrogh wrote to O’Leary accusing him of trying to get a headline with his comments.

She said the DRCC had received calls from rape victims who were “upset and distressed because of what you said”.

She offered O’Leary training on the impact of sexual violence and urged him to apologise.

“I can’t imagine you would ever use the term so flippantly again if you truly understood [what] it was like to survive rape,” she wrote.

In response, O’Leary said: “I am quite clear that no remarks of mine could possibly trivialise the heinous crime of rape.”

He added that as he had not “trivialised the heinous crime of rape” he would “not be issuing any apology or accepting your offer of training”.

It is not the first time O’Leary has offended people while talking about his business.

In 2004, he reportedly called the owners of Stansted Airport “a bunch of overcharging rapists”, external in a row over airport charges.

He has also previously called some of his own staff “lazy bastards” and once said to passengers looking for a refund “we don’t want to hear your sob stories”.

In June, he said the airline would “reluctantly” stop charging parents to sit next to children after a watchdog investigation was opened, but insisted its previous policy complied with laws.

MIAMI — Cancer deaths attributed to alcohol in the United States roughly doubled between 1990 and 2023, and among adults ages 20 to 54 the leading killers were not liver tumors, researchers reported.

The analysis, published in The Lancet Regional Health — Americas and led by physicians at the University of Miami’s Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, estimated 23,126 alcohol-attributable cancer deaths in 2023, up from 11,361 in 1990. Men accounted for 17,477 of the later total. The work drew on more than three decades of Global Burden of Disease data.

“The most surprising finding was the breadth of alcohol’s potential impact across cancer types,” said Chinmay Jani, corresponding author and chief fellow in hematology and oncology at Sylvester. “Although its relationship with liver cancer is widely recognized, its contribution to cancers such as colorectal, esophageal, breast, pancreatic and prostate cancer is less well understood by the public.”

That gap is sharpest under age 55. “Notably, among adults aged 20 to 54, colorectal cancer was the leading cause of alcohol-attributable cancer mortality in men and the second leading cause in women, surpassing liver cancer in both groups,” Jani said. For women in that age band, breast cancer ranked first and colorectal second. Esophageal cancer followed colorectal among younger men. Liver cancer sat below both in each sex.

The raw death rate in ages 20 to 54 was unchanged at 2.4 per 100,000 from 1990 to 2023. What changed was alcohol’s share. The percentage of cancer mortality attributed to drinking in that group rose from 4.5% to 6.6%. Among people 55 and older, the age-standardized rate climbed from 15.8 to 19.2 per 100,000, and alcohol’s share rose from 1.7% to 3.0%.

“Even though overall the cancer mortality was going down for some of these cancers … alcohol associated mortality was going up,” Jani told The Washington Post. “Which means that alcohol as a risk factor was impacting more cancer deaths in 2023 than it was in 1990.” He told MedPage Today the same pattern held “for both males and females, and for the younger and elderly population as well.” “For the younger population, cancer mortality from colorectal cancer has taken over from liver cancer, especially among males, which is concerning,” he said.

Among older men, liver cancer still produced the highest alcohol-linked death rates, then esophageal and colorectal cancers. Among women of all ages, breast cancer was the leading alcohol-attributable cancer death. The study found rising alcohol shares across most tumor types except liver cancer in some older groups. The largest proportional jumps included stomach, pancreatic and colorectal cancers.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies alcoholic beverages as a Group 1 carcinogen. Ethanol and its metabolite acetaldehyde can damage DNA, raise estrogen and promote inflammation. Public surveys still show limited awareness of that list beyond the liver.

The estimates are modeled, not death-certificate counts that list “alcohol” as the cause. They apply population drinking patterns and established risk ratios to cancer mortality. That method can miss binge patterns, underreporting and other overlapping risks such as obesity and smoking. It cannot prove that any single patient’s tumor was caused by drinking. State rates varied: the District of Columbia was highest and Utah lowest in the paper’s maps.

An earlier version of the analysis, using data through 2021, was presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting. Gilberto Lopes, Sylvester’s chief of medical oncology, co-led the work.

The clinical implication is screening, not slogans. Early-onset colorectal cancer has been rising in the United States for years. Breast cancer remains the most common cancer in younger women. Neither is framed in most public-health ads as an alcohol disease. Jani’s tables say that, among drinkers who die of cancer before 55, those two sites now outrank the organ people picture when they cut back.

The study does not prescribe a safe number of drinks. It does say the death count tied to alcohol is larger than it was a generation ago, that men and older adults still carry most of it, and that the mix under 55 has shifted toward the colon, rectum and breast. Physicians who ask only about the liver are asking the wrong first question.