Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi attends a summit with five Central Asian nations in Tokyo on Saturday. Japan and five Central Asian nations adopted a joint declaration at their first summit, held in Tokyo for two days through Saturday. The declaration identifies transportation infrastructure development, decarbonization and people-to-people exchanges as three priority areas. The current rapidly changing environment surrounding Central Asia, due to recent changes in the international situation, is making regional and global cooperation more important, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said at the summit. The summit was also attended by the leaders of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

A 14th century trickster tale was misread as fact. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Misinformation surrounding COVID-19 is still a major problem more than five years after its emergence. Even after hundreds of years, our understanding of the Black Death () remains clouded by false narratives. In a study recently published in the, historians at the UK's University of Exeter argue the infamous plague likely didn't move across the continent as quickly as many experts thought.

One of NASA's stranded astronauts has finally left the International Space Station (ISS) after being stuck inside for eight months - but she's not headed home. Sunita Williams had a much-needed change of scenery Thursday during her first spacewalk since arriving on the ISS on June 6. Williams, the station's commander, had to tackle some overdue outdoor repair work alongside NASA's Nick Hague. The pair emerged as the orbiting lab sailed 260 miles above Turkmenistan in Central Asia. The spacewalk is expected to take six and a half hours, concluding at around 1pm ET.

The face of an eight-year-old Neanderthal boy who died more than 30,000 years ago has been reconstructed by scientists who used a skull initially found in the Teshik-Tash cave in Uzbekistan in 1938. The portrait is the first three-dimensional restoration of a Neanderthal skull fossil, which reveals the young boy had a small, turned-up nose that sunk into his face. The fossil is the first Neanderthal fossil discovered in Asia and the only complete Asian Neanderthal skull fossil preserved so far. The team, led by China's Jilin University and Russia's Moscow State University, believes that the restoration shows the facial shape of prehistoric humans in Eurasia and displays the morphological characteristics of Neanderthals in Central Asia. The skull, dubbed Teshik-Tash 1, was found in a shallow pit inside the cave, along with five pairs of Siberian ibex horn cores and bird skeletons.