404 Media

2026-03-17 17:29:36

Was Life Seeded from Space? ‘Complete Set’ of DNA Ingredients Discovered on Asteroid

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Scientists have discovered all five nucleobases—the fundamental components of DNA and RNA—in pristine samples from the asteroid Ryugu, according to a study published on Monday in Nature Astronomy. The finding strengthens the case that the ingredients for life are abundant in the solar system and may have found their way to Earth from space, according to a study published on Monday in Nature Astronomy.

Life as we know it runs on DNA and RNA, which are built from five chemical bases: adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine, and uracil. A team has now identified this “complete set” of nucleobases in rocks snatched from the surface of Ryugu in 2019 by the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa-2, which successfully returned them to Earth the following year.

This discovery corroborates the results from another mission, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx, which returned samples of the asteroid Bennu that also contained all five nucleobases. Both asteroids belong to the same “carbonaceous” (C-type) family of primitive carbon-rich rocks, though the samples contain different ratios of the five nucleobases.

Taken together, the findings shed light on the origin of life on Earth and raise new questions about the odds that it exists elsewhere.

“These findings suggest that nucleobases may be widespread in carbonaceous asteroids and, by extension, in planetary systems,” said Toshiki Koga, a postdoctoral researcher at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), in an email to 404 Media.

“This means that some of the key molecular ingredients for life could be commonly available,” he added. “However, this does not imply that life itself is widespread, but rather that the chemical starting materials for life may be more common than previously thought.”

The emergence of life on Earth, also known as abiogenesis, remains one of the biggest mysteries in science. To untangle this enigma, scientists first need to figure out how our planet was initially enriched with the basic stuff of life—including water, amino acids, and the nucleobases that make up our genetic material.
The “Ryugu Story” illustration depicting the detection of all five canonical nucleobases in samples returned from asteroid Ryugu by the Hayabusa2 mission. Image: JAMSTEC
One popular hypothesis suggests that asteroids bearing these biological building blocks pelted Earth as it formed more than four billion years ago. This idea has been supported by the presence of nucleobases in pieces of carbonaceous asteroids that have fallen down to Earth, such as the Murchison meteorite of Australia or the Orgueil meteorite of France.

Meteorites, however, are not pristine as they become eroded by exposure to space and can also be contaminated by terrestrial material after landing on Earth. To get cleaner samples, scientists launched several spacecraft to grab samples directly from the source, beginning with Japan’s Hayabusa mission, which delivered several milligrams of dusty grains from asteroid Itokawa to Earth in 2010.

Hayabusa-2 and OSIRIS-REx then obtained even larger samples from their targets, bringing back 5.4 grams from Ryugu and 121.6 grams from Bennu. Previous studies have already identified more than a dozen amino acids associated with life in both samples, as well as evidence that these asteroids were once altered by ice and water.

Now, following the discovery of all five nucleobases in the Bennu pebbles, Koga and his colleagues have found the complete set in Ryugu. The findings lend weight to the so-called “RNA world” model of abiogenesis. In this hypothesis, early life on Earth depended solely on RNA as a self-replicating molecule, laying the biological groundwork for later, more complicated systems that involved DNA and protein-based organisms. The extraterrestrial samples from Ryugu and Bennu provide evidence that at least some of the nucleobases that made up these early lifeforms came from outer space.

The results were “broadly in line with our expectations, but still very exciting to confirm,” Koga said. “All five nucleobases had already been detected in the Murchison meteorite and in samples from the asteroid Bennu. Since Ryugu is also a carbonaceous asteroid, we expected that these molecules might be present, and it was very satisfying to confirm that the complete set is indeed present in the Ryugu samples.”

But while both samples contained the royal flush of nucleobases, they differed in their relative abundances. For example, Bennu is much richer in pyrimidine nucleobases (cytosine, thymine and uracil) than Ryugu, though they both contain roughly similar levels of purine nucleobases (adenine and guanine). These idiosyncrasies point to a variety of formation processes that produced prebiotic materials on these celestial relics.

“Our results suggest that nucleobases can form under a range of conditions in early Solar System materials, particularly within primitive asteroid parent bodies that experienced aqueous alteration,” Koga said. “The observed relationship between nucleobase composition and ammonia abundance indicates that local chemical environments, such as the availability of ammonia, may play an important role.”

“At the same time, some precursor molecules may have formed earlier in interstellar environments, so nucleobase formation could involve multiple stages,” he continued. “Future studies, including analyses of different types of meteorites and laboratory experiments that simulate these conditions, will help to better constrain these formation pathways.”

In other words, understanding how these molecules form in space could help answer the age-old mystery of whether life is a rare cosmic fluke—or a common process in the universe. The research also highlights the remarkable ingenuity behind these sample-return missions, which have delivered tiny time capsules from the birth of our solar system directly into our hands.

“It is both exciting and humbling to work with these samples,” Koga said. “They are extremely limited and represent material that has remained largely unchanged since the early Solar System. At the same time, there is a strong sense of responsibility, because each tiny grain may contain important information about how organic molecules formed and evolved before the origin of life.”

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Sugars, ‘Gum,’ Stardust Found in NASA's Asteroid Bennu Samples - NASA

The asteroid Bennu continues to provide new clues to scientists’ biggest questions about the formation of the early solar system and the origins of life. As

^{Abby Tabor (NASA)}

404 Media

2026-03-14 13:00:25

Alien Life Might Exist on the Starless Moons of Rogue Planets, Scientists Say

Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that searched for life in the dark, stood up for hedgehogs, dropped some wisdom, and died in an inexplicably epic explosion.

First, aliens might be riding around interstellar space on exomoons, just in case that’s of interest to you. Then: an ultrasonic solution to roadkill, the limits of metrification, and an answer to a cosmic mystery.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliensor subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files. b

The view from a rogue exomoon

Dahlbüdding, David et al. “Habitability of Tidally Heated H2-Dominated Exomoons around Free-Floating Planets.”

Living on a planet with a boring old Sun is for normies. In a new study, astronomers suggest that alien life could potentially emerge in a much more unexpected place—”exomoons” that orbit free-floating planets in interstellar space.

There are likely trillions of rogue planets wandering through the Milky Way, untethered to any star, raising the tantalizing mystery of whether any of them could be habitable. Now, researchers led by David Dahlbüdding of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) extend this question to exomoons that were dragged out into interstellar space with their planets.

“The search for exomoons within conventional stellar systems continues with no confirmed detection to date,” the team said. “Thus, free-floating planets might offer an alternative pathway for the first discovery of an exomoon.”

In other words, astronomers have never clearly seen an exomoon. But new techniques for spying free-floating worlds—such as microlensing, which reveals objects through the warped light of their gravity—could provide the sensitivity that is required for this long-sought detection.

With regard to potential habitability, Dahlbüdding and his colleagues focused specifically on exomoons that orbit planets with thick hydrogen atmospheres. If such a pair were to be kicked out of a star system, the exomoon’s orbit could become stretched out into a far more elliptical shape. This shift would cause the planet to exert more intense tidal forces onto its satellite, generating heat that could keep liquid water flowing on the moon over vast timescales.

“Close encounters before the final ejection even increase the ellipticity of the moon’s orbit, boosting tidal heating over millions to billions of years, depending on the moon’s and free-floating planet’s properties,” the team said. The tidal forces and atmospheric components could also “create favourable conditions for RNA polymerisation and thus support the emergence of life.”

“These potentially habitable moons could be detected through a variety of techniques,” including microlensing, the researchers added, though they noted that actually analyzing their atmospheres “may not be feasible with any instruments currently in operation.”

While we may not be able to spot signs of life on these worlds anytime soon, it would be exciting just to discover a planet and a moon bound together, but unbound from any star, which is a genuine near-term possibility.

In other news…

Ultra-sonic the hedgehog

Rasmussen, Sophie Lund et al. “Hearing and anatomy of the ear of the European hedgehog Erinaceus europaeus.” Biology Letters.

Hedgehogs have long been ubiquitous in Europe, but cars now kill up to one-third of their population each year. Even more nightmarish, the advent of robotic lawn mowers has led to an uptick in hedgehog deaths.

To help protect these iconic critters, scientists suggest testing out acoustic repellents. A series of experiments with 20 hedgehogs from a wildlife rescue established that “hedgehogs can perceive a broad ultrasonic range,” with peak sensitivity around 40 kHz.
Rasmussen, who goes by Dr. Hedgehog, with a hedgehog. Image: Joan Ostenfeldt
The results “show a potential for the development of targeted ultrasonic sound repellents to deter hedgehogs temporarily from potential dangers such as the particular models of robotic lawn mowers found to be hazardous to hedgehog survival, and more importantly, cars,” said researchers led by Sophie Lund Rasmussen of the University of Oxford.

“Designing sound repellents for cars to reduce the high number of road-killed hedgehogs enhances animal welfare and supports conservation of this declining flagship species,” the team concluded.

To channel the old joke, why did the hedgehog cross the road? Answer: Ideally it didn’t, due to scientific intervention. (I’ll be here all night).

Dropping in on science history

Cornu, Armel et al. “The drop and the metric system: how an unruly unit survived revolutions.” Annals of Science.

The metric system has been adopted by every country except Liberia, Myanmar, and the United States. But even as metrication was rapidly embraced in the 17th and 18th centuries, a far more imprecise system—the drop—refused to drop out.

People have measured liquids in drop form for thousands of years, and still do in many contexts today. Researchers led by Armel Cornu of Uppsala University have now explored how such “non-standard units survive lengthy waves of standardization.” The paper is worth a read for its many interesting asides, like how acids were tested “by counting the number of drops…that could be placed on the skin before one witnessed the effects.” Gnarly.

It also gets into the political dimensions of metrication, including this proto-populist justification for standardizing units: “Numerous complaints about the diversity of measurements and their lack of cross-readability” were directed with “a special ire at powerful lords who abused standards in order to extort the population,” Cornu’s team said. The metric system was one response to "the discontent of peasants and the little people against the powerful.”

Anyway, a little bit of drop-related science history never hurt anyone—unless you volunteered to be an acid tester.

A (dead) star is born

Farah, Joseph et al. “Lense–Thirring precessing magnetar engine drives a superluminous supernova.” Nature.

Astronomers have discovered the mysterious power source of rare and radiant stellar explosions called “Type I superluminous supernovae” which are ten times brighter than regular supernovae.

The secret superluminous sauce, as it turns out, is the birth of a magnetar, a highly magnetized stellar remnant, according to a supernova first observed in December 2024. The light from this stellar explosion contained imprints of the Lense–Thirring effect, in which spacetime is dragged around by massive and rapidly rotating objects, a key sign of a magnetar origin.
Artist’s conception of a magnetar surrounded by an accretion disk exhibiting Lense-Thirring precession. Image: Joseph Farah and Curtis McCully
“Our observations are consistent with a magnetar centrally located within the expanding supernova ejecta,” said researchers led by Joseph Farah of Las Cumbres Observatory. “These results provide the first observational evidence of the Lense–Thirring effect in the environment of a magnetar and confirm the magnetar spin-down model as an explanation for the extreme luminosity observed in Type I superluminous supernovae.”

“We anticipate that this discovery will create avenues for testing general relativity in a new regime—the violent centres of young supernovae,” the team concluded.

Forget “stellar” as slang for great; we have graduated to “superluminous.”

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

First Contact

A narrative and visual exploration of humanity’s age-old search for and fixation with extraterrestrials.First Contact explores the ancient idea—and epic ...

^{Hachette Book Group}

404 Media

2026-03-07 14:00:31

Humanity Has Altered an Asteroid’s Orbit Around the Sun

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that moved the heavens, coveted crystals, dined on lunar legumes, and got a four-star review.

First, humanity has permanently signed its name into the orbital dynamics of the solar system. Take the win! Then, we’ve got the origins of our obsession with sparkly rocks, a stint of extraterrestrial gardening, and a story of stellar significance.

As always, for more of my work, check out my bookFirst Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.

DART delivers an orbital bullseye

Makadia, Rahil and Steven R. Chesley. “Direct detection of an asteroid’s heliocentric deflection: The Didymos system after DART.” Science.

Well folks, pack it up: Humanity has shifted the path of a celestial object around the Sun.

You may remember NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft, which slammed into an asteroid named Dimorphos in September 2022. Dimorphos, which is about the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza, orbits an asteroid named Didymos, roughly five times bigger. In the aftermath of the crash, scientists determined that DART had successfully shifted Dimorphos’ path around Didymos, shortening its roughly 11-hour orbit by 33 minutes.

Now, scientists have confirmed that the mission also changed the entire binary system’s “heliocentric” orbit around the Sun. While scientists had expected the spacecraft to push this pair of asteroids off-kilter, a new study has now quantified the impact by presenting “the first-ever measurement of human-caused change in the heliocentric orbit of a celestial body.”

The team determined that the system’s pace around the Sun was slowed by about 10 micrometers per second as a result of the mighty spaceship wallop. It took years to refine that measurement, which the researchers calculated with radar and stellar occultations, which are observations of the system against background stars.
youtube.com/embed/N-OvnVdZP_8?…
But it’s worth the wait to know that we shifted a celestial object’s circuit around the Sun, even by a tiny bit—an achievement that may come in handy if we ever need to deflect an asteroid or comet on a collision course with Earth.

“By demonstrating that asteroid deflection missions such as DART can effect change in the heliocentric orbit of a celestial body, this study marks a notable step forward in our ability to prevent future asteroid impacts on Earth,” said researchers co-led by Rahil Makadia of the University of Illinois Urbana-­Champaign and Steven R. Chesley of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

So, forget moving mountains—we’ve graduated to moving space rocks.

For anyone interested in learning more about DART, I highly recommend How to Kill an Asteroid by Robin George Andrews, which provides a fascinating inside account of the mission.

In other news…

Chimps glimpse a “big beyond”

García-Ruiz, Juan Manuel et al. “On the origin of our fascination with crystals.” Frontiers in Psychology.

It’s crystal clear: We clearly love crystals. Humans and our early hominin relatives have collected crystals for nearly 800,000 years, making them “among the first natural objects collected by hominins without any apparent utilitarian purpose,” according to a new study.

To explore the origins of this fascination, scientists gave chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, a bunch of sparkly crystals at an ape preserve in Spain. The chimps were intrigued by the offerings; indeed, one female named Sandy immediately absconded with a large crystal dubbed the “Monolith” and took it back to her group’s indoor dormitory for two days.
Chimp Toti attentively observes the quartz crystal during Experiment 1. Image: García-Ruiz et al., 2026.
“When the team of caretakers tried to retrieve the crystal, it took hours to exchange it for valuable ‘gifts’ (i.e., favored food items—bananas and yogurt—which are known from daily observations to be highly appreciated by the chimpanzees), which suggests that the crystal was highly valued,” said researchers led by Juan Manuel García-Ruiz of Donostia International Physics Center.

“Crystals may have contributed to the development of metaphysical and symbolic thinking, acting as catalysts for the conceptualization of a ‘big beyond,’” the team concluded.

Shining moonbeams on moon beans

Atkin, Jessica et al. “Bioremediation of lunar regolith simulant through mycorrhizal fungi and plant symbioses enables chickpea to seed.” Scientific Reports.

Scientists are finally addressing my dream of enjoying locally-grown falafel on the Moon. In a new study, a team experimented with planting chickpeas in lunar regolith simulant (LRS), a human-made substance that mimics lunar soil.

The results revealed that chickpeas could flower and produce seeds in the simulant, provided that it was treated with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) which are fungal microbes known to protect plant health. Small additions of vermicompost also helped the Moon beans flourish.
The Moon chickpeas. Image: Jessica Atkin
“Plants seeded successfully in mixtures containing up to 75 percent LRS when inoculated with AMF,” said researchers led by Jessica Atkin of Texas A&M University. “Higher LRS concentrations induced stress; however, plants grown in 100 percent LRS inoculated with AMF demonstrated an average extension of two weeks in survival compared to non-inoculated plants.”

“We present a step toward sustainable agriculture on the Moon, addressing the fundamental challenges of using Lunar regolith as a plant growth medium,” the team concluded.

Who knows if we’ll ever live off the lunar land, but as a garbanzo fanzo, I’m hoping for heavenly hummus.

TIC 120362137 is the real quad god

Borkovits, T., Rappaport, S.A., Chen, HL. et al. “Discovery of the most compact 3+1-type quadruple star system TIC 120362137.” Nature Communications.

Three-body problems are so last season; the era of the quadruple star system is upon us. In a new study, scientists unveil the most compact quartet of stars ever discovered, known as TIC 120362137, which is about 2,000 light years from Earth.

“This inner subsystem, which contains three stars that are more massive and hotter than the Sun, is more spatially compact than Mercury’s orbit around our Sun, and is orbited by a fourth Sun-like star with a period of 1,046 days,” said researchers co-led by Tamás Borkovits and Saul A. Rappaport of the University of Szeged, Hai-Liang Chen of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Guillermo Torres of the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian.

“To our knowledge, there are no other known, similarly compact and tight, planetary-system-like 3 + 1 quadruple stellar systems,” the team added.

The researchers predicted that this fantastic foursome will eventually merge together into a pair of dead stars known as white dwarfs in about nine billion years. No planets have been found in this system, and it may be that it is too dynamically eccentric to host them. Still, it’s fun to imagine the view from such a hypothetical world, with four Suns in its sky. Eat your heart out, Tatooine.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Bioremediation of lunar regolith simulant through mycorrhizal fungi and plant symbioses enables chickpea to seed - Scientific Reports

Food sustainability is a significant challenge for long-term space travel. Plants can provide fresh nutrition, reducing reliance on packaged foods.

^Nature

404 Media

2026-03-04 00:01:04

The Sun Is 'Glitching.' Scientists Investigated and Solved a Cosmic Mystery

Scientists have peered inside the Sun and observed subtle shifts and “glitches” that have occurred over four decades, shedding light on the enigmatic long-term vibrations of our star, reports a study published on Tuesday in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The Sun goes through a roughly 11-year cycle that includes a period of high and low activity, known as solar maximum and minimum. The past few cycles have revealed changes in solar behavior that could have implications for predicting space weather and unraveling the internal dynamics of our Sun, along with other Sun-like stars.

To drill down on this mystery, researchers with the Birmingham Solar-Oscillations Network (BiSON), a network of telescopes that have monitored the Sun since the 1970s, compared the last four solar minima using this unique 40-year dataset and focused on internal vibrations that make the sun subtly oscillate.

“The entire Sun oscillates in a globally coherent way, and the oscillations are formed by sound waves trapped inside the Sun that make it resonate just like a musical instrument,”said Bill Chaplin, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Birmingham who co-authored the study, in a call with 404 Media.

“For this particular study, we were interested in seeing whether there are differences in what the Sun is doing in its structure when you focus on the periods or epochs when the Sun is very quiet,” he continued. “The last few cycles have seen some quite marked changes in behavior.”

For example, scientists have been perplexed for years by an unusually long and quiet solar minimum between cycle 23 to 24, which occurred from 2008 to 2009. Chaplin and his colleagues were able to use BiSON’s long record of asteroseismology—the study of stellar interiors—to directly contrast the interior vibrations of the Sun during this minimum to others.

“There were hints that there were things that were different” about this cycle, said Chaplin. “But now that we have the cycle 24-25 minimum—the last one in about 2019—in the bag, then we thought, ‘okay, now's the time to actually go back and look at this.’”

The team specifically looked for an acoustic wave “glitch” caused by an interior layer in which helium atoms lose electrons, producing a detectable change in the Sun’s internal structure. This glitch was significantly stronger during the 2008–2009 minimum, suggesting that the Sun’s outer interior was slightly hotter and allowed sound waves to travel faster at that time of magnetic weakness.

“The ionizing helium affects the speed at which the sound waves move through that region,” explained Chaplin. “It leaves a characteristic imprint.”

“It's not just that there is a difference with the other cycles, but it's starting to tell us about what physically has really changed beneath the surface,” he added. “They're quite subtle changes, but it's nevertheless giving us clues as to what is actually happening beneath the Sun during this very quiet period.”

The results confirm that the Sun doesn’t return to the same minimum baseline at the end of every cycle, and its activity varies within timescales of decades and centuries. For example, Chaplin pointed to one bizarrely long quiet period from 1645 to 1715, known as the Maunder Minimum.

Astronomers during this time marvelled at the prolonged lack of visible sunspots on the Sun’s surface, a sign of extremely low solar activity. Centuries later, BiSON and other solar observatories are allowing scientists to study the interior dynamics behind these shifts in depth for the first time.

“This is the first step in actually demonstrating that there are changes,” Chaplin said. “Does this mean that there are systematic changes in the way that the Sun is generating its field? It's really only now, because we have this long dataset, that we can start to ask questions like that. Previously, we just didn't have enough data to say.”

Scientists hope to keep recording the long-term behavior of the Sun with projects like BiSON so that we can better understand its mercurial nature over time. This is interesting work on its own merits, but it is also useful for refining forecasts of space storms that can wreak havoc on power grids and space assets (while also producing pretty auroras).

Chaplin also nodded to the European space telescope PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO), due for launch in 2027. This mission will search for analogous oscillations in stars beyond the Sun, building on similar work conducted by NASA’s retired Kepler space telescope.

Studying the vibrations of the Sun and other similar stars is not only important for life here on Earth; it also has implications in the search for extraterrestrial life, because local solar activity is one key to assessing the habitability of star systems similar to our own.

“The data that we have on other stars from Kepler has really helped to understand and get a better picture of the cyclic variability of other stars, like the Sun,” Chaplin concluded. “But it's still not an entirely clear picture; let's put it that way. Seismology now enables you to do really detailed analysis of stars that you can't do by other means.”

404 Media

2026-02-28 20:48:27

Scientists Reveal the Surprising Sex Lives of Neanderthals and Early Humans

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that exposed prehistoric hookups, marched toward death, feasted on their own bodies, and found a buried legend in the Sahara.

First, Neanderthal males had lots more babies with human females than human males had with Neanderthal females. What’s up with that?! Then, strap in for a stellar swan song, antlers for breakfast, and a timeless style icon from the Cretaceous.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.

Dad’s a Neanderthal, Mom’s a human, I’m in therapy

Platt, Alexander et al. “Interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans was strongly sex biased.” Science.

Humans and our close relatives, Neanderthals, produced children together many times before the latter went extinct about 40,000 years ago. As a result, the vast majority of people living today carry a pinch of Neanderthal DNA—the enduring proof of past copulations between our species.

Now, scientists have proposed that these prehistoric partnerships overwhelmingly occurred between Neanderthal males and females of our own species, Homo sapiens, with far fewer couplings between Neanderthal females and human males. This strong sexual bias provides the most "parsimonious” explanation for the uneven distribution of Neanderthal alleles (variants of specific genes) in modern human genomes, according to a new study.

“One of the notable features evident in alignments of Neanderthal genomes to those of modern humans is the presence of ‘Neanderthal deserts’ within modern human genomes: genomic regions where Neanderthal alleles are conspicuously rare in the modern human (and ancient modern human) gene pool,” said researchers led by Alexander Platt of the University of Pennsylvania.
This meme, provided by lead author Alexander Platt, is NOT part of the scientific study. But perhaps somebody should consider founding a journal where memes are acceptable figures.
In particular, the team noted that Neanderthal deserts show up on the human X chromosome, which they think hints at a strong sex bias toward breeding between Neanderthal males and human females.

The team compared Neanderthal genomes with genetic data from some sub-Saharan African populations that have no Neanderthal ancestry. This approach allowed them to track ancient gene flow from anatomically modern humans (AMHs)—in other words, our ancient Homo sapiens ancestors—into Neanderthal populations.

The results revealed that the Neanderthal X chromosomes had a 62 percent relative excess of DNA from AMHs. In other words, not only are there Neanderthal deserts on human X chromosomes, there are corollary “floods” or “oases” (whatever metaphor you like) of human DNA on Neanderthal X chromosomes.

This discovery is strong evidence that humans were contributing more alleles to the Neanderthal X chromosome, and Neanderthals were contributing less to the human X chromosome, due to an unexplained asymmetry in mate preference.

Overall, the genetic patterns the team observed “were likely colored by a persistent preference for pairings between males of predominantly Neanderthal ancestry and females of predominantly AMH ancestry over the reverse,” the researchers concluded. “The bias that we inferred seems to have remained consistent across admixture events separated by 200,000 years.”

Men prefer blondes; women prefer Neanderthals? I don’t know. This is just wildly interesting.

In other news…

A (hypergiant) star is born

Muñoz-Sanchez, Gonzalo et al. “The dramatic transition of the extreme red supergiant WOH G64 to a yellow hypergiant.” Nature Astronomy.

We’ve all been there: One day, you’re an extreme red supergiant, and the next, you’re a yellow hypergiant. A new study reports that WOH G64, one of the biggest known stars in the sky, went through this “dramatic transition” sometime in 2014 (or at least, that’s when astronomers first captured this spectral shift in the star, which is located about 163,000 light years from Earth).
Concept art of WOH G64, a cosmic eye of Sauron. Image: ESO / L. Calçada
If the Sun were as big as WOH G64, it would stretch to the orbit of Saturn. This late-stage stellar titan offers an ultra-rare opportunity to see how red supergiants (RSGs) end their lives, a process that is shrouded in mystery—often literally, as these stars tend to be obscured by a lot of circumstellar gas.

“The apparent lack of luminous RSGs detected as supernova progenitors has sparked an ongoing debate over the fate of these stars,” said researchers led by Gonzalo Muñoz-Sanchez of the National Observatory of Athens. “WOH G64 thus provides critical insight into post-RSG evolution and the formation of dense circumstellar environments seen in core-collapse supernovae.”

It could be that WOH G64 does detonate. In fact, this may have already happened, but the light show hasn’t reached us yet. It may also collapse directly into a black hole with no supernova to show for it. We’ll just have to keep watching this space! This has been Big Star News.

That’s deer-licious

Gaetano, Madison et al. “A Gnawing Question: How Do Caribou and Other Arctic Mammals Exploit Shared Bone Resources?” Ecology and Evolution.

Antlers in deer are usually a male ornamentation that allows females to judge potential mates based on the quality of their head-bling. Caribou females, however, buck this trend as the only female deer with antlers. So, as a folktale might ask: How did the caribou get her antlers?

One answer is that antlers make a great post-partum snack, according to a new study. In migratory populations, female caribou shed their antlers when they reach calving grounds, usually just days before they give birth, which may give nursing mothers a much-needed vitamin boost.
Percentages of antlers (light gray) and skeletal bones (dark gray) modified by caribou (ruminants), rodents, or carnivorans. Image: Gaetano, Madison et al.
“Pervasive antler consumption by caribou suggests that synchroneity between birthing and antler shedding evinces the importance of nutrient (calcium, phosphorus) transport for supporting calf survival,” said researchers led by Madison Gaetano of the University of Cincinnati. “Though intriguing, additional research will be important to more explicitly evaluate the dietary and fitness benefits (for both females and their calves) of antler-derived nutrients.”

Given that caribou also eat their placentas, it’s really impressive how these new mothers nourish themselves and their young with the fruits of their own bodies. Hardcore. Respect.

New spinosaur just dropped

Sereno, Paul C. et al. “Scimitar-crested Spinosaurus species from the Sahara caps stepwise spinosaurid radiation.” Science.

Speaking of animals with rad headgear, we’ll close with a shoutout to Spinosaurus mirabilis, a newly-discovered species of giant carnivorous dinosaur that rocked an epic scimitar-shaped skull crest. Move over, rock band T. Rex—this killer is the new wave of dinosaurian glam.
Spinosaurus mirabilis, pictured with a guinea fowl N. meleagris, a much smaller and less frightening modern analog. Scale bar, 20 cm for S. mirabilis and 3 cm for fowl. Image: Flesh rendering and layout by Dani Navarro; Adult skull cast by the Fossil Lab; helmeted guinea fowl images by Todd Green
“Spinosaurus mirabilis…discovered in the central Sahara alongside long-necked dinosaurs in a riparian habitat, is distinguished by a scimitar-shaped bony crest projecting far above its skull roof,” said researchers led by Paul C. Sereno of the University of Chicago.

Spinosaurus stock has gone through the roof in recent decades as new finds have confirmed that they were the biggest land predators of all time, dethroning T-rex from a tyrant king to a mere tyrant vassal. As the ultimate charismatic megafauna, spinosaurs are popular in dino-blockbusters. Indeed, one of my favorite gags in cinematic history is when a Spinosaurus swallows a satellite phone in Jurassic Park III, so you know it’s lurking when you hear the Nokia ring tone. Pure dinosaurian comedic gold.
youtube.com/embed/cVA4BO2v7zs?…
In any case, the new study sheds new light into the semi-aquatic nature of this majestic hunter, suggesting that this particular species was “a wading, shoreline predator with visual display an important aspect of its biology.” While this animal was no doubt visually captivating, it’s best to view it from a safe distance of about 94 million years.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

First Contact

A narrative and visual exploration of humanity’s age-old search for and fixation with extraterrestrials.First Contact explores the ancient idea—and epic ...

^{Hachette Book Group}

404 Media

2026-02-23 20:00:48

A Billion Years Are Mysteriously Missing From Earth’s History. Now, We Know Why.

Scientists have resolved a longstanding mystery about the Great Unconformity, a huge gap in the geological record that shows up across the world and has inspired speculation for more than 150 years, reports a study published on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The unconformity shows up around the world when sedimentary rock that is about 500 million years old lies directly on top of far more ancient “basement” rock that can be often over 1.7 billion years old. The missing layers can represent anywhere from several million to more than a billion years, making this feature “arguably the most iconic but enigmatic gap in Earth’s stratigraphic record,” according to the new study.

Now, scientists led by Rong-Ruo Zhan of Northwest University in China have presented new evidence that the gap was largely created by tectonic processes that occurred from 2.1 billion to 1.6 billion years ago, in the Neoproterozoic era, during the formation of an ancient supercontinent called Columbia.

Their results, based on geological sites in North China, cast doubt on an alternate explanation that suggests that the gap was formed by a “snowball Earth” phase of widespread glaciation that happened much later in time, around 700 to 600 million years ago.

This snowball phase closely preceded the Cambrian explosion, a sudden proliferation of complex life around 530 million years ago that established major animal families, leading to theories that the two events were linked. The new study, with its revised timeline of tectonic processes, challenges that connection.

“The contribution of this paper is to show that exhumation of mid-crustal metamorphic/igneous rocks in North China occurred mostly between 2.1 and 1.6 billion years ago, and that the timing of exhumation varies from one continent to another,” said study co-author Nicholas Christie-Blick, professor emeritus at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, in an email to 404 Media.

“In other words, the surface may appear to be global, but its significance varies,” he added, noting that the unconformity in North America is shaped by specific regional factors, such as the break-up of the supercontinent Rodinia and sustained sea flooding.

“The conclusion therefore isn't surprising,” Christie-Blick said. “It is just very nice to have shown in a previously less documented example (North China) that the timing has nothing much to do with late Proterozoic glaciation (720-635 million years ago) or the emergence of animals in the Cambrian.”

The Great Unconformity is perhaps most famous as a visible feature of the Grand Canyon, which preserves the core of a long-lost paleocontinent called Laurentia. But it is also present in the remnants of other paleocontinents, such as Baltica and Amazonia. It’s a wild case of stratigraphic amnesia, in which Earth seems to have memory-wiped epochs of geological time.

To further constrain the origins of the unconformity, Zhan’s team studied the thermal history of rocks at five locations in North China. The results revealed that in this region, crustal exhumation—the process by which buried rocks are pushed upward toward Earth’s surface—was mostly driven by tectonic processes in the ancient Neoproterozoic era.

Christie-Blick credited his colleagues in China with the bulk of the work, including the sampling and data acquisition, and said his role on the paper “was in thinking about the issues, and in helping to frame the paper.”

“The best way to think about unconformities is that they represent everything that may have happened over a span of time that in this particular case is more than one billion years” said Christie-Blick, adding that “it was never in the cards that we would discover one 'cause.'”

“It is merely the case that much of the erosion occurred early, and that formation of the unconformity could not have 'triggered' anything to use an expression from one of the early papers” that had speculated on a link to the Cambrian explosion, he noted.

While the new study has shed new light on the origin of the Great Unconformity—and its regional variability—there are still plenty of outstanding questions left to resolve about this geological gap. Christie-Blick is developing a new work about the late Proterozoic-Cambrian tectonic development of southwest Laurentia, and also pointed to the work of his colleague on the paper, Liang Duan, who has published several works on basin tectonics in China.

“Both of us like to challenge conventional thinking because that is where advances in understanding are commonly made,” Christie-Blick concluded.

Formation of the 'Great Unconformity' as a trigger for the Cambrian explosion - PubMed

The transition between the Proterozoic and Phanerozoic eons, beginning 542 million years (Myr) ago, is distinguished by the diversification of multicellular animals and by their acquisition of mineralized skeletons during the Cambrian period.

^PubMed

404 Media

2026-02-21 14:00:56

At the World’s Largest General Science Meeting, Surviving Trump Is the Topic

Welcome back to the Abstract! This week, we have a very special edition of the newsletter packed with everything I saw and heard at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting, held in Phoenix from February 12 to 14.

Founded in 1848, AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society, with over 120,000 members. It operates with the mission of advancing “science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all people," according to its website. It’s also the publisher of Science, a leading collection of journals that have graced this newsletter many times.

The overarching theme this year was the damage inflicted on the U.S. science sector by the Trump administration and how to best respond to it. Since Trump returned to office, his team has terminated or frozen 7,800 research grants, laid off 25,000 scientists and personnel from research agencies, and proposed budget cuts of 35 percent to federal science funding, amounting to $32 billion, according to Nature.

It’s an epic own goal for American science leadership that is also reverberating through the global scientific community. But experts at the meeting highlighted the bright spots in the darkness, as the world learns to respond to the new normal.

Excuse the quality of my pictures; I’m untalented as a photographer at the best of times and I also refuse to part with my six-year-old iPhone SE. Without further ado, here are the highlights from the meeting.

The state of state science

State-Level Science Policy: A Conversation with Expert Practitioners

With the U.S. federal science sector in crisis, scientists working at the state, regional, and local levels have a unique opportunity and obligation to fill in the gaps. During one Friday session, two politicians on opposite sides of the aisle shared their thoughts on how to build public trust in science at the local level.

Andrew Zwicker, a Democrat state senatorwho represents about 250,000 people in New Jersey’s 16th Legislative District, said action on local levels is often smoother because the “hyper-partisanship that you read about or maybe have personally experienced in Washington [D.C.] rarely happens in the states.” Zwicker, a physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, also expressed hope because his younger constituents are interested in scientific policy, particularly on climate change “because they see it as an existential threat to their own future.”

Roger Hanshaw, a Republican who serves as the speaker of the West Virginia House of Delegates, said he represents “the opposite end of that bell curve” as his district (WV-62) contains 17,500 people and does not have “a stoplight, a Walmart, or a McDonald's.” Hanshaw, who has a background in environmental law, advised citizens to remain consistently engaged with their representatives at all times, not just when the issues they care about are a flashpoint in the news.

How screwed are we?

America @250: Redesigning the Scientific Enterprise
Arthur Daemmrich (right) and Mahmud Farooque during their talk. Image by author.
I tuned into a talk by Arthur Daemmrich and Mahmud Farooque, the director and associate director, respectively, of the Arizona State University Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes (CSPO). They outlined how the United States came to be such a global powerhouse in science, and how that leadership role has been upended by Trump’s threats against academic universities, the massive cuts implemented by DOGE, and the loss of personnel and expertise across the U.S. science sector.

“This is a very concerted attack on these institutions,” Daemmrich said. “This is really a turning point and we’re in a historical transition at present.”

To help come up with solutions, CSPO has launched a new project to engage the public on the future of American science policy, including through a series of one-day public forums this summer that will take place in Arizona, West Virginia, and Massachusetts. After the talk, I asked the pair if they would tailor those forums to address science issues that are specific to the diverse interests of those very different states.

“What we want to do is create national-level baseline data,” Farooque replied. “We do this on one Saturday. In the past, we have done a national and local question that is different. We will take that into the design, but we will see what is possible. That will be another value proposition for the different states to get interested in answering the questions that are relevant to them.”

Daemmrich added that “a lot of our forums begin with a kind of open framing session where people are identifying hopes and concerns for their community before they are getting into the substance of how the U.S. science funding system works, what science has done for your community, or questions about how would you think about allocating science. They have this opportunity to articulate what they see in their community and we collect all that data as well.”

Fighting misinformation in a hostile environment

Rigor and Transparency: Editors-in-Chief on the Role of Scientific Journals

At this session, the editors-in-chief of three major scientific journals discussed their responses to an administration that is hostile to many scientific fields, as well as the challenges of combating the dissemination of bad scientific information on social media or podcasts.

During the Q&A, I asked Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of Science, how, and if, scientists and science communicators can compete with celebrity personalities like Joe Rogan, who often air misinformation on their platforms.

“Well, for sure, you don't want me doing it,” Thorp replied. “I'm way too blunt.”

“I believe that the answer probably isn't going to come from science communication the way we think about it,” he said. “I think that the people who can move the meter are the primary care physicians, the emergency room docs, the nurse practitioners, the pharmacists, the social workers, the teachers, and the people who folks have a personal relationship with.”

“That's a lot of burden to put on those folks because they're not the most powerful people in the ecosystem,” he continued. But he said that these on-the-ground practitioners who have direct personal relationships with the public “have a much better chance” to persuade people “than one of us would have going on Joe Rogan.”

Helping corals beat the heat

Rebuilding Coral Resilience Through Cellular Biochemistry and Nanotechnology
Liza M. Roger during her talk. Image by author
Not everything at the meeting revolved around the president. Corals are the foundation of the most biodiverse regions in the oceans, but marine heatwaves—which are intensifying due to human-driven climate change—are already killing off many of these vital reefs worldwide.

I stopped by the Arizona State University (ASU) expo booth to hear a short talk by Liza M. Roger, an assistant professor of molecular sciences at ASU who is developing nanomedicines that could help boost the resilience of reefs. After her talk, I asked her how often these therapies would need to be applied to ensure coral survival.

“It would need to be a combination—like a cocktail of nanomedicine together—and then finding what time you would have to dose the system so that it responds the way that you want it to respond,” she replied. “Most likely, it would be a cyclical thing because the heatwaves are seasonal.”

“It’s a case where you have got to know your environment and when the waters are starting to warm, then you could eventually treat the corals, and wait for the heatwave to pass,” she said. “Then maybe, next summer you have to do it again.”

The fireside chats of prehistory

Cat Hobaiter: Storytelling Apes
Cat Hobaiter during her talk. Image by author.
What separates human language from gestural communication between our closest relatives, the great apes? Catherine Hobaiter, a primatologist at the University of St. Andrews, speculated on the role of fireside storytelling as a driver of our human capacity for complex language and abstract thinking.

She noted that once our early human relatives had mastered controlled fires, they were able to extend their hours late into the dark evenings, perhaps reflecting on the events of the day and anticipating the outcomes of tomorrow. These stories and conversations would necessitate the development of more symbolic concepts and complicated communication.
Hobaiter demonstrating ape gestures during her talk. Image by author.
Hobaiter also shared some amazing videos of ape communication in the wild, including chimpanzees that beat distinct drum patterns on tree trunks with their hands, creating vibrations of which can be heard for more than a mile. During the Q&A, I asked Hobaiter about her team’s process for obtaining these observations of wild apes in various parts of Africa.

“We have really well-established field camps,” she said. “My camp in northern Uganda has houses with beds, and a hot shower—if you like fire under the shower bucket. There are other camps where we go hiking. You drive three days until the road runs out, you hike two more days, and you’re in tents for the next few months.”

“Camera traps are amazing these days,” she added. “We’re starting to use various different computer science AI models to help us handle tens of thousands of camera trap videos. But we’re also really committed to manual coding because one of the things we’ve learned is that you can’t train a model to look for the thing that you don’t know is there. So it’s lots of different ways that are coming together.”

Do look up—with these fancy asteroid missions

Sizing Up the Asteroid Threat
Kelly Fast gives her talk. Image by author.
As if we don’t have enough to worry about here on Earth, there’s always the outside risk that some random rock from space might wallop us into oblivion. At this session, three scientists outlined how experts are working to mitigate the threat of death-by-asteroid while also assuring attendees it is not something that keeps them up at night.

Kelly Fast, the acting planetary defense officer for NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office, provided an overview of her office’s goal to identify as many potentially hazardous asteroids as possible. In particular, she spotlighted the upcoming mission NEO Surveyor, due for launch no later than 2028, which is designed to spot asteroids over 140 meters (460 feet) in diameter.

Nancy Chabot, the chief scientist of the Space Exploration Sector at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, walked the audience through the results of NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), a spacecraft that slammed into the asteroid Dimorphos in 2022, shifting its trajectory.

Last, Daniella DellaGiustina, principal investigator for NASA's OSIRIS-APEX Mission, outlined her team’s plan to send a spacecraft to rendezvous with the asteroid Apophis after it makes a very close approach with Earth in spring 2029.

During the Q&A, I asked the panelists about the popularity of asteroid impacts in science fiction, especially action movies, and whether those depictions are a hindrance or a help in their research and public engagement.

“I think it’s a help,” said Chabot. “The fact that this is something that people relate to, that people are interested in, does make it easier to have that conversation.”

“So it really can be this great gateway and if it comes about from Armageddon, Deep Impact, Don’t Look Up, or whatever your favorite one happens to be—I’ve seen them all multiple times,” she added. “ I think it’s something to lean into, personally.”

“I have obviously watched these films and see a lot of flaws in some of the basic premises,” said DellaGiustina, “but it’s great to use whatever tools we have in our toolbox to engage the public.”

Last, Fast weighed in, saying: “It can be challenging sometimes, engaging on science. I think in a way, we have it easy. We can have fun with it. When we can come out and speak, we can at least redirect to: here’s how it really works, and here’s what we really know.”

Conversations at the Expo

In addition to attending talks and sessions, I also wandered around the expo interviewing people at the booths. Here are my favorite three conversations.

That’s one small step for a dog…

Jeffery Bennett at his booth. Image by author.
Jeffrey Bennett, a Colorado-based astrophysicist and former NASA scientist, is the author of a children’s series about his Rottweiler dog, Max, who travels all around the solar system. His series was the first to be selected by NASA to go to space with astronauts onboard the International Space Station for a literacy program called Story Time From Space. Since 2011, many ISS crew members have filmed themselves reading about Max’s space adventures to encourage kids to get interested in reading, science, and space exploration.

"Hopefully, we start reading books from the Moon,” Bennett told me. ”Kids really get excited about watching these videos. We've had millions of views, most of them probably in classrooms with lots of kids watching all around the world, because it's all free.”

“I think the more that this can be done, the more it gives kids a chance to get engaged with astronauts and with space and with real science.”

A visit to the arXiv…

The arXiv booth. Image by author.
ArXiv, a preprint server owned by Cornell University, is in many ways the connective tissue of the global science community. Given how often I have personally relied on this server as a reporter, I was delighted to see its booth at the expo. I spoke with Steinn Sigurdsson, arXiv’s scientific director, about its mission.

“It delivers a thousand new papers every day and we have an archive of three million papers covering the last, actually, more than 35 years because some people backdated their papers to before arXiv started,” he added.

Sigurdsson said arXiv’s primary purpose “is to get the research circulating early because things happen fast.” The server has been essential in rapidly disseminating news about everything from astronomical discoveries to emerging Covid research early on in the pandemic. Long live arXiv!

Interactive Interactions

Genzer with his colleagues at their booth. Image by author.
The eye-catching Interactions.org booth was decorated with artistic photographs from the Global Physics Photowalk, a recent photo contest that showcased particle physics facilities around the world. Pete Genzer, the co-chair of the Interactions Collaboration, told me that the organization’s mission is to encourage “peaceful promotion of particle physics globally” and “to try to make particle physics, which should be very complicated, more accessible to the public.”
A close-up of the photo contest finalists. Image by author.
“We also do a dark matter day every October,” said Genzer, who also serves as manager of the media and communications office at Brookhaven National Laboratory. “We tie it to Halloween because, you know, dark matter is kind of spooky, and it's a good time. We've been doing that for several years now, and there's a series of events and lectures at these labs all around the world on dark matter, what we're doing to try to figure out what it is, and what place it plays in our universe.”

Vera Rubin is groovin’

Closing Plenary: Robert Blum of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in conversation with astronomer Jennifer Wiseman
Robert Blum’s plenary speech. Image by author.
The conference capped off with a plenary speech from Robert Blum, the director of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a major new telescope that began operating last year. Blum walked the audience through the genesis of the telescope as a literal napkin doodle in the 1990s, to its meticulous construction on a hilltop in the Atacama Desert of Chile, to the exciting moment when it captured its first light in 2025.

He ended his talk with a quote from the telescope’s namesake, Vera C. Rubin (1928-2016), who was the first astronomer to describe dark matter as well as a passionate advocate for the participation of women and other under-represented groups in astronomy. I think it also serves as a fitting end for this newsletter that hopefully provides some inspiration in a time when science is under threat.

“Don't shoot for the stars, we already know what's there,” Rubin said. “Shoot for the space in between because that's where the real mystery lies."

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

NEO Surveyor

NEO Surveyor is the first space telescope specifically designed to hunt asteroids and comets that may be potential hazards to Earth.

^{NASA Science Editorial Team (NASA Science)}

404 Media

2026-02-20 17:38:06

The U.S. Military Is Reviving Microbes from 40,000-Year-Old Ice

🌘
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Scientists with the U.S. military have revived microbes frozen in Alaskan permafrost that dates back nearly 40,000 years—leading to the discovery of 26 new species—as part of an effort to pioneer technologies to help the military endure extremely cold environments, according to a new release from the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC).

Researchers with ERDC’s Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) discovered the novel microbes in its Permafrost Tunnel Research Facility in Fox, Alaska. Some of these microbes were frozen into the ice 38,000 years ago, a time when Neanderthals still walked Earth, though the samples contain species from many different eras across tens of thousands of years.

“Microbes are the best chemists,” said Robyn Barbato, senior research microbiologist and leader of CRREL’s soil microbiology team, in a call with 404 Media, noting that the permafrost cores are cold and extremely salty.

“We purposefully thought of permafrost and terrestrial ice as a great habitat to think about ice and to discover ice modulation properties,” she added. “If we can learn what they're doing, how they're doing it, then we can take that as a biotechnology and apply it to real world problems out there.”
Barbato in a Tyvek suit taking cores from the Permafrost Tunnel Research Facility in Fox, Alaska. Image: U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center’s Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL)
Digging up ancient lifeforms from permafrost is a busy field, with researchers reviving viruses that have been dormant for nearly 50,000 years in some cases, as well as recently discovering millennia-old bacteria that are resistant to many common antibiotics. But why is the U.S. Army interested? Some of the possible military applications of CRREL’s research include the development of frostbite prevention creams for soldiers working in extreme environments, novel antifreeze formulas, and techniques for de-icing vehicles and other equipment. Microbial research could also lead to new methods for creating stable ice so that, for example, vehicles could pass safely over melted or thawed ground.

“For the military, frostbite is a huge, huge problem when you're in extreme weather conditions in the Arctic,” Barbato said, noting that cold conditions can also stop batteries and other items from working. “You want to write with a pen—guess what? Your ink froze. You actually have to write with a pencil.”

“When you think about military operations in the cold, you have to think of all these practical things,” she continued. “To link it back to the microorganisms, they've developed these properties and materials that we can use to advance the opportunity of staying in the cold longer, and not having as many medical emergencies due to frostbite.”

Barbato and her colleagues at CRREL are funded by a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s project called Ice Control for Cold Environments. Their research demonstrates that “permafrost microorganisms have diverse stress responses and survival adaptations relevant to biotechnology,” according to a study the team published last year in the journal Applied and Industrial Microbiology.

“We have a rich history of doing cold regions research,” Barbato said. “We have technical reports that, for the 60 years that we've been around, are still referenced today on how to collect ice cores in the middle of nowhere under freezing conditions. That initial research was just incredible, and is still used today, which is cool. Pun intended.”

Barbato noted that while her team develops technologies for the military, the discoveries are also applicable to civil spheres. In addition to practical technologies such as de-icing or frostbite prevention, these projects are uncovering novel proteins that may lead to biomedical breakthroughs.

“We're looking at it from a range of biotechnology applications,” Barbato said. “Specific to the DARPA work is we're now down-selecting 50 of those bacteria and seeing the top performers, and then starting to apply the technology for military use.”

The samples that the team collects contain spores that may have been frozen in stasis for as long as the ice itself, meaning they date back tens of thousands of years. But some of the younger bacteria in the permafrost has managed to remain metabolically active, reproducing slowly over thousands of years, and even consuming other bacteria in the environment.

These samples are carefully transported back to the CRREL’s soil microbiology laboratory in Hanover, New Hampshire, where they are revived, cultured, and added to CRREL’s Innovative, Collaborative, Exploratory Cold Regions Organism Library for Discovery in Biotechnology (ICE COLD) library.

“In permafrost, there's about ten million cells of bacteria in one gram, so there's a tremendous biodiversity that has been frozen in time,” Barbato concluded.

5,000-Year-Old Bacteria Strain Found in Ice Cave Resistant to 10 Common Antibiotics

The discovery of an antibiotic-resistant microbe locked in Romanian cave ice highlights both the risks of a warming world and an unexpected source of future medicines.

^{Jenny Lehmann (Discover Magazine)}

404 Media

2026-02-14 14:00:58

Astronomers Create Strange ‘Vortex Crystals’ from Space in the Lab

Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that kept it reel, fertilized the land, established Martian law, and cooked up an extraterrestrial tempest in a teapot.

First, ever wondered how cities are represented in Soviet propaganda? Look no further. Then: the path to civilization runs through the bums of birds, what the first Martian settlers could learn from unions, and VORTEX CRYSTALS FROM OUTER SPACE.

Before we get started, I wanted to give a little heads-up that I’m currently attending the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) annual meeting in Phoenix, which is a gathering of people who think science is good and should ideally get better. I think it will be especially interesting this year given the ongoing damage that the Trump administration is inflicting on the science sector in the United States, a trend with global implications.

Next Saturday, we will run a special edition of the Abstract with pictures, interviews, and some of my other takeaways from the meeting. Have a great week until then!

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.

Soviet Propaganda: A City Guide

Tamm, Mikhail et al. “City representation in Soviet propaganda and geographical biases in cultural data.” Nature Cities.

Certain cities loom large in our collective imagination, not only as distinct skylines but as symbols of specific ideals and values. A fascinating new study explores this idea through the lens of Soviet propaganda by analyzing which major cities show up the most, and least, in popular ‘Novosti Dnya’ (News of the day) newsreels from 1954 to 1986.

“Cultural representations typically contain illuminating biases,” said researchers led by Mikhail V. Tamm of Tallinn University in Estonia. “For example, geographical locations are unequally portrayed in media, creating a distorted representation of the world. Identifying and measuring such biases is crucial to understanding both the data and the socio-cultural processes behind them.”

“Newsreels—short news films shown in cinemas before the evening’s feature film—were influential means of depicting the world for the cinema-goers in the twentieth century, visualizing events, individuals and places that the spectators could read about in the newspapers,” the team continued. “Throughout almost all history of the Soviet Union, the production system and censorship made sure that newsreels reflected the policies of the leadership.”

In other words, these newsreels were designed to communicate the innate “social, economic, political and cultural superiority of the communist system,” according to the study. It’s perhaps no surprise that the Soviet Union’s two most iconic cities—the modern capital Moscow and the past capital St. Petersburg—were disproportionately represented based on a population analysis.

Moscow was visually displayed or mentioned 2,831 times in the team’s newsreel sample, while St. Petersburg trailed at a distance with 339 mentions. These heavy-hitters were followed by Kyiv (95), Riga (73), Minsk (72), and Volgograd (62). Meanwhile, the most-commonly displayed foreign cities (from a Soviet perspective) were led by satellite state capitals Warsaw (64), Berlin (62), and Prague (51), followed by Paris (39), New York City (29), and Tokyo (16).

“Contrary to the messaging of the official Soviet ideology, which emphasized equality of nations and anticolonial movement, the silently sold Soviet worldview is heavily centered on Europe being in the role of a privileged or hierarchically higher ‘Other,’ Tamm and his colleagues noted.

“We found that this profound East–West asymmetry is surprisingly underreported in the post-colonial studies of the USSR.”

The team also found overrepresentation in cities with major construction projects, such as the Siberian cities Bratsk and Krasnoyarsk, while other “heartland” regions like the Donbas in Ukraine and Rostov oblast in Russia were given short shrift because they lacked “clear ideological importance beyond their industrial role.”

“Finally, in some cases places are overmentioned seemingly just because it is convenient (close to Moscow) or pleasant (Baltic and Black Sea coasts) to film there,” the team concluded.

Anyway, what a cool and random topic to study. While it is niche, the study offers an opportunity to reflect on the thousands of visual messages we absorb every day and the larger portrait they paint.

In other news…

You’re guano want to read this study

Bongers, Jacob L. et al. “Seabirds shaped the expansion of pre-Inca society in Peru.” PLOS One.

Seabird excrement is a cheat code to civilization, according to a new study that directly linked the guano trade to flourishing empires of Peru’s Chincha Valley.

“Recent research suggests that guano fertilization may have begun by at least 1000 CE in Tarapacá, northern Chile, yet the origins and regional importance of this fertilizer are poorly understood,” said researchers led by Jacob L. Bongers of the University of Sydney. “Using archaeological, historical, and isotopic data from the Chincha Valley, Peru, we ask: to what extent did seabird guano shape the development of pre-Hispanic societies in the Andes?”

Answer: A lot. Guano, which is sometimes called “white gold” because it is so valuable as a fertilizer, was essential to ensuring an abundance of crops like maize, making it “a potentially widespread driving force of social change among pre-Hispanic societies.”
The primary guano-producing bird species (left to right) – the Peruvian booby (Sula variegata), the Peruvian pelican (Pelecanus thagus), and the Guanay cormorant (Leucocarbo bougainvilliorum). Image: Diego H. (left and right) and Claude Kolwelter (center), iNaturalist.org. Licensed under CC-BY 4.0.
“Our multidisciplinary dataset provides strong support for pre-Inca seabird guano fertilization, an effective agricultural practice for boosting crop production that is more commonly associated with industrial societies,” the team concluded. In short, it’s good shit.

In addition to these Inca precursors, the researchers noted that the Inca also prized guano, outlawing the killing of guano birds “under penalty of death.” As the saying goes, an eye for a bird bum.

You’ve reached Mars, please hold

Ferguson, Alexander H. Ferdinand and Haqq-Misra, Jacob. “Cooperative sovereignty on Mars: Lessons from the International Telecommunication Union and Universal Postal Union.” Acta Astronautica.

After years of hyping Mars, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk pivoted away from the red planet this week because it is “much faster to complete a Moon city than a Mars city.” But the dream of human settlements on Mars lives on in a new study that uses, of all things, the International Telecommunication Union and the Universal Postal Union as case studies for our Martian future.

“We proceed from the assumption that future Martian settlers, whether national or corporate, will be primarily driven by self-interest, competition, and a desire for strategic or economic advantage,” said authors Alexander H. Ferdinand Ferguson and Jacob Haqq-Misra of the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science. “We do not assume an inherent desire for equitable sharing.”

“However, we argue that the Martian environment itself imposes a unique and brutal logic that compels cooperation on a foundational technical level,” they added. “On Earth, non-cooperation on technical standards typically leads to inefficiency; on Mars, it can lead to catastrophic, mission-ending failure.”

The study goes on to point to the two expansive unions as “powerful historical precedents” for establishing clear standards between independent actors that are operating without a central territorial government which they say is “one of the challenges Mars settlements will face.”

Who knows if the rubber will ever meet the regolith on these ideas, but I’m personally more comfortable looking to international telecom and postal unions for guidance on governance than space billionaires.

Behold the Jovian vortex crystals

Benzeggouta, Djihane et al. “A laboratory model for Jovian polar vortex crystals.” Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

This week in science from the enchanted spellbook, astronomers have concocted miniature vortex crystals from outer space right here on Earth. Though they sound like hex ingredients, these crystals are actually enormous cyclonic storms that rage at Jupiter’s poles, which cluster together into intricate patterns of equilateral triangles, inspiring the distinctive name.

Now, scientists led by Djihane Benzeggouta of Aix Marseille University have “experimentally reproduced long-lived vortex crystals like those at Jupiter’s poles” in fluid tanks with a mix of fresh and saltwater, according to the new work.
An explanation of the experiment and observations of its vortex crystals. Image: Benzeggouta, Djihane et al.
“We present an experimental model in which three similar cyclonic vortices are released into the upper layer of a rotating, two-layer stratified fluid system with a free upper surface, and spontaneously organize into a stable, long-lived vortex crystal,” the team said. “Long-lived” in this case means that the crystals persisted for hundreds of rotations, translating to several minutes.

“Achieving the spontaneous emergence of vortices and crystals from background turbulence remains the ultimate goal,” the researchers concluded.

And on some basic level, isn’t the emergence of crystals from background turbulence the ultimate goal for us all?

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

First Contact

A narrative and visual exploration of humanity’s age-old search for and fixation with extraterrestrials.First Contact explores the ancient idea—and epic ...

^{Hachette Book Group}

404 Media

2026-02-11 16:42:11

A Mystery Inside Earth’s Core Has Finally Been Solved With a Mind-Boggling Discovery

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For decades, scientists have puzzled over the “density deficit” in Earth’s core, an unexplained discrepancy between the expected density of a solid iron core and the much lower density that is actually observed through seismic measurements of our planet’s center.

Now, scientists have provided some of the best experimental evidence yet that this deficit can be explained by vast oceans of hydrogen that are locked within the core, significantly lowering its overall density, according to a study published on Tuesday in Nature Communications.

In addition to constraining this longstanding problem, the research reveals new insights about another persistent mystery: the original source of Earth’s liquid water, the key ingredient that enabled life on our planet to emerge.

“Hydrogen has long been considered a major light-element candidate to account for the observed density deficit in Earth’s core,” said researchers led by Dongyang Huang, an assistant professor of Earth and space sciences at Peking University, in the new study. “For decades, however, our knowledge of the exact content of H in planetary cores has been hindered by the inability to unambiguously quantify H in high-pressure samples.”

To solve this problem, the researchers performed a series of experiments that simulated the extreme environment in the core during Earth’s formation billions of years ago. This approach involved heating up iron metal with lasers to a fully-molten state that resembles ancient Earth’s inner magma ocean, which reached temperatures up to 8,700°F, and pressures more than a million times more intense than those we experience on Earth’s surface.

The team then searched for the presence of hydrogen in nanostructures made primarily of silicon and oxygen. The results revealed that the core’s hydrogen percentage sits between 0.07 to 0.36 percent, which works out to roughly nine-to-45 times the amount of the hydrogen in all of Earth’s oceans.

But perhaps the most tantalizing part of the study is its implications for understanding the enigmatic origins of Earth’s water, the wellspring of life on our world.

Some theories suggest that Earth’s water was primarily delivered from extraterrestrial sources, such as comets and asteroids that impacted our planet as it was forming more than four billion years ago. An alternate possibility is that Earth’s water was largely sourced from its building blocks, including vast interior reservoirs of hydrogen. This latter scenario is supported by the new study.

“Although 71 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by ocean, mainly made of H, it has been argued that the majority of Earth’s H had been stored in the core since its formation, ~4.5 billion years ago,” the researchers said.

The estimates presented in the study “require the Earth to obtain the majority of its water from the main stages of terrestrial accretion, instead of through comets during late addition,” the team concluded.

The study certainly helps tackle the mystery of the precise contents of Earth’s core, though the authors note that their estimate has large uncertainties that will need to be further narrowed down in future work. They also suggest that hydrogen alone cannot explain the density deficit, and that other light elements or compounds, including water, might be contributing to the discrepancy.

“Compared to existing models for Earth’s core composition this is a somewhat less H-rich core, and requires its density deficit to be accounted for by a mixture of light elements, rather than a single light species, akin to that of Mars’ core,” the team said in the study.

Given that water is essential to all life on Earth, solving the riddle of its origins is the first step to understanding how our planet came to be inhabited, and whether other planets may commonly go through the same process.

Experimental quantification of hydrogen content in the Earth’s core - Nature Communications

Earth’s core is arguably the largest reservoir of hydrogen (H) on the planet. Experiments show that H sequestration is coupled with those of Si and O, enabling the core to store the equivalent of dozens of Earth’s oceans.

^Nature

404 Media

2026-02-07 14:00:21

As Space Tourism Looms, Scientists Ask: Should We Have Sex In Orbit?

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that had off-Earth offspring, took stock of a mortal threat, productively slept, and sought out old friends.

First, what to expect when you’re expecting a star child. Then: how to fight cancer, the nap-plications of lucid dreaming, and why old rats don’t make new friends.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.

How to make babies in space (Don’t)

Palmer, Giles Anthony et al. “Reproductive biomedicine in space: implications for gametogenesis, fertility and ethical considerations in the era of commercial spaceflight.” Reproductive BioMedicine Online.

It’s hard enough to have babies on Earth, let alone off it. But if humans ever do expand beyond our planet to live in orbital outposts or on other planets, we would presumably want to build healthy families there. Even in the near term, it is conceivable that space will be flooded by rich tourists eager to join the 250-mile-high club, raising questions about how to practice safe space sex (or if that is even possible).

In a new study, scientists review the medical and ethical challenges of space reproduction, noting that while space sex is “often overshadowed by sensationalized or speculative portrayals, the topic…nonetheless demands serious attention.”

“Space is toxic to terrestrial life. It is an inherently hostile environment for terrestrial biology to thrive,” said researchers led by Giles Anthony Palmer of the International IVF Initiative Inc. “The microgravity, cosmic radiation, circadian disruption, pressure differentials, and extreme temperatures found in orbit or beyond present unique and multifactorial stressors to the human body.”

“As we enter a new era of space exploration, defined by longer missions, broader participation, and eventual human settlement beyond Earth, the question is not simply whether reproduction can occur in space, but whether human fertility can be preserved, protected and comprehensively understood in an environment fundamentally different from that in which our species evolved,” the team added.

The study provides a comprehensive review of how various space environments might impact fertility, pregnancy, labor, and health outcomes of children. For example, studies of rodent reproduction in space show higher risks of abnormal cell division and impaired development; meanwhile, the inherent dangers of pregnancy and labor are significantly amplified in space environments.

“The question of whether humanity should reproduce beyond Earth is no longer hypothetical—it is a pressing ethical frontier,” the team concluded. “In the context of commercial spaceflight, where ambition often outpaces caution, the stakes are higher than ever. Without robust frameworks, rigorous research, and a deeply human commitment to ethical principles, there is a risk of exporting not just life but injustice, exploitation and harm into the cosmos. To be worthy of the stars, we must earn our place, not only through technological prowess, but through ethical wisdom.”

In other news…

Let’s get cancer’s ass

Fink, Hanna et al. “Global and regional cancer burden attributable to modifiable risk factors to inform prevention.” Nature Medicine.

Roughly ten million people die from cancer each year, making it a leading cause of morbidity worldwide. While many cancers are not preventable, scientists set out to estimate just how much of the global cancer burden can be attributable to “modifiable risk factors,” meaning behavioral, environmental, or occupational factors that influence the odds of developing cancer.

The results revealed that “nearly 4 in 10 cancer cases worldwide in 2022 could have been prevented by eliminating exposure to the risk factors considered in this study,” which include smoking, alcohol consumption, and contaminated environments, said researchers led by Hanna Fink of the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer.

“Smoking (15.1%), infections (10.2%) and alcohol consumption (3.2%) were the leading contributors to cancer burden,” the team added. “Lung, stomach, and cervical cancers represented nearly half of preventable cancers. Strengthening efforts to reduce modifiable exposures remains central to global cancer prevention.”

The researchers also found “obvious gendered patterns in causes of cancer” such as higher rates of smoking and alcohol consumption in men, and higher BMI in women. While there is an enduring allure to the idea of a cancer cure-all, this study underscores that the disease emerges from a complex interplay of factors, only some of which are under our control.

To sleep, perchance to lucid dream

Konkoly, Karen R. et al. “Creative problem-solving after experimentally provoking dreams of unsolved puzzles during REM sleep.” Neuroscience of Consciousness.

Scientists have gone ahead and done an Inception. In a new study, 20 experienced lucid dreamers were presented with puzzles matched with sound cues, which were then played as the participants slept to help them crack unsolved tasks in their dreams.
Figure illustrating the experiment design. Image: Konkoly, Karen R. et al.
“Whereas dream content is notoriously difficult to control experimentally, here we induced dreams about specific puzzles by presenting associated sounds during REM sleep,” said researchers led by Karen R. Konkoly of Northwestern University. “We preferentially recruited experienced lucid dreamers, intending for them to receive our real-time instructions in their dreams about which puzzles to volitionally attempt to solve.”

“Although many participants did not experience lucid dreams, we nevertheless found that cues successfully influenced dream content, biasing dreaming toward specific puzzles,” the team added. “Moreover, when puzzles were incorporated into dreams, they were more likely to be solved the next morning.”

Yet more evidence for the most broadly applicable advice to humanity: sleep on it.

Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a maze

Gupta, Subhadeep Dutta et al. “When Familiar Faces Feel Better: A Framework for Social Neurocognitive Aging in a Rat Model.” eNeuro.

People get set in their ways as they get older—and that’s apparently true for rats, according to this new research. To probe the effects of age on mammalian social behavior, researchers obtained 169 male rats in two age cohorts: “young adults” at six months old and “aged” rats that were way over the hill at two years old.

A series of rat mixers in water mazes revealed that the rodent elders were as likely to interact with rats as youngsters, but nearly half of them preferred to mingle with rats that were familiar to them, rather than socializing with new faces.

“Results for the aged rats were strikingly different from young in two ways,” said researchers led by Subhadeep Dutta Gupta of the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore. “First, as a group, aged rats failed to display a reliable social novelty preference overall” and “second, inter-individual variability was significantly greater among old animals, with nearly half exhibiting a phenotype not seen in the young group, comprising an apparent social bias for the familiar conspecific.”

I think we can all relate to an occasional social bias for familiar conspecifics. To that end, the study concludes with a truth bomb: “It is important to recognize that a brief session of social interaction with a stranger inevitably falls short in matching the depth of familiarity established through enduring human social relationships.”

In the words of the ultimate rat elder, Master Splinter: “Help each other, draw upon one another, and always remember the true force that binds you.”

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

First Contact

A narrative and visual exploration of humanity’s age-old search for and fixation with extraterrestrials.First Contact explores the ancient idea—and epic ...

^{Hachette Book Group}

404 Media

2026-02-04 15:53:58

Scientists Keep Discovering Mysterious Ancient Tunnels Across Europe

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Archeologists in Germany have unearthed a mysterious underground tunnel built centuries ago within a prehistoric burial ground, marking a “very special” discovery according to a recent release from the State Office for Monument Preservation and Archaeology (LDA) of Saxony-Anhalt.

The buried tunnel measures about two-feet wide and four-feet high, and was likely constructed anywhere between 800 to 1,100 years ago near the town of Reinstedt. Archeologists found pottery that dates to about the 13th or 14th century in the chamber, and also discovered a separate cavity that contained a horseshoe, a fox skeleton, and some small mammal bones. A layer of charcoal in the tunnel suggests that fires were once lit in this space.

The tunnel is just one of hundreds of similar structures, known as erdstalls, that have been discovered across Europe. Fascinatingly, nobody knows what function they served, with the debated possibilities including use as hideaways or sites for cultic activity. Erdstalls are “man-made underground tunnel systems, sometimes with chamber-like extensions,” said Jochen Fahr, an archaeologist at LDA who organized the excavation in an email to 404 Media. “Around a dozen such findings are known from the federal state of Saxony-Anhalt, which means that the density of these structures is lower in our region than it is in others. Their function has not yet been clarified and may also vary from case to case.”

“Possible interpretations include hiding places in case of danger or storage cellars,” Fahr continued. “A cultic-religious function could also be possible, as a kind of Christian chapel. The interpretation of these structures is made more difficult by the fact that the examples known to us contain little or no archaeological finds, which makes it very difficult to draw any firm conclusions on their function.”
The horse shoe and pottery found in the erdstall. Image: © State Office for Monument Preservation and Archaeology of Saxony-Anhalt, Ulf Petzschmann.
Researchers initially set out to survey this site last year before the construction of wind turbines in the area. The site was already known as the location of a trapezoidal ditch that was used as a burial ground by the Baalberge people, who lived in Saxony-Anhalt during the Neolithic period of prehistory 6,000 years ago.

“In the course of the site‘s further investigation and documentation, the erdstall was discovered,” Fahr explained. “It had been dug into the southern part of the trapezoidal ditch thousands of years after the ditch‘s construction. Initially, the erdstall appeared as a well-defined elongated oval pit, about two meters long and up to 75 centimeters wide, which cut the older ditch almost at right angles.”

“This led to the assumption that it could be a burial—but the fact that the finding then turned out to be something completely different, that it was in fact an erdstall, was an unexpected surprise that caused fascination and excitement among the team,” he added.
A section of the underground passage with a pointed gable and a small niche in the wall. The passage is approximately one meter high and 50 to 70 centimeters wide. Image © State Office for Monument Preservation and Archaeology of Saxony-Anhalt, Ulf Petzschmann.
The team speculated that the people who dug out this passageway may have deliberately selected the ancient burial ground as a secret hideaway. The area may have been “generally avoided by the population due to its special nature—perhaps a pagan burial site—and was therefore particularly suitable as a hiding place,” according to the press release.

Hundreds of erdstalls have been found across Europe, and they are often associated with local folklore passed down across generations. Because the tunnels are normally extremely narrow, some legends cast erdstalls as home to dwarfs, goblins, and other diminutive mythical creatures, which is why they are known as Schratzlloch (goblin holes) or Zwergloch (dwarf holes) in some regions.

Some of the most famous examples include the Beate Greithanner erdstall, a passage that was discovered in 2011 after a dairy cow fell into it. The Ratgöbluckn erdstall in Austria is one of the rare passages that is big enough to safely accommodate tourists.
The Ratgöbluckn erdstall. Image: Pfeifferfranz
The new erdstall found at Reinstedt deepens the mystery of these structures, which have intrigued archeologists for decades and still remain largely unexplained.

“The excavation has been completed, the team is currently in the process of evaluating the findings and finds,” Fahr said. “In this context, my colleagues are also in the process of delving deeper into the topic of the erdstall, based on the latest literature on the subject, for example. A scholarly publication is planned.”

“It is also hoped that further findings in the future will help us to better understand the phenomenon of erdstalls and, in particular, to further clarify their function,” he concluded.

Experts Baffled by Mysterious Underground Chambers

Are they hideouts or sacred spaces?

^{ABC News}

404 Media

2026-01-30 16:42:07

Dozens of Bizarre Ancient Lifeforms Discovered in ‘Extraordinary’ Fossil Find

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Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that roamed a superocean, took to the skies, grabbed some grub, and watched alien auroras.

First, check out some 512-million-year-old guts, brains, and tentacles. Gnarly! Then, dig into the mega-importance of Microraptor, some entomological edibles, and more weird radio signals from outer space.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.

Blast from the Cambrian past

Zeng, Han and Liu, Qi et al. “A Cambrian soft-bodied biota after the first Phanerozoic mass extinction.” Nature.

Paleontologists have discovered the remains of a vibrant ecosystem that existed more than half a billion years ago, revealing dozens of strange species that have never been seen in the fossil record before.

Found in the southern mountains of China’s Huayuan County, this fossilized snapshot offers an unprecedented glimpse of the creatures that were crawling (or swimming, or slithering, etc.) through the oceans 512 million years ago, during the Cambrian period, when complex life on Earth first went into overdrive.

Between 2021 and 2024, paleontologists unearthed thousands of specimens at this site, which yielded “remarkable taxonomic richness, comprising 153 animal species…among which 59 percent of species are new,” according to researchers co-led by Han Zeng and Qi Liu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Many of the same animals have been found at other Cambrian sites—such as Canada’s famous Burgess Shale—suggesting that species dispersed widely through the vast superocean that existed at this time, traveling by ocean currents or even “floating rafts,” the team said.

Not only is this ecosystem notably diverse, but the fossils have remained unusually intact in the ancient mudstone, allowing for the preservation of soft tissues like tentacles, guts, and a nearly-complete nervous system found in one arthropod.

“The biota is comprised overwhelmingly of soft-bodied forms that include preserved cellular tissues” in a state of “extraordinary soft-tissue preservation,” the team said.

The middle Cambrian period famously featured an “explosion” of complex Earthlings that rapidly proliferated from about 538 to 518 million years ago. While 20 million years is a long time from a human perspective, this was a sudden and dramatic event for life on Earth as a whole, which had previously been confined to microbial form for billions of years. The newly-discovered Huayuan biota lived in the wake of the explosion and a subsequent collapse, a mass extinction called the Sinsk event.

There are way too many cool finds in this study to summarize in one humble newsletter, so I will close this up with one of my absolute favorite Cambrian weirdos: Herpetogaster, a phantasmagorical creature of tubes and tentacles depicted in the below illustration that I offer without comment.
Herpetogaster doing whatever Herpetogaster does. Image: Marianne Collins - PLoS One
“The enigmatic cambroernid Herpetogaster—an iconic taxon first described from the Burgess Shale—is represented by over 100 specimens in the Huayuan biota, making it the most abundant entirely soft-bodied species,” said the team.

Forget gold, oil, and diamonds. There is no richer vein to tap than the Herpetogaster mother lode.

In other news…

Microraptor: the original early bird

Hefler, Csaba et al. “Microraptor reveals specialized gliding capabilities in multiwinged early paravians.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Speaking of enchanting extinct animals, let’s glide forward in time to the early Cretaceous period, when the dinosaur Microraptor was on the wing—or more accurately, four wings. Unlike pterosaurs or birds, which sport just one pair of wings, Microraptor evolved feathered wings on both its fore and hind limbs, a body plan that has long fascinated paleontologists.
Act casual when confronted by dinosaurian raptors of various scales (Microraptor is #1). Image: Fred Wierum
To get a better handle on how Microraptor took to the sky, researchers led by Csaba Hefler of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology modelled its possible flight dynamics and demonstrated “the potential for beneficial interactions between the forewing and hindwing” that helped this airborne predator attack its prey.

“The specialization of the hindwing to accommodate the downstream extended tip vortex for a wide range of angles of attack is to our knowledge unique among flying animals, including four-winged insects,” the team said. “Our results suggest that greater utilization of unsteady aerodynamic features was potentially a crucial milestone of early flight development.”

Respect to this deft handler of the downstream vortex. As its name implies, Microraptor was very small, but to its prey, it was a terrifying portent of death from on high.

Grub’s up

De Oliveira, Pamela Barroso et al.“The use of edible insects in human food.” Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture.

Pass the beetle sausage and butter the larva bread, because it’s time to embrace your inner insectivore. Insects have been part of the human diet for ages—many are considered delicacies—but they have become taboo and reviled as a food source in many Western societies that view insects with disgust.

In a new study, scientists advise that we get over the ick factor, as insects could play an important part in maintaining food security in the coming decades.

“More than 2,000 insect species have been identified as safe for human consumption, offering a wide range of nutrients, including proteins, lipids, minerals, and vitamins at different life stages such as eggs, larvae, pupae, and adults,” said researchers led by Pamela Barroso de Oliveira of the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil.

“In addition to their nutritional value, insect-based food production presents several environmental advantages, including lower water consumption, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, and higher feed conversion efficiency,” they add.
Breads made with various insect flours. Image: Machado and Thys
The study includes pictures of ground cricket, mealworm sausage, and breads made from various insect-enriched flours. Look, I’m not exactly craving crickets, but maybe we should take a lesson from Simba in The Lion King, who manages to avenge a murder and reclaim a throne on what is apparently an entirely grub-based diet. Bon appetit!

A glimpse of alien auroras

Tasse, Cyril et al. “The detection of circularly polarized radio bursts from stellar and exoplanetary systems.” Nature Astronomy.

We’ll close, as all things should, with exciting radio signals from faraway planets.

Since the Sun spits out flares—sparking storms and brilliant auroras on Earth and other planets—scientists have wondered whether they might be able to detect the faint effects of analogous activity in other star systems. Now, one team thinks they have spotted these elusive signals.

“In the Solar System, low-frequency radio emission at frequencies ≲200 MHz is produced by acceleration processes in the Sun and in planetary magnetospheres,” said researchers led by Cyril Tasse of Sorbonne University. “Such emission has been actively searched for in other stellar systems, as it could potentially enable the study of the interactions between stars and the magnetospheres of their exoplanets.”

The team developed a new analysis method for analyzing archival data, which revealed events that are “fully compatible with radio emission generated by star–planet interactions, although an intrinsic stellar origin is still a possible explanation,” according to the study.

In other words, it will take more research to confirm the origin of this radio emission. But we may be getting a glimpse of the space weather beyond the interstellar horizon.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

First Contact

A narrative and visual exploration of humanity’s age-old search for and fixation with extraterrestrials.First Contact explores the ancient idea—and epic ...

^{Hachette Book Group}

404 Media

2026-01-26 22:13:10

Dozens of CDC Health Databases Have Gone Dark Under Trump: ‘The Consequences Will Be Dire’

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Researchers are raising alarms over “unexplained pauses” that have interrupted dozens of U.S. federal health surveillance databases covering vaccinations and overdose deaths during the second Trump administration. The breakdown is creating critical gaps in public health according to a study published on Monday in Annals of Internal Medicine.

During 2025, nearly half (46 percent) of 82 routinely-updated databases managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) experienced delays or total cessations of new data, an interdisciplinary team reports in their new audit. The majority (87 percent) of the affected databases monitor vaccination-related topics, and most experienced data blackouts for a period of more than six months as of late October 2025.

“Such long pauses may have compromised evidence for decision making and policies by clinicians, administrators, professional organizations, and policymakers,” wrote the researchers led by Jeremy W. Jacobs, an assistant professor of pathology, microbiology and immunology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

“Without current data on disease burden, vaccination coverage, behavioral health indicators, and demographic disparities, clinicians cannot identify emerging threats or focus on meeting the needs of specific populations,” the team continued. “Without safeguards, unexplained pauses in surveillance undermine evidence-based medicine and erode public trust at a time when both are critically needed.”

The affected CDC databases collect surveillance information from hospitals, research centers, and other sources to monitor dangerous situations—like infectious disease outbreaks or upticks in drug overdoses—and provide real-time aid and guidance to assist local health authorities. As of December 2025, only one of the paused databases identified in the October survey had been updated.

Over the course of the past year, the team wrote, federal health databases have seen "unprecedented removal and undocumented alteration.” They speculated that the interruptions are related to the Trump administration’s major cuts to federal staff and budgets across the U.S. government, including at the CDC and the National Institute of Health, which likely played a role in disrupting data collection and updates to technical infrastructure.

The disproportionate impact on vaccination-related databases also reflect the priorities of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary, who has spread misinformation about vaccines, reduced the childhood vaccine schedule, and fired leading scientific advisors and CDC officials who have pushed back on his views.

“Vaccination tracking is particularly vulnerable because it requires ongoing coordination across federal, state, and health care system data sources,” the researchers said. “Vaccination surveillance identifies groups with greater challenges to access and equity by stratifying by age, race and ethnicity, geographic jurisdiction, and insurance coverage. The ability to address these disparities has been compromised precisely when such information is most needed to counter misinformation and target outreach.”

In an editorial published alongside the study, Jeanne Marrazzo, a physician and CEO of the Infectious Disease Society of America, called the new study “damning” and said it exposed “tampering with evidence” and “selective silencing." She warns that the loss of updated data in these systems could lead to “dire” consequences, including delayed responses to disease outbreaks, and a loss of public trust in federal health institutions.

“The administration’s antivaccine stance has interrupted the reliable flow of the data we need to keep Americans safe from preventable infections,” said Marrazzo, who was not an author of the study.

“The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary, who has stated baldly that the CDC failed to protect Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic, is now enacting a self-fulfilling prophecy,” she warned. “The CDC as it currently exists is no longer the stalwart, reliable source of public health data that for decades has set the global bar for rigorous public health practice.”

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2026-01-24 14:00:33

Scientists Discovered a Cow That Uses Tools Like a Chimpanzee

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that scratched the sweet spot, extended a hand, went over the hill, and ended up on Mercury.

First, a clever cow single-hoofedly upends assumptions about bovine intelligence. Next, we’ve got the oldest rock art ever discovered, the graying of modern zoos, and the delightfully named phenomena of bursty bulk flows.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.

Cows use tools? You herd it here first

Osuna-Mascaró, Antonio J. et al. “Flexible use of a multi-purpose tool by a cow.” Current Biology.

Veronika, a Swiss brown cow that lives in a rural mountain village in Austria, is the first cow to demonstrate tool use. How udderly amoosing!

Veronkia’s owner Witgar Wiegele, who keeps her as a pet companion, noticed years ago that she likes to pick up sticks with her mouth in order to reach hard-to-scratch places on her body.

The hills were soon alive with word of Veronika’s tool-using prowess, attracting the attention of researchers Antonio Osuna-Mascaró and Alice Auersperg of the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna.

Tool use is a sign of advanced cognition that has been observed in many animals, including primates, orcas, and birds. But cows, with their vacant expressions and docile nature, have been overlooked as likely tool users, except as a joke in Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoons.

In their new study, Osuna-Mascaró and Auersperg presented Veronika with a deck brush, which she proceeded to use as a scratching tool in a variety of configurations.
youtube.com/embed/bAk4PFEuWKQ?…
“We hypothesized that she would target difficult-to-reach body regions and use the more effective brushed end over the stick end,” the researchers said. “Veronika’s behavior went beyond these predictions, however, showing versatility, anticipation, and fine motor targeting.”

“Unexpectedly and revealingly, Veronika’s tool-end use depended strongly on body region: she predominantly used the brush end for upper-body scratching and the stick end for lower areas, such as the udder and belly skin flaps,” they added. “Importantly, the differential use of both broom ends constitutes the use of a multipurpose tool, exploiting distinct properties of a single object for different functions. Comparable behavior has only been consistently documented in chimpanzees.”

I recommend reading the study in full, as it is not very long and contains ample video footage demonstrating Veronika’s mastery of the deck brush. The authors seem genuinely enraptured by her talents and, frankly, it’s hard to blame them for milking the discovery. Overall, the findings serves as a reminder not to cowtow to stereotypes of braindead bovines, a point made by the study’s bullish conclusion:

“Despite millennia of domestication for productivity, livestock have been almost entirely excluded from discussions of animal intelligence,” Osuna-Mascaró and Auersperg said. “Veronika’s case challenges this neglect, revealing that technical problem-solving is not confined to large-brained species with manipulative hands or beaks.”

“She did not fashion tools like the cow in Gary Larson’s cartoon, but she selected, adjusted, and used one with notable dexterity and flexibility,” they concluded. “Perhaps the real absurdity lies not in imagining a tool-using cow, but in assuming such a thing could never exist.”

Now that’s something to ruminate on.

In other news…

Hands of ancients

Oktaviana, A.A., Joannes-Boyau, R., Hakim, B. et al. “Rock art from at least 67,800 years ago in Sulawesi.” Nature.

Archaeologists have discovered the oldest known rock art, which are very faint hand stencils made by humans 68,000 years ago on a cave wall on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

For comparison, the next oldest rock art, located in Spain and attributed to Neanderthals, is roughly 66,000 years old. The newly-dated hand stencils were made by a mysterious group of people who eventually migrated across the lost landmass of Sahul, which is now submerged, and reached Australia.

The find supports a “growing view that Sulawesi was host to a vibrant and longstanding artistic culture,” said researchers co-led by Adhi Agus Oktaviana and Budianto Hakim of Indonesia's National Agency for Research and Innovation, and Renaud Joannes-Boyau of Southern Cross University.

“The presence of this extremely old art in Sulawesi suggests that the initial peopling of Sahul about 65,000 years involved maritime journeys between Borneo and Papua, a region that remains poorly explored from an archaeological perspective,” the team added.

Though the stencils are extremely faint and obscured by younger paintings, it’s still eerie to see the contours of human hands from a long-lost era when dire wolves and Siberian unicorns still roamed our world.

Zoo animals get long in the tooth

Meireles, João Pedro et al. “Aging populations threaten conservation goals of zoos.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Speaking of really old stuff, there has been much consternation of late about falling birth rates and aging populations in many nations around the world. As it turns out, similar demographic anxieties are playing out in zoos across Europe and North America, where mammal populations “have, on average, become older and less reproductively active” according to a new study.

On the one hand, this is good news because it signals improvements in the health and longevity of mammals in zoos, reflecting a long-term effort to transform zoos into conservation hubs as opposed to sites of spectacle. But it also “fundamentally jeopardizes the long-term capacity of zoos to harbor insurance populations, facilitate reintroductions of threatened species, and simply maintain a variety of self-sustaining species programs,” said researchers led by João Pedro Meireles of the University of Zurich.

This story struck me because of my many childhood visits to see an Asian elephant named Lucy, who was the star of the Edmonton Valley Zoo when I was young (I am now old). I recently learned Lucy is still chilling there at the ripe old age of 50! This is positively Methuselan for a zoo elephant, though it is not an unusual age for them in the wild. Lucy is the perfect poster child (or rather, poster senior) for this broader aging effect. Long may she reign.

Bust out the bursty bulk flow

Williamson, Hayley N. et al. “BepiColombo at Mercury: Three Flybys, Three Magnetospheres.” Geophysical Research Letters.

We’ll close with a reminder that the planet Mercury exists.

It can be easy to overlook this tiny rock, which is barely bigger than the Moon. But Mercury is dynamic and full of surprises, according to a study based on close flybys of the planet by BepiColombo, a collaborative space mission between Europe and Japan, which is tasked with cracking this mercurial nut.

BepiColombo zoomed just over 100 miles above Mercury’s surface in October 2021, June 2022, and June 2023, but each encounter revealed distinct portraits of the planet’s magnetosphere, which is a magnetic bubble that surrounds some planets, including Earth.

“These flybys all passed from dusk to dawn through the nightside equatorial region but were noticeably different from each other,” said researchers led by Hayley N. Williamson of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics. “Specifically, we see energetic ions in the second and third flybys that are not there in the first.”

“We conclude that these ions are part of a phenomenon called bursty bulk flow, which also happens at Earth,” the team concluded. Bursty bulk flow, in addition to being a fun phrase to say outloud, are intense, transient jets in a magnetosphere that drive energetic particles toward the planet, and are driven by solar activity.

BepiColombo is on track to scooch into orbit around Mercury this November, where it will continue to study the planet up close for years, illuminating this world of extremes. In my hierarchy of Mercurys, the planet sits above the Ford brand, the 80th element, and the Roman god, with only Freddie surpassing it. So, it’s good to see it getting the attention it deserves.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

First Contact

A narrative and visual exploration of humanity’s age-old search for and fixation with extraterrestrials.First Contact explores the ancient idea—and epic ...

^{Hachette Book Group}

404 Media

2026-01-22 19:00:38

Scientists Got Men to Rate Penises by How Intimidating They Are. This Is What They Found.

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When it comes to the evolution of the human penis, size matters.

Scientists have discovered that men with larger penises are not only more attractive to women, they are also deemed more threatening to men, which is “the first experimental evidence that males assess rivals’ fighting ability and attractiveness to females based partly on a rival’s penis size,” according to a study published in PLOS Biology on Thursday.

“In humans, height and body shape are well known to influence attractiveness, but penis size has rarely been tested alongside these traits in a controlled, experimental setup,” said Upama Aich, a behavioral and evolutionary biologist at the University of Western Australia who led the study, in an email to 404 Media.

“What motivated us was the evolutionary puzzle that the human penis is unusually large relative to other primates, which raises the question of whether it signals information beyond its primary reproductive role of sperm transfer,” she added.

Sexual selection, a form of natural selection, is a process in which certain traits that enhance reproductive success—from big antlers to colorful feathers—become amplified in a lineage over time. Male traits may persist both because they are selected by females, which is known as intersexual selection, or because those traits are associated with better success against male rivals, which is called intrasexual selection.

Previous research has presented evidence that bigger penises are more attractive to women, in tandem with characteristics like height and body shape, suggesting that intersexual selection may have played a role in the anomalously large human penis. Aich and her colleagues set out to confirm that result, while also testing out the role of intrasexual selection for the first time.

The researchers recruited more than 600 male and 200 female participants to rate computer-generated male figures with different heights, body shapes, and penis sizes (all shown in a flaccid state). Some participants attended an in-person display of life-size images while others rated the figures on an online platform. Men were asked to assess the figures as potential rivals, while women were asked to rate them as potential mates.

Participants also filled out a questionnaire about their physical characteristics (including height and weight) and sexuality. Given the focus on mates and rivals, the researchers only used responses from self-identified heterosexual males and females in the study.

The team designed the approach with nondescript figures devoid of any personality or identifiable background in part to sidestep the immense cultural weight of the human penis, an anatomical feature endowed with major significance across eras and societies.

“We were very conscious that penis size is culturally loaded and surrounded by myths, humour, and anxiety,” said Aich. “That’s one reason we used anatomically accurate, computer-generated figures: it allowed us to manipulate specific traits independently while controlling for personal identity, social narratives and contextual cues.”

“I do think this cultural baggage has discouraged careful scientific study in sensitive topics in the past, but from an evolutionary perspective, that makes it even more important to examine the question empirically rather than relying on assumptions,” she added.

To that end, the new study confirmed that women generally preferred figures with larger penises in addition to taller figures with more V-shaped bodies. It also revealed for the first time that men factored penis size into their assessment of male rivals, as they rated the figures with larger penises as more threatening rivals. Even more importantly, the men overwhelmingly guessed that the figures with larger penises would be more attractive to women.

According to the researchers, this hints that in our evolutionary past, males may have avoided confrontations with rivals based in part on their penis size in addition to height and body shape. As a consequence, males with larger penises may have secured more access to mates not only due to female preference, but also because they were not challenged by rivals as often. This aspect of male-male competition may have helped to enlarge the human penis over time through selection.

“Previous research had often focused on the effect of penis size on female preferences, so our results that men also use penis size when assessing rivals adds a new dimension to the story,” Aich said. “It suggests penis size is interpreted not only in a sexual context, but also in competitive rival cues.”

“However, the effect of penis size on attractiveness was four to seven times higher than its effect as a signal of fighting ability,” she continued. “This suggests that the enlarged penis in humans may have evolved more in response to its effect as a sexual ornament to attract females than as a badge of status for males, although it does both.”

Aich said her team was most surprised by the consistency of the participants’ responses across many manipulated variables. Similar patterns in the responses showed up regardless of whether the participants were viewing life-sized projections or scaled images online, whether they received payment for the experiment, and across both male and female participants.

“One obvious next step is to study how these visual cues interact with others that matter in real-world interactions, such as facial features, voice, or movement,” she said. “Another open question is how culturally variable these perceptions are, since standards of masculinity and attractiveness differ across societies. A cross-cultural study would be interesting.”

The new study adds to the evidence that both forms of sex selection influenced the size of the human penis, but many other factors also played a role in the development of the organ. For example, penis shape and size may have evolved to scoop the sperm of rival males out of the vaginal canal, or to raise the odds of female orgasm, both of which can contribute to reproductive success.

In other words, both the size of the ship and the motion of the ocean are a part of the complex story of human sexual evolution.

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Experimental evidence that penis size, height, and body shape influence assessment of male sexual attractiveness and fighting ability in humans

Why the human penis is unusually large compared to other primates is a long-standing evolutionary question.

^plos.io

404 Media

2026-01-17 14:00:31

Scientists Make Stunning Find Inside Prehistoric Wolf’s Stomach

Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that entered the belly of the beast, craved human blood, exposed primate bonds, and pranked birds

First, a prehistoric chew toy for a puppy opens a window into a doomed lineage. Then: why saving species could save your own skin, the dazzling diversity of same-sex behavior in primates, and the exploits of asexual yams.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.

I’m so hungry, I could eat a woolly rhinoceros

Guðjónsdóttir, Sólveig et al. “Genome Shows no Recent Inbreeding in Near-Extinction Woolly Rhinoceros Sample Found in Ancient Wolf's Stomach.” Genome Biology and Evolution.

Record scratch, freeze frame: Yep, that's me, an Ice Age woolly rhinoceros in a mummified wolf stomach. You’re probably wondering how I got into this situation. Well, the good news is that it was not because I am inbred, according to a new study.

That’s my pitch for a movie based on the true story of some half-digested woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis) remains that were wolfed down by a permafrost-preserved pupsicle from 14,400 years ago.

Incredibly, scientists were able to sequence the genome of the rhino, which revealed that this individual still had a high level of genetic diversity in its lineage, and no signs of inbreeding. Considering that woolly rhinos vanished from the fossil record around 14,000 years ago, this study suggests that they may have experienced a very sudden population collapse, rather than a gradual demise.
The piece of woolly rhino tissue found inside the stomach of the Tumat-1 puppy. Image: Love Dalén/Stockholm University.
“While Late Pleistocene remains of woolly rhinoceros are numerous, very few remains exist from around the estimated time of extinction,” said researchers led by Sólveig M. Guðjónsdóttir of Stockholm University. At 14,400 years old, the mummified tissue found in the wolf is “one of the youngest known woolly rhinoceros remains.”

“Given our results, we suggest that any change at the genomic level associated with the species extinction must have taken place during the last few hundred years of the species' existence,” the team added. “We conclude that their decline toward extinction likely occurred rapidly after ∼14,400 years ago, most likely driven by rapid changes in environmental conditions.”

In other words, the last supper of a wolf that died when giant ice sheets still covered much of the Northern Hemisphere has opened a window into the rich heritage of this rhinoceros—and the sudden downfall that awaited its relatives.

And for anyone interested in cryptids, the authors note that the “last appearance dates in the fossil record do not exclude the possibility that the species persisted for longer.” Does this mean that woolly rhinos live on in some untrammeled wilderness to this day? Definitely not, they are dunzo. But it does raise the tantalizing question of when and where the last woolly rhino took its final steps, ending a long and storied line.

In other news…

Save wildlife, stay off the menu

Alves, Dálete Cássia Vieira et al. Aspects of the blood meal of mosquitoes (Diptera: culicidae) during the crepuscular period in Atlantic Forest remnants of the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

Here’s one way to get people to care about biodiversity loss: tell them that the mosquitos are out for their blood.

In a new study, scientists captured and studied 145 engorged mosquitoes from a deforested area in Brazil, which revealed a growing reliance on human blood. The results suggest that mosquitoes are more likely to seek out human blood in areas experiencing biodiversity loss.

“In the present study, human blood meals were detected in nine species” including mosquitoes that “spread dengue, yellow fever, Zika, and chikungunya,” said researchers led by Dálete Cássia Vieira Alves of the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro. “The results revealed a clear tendency for the captured mosquito species to feed predominantly on humans.”

“Deforestation reduces local biodiversity, causing mosquitoes, including vectors of pathogenic agents, to disperse and seek alternative food sources…such as humans,” the team said.

In other words, a future of biodiversity collapse is going to be buzzy, and itchy, and deadly, given that mosquitoes are notoriously the most dangerous animals to humans—killing roughly a million people per year—due to their capacity to spread pathogens. It would be great if we could all conserve wildlife for solely altruistic reasons, but a little nightmare fuel is useful in small doses.

Same-sex sexual behavior plays many roles in primates

Coxshall, Chloë et al. “Ecological and social pressures drive same-sex sexual behaviour in non-human primates.” Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Same-sex sexual behavior (SSB) is common in nature—documented in more than 1,500 animals—especially among socially complex species like primates. Now, scientists have presented a comprehensive review of these sexual bonds in dozens of non-human primates, which revealed that the interactions are context-dependent and may serve a variety of evolutionary functions.

“In baboons, for example, females form affiliative networks, through grooming and possibly SSB, to manage group tension, especially during unstable periods such as hierarchical shifts,” said researchers led by Chloë Coxshall of Imperial College London. “Male rhesus macaques use SSB to navigate aggression and shifting dominance by forming coalitions. Those engaging in SSB are more likely to ally and support each other in competition.”

While the study focused on non-human primates, the team also speculated about the possible evolutionary links between SSB in humans and non-human primates, but warned that the study “does not address human sexual orientation, identity or lived experience.”

“While acknowledging that cultural biases have historically shaped how SSB is reported in animals, we hope this study encourages further research into its evolutionary and social roles in primates at large,” the team concluded.

Don’t be deceived by the asexual yams

Chen, Zhi and Chomicki, Guillaume et al. “Berry Batesian mimicry enables bird dispersal of asexual bulbils in a yam.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Even in all of its diverse configurations, sex is simply not everyone’s bag. Lots of species have opted to eschew it entirely in favor of asexually cloning themselves, such as the Asian yam Dioscorea melanophyma.

This yam has evolved a clever technique to disperse its version of “bulbils,” the asexual version of seeds, by dressing them up like berries so that birds will eat them, reports a new study. This helps the plant spread its clones far and wide without the need for sexual reproduction.

“We show that the yam Dioscorea melanophyma—which has lost sexual reproduction—evolved black, glossy bulbils that mimic co-occurring black berries and entice frugivorous birds to ingest and disperse them,” said researchers co-led by Zhi Chen of the Kunming Institute of Botany at the Chinese Academy of Science and Guillaume Chomicki of Durham University.
The false berry “bulbils” of the yam. Image: Gao Chen
The team found that birds preferred real berries “yet they significantly consumed bulbils too” and “could not visually discriminate bulbils from berries.” In this way, the yams use “mimicry to deceive birds and achieve longer dispersal distance,” the study concludes.

It’s amazing how many adaptive strategies boil down to pranking one’s fellow Earthlings. So if you’re a bird, beware the sham yam yums. And if you are looking to name a band, the Asexual Yams is officially out there as an option.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Aspects of the blood meal of mosquitoes (Diptera: culicidae) during the crepuscular period in Atlantic Forest remnants of the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Identifying their food sources provides insights into mosquito foraging behaviors and directly impacts the epidemiology of mosquito-borne pathogens such as d...

^{Dálete Cássia Vieira Alves (Frontiers)}

404 Media

2026-01-14 19:46:53

Strange ‘Little Red Dots’ in Space Have a Mind-Boggling Explanation, Scientists Discover

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Astronomers think they have solved the puzzle of so-called “little red dots” in space, a population of bizarre objects at the very edge of the observable universe, according to a study published on Wednesday in Nature.

The new research suggests that these dots are likely the youngest black holes we have ever glimpsed, which are “cocooned” in dense gas, a never-before-seen phenomenon that sheds light on the early evolution of the universe.

“LRDs were first spotted in 2023 in the first images made with the James Webb Space Telescope,” said Vadim Rusakov, an astronomer at the University of Manchester, in an email to 404 Media. “People have very actively studied these objects since then.”

“They are tiny, bright and red objects seen when the universe was only about 5-15 percent of its current age,” he continued. “They have puzzled astronomers: on one hand, they are too compact and massive for normal galaxies, on the other, they do not look like typical supermassive black holes, because we do not detect their usual signals, such as X-rays. And they are not just a few odd apples—almost every tenth galaxy in the early universe is an LRD.”

These baffling properties have sparked spirited debate about the nature of LRDs. Some studies have suggested they might be exotic star-studded galaxies, or weirdly overmassive black holes.

Hoping to resolve the mystery, Rusakov and his colleagues analyzed JWST observations of more than a dozen of the little red dots across longer timescales. The team confirmed that the dots are likely black holes that are enshrouded by a “cocoon” of energetic gas that can explain their novel properties.

“Our simple solution is: we think that they are massive black holes wrapped in a thick cocoon of dense gas, which makes them appear red and hides the black hole,” Rusakov said. “This idea of the cocoon was inspired by another work that predicted the presence of thick gas. We could check this idea by studying the hydrogen emission from LRDs. This showed us that the cocoon is partly ionised—meaning it has lots of free electrons. This was a surprising discovery, because by scattering light, these electrons hid most useful black hole signals from our sight and also made it appear more evolved than it actually is.”

“By looking inside, we found that these are some of the youngest black holes ever seen,” he added. “This makes them unique laboratories for understanding how black holes got started in the early universe.”
An image of little red dots from JADES 1 The JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (Eisenstein et al. 2023). Image: The CEERS Survey/The JADES Survey/PRIMER Survey/Dawn JWST Archive
In other words, it’s not that these objects aren’t radiating in X-rays, it’s just that those wavelengths are largely blotted out by the gassy cocoons. Moreover, the cocoons warp light from the black holes, making them seem much more massive than they actually are, like some kind of cosmic funhouse mirror. Rusakov and his colleagues calculated that the black holes are probably a few million times as massive as the Sun, more than a hundred times smaller than expected by their appearance.

The findings are part of a wave of discoveries about the early universe primarily fueled by the unparalleled precision and sensitivity of JWST’s infrared vision.

“The first JWST observations caused several debates about how galaxies formed in the early universe, such as whether galaxies grow quicker than we thought,” Rusakov explained. “In fact, some of those initially problematic galaxies turned out to be Little Red Dots. As our study shows, they were misinterpreted as purely stellar galaxies and they are supermassive black holes instead.”

As JWST continues to expose strange new frontiers of the universe, astronomers can determine which anomalies point to novel entities and which, like the little red dots, turn out to be familiar objects going through an unfamiliar phase.

Either way, each breakthrough raises new questions. Rusakov and his colleagues may have identified the origin of the little red dots, but it remains unclear whether these young black holes grow faster than the galaxies associated with them, and what that might mean for our understanding of galactic evolution.

“LRDs show us what the black holes looked like a long time ago, and if we are lucky, they may show us how these massive black holes got started,” Rusakov said. “Just to be clear, even though they are likely the youngest black holes we ever found, they already have masses of a few million Suns.”

“This opens up the next big questions: can we find even smaller black holes with the James Webb Space Telescope? Do black holes start tiny and grow or are they born already quite big?” he added. “These exciting questions will definitely keep us busy for some time.”

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Little red dots as young supermassive black holes in dense ionized cocoons - Nature

The highest-quality JWST spectra reveal that little red dots are young supermassive black holes shrouded in dense cocoons of ionized gas, where electron scattering, not Doppler motions, broadens their spectral lines.

^Nature

404 Media

2026-01-10 14:00:07

‘Gifted’ Dogs Learn Human Language, Study Finds

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that lurked in the dark, pulsated with light, wagged a tail, and called it a night.

First, scientists have yet again spotted a bizarre object in space that has never been seen before—the universe just keeps serving them up. Then: news from the biggest star in the sky, a tale of eavesdropping dogs, and a jellyfish sleepover.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliensor subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.

You don’t want to be on this Cloud-9

Anand, Gagandeep S. et al. “The First RELHIC? Cloud-9 is a Starless Gas Cloud.” The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Astronomers have glimpsed a new type of cosmic object—a starless clump of dark matter that never quite worked up the oomph to become a galaxy. Known as Cloud-9, the entity is located about 14 million light years away and likely provides the first look at an ancient dark matter halo.

Dark matter, as you may have heard, is weird stuff that has never been directly detected or identified, but nonetheless accounts for almost all matter in the universe. In the early universe, clumps of dark matter formed halos that attracted gas, sparked star formation, and evolved into the first galaxies. But while all galaxies appear to have dark matter halos, not all dark matter halos turned into galaxies.

Scientists have long speculated that some halos may have never accumulated the right amount of mass to make a star-studded galaxy. For years, astronomers have searched for the gravitational signatures of these dark starless “failed galaxies,” which are known as Reionization-Limited H I Clouds (RELHICs).

Now, a team reports that the first clear RELHIC candidate ever discovered, providing support for the standard model of cosmology, also known as the Lambda cold dark matter (ΛCDM) model, which is the current working framework of the universe.
Digitized Sky Survey image covering a 10′ × 10′ region around Cloud-9. Image: Anand, Gagandeep S. et al.
“The abundance of halos far exceeds that of known galaxies, implying that not all halos are able to host luminous galaxies,” said researchers led by Gagandeep S. Anand of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “This has been interpreted to mean that galaxies only form in halos that exceed a ‘critical’ mass.’”

“Our results make Cloud-9 the leading RELHIC candidate,” the team continued. “This provides strong support for a cornerstone prediction of the Lambda cold dark matter model, namely the existence of gas-filled starless dark matter halos on subgalactic mass scales, and constrains the present-day threshold halo mass for galaxy formation.”

Cloud-9 might one day accumulate enough mass to pass the threshold for star formation, allowing it to eventually graduate into a galaxy. But for now, it is a galaxy school flunkie.

In other news…

Big star go boom soon

Th van Loon, Jacco et al. “A phoenix rises from the ashes: WOH G64 is still a red supergiant, for now.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

WOH G64, one of the largest stars in the sky, is nearing its death. At about 2,000 times the size of the Sun, this supergiant would extend beyond Saturn if it were placed in our solar system.

Scientists have speculated that the recent dimming of the senescent star might signal a transition from a red supergiant to a yellow hypergiant, making it one step closer to supernova. But a new study reveals evidence that WOH G64 “is currently a red supergiant” and its changing light may be influenced by a companion star in orbit around it, making this a binary system.
Concept art of WOH G64. image: ESO/L. Calçada
“For a long time, WOH G64 was known as the most extreme red supergiant outside our Galaxy,” said researchers led by Jacco Th. van Loon of Keele University. “However, in a matter of years it has faded” and “its pulsations have become suppressed.”

“We have presented evidence that the remarkable changes witnessed in the 21st-century in the optical brightness and spectrum of the most extreme known extragalactic red supergiant, WOH G64 may be due to binary interaction,” the team continued, noting that “we may be witnessing the birth of a…supernova progenitor.”

Fortunately, this time bomb is located 160,000 light years away, so we are well beyond the blast radius. Whenever WOH G64 does explode, the supernova could be bright enough to see with the naked eye from Earth, despite its location far outside the Milky Way.

Learn with doggo-lingo

Dror, Shany et al. “Dogs with a large vocabulary of object labels learn new labels by overhearing like 1.5-year-old infants.” Science.

It’s not your imagination: Your dog might actually be a really good listener. While it’s well-known that dogs respond to a variety of commands, researchers have now demonstrated that some pooches, known as Gifted Word Learners, can pick up new words just by passively overhearing their owners’ conversations.

Over a series of experiments, researchers gave dogs fun toys to play with, which their owners then named in conversations that were not directed at the dogs. The pets were then able to identify the toys by the labels at a rate significantly above what would be expected by chance, even though they had never been directly taught the words.
A dog that participated in the study, enjoying the toys. Image: Don Harvey
The findings suggest that some dogs may have sociocognitive skills parallel to young toddlers, and further confirms that a variety of animals can demonstrate various degrees of language comprehension. But the best part is the following detail about how the effervescent joy of dogs was accounted for in the experimental design.

“Because dogs are neophilic and often get excited by new toys, we gave them ample opportunities to interact with the toys without hearing their labels,” said researchers led by Shany Dror of University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna.

Science completed? Check. Dogs got loads of playtime? Check. Win-win.

Jellyfish naps > cat naps

Aguillon, Raphaël et al. “DNA damage modulates sleep drive in basal cnidarians with divergent chronotypes.” Nature Communications.

We’ll close by yawning and going back to bed—a waterbed in this case, because this is a story about the sleep cycles of marine animals. To probe the broader evolutionary purpose of sleep, scientists monitored periods of slumber and wakefulness in the upside-down jellyfish Cassiopea andromeda and the anemone Nematostella vectensis.

The results revealed that these animals had remarkably similar sleeping habits to people. “Like humans, both species require a total of approximately 8 hours of sleep per day,” said researchers led by Raphaël Aguillon, who conducted the work at Bar-Ilan University, and is now at IBPC Paris-Sorbonne University.

“Notably, similar to findings in primates and flies, a midday nap was also observed in C. andromeda,” the team added.

Talk about sleeping with the fishes! The upshot of the study is that sleep has evolved across all animals with a nervous system to help repair damaged DNA, a benefit that is apparently worth the vulnerability of a resting state. But for our weekend purposes, my takeaway is that even jellyfish enjoy a midday nap, so go ahead and take that siesta.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

NASA’s Hubble Examines Cloud-9, First of New Type of Object

A team using Hubble uncovered a new type of astronomical object — a starless, gas-rich, dark-matter cloud, a remnant of early galaxy formation.

^{NASA Hubble Mission Team (NASA Science)}

404 Media

2026-01-06 20:28:53

Astronomers Discovered Something Near the Dawn of Time That Shouldn’t Exist

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Astronomers have discovered an ancient reservoir of gas that is too hot for cosmic models to handle, reports a study published on Monday in Nature.

By peering over 12 billion years through time to the infant cosmos, a team captured an unprecedented glimpse of a baby galaxy cluster called SPT2349-56. Cosmological models suggest that the gas strewn between galaxies in these ancient clusters should be much cooler than gas observed in modern galaxies, which has been heated up by the intense gravitational interactions that play out in clusters over billions of years.

But the new observations of SPT2349-56 reveal an inexplicably hot reservoir of this intracluster gas, with temperatures similar to those at the center of the Sun, a finding that is “contrary to current theoretical expectations,” according to the new study.

“It is a massive surprise,” said Dazhi Zhou, a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia who led the study, in a call with 404 Media. “According to our current theory, this kind of hot gas inside young galaxy clusters should still be cool and less abundant, because these baby clusters are still accumulating and gradually heating their gas.”

“This one we discover is already pretty abundant and even hotter than many mature clusters that we see today,” he added. “So, it's a bit different and forces us to rethink our current understanding of how these large structures form and evolve in the universe.”

The first stars and galaxies emerged in the universe a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, during an era called cosmic dawn. Galaxies gradually accumulated together into large clusters over time; for instance, our Milky Way galaxy is part of the Laniakea supercluster which contains about 100,000 galaxies and stretches across hundreds of millions of light years.

As a baby cluster, SPT2349-56 is much smaller, measuring about 500,000 light years across, and containing about 30 luminous galaxies and at least three supermassive black holes. Zhou and his colleagues observed the cluster with Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a highly sensitive network of radio telescopes in Chile, which allowed them to capture the first temp check of its intracluster gas.

“Because this gas is pretty distant, it's very challenging to see the light of the gas directly,” explained Zhou. To probe it, the team searched for what’s known as the thermal Sunyaev–Zeldovich signature, which is a detectable distortion of the oldest light in the universe as it passes through intracluster gas.

The results produced a thermal energy measurement of 10⁶¹ erg, which is about five times hotter than expected. While the heat source is still unknown, Zhou speculated that it could be caused by high levels of activity in the cluster, where stars are forming 5,000 times faster than in our own galaxy and huge energetic jets of matter spout out of galactic cores.

However, it will take more observations of these distant clusters to figure out whether the hot gas within SPT2349-56 is an aberration, or if super-hot gas is more common in early clusters than predicted.

“Like every first discovery, we have to be cautious and careful with big results,” Zhou said. “We need to test it further, with more independent observations and comparisons to other galaxy clusters at a similar time. This is what we hope that our community will do next, and we're also planning for follow up observations of other clusters to see whether there is a broader trend or if this system is an outlier.”

The new study is part of a wave of unprecedented observations of the early universe within the past few years. The James Webb Space Telescope, for example, has discovered massive galaxies much earlier in time than expected, pointing to a tantalizing gap in our knowledge about how our modern cosmos emerged from these ancient structures.

“It is starting to change our current understanding of how energetic the galaxy formation process was in such an early time,” Zhou said. “Galaxies were formed and evolved with much more violence, and were more active, more extreme, and more energetic than what we used to expect. The James Webb results are also consistent with our current discovery that these galaxies were very powerful in shaping their surroundings.”

Sunyaev–Zeldovich detection of hot intracluster gas at redshift 4.3 - Nature

Detection of hot intracluster gas in SPT2349−56 with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array provides new insights into early cluster formation.

^Nature

404 Media

2026-01-04 17:57:17

Scientists Discover One of the World’s Oldest Cremations

Welcome back to the Abstract, and Happy New Year! Here are the studies this week that stoked the flames, cooled off, then went feral and rogue.

First, the ashy remains of a cremation pyre reveal a rare glimpse of an ancient ritual. Then: Uranus is chilling, ham on the lam, and a Saturn without a Sun.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliensor subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.

An ancient cremation comes to light

Cerezo-Román, Jessica I. et al. “Earliest Evidence for Intentional Cremation of Human Remains in Africa.” Science Advances.

Some 9,500 years ago, a community of hunter-gatherers assembled to cremate a small woman in a ceremonial pyre at a rock shelter near Mount Hora in Malawi.

Millennia passed. Many things happened. And now, at the dawn of the year 2026, scientists report the unearthing of the ashy remains of this ritual at a site, called HOR-1, which is "the oldest known cremation in Africa” and “one of the oldest in the world,” according to their study.

“Archaeological evidence for cremation amongst African hunter-gatherers is extremely rare, with no reported cases south of the Sahara,” said researchers led by Jessica I. Cerezo-Román of the University of Oklahoma. “Open pyre cremations such as that at HOR-1 demand substantial social and labor-intensive investment on behalf of the deceased. Thus, cremation is rarely practiced amongst small-scale hunter-gatherer societies.”

Indeed, before reading this study, I did not fully appreciate the work that goes into cremating a corpse from scratch. For a body to be properly reduced to ash in this prehistoric era, a community had to collect tinder, build the pyre, ignite it, and then keep the flames stoked at high temperatures for around seven to nine hours by continually adding more fuel.

The process would have been long and arduous, suggesting that it held a significant meaning to these prehistoric attendees. This ancient rock shelter was clearly used for mortuary practices over millennia, which “reflect a deep-rooted tradition of repeatedly using and revisiting the site, intricately linked to memory-making,” the researchers said.

The oldest known pyre, located in Alaska, dates back 11,500 years and contains the created remains of a 3-year-old child. But HOR-1 is the oldest example of adult cremated remains found in a pyre. We will likely never know the identity of this woman, or why her death inspired such a carefully coordinated ritual. But it seems safe to assume that the cremation was a significant event for the community that expended so much forethought and labor to perform it.

“While this cremation is highly unusual in the African archaeological record, it contributes to growing evidence of complex social worldviews among tropical African hunter-gatherers,” they added. “These practices emphasize complex mortuary and ritual activities with origins predating the advent of food production.”

In other news…

The inexplicable Uranian chillout

Jasinski, Jamie M. et al. “Uranus' Long-Term Thermospheric Cooling Is Unlikely to Be Primarily Driven by the Solar Wind.” Geophysical Research Letters.

Uranus is so cool. I mean this in the flattering vernacular sense—Uranus is genuinely nifty—but it’s also literally true. Not only is this ice giant the coldest planet in the solar system, its upper atmosphere (the thermosphere) has been getting steadily cooler for the past 40 years—and nobody really knows why.

Scientists now think they have ruled out a hypothesis that linked this long-term thermospheric cooling to a weakening of the solar wind, which is a stream of energetic radiation and particles emitted by the Sun. A new analysis suggests that this weakening effect has reversed over the past 15 years, hinting that it is not the cause of the cooldown.

“We determine that the solar wind kinetic power at Uranus has increased by ∼28% since the start of solar cycle 24 (at the end of 2008),” said researchers led by Jamie M. Jasinski at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“If the solar wind is a driver of Uranus' thermospheric temperature, then one would have expected a gradual increase in the temperature since then. However, the temperature has continued to consistently decline over the same time period. Therefore…we argue that the solar wind kinetic power is unlikely to be the primary driver of thermospheric temperature at Uranus.”

As for the real cause, the truth is still out there. May this mystery inspire a new generation of Uranian scientists.

When pigs sail…

Stanton, David W. G. et al. “Genomic and morphometric evidence for Austronesian-mediated pig translocation in the Pacific.” Science.

Now, for the incredible adventures of ancient seafaring pigs. Today, many domestic and feral pig lineages are scattered across the Pacific islands of Wallacea, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia; their ancestors were schlepped over the oceans by early mariners in several migratory waves.

To learn more about how these boats brought home the bacon, scientists sequenced 117 modern, historical, and ancient pig genomes spanning nearly 3,000 years. The results revealed that pigs from Indonesia to Hawaii are mostly descended from a group of domestic pigs that voyaged with Austronesian-speaking groups from Southeast China and Taiwan about 4,000 years ago.

“Transporting these animals between islands resulted in a distinctive evolutionary history characterized by serial founder effects, gene flow from divergent lineages, and likely selection for specific traits that facilitated the establishment of feral populations,” said researchers led by David W.G. Stanton of Queen Mary University of London and Cardiff University.

In other words, some of the most significant Pacific voyages also doubled as piggyback rides.

A glimpse of a sunless Saturn

Dong, Subo et al. “A free-floating-planet microlensing event caused by a Saturn-mass object.” Science.

I don’t mean to cause alarm, but there’s a rogue Saturn on the loose in the galaxy.

Astronomers spotted this world drifting through interstellar space, untethered to any star, with a trippy technique known as microlensing. When a distant planet passes in front of a star from our perspective on Earth, its gravitational field warps the background starlight, creating a distinctive light signature that exposes its presence (for more on microlensing, here’s a short feature I wrote).
Concept art of a freefloating planet. Image: J. Skowron, K. Ulaczyk / OGLE
Now, a team has captured a microlensing event with telescopes located on both the ground and in space, a combination that allowed them to calculate the foreground planet’s mass (Saturn-ish) and its distance from Earth, which is about 10,000 light years. Based on its mass and its very quick pace through space, this gas giant was probably born around a star, but was flung out of its home system by gravitational interactions between neighboring stars or planets.

“We conclude that violent dynamical processes shape the demographics of planetary-mass objects, both those that remain bound to their host stars and those that are expelled to become free floating,” said researchers led by Subo Dong of Peking University.

It’s a reminder that as bad as things seem sometimes here on Earth, at least our planet hasn’t been violently ejected from the solar system to drift endlessly in the dark. Small wins!

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

First Contact

A narrative and visual exploration of humanity’s age-old search for and fixation with extraterrestrials.First Contact explores the ancient idea—and epic ...

^{Hachette Book Group}

404 Media

2026-01-02 19:00:09

Scientists Identify Remains of the Earliest Human Ancestor

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Mysterious bones that date back seven million years likely belong to the oldest known human ancestor, according to a study published on Friday in Science Advances.

For years, scientists have debated whether Sahelanthropus tchadensis—an ape known from skull and limb bones found in Chad—was primarily bipedal, meaning that it walked on two legs like humans, or if it walked on all fours like chimpanzees.

Now, a team led by Scott Williams, an associate professor of anthropology at the Center for the Study of Human Origins at New York University, has spotted a detail in the femur bone, known as a femoral tubercle, that strongly suggests this ape was a biped. Since bipedalism is a defining trait of human relatives, known as hominins, the discovery confirms that these bones belonged to the earliest known human ancestor by a margin of about one million years.

“The really novel part of our study is the discovery of a new feature that had never been noticed before, and that's the femoral tubercle,” Williams told 404 Media in a call. “I think that was the final piece of evidence that convinced me that this was a biped, and therefore probably a hominin, because you don't find that feature in anything else.”

“I think this will convince a lot of people, but certainly not everyone,” he added. “There'll be rebuttals. I'm sure that people will challenge it. That's fine. That's how science works.”
Fig. 1. S. tchadensis fossils (TM 266) compared to a chimpanzee and a human. Image: Wiliams et al., Sci. Adv. 12, eadv0130
Indeed, the remains of Sahelanthropus tchadensis have generated controversy since they were initially reported in 2002. Over the past five years, different teams have argued both for and against the hypothesis that this species walked on two legs. This unresolved question inspired Williams and his colleagues to take a “fresh and independent look” at the fossils, he said.

The researchers conducted a comparison of the limb bones with other hominin remains, while also re-examining them using a technique called 3D geometric morphometrics. The latter effort exposed a hidden detail: the presence of a femoral tubercle, which is a bony protrusion where the femur connects to the hip.

“It basically prevents our torso from falling backward or falling sideways as we walk,” explained Williams. "Chimpanzees, gorillas, and other apes don't need to have that structure because they don't have to take on a vertical posture like we do. You don't need that structure—unless you're a biped.”

Of course, hominins didn’t just suddenly stand upright one day, and this ancient species shows an interesting mix of features that suggest it still spent plenty of time in the treetops in addition to walking on land. This liminal state between arboreal and terrestrial life persisted for millions of years in hominins until the rise of Homo erectus two million years ago, which is the first hominin to walk in a similar upright position to modern humans.

In addition to pinpointing our own human origins, the fossils offer a possible glimpse of the last common ancestor between humans and our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos. These two ape lineages split about six or seven million years ago, around the same time Sahelanthropus tchadensis was roaming through Chad.

“The debate about what the last common ancestor was like is really highly contested,” Williams said. The remains of Sahelanthropus tchadensis suggest that human relatives in this era may have been similar in size to chimpanzees and bonobos, but had body proportions more akin to later hominins.

While Sahelanthropus tchadensis can be described as the earliest human ancestor in a general sense, it was probably not the direct ancestor to modern humans. It’s become clear in recent decades that a diversity of hominin lineages emerged and became extinct over the past seven million years, so it’s difficult to trace the direct lineage of our own species, Homo sapiens, the only humans that have survived to the modern day.

“The more fossils that are discovered,” Williams said, “the more complicated the picture looks.”

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^{404 Media}

404 Media

2025-12-27 14:00:50

Scientists May Have Spotted Light from the First Stars

Welcome to a special holiday edition of the Abstract! It’s been an incredible year for science, from breakthroughs in life-saving organ transplants to the discovery of 3I ATLAS, the third known interstellar object. But we can’t cover everything, so to cap off 2025 I’m pulling together a grab-bag of my favorite studies from the past year that fell through the cracks.

First, a bitter feud that has divided dinosaur lovers for decades finally came to an end in 2025, proving at last that tyrannosaurs come in size small. Then: ye olde American cats, the search for the very first stars, and humanity’s chillest invention.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.

The Vindication of Nanotyrannus

Zanno, Lindsay E. et al. “Nanotyrannus and Tyrannosaurus coexisted at the close of the Cretaceous.” Nature.

Griffin, Christopher T. et al. “A diminutive tyrannosaur lived alongside Tyrannosaurus rex.” Science.

For decades, a tiny tyrannosaur has inspired big debates. The remains of this dinosaur were initially judged to be a juvenile tyrannosaur, until a team in the 1980s suggested they might belong to a whole new species of pint-sized predator called Nanotyrannus—sort of like a T. rex shrunk down to the size of a draft horse.

This argument has raged ever since, causing bad blood between colleagues and inspiring a longstanding quest to reveal this dinosaur's true identity. Now, in the closing months of 2025, peace has at last been brokered in these bone wars, according to a pair of new studies that cement Nanotyrannus as a distinct lineage of predators that coexisted alongside heavyweight cousins like T. rex.

“Nanotyrannus has become a hot-button issue, and the debate has often been acrimonious,” said researchers led by Lindsay Zanno of North Carolina State University in an October study. “Over the past two decades, consensus among theropod specialists has aligned in favor of Nanotyrannus lancensis representing a juvenile morph of Tyrannosaurus rex.”

The only evidence that could shatter this consensus would be “a skeletally mature specimen diagnosable” as Nanotyrannus, the team continued. Enter: “Bloody Mary,” the nickname for a near-complete tyrannosaur skeleton found unearthed in Montana in 2006. After a scrupulous new look at the specimen, Zanno's team concludes that it demonstrates “beyond reasonable doubt that Nanotyrannus is a valid taxon.”
youtube.com/embed/yJw1WUXIFG8?…
These results were reinforced by another study earlier this month that argues that Nanotyrannus was “a distinct taxon…that was roughly coeval with Tyrannosaurus rex and is minimally diagnosable by its diminutive body size,” according to researchers led by Christopher Griffin of Princeton University.

Nanotyrannus supports the hypothesis that dinosaurs may have been flourishing in diversity at the end of the Cretaceous era—right before they got punched by a space rock. In addition to confirming the existence of a new tyrannosaur, the new studies “prompts a critical reevaluation of decades of scholarship on Earth’s most famous extinct organism,” meaning Tyrannosaurus rex, said Zanno’s team.

In other words, tyrannosaurs of all sizes were running around together at the end of the Cretaceous period. While T. rex will always reign supreme as the tyrant king of its time, we also salute this new dinosaurian dauphin.

In other news…

I can haz seas-burger?

Welker, Martin H. et al. “Exploring the Arrival of Domestic Cats in the Americas.” American Antiquity.

In 1559, a Spanish colonial fleet was dashed to pieces by a hurricane in Florida. Among the many casualties of this disaster were a cat and a kitten, whose remains were found centuries later in the lower hull of a galleon shipwreck at Emanuel Point, near Pensacola.

These felines “are, most likely, the earliest cats in what is now the United States,” according to a study from April filled with fascinating facts about the fallen felines. For example, the adult cat ate like a sailor, devouring nutritious fish and domestic meat (like pork or poultry), with few signs of rodents in its diet.

This suggests the cat “was so effective at controlling rat populations that such prey was an insufficient food source,” said researchers led by Martin Welker of the University of Arizona.

It seems that cats have been impressing people with their legendary hunting prowess for centuries.

The study also includes some fun passages about the prized role of cats as pest control on these European ships, including this excerpt from a marine treatise from 1484:

“If goods laden on board of a ship are devoured by rats, and the owners consequently suffer considerable damage, the master must repair the injury sustained by the owners, for he is considered in fault. But if the master kept cats on board, he is excused from the liability.”

A resolution for 2026: Bring back cat-based legal exemptions.

The search for the ur-stars

Visbal, Eli et al. LAP1-B is the First Observed System Consistent with Theoretical Predictions for Population III Stars. The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

For generations, astronomers have dreamed of glimpsing the very first stars in the universe, known as Population III. This year, these stellar trailblazers may have finally come into view, thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope and the natural phenomenon of gravitational lensing, which can magnify distant objects in space.

Lensed light from an ancient galaxy called LAP1-B, which traveled more than 13 billion years before it was captured by JWST, contains the expected low-metal signatures of Population III stars, according to a December study.

“Understanding the formation and properties of the first stars in the Universe is currently an exciting frontier in astrophysics and cosmology,” said researchers led by Eli Visbal of the University of Toledo. “Up to this point, there have been no unambiguous direct detections of Population III (Pop III) stars, defined by their extremely low metallicities.”

“We argue that LAP1-B is the first Pop III candidate to agree with three key theoretical predictions for classical Pop III sources,” the team added. “LAP1-B may only represent the tip of the iceberg in terms of the study of Pop III stars with gravitational lensing from galaxy clusters.”

JWST continues to be a JW-MVP, and it will be exciting to see what else it might spy next.

A swing-kle in time

Norton, M., Kuhn, J. “Towards a history of the hammock: An Indigenous technology in the Atlantic world.” postmedieval.

Let’s close out this wild year with some rest and relaxation in the most soothing of all human creations: the hammock. In a study published last month, researchers meditated on the history of these sleepy slings, from their Indigenous origins in the Americas to their widespread adoption by European mariners and settler-colonists.

The work is full of interesting ruminations about the unique properties and its multifaceted purposes, which ranged from rocking newborn babies to sleep at the dawn of life to comforting the ailing in the form of death beds and burial shrouds.

“The hammock facilitated transitions between life stages like birth, puberty, leadership, and death,” said researchers Marcy Norton of the University of Pennsylvania and John Kuhn of SUNY-Binghamton. But it also facilitated more quotidian shifts in the body: sleep, dreaming, entering hallucinogenic states, and healing.”

What better way to celebrate this weird liminal week, suspended between the past and the future, than an ode to this timeless technology of transitions. It’s been so much fun hanging out with you all in 2025, and I look forward to swinging into a New Year of all things Abstract.

Thanks for reading and have a Happy New Year! See you next week.

Comet 3I/ATLAS

NASA missions are working together to track and study this rare, interstellar comet as it passes through our solar system.

^{dghernandez (NASA Science)}

404 Media

2025-12-25 14:00:22

In the Dark Arctic Deep, Scientists Find a Hidden Oasis of Strange Life

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Scientists have discovered a hotspot of weird marine life more than two miles underwater in the Arctic, making it the deepest known example of an environment called a gas hydrate cold seep, according to a new study in Nature Communications.

Researchers found the thriving ecosystem some 2.2 miles under the Greenland Sea using a remote operated vehicle during the Ocean Census Arctic Deep EXTREME24 expedition in 2024. Gas hydrate seeps are patches of seafloor that releases large amounts of gasses, such as methane; the newly discovered site is more than a mile deeper than any previously documented gas hydrate.

The discovery sheds new light on these influential seeps, which play a role in the climate and carbon cycle and support chemosynthetic ecosystems that feed on seafloor gasses instead of sunlight. Giuliana Panieri, the chief scientist of the expedition and lead author of the new study, recalled yelling out with excitement when the team received the first visuals of the seafloor hotspot, which the researchers named the Freya gas hydrate mounds.

“It was crazy because we saw several of these mounds, which are filled with gas hydrates, and all the organisms living there,” said Panieri, who is a professor at University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway and the director of the Italian National Research Council's Institute of Polar Sciences, in a call with 404 Media.

“What is fascinating when we have this kind of expedition is the organisms that are living down there,” she added. “At a water depth of almost 4,000 meters, you have these dense oases of organisms. I know that there are many new species. I have to admit, it was very exciting.”

Some of the lifeforms found at Freya mounds: Image: UiT / Ocean Census / REV Ocean

Panieri and her colleagues decided to explore this region after previous detections of massive plumes of gassy bubbles rising up from the seafloor. One of these plumes measured two miles in height, making it the tallest plume of this kind ever found in the oceans. While the team expected to find geological activity, it was still a surprise to see this wealth of gas-stuffed mounds, leaking crude oil and methane, as well as the ecosystem of tubeworms, snails, crustaceans, and microbes that are fueled by chemicals from the seep.

In addition to discovering this biological hub at the Freya mounds, the team also explored ecosystems living on hydrothermal vents in the nearby seafloor in the Fram Strait. Hydrothermal vents form at fissures in the seafloor where hot mineral-rich water erupts into the ocean, and they are also known for supporting rich chemosynthetic ecosystems.

The expedition revealed that the organisms living in the hydrate seeps and the vent systems are related, suggesting an ecological connectivity in the Arctic that is absent in other parts of the ocean.

“The Fram Strait of the Arctic is a rare place where deep-sea vents and seeps occur close to each other,” said study co-author Jon Copley, a professor of ocean exploration and science communication at the University of Southampton, in an email to 404 Media.

“The deep Arctic is also a part of the world where there aren't as many deep-sea species overall as other regions, because deep-sea life is still recovering from when a thick ice sheet covered much of the ocean around 20,000 years ago,” he continued. “But hydrothermal vents and cold seeps are an important part of deep-sea biodiversity there today, because life carried on in those chemosynthetic oases beneath that ice-capped ocean.”

Freya gas hydrate mounds with different morphologies. Image: UiT / Ocean Census / REV Ocean

Gas hydrates also store huge volumes of greenhouse gases, like methane, which could potentially be released as ocean temperatures rise, making these environments a bit of a wild card for climate predictions. While the Freya mounds are too deep to be affected by ocean warming, its discovery helps to fill in the map of these oily, gas-rich sites in the ocean.

To that point, these seeps are also potential sites for resource extraction through offshore oil drilling and deep sea mining. A central goal of the Ocean Census Arctic Deep expedition is to explore these remote regions to document their ecological activity and assess their vulnerability to future industrial activities.

“Research has already established that hydrothermal vents must be protected from deep-sea mining anywhere in the world, because of the unique colonies of species that live around them,” Copley said. “Our study indicates that deep cold seeps in the Arctic will need similar protection, because they are part of the same web of life with hydrothermal vents in that region. And there are undoubtedly more deep methane hydrate seeps like the Freya Mounds out there in the Arctic, as other deep bubble plumes have been detected nearby.”

“So our discovery shows how much there still is to explore and understand about Arctic deep-sea life—and the need for caution and protection if the Norwegian government resumes plans for deep-sea mining there,” he added, noting that Norway’s parliament has put these plans temporarily on hold, but they could reverse that decision in the future.

This is why Panieri and her colleagues believe that it is critical to secure more funding and support for Arctic exploration, and ocean research more broadly. These expeditions not only reveal new and exotic organisms, they have also been inspired novel biomolecules used in medicines, among other applications.

“The sea floor and the ocean is almost unknown,” Panieri said. “There is so much to be investigated. I think this is also the take-home message here: Every time that we have the possibility to see the seafloor, we discover something new.”

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Deep-sea gas hydrate mounds and chemosynthetic fauna discovered at 3640 m on the Molloy Ridge, Greenland Sea - Nature Communications

This study reveals dissociating methane hydrate mounds on the seafloor at more than 3600 m deep in the Greenland Sea.

^Nature

404 Media

2025-12-20 14:00:00

Scientists Discover ‘Black Widow’ Exoplanet That Defies Explanation

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that defied expectations, broke barriers, made trash into shelter, and lived to swear another day.

First, there’s a giant, lemony, diamond-studded, black widow in space. I’ll explain. Then: electrons get ready for a close-up, the ultimately tiny home, and why expletives are the hottest new workout hack.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.

“Lemonworld”

Zhang, Michael et al. “A Carbon-rich Atmosphere on a Windy Pulsar Planet.” The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Astronomers have observed a Jupiter-sized planet more than 700 light years from Earth that is unlike anything spotted before and defies explanation.

Known as PSR J2322-2650b, the exoplanet is shaped like a lemon, boasts baffling skies, and may have hidden troves of diamonds in its belly. The distant world closely orbits a pulsar, a type of hyper-dense dead star that is tugging on the gassy planet, giving it the distended shape.

Pulsar companions are normally other stars. These are called “black widow” systems because winds from the pulsar weather down the stellar companion, eventually destroying it, similar to the deadly embrace of the namesake spider. It is very rare to see a black widow system with a planet as the pulsar companion.

Curious about this unusual exoplanet, astronomers observed it with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), thereby “unveiling a bizarre atmosphere that raises more questions than it answers,” according to their new study.

“PSR J2322–2650b is different from other ultralight pulsar companions, being the only pulsar companion with a mass, a density, and a temperature similar to those of hot Jupiters,” said researchers led by Michael Zhang of the University of Chicago. “The atmosphere of such an object has never been observed.”

“In stark contrast to every known exoplanet orbiting a main-sequence star, we find an atmosphere rich in molecular carbon (C3, C2) with strong westward winds,” they said.
youtube.com/embed/oBf1GFkFjdc?…
Molecular carbon is unusual in planetary atmospheres because carbon atoms tend to bind to other elements, producing more familiar compounds like carbon dioxide. The atmosphere is so carbon-dominated, and so depleted in oxygen and nitrogen, that it doesn’t neatly line up with any known planetary formation scenarios. In a sparkling twist, its dense carbon atmosphere may produce soot clouds that then solidify into diamonds, bedazzling its core.

Is this a long-lived gas giant that survived the transformation of its star into a pulsar? Or was it born from the debris of the supernova that created the pulsar? And will this black widow system end as others do, with a slow death by pulsar winds? Nobody knows!

“Our findings pose a challenge to the current understanding of black-widow formation” and it will take more observations of similar systems “to determine whether PSR J2322–2650b’s composition is unusual or representative of the class.”

In other news…

An attofirst for attoseconds

Ardana-Lamas, Fernando et al. “Brilliant Source of 19.2-Attosecond Soft X-ray Pulses below the Atomic Unit of Time.” Ultrafast Science.

Scientists have created the shortest X-ray light pulse ever produced, a breakthrough that could resolve the previously hidden motions of electrons and other particles at subatomic scales.

These newly-demonstrated soft X-ray pulses last for just 19.2 attoseconds, where an attosecond is equal to one quintillionth (10⁻¹⁸) of a second. In other words, an attosecond is to a second as a second is to 31.69 billion years, more than twice the age of the universe.
This is where the science happened. Image: ICFO
“Excitation, scattering, and electron relaxation are crucial processes that control how matter interacts with light,” said researchers led by Fernando Ardana-Lamas of the Institute of Photonic Science (ICFO) in Spain. “Their timing influences how chemical bonds form or break, how charge and energy move, and how properties of molecules and materials emerge. Understanding these dynamics requires attosecond resolution, as electronic excitations and dynamics occur on timescales of tens of attoseconds.”

“We demonstrated the generation of coherent attosecond [short X-ray] pulses with a duration of 19.2 as, significantly shorter than the atomic unit of time,” a milestone that offers “exciting new opportunities to investigate atomic, molecular, and solid-state physics,” the team concluded.

This high pulse speed is necessary for the development of instruments that could capture the mysterious dynamics of particles on subatomic timescales. Other experimental technologies are still required to make these ultrafast cameras a reality, but for now, here’s to shattering the shutter speed record.

My other house is a tooth socket

Viñola-López, Lázaro W. et al “Trace fossils within mammal remains reveal novel bee nesting behaviour.” Royal Society Open Science.

Here’s a question for prospective home owners: have you ever considered living in a clump of regurgitated bones? This solution worked out well for Caribbean cave bees that lived some 20,000 years ago, according to a new study that reports the discovery of the first known fossilized bee nests built inside skeletal remains.

Scientists found the honeycombed bones buried in a cave on the island of Hispaniola that was once also inhabited by owls. Since owls regularly barf up pellets—gnarly globs of half-digested prey—the solitary bee species had a ready-made supply of skeletal remains, which were apparently a perfect place to raise offspring.
A part of a fossilized mammal skull, with sediment in a tooth socket that turned out to be a nest built by a prehistoric bee. Image: Courtesy of Lazaro Viñola López.
“Isolated brood cells…were found inside cavities of vertebrate remains,” including tooth sockets and the spinal canal, said researchers led by Lázaro Viñola López of the Field Museum in Chicago. “The high abundance of nests throughout the deposit indicated that this cave was used for a long period as a nesting aggregation area by this solitary bee.”

There’s nothing like getting the skeleton keys to your new skeleton house.

A prescription for profanity

Stephens, Richard et al. “‘Don’t Hold Back’: Swearing Improves Strength Through State Disinhibition.” American Psychologist.

Cussing is discouraged in polite company, but it may actually be good for your health and performance, according to a new study that confirms swearing alleviates inhibitions and provides increased endurance during physical challenges.

Psychologists recruited nearly 200 volunteers to hold themselves in a sustained chair pushup while repeating either a swear word of their choice, or a neutral word, every two seconds. The results revealed a consistent “swearing advantage” characterized by “significant performance improvements in the swearing condition.”

“These effects have potential implications for athletic performance, rehabilitation, and contexts requiring courage or assertiveness,” said researchers led by Richard Stephens of Keele University. “As such, swearing may represent a low-cost, widely accessible psychological intervention to help individuals ‘not hold back’ when peak performance is needed.”

At long last, science has vindicated the foul-spoken, the pottymouths, the salty-tongued, and the vulgarians. So go forth, ye cursers, and f*ck that sh*t up! It’s the doctor’s orders, after all.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

First Contact

A narrative and visual exploration of humanity’s age-old search for and fixation with extraterrestrials.First Contact explores the ancient idea—and epic ...

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2025-12-18 14:00:53

Scientists Discover Massive Underwater Ruins That May Be a Lost City of Legend

Scientists have discovered the underwater ruins of huge stone structures erected by humans at least 7,000 years ago in the coastal waters of France, according to a new study published in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.

The submerged granite ruins near Sein Island, a Breton island in the Atlantic Ocean, are among the oldest large stone structures ever found in France, and may have inspired an ancient local legend about a city called Ys that vanished under the waves.

The structures vary in size from small stone dams, which were probably fish traps, to large monoliths and slabs that protrude six feet from the seafloor and extend 400 feet in length, which perhaps once served as a protective seawall.

Yves Fouquet, a geologist who works with the Society for Maritime Archaeology and Heritage (SAMM), first noticed hints of these long-lost megaliths in LiDAR data collected by the Litto3D program, a national initiative to create a precise 3D digital reconstruction of the entire French coastline. Fouquet and his colleagues confirmed the existence of the mysterious structures, and mapped out their locations, across dozens of dives carried out by ten SAMM divers between 2022 and 2024.

“The detailed analysis of these maps to redraw the underwater geological map of this area (faults, rock types) has made it possible to identify structures that did not appear natural to a geologist,” Fouquet said in an email to 404 Media.

Brittany, a peninsular region of northwest France, is home to the oldest megaliths in the nation and some of the earliest in Europe, which date back some 6,500 years. The team estimated that the submerged stone structures off Sein Island may predate these early megaliths in Brittany by about 500 years, based on their estimation of when the stones would have last been above sea level. But it will take more research to home in on the exact age of the megaliths.

“We plan to continue the exploration and carry out more detailed work to understand the architecture and precise the age of the structures,” Fouquet said.

The discovery of these stones opens a new window into the societies living in Brittany during the Mesolithic/Neolithic Transition, a period when hunter-gatherers began to shift toward settled lifestyles involving fishing, farming, and the construction of megaliths and other buildings.
Photos of the structures in Figure 7 of the study. Image: SAMM, 2023
The peoples who made these structures must have been both highly organized and relatively abundant in population in order to erect the stones. They were also sophisticated marine navigators, as the waters around Sein Island are notoriously dangerous—prone to swells and strong currents—which is one reason its underwater heritage has remained relatively poorly explored.

“Our results bear witness to the possible sedentary lifestyle of maritime hunter-gatherers on the coast of the extreme west of France from the 6th millennium onwards,” said Fouquet and his colleagues in the study. “The technical know-how to extract, transport, and erect monoliths and large slabs during the Mesolithic/Neolithic transition precedes by about 500 years the megalithic constructions in western France in the 5th millennium.”

The discovery raises new questions about the origins of these megalithics structures, which may have had a symbolic or religious resonance to these past peoples. the team added. “This discovery in a high hydrodynamic environment opens up new perspectives for searching for traces of human settlement in Brittany along the submerged coastline of the period 6000–5000 years cal. BCE.”

The researchers also speculate about a possible link between these structures, and the prehistoric people who made them, and local legends about sunken cities that may date back thousands of years.

“Legends about sunken cities, compared with recent data on rising sea levels, shows that the stories of ancient submergences, passed down by oral tradition, could date back as far as 5,000 to 15,000 years,” the team said, citing a 2022 study. “This suggests that oral traditions that may have preserved significant events in memory that could well be worthy of scientific examination. These settlements described in legend reveal the profound symbolic significance of maritime prehistory, which should not be overlooked.”

In particular, the people of Brittany have long told tales of the lost city of Ys, a sunken settlement thought to be located in the Bay of Douarnenez, about six miles east of Sein Island. The sunken megaliths off Sein Island “allow us to question the origin of the history of the city of Ys, not from the historical legends and their numerous additions, but from scientific findings that may be at the origin of this legend,” the team said.

It’s extremely tantalizing to imagine that the long-hidden ruins of these peoples, who appear to have been expert seafarers and builders, are the source of tales that date back for untold generations in the region. But while the researchers raise the possibility of a link between the stones and the story, they cannot conclusively confirm the connection.

“Legend is legend, enriched by all the additions of human imagination over the centuries,” Fouquet said in his email. “Our discoveries are based on what can be scientifically proven.”

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Accueil - Archéologie sous-marine, les Epaves et naufrages en Manche et Atlantique

Société d’Archéologie et de Mémoire Maritime Plongez dans l’histoire maritime. Vous recherchez sur le littoral Manche-Atlantique un navire, un naufrage, un ancêtre […]

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404 Media

2025-12-13 14:00:24

Earth-Like Planets Are More Common Than We Thought, Study Says

Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that got hosed with star spray, mounted a failed invasion, declined to comment, and achieved previously unknown levels of adorability.

First, a study about how the solar system wasn’t destroyed 4.5 billion years ago (phew!). Then: a human touch on an ancient boat, the duality of posters and lurkers, and an important update on toadlets.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliensor subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.

Sink into a warm cosmic-ray bath

Sawada, Ryo et al. “Cosmic-ray bath in a past supernova gives birth to Earth-like planets.” Science Advances.

Earth was cosmically conceived in part by a massive shockwave from a nearby supernova, which seeded our home world and neighboring rocky planets with telltale radioactive signatures, according to a new study.

The solar system’s rocky planets contain short-lived radionuclides (SLRs), which are ancient elements that were likely barfed out from exploding stars. For this reason, scientists have long suspected that stars must’ve detonated next to the gassy disk that gave rise to the solar system. The heat generated from these radioactive elements helped the building blocks of the rocky planets—Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars—melt together so they could become whole worlds, which means we owe our existence to these ancient supernovas.

Now, a team has developed a new model to explain how the primordial pyrotechnics didn’t just blow up the nascent solar system. The results suggest that rocky Earth-like worlds may be common in the universe, with potential implications for the search for extraterrestrial life.

“A key question in astronomy is how ubiquitous Earth-like rocky planets are,” said researchers led by Ryo Sawada of the University of Tokyo. “The formation of terrestrial planets in our Solar System was strongly influenced by the radioactive decay heat of SLRs, particularly aluminum-26, likely delivered from nearby supernovae.”

“However, the supernova injection scenario faces an unresolved problem in that existing supernova models could not reproduce both the relative and absolute abundances of SLRs without disrupting the protosolar disk,” an event that “would likely prevent the Solar System formation altogether,” the team added.

In other words, it’s hard to explain how the solar system got its high abundance of SLRs without killing it in the cradle. Sawada and his colleagues propose a solution that involves at least one star exploding about three light years of the disk, sparking a shockwave that created a cosmic-ray “bath.”
Schematic picture of the system assumed in this study. Image: Sawada et al., Sci. Adv. 11, eadx7892
In this “immersion mechanism,” energetic cosmic rays trapped in the bath triggered SLR-producing reactions directly within the disk. This contrasts with the hypothesis that the SLRs were largely injected and then mixed up in the disk through some unknown process. This new solution can account both for the high abundance of certain SLRs, like aluminum-26, and the fact that the solar system was not destroyed, as evidenced by its apparent continued existence.

“Our results suggest that Earth-like, water-poor rocky planets may be more prevalent in the

Galaxy than previously thought,” the team said, noting that many disks are rocked by similar supernova-shockwaves. “This challenges previous interpretations that classified the Solar System as an outlier with a particularly high [aluminum-26] abundance.”

In addition to offering a new hypothesis for an old astronomical problem, the study gets bonus points for its extremely poetic title: “Cosmic-ray bath in a past supernova gives birth to Earth-like planets.” If you say this enchanted phrase three times, somewhere an Earth-like world will be born.

In other news…

The biometrics of a Baltic boatsman

Fauvelle, Mikael et al. “New investigations of the Hjortspring boat: Dating and analysis of the cordage and caulking materials used in a pre-Roman iron age plank boat.” PLOS One

Stars aren’t the only things leaving their dirty fingerprints in unexpected places this week. Archeologists working on the mysterious Hjortspring boat, a 2,400-year-old Scandinavian vessel, discovered a tantalizing partial human fingerprint in its caulking, providing “a direct link to the ancient seafarers who used this boat,” according to the study.
Photo of caulking fragment showing fingerprint on the left and high-resolution x-ray tomography scan of fingerprint region on the right. Image: Photography by Erik Johansson, 3D model by Sahel Ganji
The ridges of the fingerprint “fall within average distributions for both adult male and females as well as for juvenile adults, making it difficult to say much about the individual who produced the print,” said researchers led by Mikael Fauvelle of Lund University. “The most likely interpretation, however, is that it was made during repairs by one of the crew members on the boat itself, providing a direct link to the seafarers of the ancient vessel.”

Regardless of this person’s identity, their voyage didn’t end well. Researchers think the crew of the Hjortspring boat probably sailed from the eastern Baltic Sea to attack the Danish island of Als, where they were defeated. “The victors [deposited] the weapons of their vanquished foes together with one of their boats into the bog,” where they remained for millennia until they were rediscovered in the 1880s, the team said.

It’s a timeless reminder for would-be invaders: Don’t get caulky.

Long-time lurker, first-time poster

Oswald, Lisa et al. “Disentangling participation in online political discussions with a collective field experiment.” Science Advances.

At last, scientists have investigated the most elusive online demographic: the humble lurker. A team recruited 520 Redditors in the U.S. to participate in small subreddits focused on a variety of political topics during the summer of 2024. The aim was to probe why some people became prolific “power-users” that post with voluminous confidence, while others remained wallflowers.

“Online political discussions are often dominated by a small group of active users, while most remain silent,” said researchers led by Lisa Oswalt of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. “This visibility gap can distort perceptions of public opinion and fuel polarization.”

The team found that “lurking (posting nothing) was most common among users who perceived discussions as toxic, disrespectful, or unconstructive.” Lurkers were offered small payments to post in the experiment, which succeeded in motivating some to contribute to discussions. As a result, the study concluded that “future interventions may be able to make online political discussions more representative by offering more positive social rewards for lurkers to post.”

At last, an opportunity to unionize the lurkers of the world. Solidarity (in silence) forever.

It’s the great pumpkin toadlet, Charlie Brown

Bornschein, Marcos R. et al. “A new species of Brachycephalus (Anura: Brachycephalidae) from Serra do Quiriri, northeastern Santa Catarina state, southern Brazil, with a review of the diagnosis among species of the B. pernix group and proposed conservation measures.” PLOS One.

We will close, as we have before, with an impossibly cute toadlet. Scientists have discovered this new species of “pumpkin toadlet” in the “cloud forests” of Brazil, a sentence so twee that it’s practically its own fairy tale. The tiny toad Brachycephalus lulai, pictured below on a pencil tip, belongs to a family of “flea toads” that are among the smallest vertebrates on Earth.
Basically it is very smol: Brachycephalus lulai is a tiny pumpkin toadlet measuring less than 14 mm in length. Photo: Luiz Fernando Ribeiro. Image credit 1: Luiz Fernando Ribeiro, CC-BY 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/b…)
“Our team sought to better document the individual variation of all Brachycephalus species in southern Brazil, looking for them in the field over the past seven years,” said researchers led by Marcos R. Bornschein of São Paulo State University. “As a result of this work, we discovered and herein described a population collected on the eastern slope of Serra do Quiriri as a new species.”

The team also reported that the toads are actively colonizing newly formed cloud forests, which are high-altitude woods shrouded in mist. The researchers propose making these unique habitats into refuges for the adorable anurans.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

First Contact

A narrative and visual exploration of humanity’s age-old search for and fixation with extraterrestrials.First Contact explores the ancient idea—and epic ...

^{Hachette Book Group}

404 Media

2025-12-06 14:00:38

An Asteroid Threatening Earth Is Teeming With Ingredients for Life, Scientists Discover

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that fought for their food, took one for the team, passed the extraterrestrial sugar, and got lost in an ancient haze.

First, a story about the spiciest meatball in the animal kingdom. Then: ants are being interesting again, a new discovery about an old rock, and a walk in an ancient sulfur rainstorm.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.

Pond frog versus murder hornet

Sugiura, Shinji. “Pond frog as a predator of hornet workers: High tolerance to venomous stings.” Ecosphere.

Most animals don’t eat hornets, because dinner is just not as fun if it comes with a side of deadly venom and stab wounds. But a scientist has now observed an incredible exception to the rule with the humble black-spotted pond frog (Pelophylax nigromaculatus), which will straight-up house a hornet and ask for seconds.
youtube.com/embed/nv9LQ0LTfoc?…
Hornets have occasionally been found in the bellies of pond frogs, suggesting that the amphibians can tolerate their intense stings, but not much else is known about this unusual predator-prey relationship. To remedy the situation, Shinji Sugiura of Kobe University went out to the prefecture of Hyogo in Central Japan and netted a bunch of hornets from grasslands and forests—including the infamous “murder hornet” Vespa mandarinia, the largest in the world. He then captured pond frogs from wetlands with paddy fields and ponds in Hyogo and Shimane prefectures. Then, he let them duke it out in the lab in the world’s gnarliest series of cage matches.

“When a frog opened its mouth and its tongue made contact with a hornet, the action was classified as an attack on the hornet,” Sugiura said in the study. “If the frog did not stop the attack, spit out, or regurgitate the hornet, it was considered to have successfully consumed the hornet.”

The results revealed that most frogs made short work of the hornets (Videos S2) even though their meals were actively stinging them in their faces, eyes, tongues, palates, or throats of the frogs during attacks (Figure 3c,d).

“None of the frogs regurgitated the hornets after swallowing them,” Sugiura noted. “All frogs that swallowed hornets excreted the undigested body parts of the hornets as feces 2–4 days after ingestion.”

Lets just sit with that mental image of poopy undigested hornets for a second. What a nightmare. But what’s truly wild about this study is that the insects are known to inject lethal doses of venom into much larger animals, like mice, so the frogs clearly have some unknown defense against their attacks.

“Although many frogs were stung repeatedly by [hornets] in this study…none of the frogs died, and all individuals resumed normal behavior shortly after being stung,” Suguira said. “Moreover, despite repeated stings, most of the frogs ultimately consumed hornet workers…indicating a high level of predation success even against the largest hornet species.”

We humans are so lucky that when we sit down to dinner, our food generally does not try to kill us with repeated venomous needlepoint impalements. Count your blessings!

In other news…

Meet the ant-y Christs

Dawson, Erika H. “Altruistic disease signalling in ant colonies.” Nature Communications.

We’ll move now from death by frog munchies to death by team spirit. Scientists have discovered that ant pupae (baby ants) will sacrifice themselves if they are sick, lest they risk the health of the entire colony.

“Here we show…that sick ant pupae instead actively emit a chemical signal that in itself is sufficient to trigger their own destruction by colony members,” said researchers led by Erika H. Dawson of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria. “Our data suggest the evolution of a finely-tuned signalling system…that triggers pupal signalling for sacrifice. This demonstrates a balanced interplay between individual and social immunity that efficiently achieves whole-colony health.”

In other words, if an ant gets bitten by a zombie in a movie, it would immediately let everyone know and offer its life for the good of the group. Do what you will with this information.

Do you take sugar in your asteroid?

Furukawa, Yoshihiro et al. “Bio-essential sugars in samples from asteroid Bennu.” Nature Geoscience.

Scientists have found bio-essential sugars, including ribose and glucose, in samples of an asteroid called Bennu that were brought to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission in 2023. The discovery marks the first time key sugars have been found in any extraterrestrial sample. Ribose is an essential ingredient of RNA (ribonucleic acid), making it a particularly significant find in the quest to understand how life arose on Earth, and if it exists elsewhere.
youtube.com/embed/9LyH6jTefU8?…
“All five of the canonical nucleobases in DNA and RNA, and phosphate, were previously found in Bennu samples,” said researchers led by Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University. “Our detection of ribose means that all the components of RNA are present in Bennu.”

“Our confident detection in Bennu of abundant glucose—the hexose molecule that is life’s common energy source—and other hexoses indicates that they were present in the early solar system,” the team added. “Thus, all three crucial building blocks of life”— bio-essential sugars, nucleobases, and protein-building amino acids—”would have reached the prebiotic Earth and other potentially habitable planets.”

While Bennu bears the stuff of life, it may also be an omen of death: It has a 1 in 2,700 chance of hitting Earth on September 24, 2182. These are very low odds, but the risk is high enough to classify Bennu as potentially hazardous. So while visions of sugar plums may dance in your head this season, beware the nightmares about sugar-asteroids.

It’s raining sulfur—hallelujah!

Reed, Nathan W. “An Archean atmosphere rich in sulfur biomolecules.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

I’ve made you walk through many valleys of death in this newsletter, but we’ll close with some unadulterated life. Scientists have discovered that many of the sulfur molecules that help make up all modern organisms may have rained down from the hazy skies of the Archean period four billion years ago.

Assuming the results are confirmed in future research, it would mean that these sulfur molecules could have predated life, upending a leading hypothesis that they were a product of life and thus emerged later.

The work challenges “the assumption that life must have ‘invented’ sulfur biomolecules during evolution…by demonstrating the production of a variety of sulfur biomolecules, including cysteine, in laboratory experiments mimicking the atmospheric chemistry of the early Earth,” said researchers led by Nathan Reed of NASA, who conducted the work while at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

“The results presented here imply that an atmospheric organic haze is a potential powerhouse in providing a diversity of essential biomolecules in sufficient quantities for a budding global biosphere,” the team concluded.

Taken together with the Bennu study, it looks as if early Earth was positively marinating in life juices from multiple sources, including the sky and extraterrestrial impactors. Though this still doesn’t explain how living things sprang up from the prebiotic stew, it provides further confirmation that the ingredients of life as we know it are spread far and wide here in our solar system, and beyond.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

First Contact

A narrative and visual exploration of humanity’s age-old search for and fixation with extraterrestrials.First Contact explores the ancient idea—and epic ...

^{Hachette Book Group}

404 Media

2025-12-04 19:00:28

Scientists Are Increasingly Worried AI Will Sway Elections

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Scientists are raising alarms about the potential influence of artificial intelligence on elections, according to a spate of new studies that warn AI can rig polls and manipulate public opinion.

In a study published in Nature on Thursday, scientists report that AI chatbots can meaningfully sway people toward a particular candidate—providing better results than video or television ads. Moreover, chatbots optimized for political persuasion “may increasingly deploy misleading or false information,” according to a separate study published on Thursday in Science.

“The general public has lots of concern around AI and election interference, but among political scientists there’s a sense that it’s really hard to change peoples’ opinions, ” said David Rand, a professor of information science, marketing, and psychology at Cornell University and an author of both studies. “We wanted to see how much of a risk it really is.”

In the Nature study, Rand and his colleagues enlisted 2,306 U.S. citizens to converse with an AI chatbot in late August and early September 2024. The AI model was tasked with both increasing support for an assigned candidate (Harris or Trump) and with increasing the odds that the participant who initially favoured the model’s candidate would vote, or decreasing the odds they would vote if the participant initially favored the opposing candidate—in other words, voter suppression.

In the U.S. experiment, the pro-Harris AI model moved likely Trump voters 3.9 points toward Harris, which is a shift that is four times larger than the impact of traditional video ads used in the 2016 and 2020 elections. Meanwhile, the pro-Trump AI model nudged likely Harris voters 1.51 points toward Trump.

The researchers ran similar experiments involving 1,530 Canadians and 2,118 Poles during the lead-up to their national elections in 2025. In the Canadian experiment, AIs advocated either for Liberal Party leader Mark Carney or Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre. Meanwhile, the Polish AI bots advocated for either Rafał Trzaskowski, the centrist-liberal Civic Coalition’s candidate, or Karol Nawrocki, the right-wing Law and Justice party’s candidate.

The Canadian and Polish bots were even more persuasive than in the U.S. experiment: The bots shifted candidate preferences up to 10 percentage points in many cases, three times farther than the American participants. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why the models were so much more persuasive to Canadians and Poles, but one significant factor could be the intense media coverage and extended campaign duration in the United States relative to the other nations.

“In the U.S., the candidates are very well-known,” Rand said. “They've both been around for a long time. The U.S. media environment also really saturates with people with information about the candidates in the campaign, whereas things are quite different in Canada, where the campaign doesn't even start until shortly before the election.”

“One of the key findings across both papers is that it seems like the primary way the models are changing people's minds is by making factual claims and arguments,” he added. “The more arguments and evidence that you've heard beforehand, the less responsive you're going to be to the new evidence.”

While the models were most persuasive when they provided fact-based arguments, they didn’t always present factual information. Across all three nations, the bot advocating for the right-leaning candidates made more inaccurate claims than those boosting the left-leaning candidates. Right-leaning laypeople and party elites tend to share more inaccurate information online than their peers on the left, so this asymmetry likely reflects the internet-sourced training data.

“Given that the models are trained essentially on the internet, if there are many more inaccurate, right-leaning claims than left-leaning claims on the internet, then it makes sense that from the training data, the models would sop up that same kind of bias,” Rand said.

With the Science study, Rand and his colleagues aimed to drill down into the exact mechanisms that make AI bots persuasive. To that end, the team tasked 19 large language models (LLMs) to sway nearly 77,000 U.K. participants on 707 political issues.

The results showed that the most effective persuasion tactic was to provide arguments packed with as many facts as possible, corroborating the findings of the Nature study. However, there was a serious tradeoff to this approach, as models tended to start hallucinating and making up facts the more they were pressed for information.

“It is not the case that misleading information is more persuasive,” Rand said. ”I think that what's happening is that as you push the model to provide more and more facts, it starts with accurate facts, and then eventually it runs out of accurate facts. But you're still pushing it to make more factual claims, so then it starts grasping at straws and making up stuff that's not accurate.”

In addition to these two new studies, research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last month found that AI bots can now corrupt public opinion data by responding to surveys at scale. Sean Westwood, associate professor of government at Dartmouth College and director of the Polarization Research Lab, created an AI agent that exhibited a 99.8 percent pass rate on 6,000 attempts to detect automated responses to survey data.

“Critically, the agent can be instructed to maliciously alter polling outcomes, demonstrating an overt vector for information warfare,” Westwood warned in the study. “These findings reveal a critical vulnerability in our data infrastructure, rendering most current detection methods obsolete and posing a potential existential threat to unsupervised online research.”

Taken together, these findings suggest that AI could influence future elections in a number of ways, from manipulating survey data to persuading voters to switch their candidate preference—possibly with misleading or false information.

To counter the impact of AI on elections, Rand suggested that campaign finance laws should provide more transparency about the use of AI, including canvasser bots, while also emphasizing the role of raising public awareness.

“One of the key take-homes is that when you are engaging with a model, you need to be cognizant of the motives of the person that prompted the model, that created the model, and how that bleeds into what the model is doing,” he said.

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Persuading voters using human–artificial intelligence dialogues - Nature

Human–artificial intelligence (AI) dialogues can meaningfully impact voters’ attitudes towards presidential candidates and policy, demonstrating the potential of conversational AI to influence political decision-making.

^Nature

404 Media

2025-11-29 14:00:30

Being Famous Can Shorten Your Lifespan, Scientists Find

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that hit the books, bottled alien lightning, reared wolf cubs, and tallied the price of fame.

First, we’ve got a centuries-long history of an Indian savannah told through songs, folktales, and screaming peacocks. Then: Mars gets charged, the secrets of Stora Karlsö, and the epidemiology of stardom.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.

When folk tales are field guides

Nerlekar, Ashish N. et al. “Utilizing traditional literature to triangulate the ecological history of a tropical savanna.” People and Nature.

It has happened again: Researchers have turned to the annals of literature to address a scientific question. Longtime readers of the Abstract will recall that this is a simply irresistible category of research to me (see: China’s porpoise corpus, Transylvanian weather reports, and milky seas). To the library!

In this edition of Science from the Stacks, researchers probed the origins of the tropical savannah in western Maharashtra, India, by collecting references to plants in 28 stories and songs dating back at least 750 years. The aim was to reconstruct a vegetation history that could hint at shifts in the region between forest and savannah biomes.

“Ttraditional literature—for example, myths, folk songs and stories—is a culturally resonant, yet underutilized line of evidence to understand ecological histories and foster biodiversity conservation,” said researchers led by Ashish N. Nerlekar of Michigan State University.
A folio from an early 19th-century manuscript of the Bhaktavijaya mentioning the taraṭī tree. Image: Nerlekar, Ashish N. et al.
“We found that descriptions of both the landscape and specific plants point to an open-canopy savanna in the past rather than a forest,” the team said. “Of the 44 wild plant species recorded (i.e. omitting exclusively cultivated plants), a clear majority (27 species) were savanna indicators, 14 were generalists, and only three were forest indicators. Our ecological reconstructions from traditional literature complement data from archival paintings, revenue records, plant and animal fossils, and dated molecular phylogenies of endemic biodiversity—all attesting to the antiquity of India's savannas.”

It’s an out-of-the-box way to reconstruct the natural history of a region. But the highlights of these studies are always the excerpts from the literature, like the amazing origin story of this village:

“A folk tale illustrates the founding myth of Kolvihire village near Jejuri. The tale is about a robber-murderer named Vālhyā Koḷī, who lived near Kolvihire. Upon meeting a sage, Vālhyā Koḷī introspected on his wrongdoings and performed penance for 12 years. After completion of the penance, as a living testimony to Vālhyā Koḷī's sincere devotion, leaves sprouted from his stick, which he had used to hit and kill travellers to loot their money. Eventually, Vālhyā Koḷī became the sage-poet Vālmikī. According to the tale, the sprouted stick grew into a pāḍaḷa tree, and the tree still exists in Kolvihire.”

You have to love a good botanical redemption story. Another standout line is this memorable description of a thorny patch in the savannah from the early 16th century: “Such is this thorny forest | it is highly frightening | this forest is empty | peacocks scream here.”

I don’t know exactly why, but “peacocks scream here” is just about the scariest description I’ve ever heard of a place. Shout out to this ancient poet for capturing some legendary bad vibes.

In other news…

Extraterrestrial electricity

Chide, Baptiste et al. “Detection of triboelectric discharges during dust events on Mars.” Nature.

Lightning is a big deal on Earth, inspiring awe, fear, and some of the naughtiest deities imaginable. But lightning also strikes on other planets, including Jupiter and Saturn. For years, scientists have suspected that Mars might host its own bolts, but detecting them has remained elusive.

Now, scientists have finally captured lightning on Mars thanks to “serendipitous observations” from the SuperCam microphone aboard the Perseverance rover.

“Fifty-five events have been detected over two Martian years, usually associated with dust devils and dust storm convective fronts,” said researchers led by Baptiste Chide of the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie in Toulouse, France. “Beyond Mars, this work also reinforces the prospect of triboelectric discharges associated with wind-blown sediment on Venus and Titan.”

It goes to show that even a very dead world like Mars can still crackle and zap now and then.

The wolves of Stora Karlsö

Girdland-Flink, Linus et al. “Gray wolves in an anthropogenic context on a small island in prehistoric Scandinavia.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”

About 4,000 years ago on a small island in the Baltic sea, people cared for two wolves — perhaps as pets — feeding them fish, seals, and other marine fare. That’s the cozy portrait presented in a new study that analyzed the remains of ancient wolves buried in the Stora Förvar cave on the Swedish island of Stora Karlsö.

While dogs are commonly buried at ancient human sites, wolves and humans rarely mix in the archaeological record. But the wolves at Stora Karlsö were unlikely to have reached the island without the aid of humans, and their primarily seafood diet—unusual for wild wolves—suggests they were also fed by people. Moreover, one of the animals suffered from a pathology that might have limited its mobility, hinting that it was kept alive by humans.

The cave where the wolf remains were found. Image: Jan Storå/Stockholm University

The study presents the “possibility of prehistoric human control of wolves,” said researchers led by Linus Girdland-Flink of the University of Aberdeen. “Our results provide evidence that extends the discourse about past human–wolf interactions and relationships.”

Fame! I’m going to live forever (or not)

Hepp, Johanna et al. “The price of fame? Mortality risk among famous singers.” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

Celebrity may literally be to die for, according to a new study that evaluated fame as a comorbidity.

Scientists collected a list of 324 big music stars active between 1950 and 1990, including Elvis Presley, Kurt Cobain, Sam Cooke, and Janis Joplin. Those heavy-hitters were then matched with 324 “twin” musicians that were not household names, but otherwise shared many characteristics of the celebs, including gender, nationality, genre, and roughly similar birth dates. The idea was to directly compare the lifespans of A-listers and B-listers to isolate the extent to which fame itself is a mortality risk factor, rather than the lifestyle of a musician.

The study suggests that famous singers die four years earlier, on average, compared to their B-list peers, demonstrating “a 33% higher mortality risk compared with less famous singers,” said researchers led by Johanna Hepp of the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany. “This study provides new evidence suggesting that fame may be associated with increased mortality risk among musicians, beyond occupational factors.”

Lady Gaga had it right, as if there were ever any doubt: Under the glitz, the Fame Monster is always waiting.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

The Ocean Spectacle that Has Entranced Sailors for Centuries

“It was like we were in the ‘Twilight Zone’ and peering at a negative of the real world,” said one mariner.

^{Becky Ferreira (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-11-26 17:50:20

A Lone Astronomer Has Reported a Dark Matter ‘Annihilation’ Breakthrough

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An astronomer has reported a possible new signature of dark matter, a mysterious substance that makes up most of the universe, according to a study published on Tuesday in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.

Dark matter accounts for 85 percent of all matter in the universe, but its existence has so far been inferred only from its indirect effects on the familiar “baryonic” matter that makes up stars, planets, and life.

Tomonori Totani, a professor of astronomy at the University of Tokyo and the author of the study, believes he has spotted novel indirect traces of dark matter particles in the “halo” surrounding the center of our galaxy using new observations from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. When these speculative particles collide—a process called dark matter annihilation—the crash is predicted to emit bright gamma rays, which is the light that Totani thinks he has identified.

“The discovery was made possible by focusing on the halo region (excluding the galactic center), which had received little attention, and by utilizing data accumulated over 15 years from the Fermi satellite,” Totani told 404 Media in an email. “After carefully removing all components other than dark matter, a signal resembling dark matter appeared.”

“It was like playing the lottery, and at first I was skeptical,” he added. “But after checking meticulously and thinking it seemed correct, I got goosebumps!”

If the detection is corroborated by follow-up studies, it could confirm a leading hypothesis that dark matter is made of a hypothetical class of weakly interacting massive particles, or “WIMPs”—potentially exposing the identity of this mysterious substance for the first time. But that potential breakthrough is still a ways off, according to other researchers in the field.

“Any new structure in the gamma-ray sky is interesting, but the dark matter interpretation here strikes me as quite preliminary,” said Danielle Norcini, an experimental particle physicist and

assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University, in an email to 404 Media.
Gamma-ray intensity map excluding components other than the halo, spanning approximately 100 degrees in the direction of the Galactic center. The horizontal gray bar in the central region corresponds to the Galactic plane area, which was excluded from the analysis to avoid strong astrophysical radiation. Image: Tomonori Totani, The University of Tokyo
Dark matter has flummoxed scientists for almost a century. In the 1930s, astronomer Fritz Zwicky observed that the motions of galaxies hinted that they are much more massive than expected based solely on visible baryonic matter. Since then, astronomers have confirmed that dark matter, which accumulates into dense halos at the centers of galaxies, acts like a gravitational glue that holds structures together. Dark matter is also the basis of a vast cosmic web of gaseous threads that links galaxy clusters across billions of light years.

But while dark matter is ubiquitous, it does not interact with the electromagnetic force, which means it does not absorb, reflect, or emit light. This property makes it difficult to spot with traditional astronomy, a challenge that has inspired the development of novel instruments designed to directly detect dark matter such as the subterranean LUX-ZEPLIN in South Dakota and the forthcoming DAMIC-M in France.

For years, scientists have been probing possible emission from dark matter annihilation at the center of the Milky Way, which is surrounded by a halo of densely-clustered dark matter. Those previous studies focus on an excess emission pattern of about 2 gigaelectronvolts (GeV). Tontani’s study spotlights a new and different pattern with extremely energetic gamma rays at 20 GeV.

“A part of the Fermi data showed a peculiar excess that our model couldn't explain, leading me to suspect it might be due to radiation originating from dark matter,” he said. “The most difficult part is removing gamma-ray emissions of origins other than dark matter, such as those from cosmic rays and celestial objects.”

This tentative report may finally fill in a major missing piece of our understanding of the universe by exposing the true nature of dark matter and confirming the existence of WIMPs. But given that similar claims have been made in the past, more research is needed to assess the significance of the results.

“For any potential indirect signal, the key next steps are independent checks: analyses using different background models, different assumptions about the Milky Way halo, and ideally complementary data sets,” Norcini said.

“Gamma-ray structures in the halo can have many astrophysical origins, so ruling those out requires careful modeling and cross-comparison,” she continued. “At this point the result seems too new for that scrutiny to have played out, and it will take multiple groups looking at the same data before a dark matter interpretation could be considered robust.”

Though Totani is confident in his interpretation of his discovery, he also looks forward to the input of other dark matter researchers around the world.

“First, I would like other researchers to independently verify my analysis,” he said. “Next, for everyone to be convinced that this is truly dark matter, the decisive factor will be the detection of gamma rays with the same spectrum from other regions, such as dwarf galaxies. The accumulation of further data from the Fermi satellite and large ground-based gamma-ray telescopes, such as the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO) will be crucial.”

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2025-11-22 14:00:14

A Lost Planet Created the Moon. Now, We Know Where It Came From.

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that overthrew the regime, survived outer space, smashed planets, and crafted an ancient mystery from clay.

First, a queen gets sprayed with acid—and that’s not even the most horrifying part of the story. Then: a moss garden that is out of this world, the big boom that made the Moon, and a breakthrough in the history of goose-human relations.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.

What is this, a regime change for ants?

Shimada, Taku et al. “Socially parasitic ant queens chemically induce queen-matricide in host workers.” Current Biology.

Every so often, a study opens with such a forceful hook that it is simply best for me to stand aside and allow it to speak for itself. Thus:

“Matricide—the killing of a mother by her own genetic offspring—is rarely observed in nature, but not unheard-of. Among animal species in which offspring remain with their mothers, the benefits gained from maternal care are so substantial that eliminating the mother almost never pays, making matricide vastly rarer than infanticide.”

“Here, we report matricidal behavior in two ant species, Lasius flavus and Lasius japonicus, where workers kill resident queens (their mothers) after the latter have been sprayed with abdominal fluid by parasitic ant queens of the ants Lasius orientalis and Lasius umbratus.”

Mad props to this team for condensing an entire etymological epic into three sentences. Such murderous acts of dynastic usurpation were first observed by Taku Shimada, an ant enthusiast who runs a blog called Ant Room. Though matricide is sometimes part of a life cycle—like mommy spiders sacrificing their bodies for consumption by their offspring—there is no clear precedent for the newly-reported form of matricide, in which neither the young nor mother benefits from an evolutionary point of view.
youtube.com/embed/YarIl8JU-6A?…
In what reads like an unfolding horror, the invading parasitic queens “covertly approach the resident queen and spray multiple jets of abdominal fluid at her”—formic acid, as it turns out—that then “elicits abrupt attacks by host workers, which ultimately kill their own mother,” report Shimada and his colleagues.

“The parasitic queens are then accepted, receive care from the orphaned host workers and produce their own brood to found a new colony,” the team said. “Our findings are the first to document a novel host manipulation that prompts offspring to kill an otherwise indispensable mother.”

My blood is curdling and yet I cannot look away! Though this strategy is uniquely nightmarish, it is not uncommon for invading parasitic ants to execute queens in any number of creative ways. The parasites are just usually a bit more hands-on (or rather, tarsus-on) about the process.

“Queen-killing” has “evolved independently on multiple occasions across [ant species], indicating repeated evolutionary gains,” Shimada’s team said. “Until now, the only mechanistically documented solution was direct assault: the parasite throttles or beheads the host queen, a tactic that has arisen convergently in several lineages.”

When will we get an ant Shakespeare?! Someone needs to step up and claim that title, because these queens blow Lady MacBeth out of the water.

In other news…

That’s one small stem for a plant, one giant leaf for plant-kind

Maeng, Chang-hyun et al. “Extreme environmental tolerance and space survivability of the moss, Physcomitrium patens.” iScience,

Scientists simply love to expose extremophile life to the vacuum of space to, you know, see how well they do out there. In a new addition to this tradition, a study reports that spores from the moss Physcomitrium patens survived a full 283 days chilling on the outside of the International Space Station, which is generally not the side of an orbital habitat you want to be stuck on.
A reddish-brown spore similar to those used in the space exposure experiment. Image: Tomomichi Fujita
Even wilder, most of the spacefaring spores were reproductively successful upon their return to Earth. “Remarkably, even after 9 months of exposure to space conditions, over 80% of the encased spores germinated upon return to Earth,” said researchers led by Chang-hyun Maeng of Hokkaido University. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report demonstrating the survival of bryophytes”—the family to which mosses belong—”following exposure to space and subsequent return to the ground.”

Congratulations to these mosses for boldly growing where no moss has grown before.

Hints of a real-life ghost world

Hopp, Timo et al. “The Moon-forming impactor Theia originated from the inner Solar System.” Science.

Earth had barely been born before a Mars-sized planet, known as Theia, smashed into it some 4.5 billion years ago. The debris from the collision coalesced into what is now our Moon, which has played a key role in Earth’s habitability, so we owe our lives in part to this primordial punch-up.
KABLOWIE! Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Scientists have now revealed new details about Theia by measuring the chemical makeup of “lunar samples, terrestrial rocks, and meteorites…from which Theia and proto-­Earth might have formed,” according to a new study. They conclude that Theia likely originated in the inner solar system based on the chemical signatures that this shattered world left behind on the Moon and Earth.

“We found that all of Theia and most of Earth’s other constituent materials originated from the inner Solar System,” said researchers led by Timo Hopp of The University of Chicago and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research. “Our calculations suggest that Theia might have formed closer to the Sun than Earth did.”

Wherever its actual birthplace, what remains of Theia is buried on the Moon and as giant undigested slabs inside Earth’s mantle. Rest in pieces, sister.

Goosebumps of yore

Davin, Laurent et al. “A 12,000-year-old clay figurine of a woman and a goose marks symbolic innovations in Southwest Asia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

You’ve heard of the albatross around your neck, but what about the goose on your back? A new study reports the discovery of a 12,000-year-old artifact in Israel that is the “earliest known figurine to depict a human–animal interaction” with its vision of a goose mysteriously draped over a woman’s spine and shoulders.

The tiny, inch-high figurine was recovered from a settlement built by the prehistoric Natufian culture and it may represent some kind of sex thing.
An image of the artifact, and an artistic reconstruction. Image: Davin, Laurent et al.
“We…suggest that by modeling a goose in this specific posture, the Natufian manufacturer intended to portray the trademark pattern of the gander’s mating behavior,” said researchers led by Laurent Davin of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “This kind of imagined mating between humans and animal spirits is typical of an animistic perspective, documented in cross-cultural archaeological and ethnographic records in specific situations” such as an “erotic dream” or “shamanistic vision.”

First, the bizarre Greek myth of Leda and the Swan, and now this? What is it about ancient cultures and weird waterfowl fantasies? In any case, my own interpretation is that the goose was just tired and needed a piggyback (or gaggle-back).

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

First Contact

A narrative and visual exploration of humanity’s age-old search for and fixation with extraterrestrials.First Contact explores the ancient idea—and epic ...

^{Hachette Book Group}

404 Media

2025-11-19 00:01:49

Scientists Discover the Origin of Kissing — And It’s Not Human

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Kissing is one of humanity’s most cherished rituals—just think of the sheer variety of smooches, from the “wedding kiss” to the “kiss of death.” Now, scientists have discovered that the origins of this behavior, which is widespread among many primates, likely dates back at least 21 million years, according to a study published on Tuesday in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.

In other words, our early primate relatives were sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G, in the early Miocene period. Moreover, the deep evolutionary roots of kissing suggest that Neanderthals likely smooched each other, and probably our human ancestors as well. The new study is the first attempt to reconstruct the evolutionary timeline of kissing by analyzing a wealth of observations about this behavior in modern primates and other animals.

“It is kind of baffling to me that people haven't looked at this from an evolutionary perspective before,” said Matilda Brindle, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford who led the study, in a call with 404 Media. “There have been some people who have put ideas out there, but no one's done it in a systematic way.”

“Kissing doesn't occur in all human cultures, but in those that it does, it's really important,” she added. “That's why we thought it was really exciting to study.”
A collage of mouth-to-mouth contact across species. Image: Brindle, Matilda et al.
The ritual of the “first kiss” is a common romantic trope, but tracking down the “first kiss” in an evolutionary sense is no easy feat. For starters, the adaptive benefits of kissing have long eluded researchers. Mouth-to-mouth contact raises the odds of oral disease transfer, and it’s not at all clear what advantages puckering up confers to make it worth the trouble.

“Kissing is kind of risky,” Brindle said. “You're getting very close to another animal's face. There could be diseases. To me, that suggests that it is important. There must be some benefits to this behavior.”

Some common explanations for sex-related kissing include mate evaluation—bad breath or other red flags during a smoochfest might affect the decision to move on to copulation. Kissing may also stimulate sexual receptiveness and perhaps boost the odds of fertilization. In platonic contexts, kissing could serve a social purpose, similar to grooming, of solidifying bonds between parents and offspring, or even to smooth over conflicts between group members.

“We know that chimpanzees, when they've had a bit of a bust up, will often go and kiss each other and make up,” Brindle said. “That might be really useful for navigating social relationships. Primates are obviously an incredibly social group of animals, and so this could be just a social lubricant for them.”

Though most of us have probably never considered the question, Brindle and her colleagues first had to ask: what is a kiss? They made a point to exclude forms of oral contact that don’t fall into the traditional idea of kissing as a prosocial behavior. For example, lots of animals share food directly through mouth-to-mouth contact, such as regurgitation from a parent to offspring. In addition, some animals display antagonistic behavior through mouth-to-mouth contact, such as “kiss-fighting” behavior seen in some fish.

The team ultimately defined kissing as “a non-agonistic interaction involving directed, intraspecific, oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer.” Many animals engage in kissing under these terms—from insects, to birds, to mammals—but the researchers were most interested in primates.

To that end, they gathered observations of kissing across primate species and fed the data into models that analyzed the timeline of the behavior through the evolutionary relationships between species. The basic idea is that if humans, bonobos, and chimpanzees all kiss (which they do) then the common ancestor of these species likely kissed as well.

The results revealed that the evolutionary “first kiss” likely occurred among primates at least 21 million years ago. Since Neanderthals and our own species, Homo sapiens, are known to have interbred—plus they also shared oral microbes—the team speculates that Neanderthals and our own human ancestors might have kissed as well.

While the study provides a foundation for the origins of kissing, Brindle said there is not yet enough empirical data to test out different hypotheses about its benefits—or to explain why it is important in some species and cultures, but not others. To that end, she hopes other scientists will be inspired to report more observations about kissing in wild and captive animal populations.

“I was actually surprised that there were so few data out there,” Brindle said. “I thought that this would be way better documented when I started this study. What I would really love is, for people who see this behavior, to note it down, report it, so that we can actually start collecting more contextual information: Is this a romantic or a platonic kiss? Who were the actors in it? Was it an adult male and an adult female, or a mother and offspring? Were they eating at the time? Was there copulation before or after the kiss?”

“These sorts of questions will enable us to pick apart these potential adaptive hypotheses,” she concluded.

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2025-11-15 16:23:35

Scientists Make Genetic Breakthrough with 39,000-Year-Old Mammoth RNA

Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that reached back through time, flooded the zone, counted the stars, scored science goals, and topped it all off with a ten-course meal.

First, scientists make a major breakthrough thanks to a very cute mammoth mummy. Then: the climate case for busy beavers; how to reconnect with 3,000 estranged siblings; this is your brain on football; and last, what Queen Elizabeth II had for lunch on February 20, 1957.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.

The long afterlife of Yuka the mammoth

Mármol Sánchez, Emilio et al. “Ancient RNA expression profiles from the extinct woolly mammoth.” Cell.

Scientists have sequenced RNA—a key ingredient of life as we know it—from the remains of a mammoth that lived 39,000 years ago during the Pleistocene “Ice Age” period, making it by far the oldest RNA on record.

The previous record holder for oldest RNA was sourced from a puppy that lived in Siberia 14,300 years ago. The new study has now pushed that timeline back by an extraordinary 25,000 years, opening a new window into ancient genetics and revealing a surprise about a famous mammoth mummy called Yuka.

“Ancient DNA has revolutionized the study of extinct and extant organisms that lived up to 2 million years ago, enabling the reconstruction of genomes from multiple extinct species, as well as the ecosystems where they once thrived,” said researchers led by Emilio Mármol Sánchez of the Globe Institute in Copenhagen, who completed the study while at Stockholm University.

“However, current DNA sequencing techniques alone cannot directly provide insights into tissue identity, gene expression dynamics, or transcriptional regulation, as these are encoded in the RNA fraction.”

“Here, we report transcriptional profiles from 10 late Pleistocene woolly mammoths,” the team continued. “One of these, dated to be ∼39,000 years old, yielded sufficient detail to recover…the oldest ancient RNA sequences recorded to date.”

DNA, the double-stranded “blueprint” molecule that stores genetic information, is far sturdier than RNA, which is why it can be traced back for millions of years instead of thousands. Single-stranded RNA, a “messenger” molecule that carries out the orders of DNA, is more fragile and rare in the paleontological record.

In addition to proving that RNA can survive much longer than previously known, the team discovered that Yuka—the mammoth that died 39,000 years ago—has been misgendered for years (yes, I realize gender is a social construct that does not apply to extremely dead mammoths, but mis-sexed just doesn’t have the same ring).

Yuka was originally deemed female according to a 2021 study that observed the “presence of skin folds in the genital area compatible with labia vulvae structures in modern elephants and the absence of male-specific muscle structures.” Mármol Sánchez and his colleagues have now overturned this anatomical judgement by probing the genetic remnants of Yuka’s Y chromosome.

In fact, as I write this on Thursday, November 13—a day before the embargo on this study lifts on Friday—Yuka is still listed as female on Wikipedia.

Just a day until you can live your truth, buddy.

In other news…

Leave it to beavers

Burgher, Jesse A. S. et al. “Beaver-related restoration and freshwater climate resilience across western North America.” Restoration Ecology.

Every era has a champion; in our warming world, eager beavers may rise to claim this lofty title.

These enterprising rodents are textbook “ecosystem engineers” that reshape environments with sturdy dams that create biodiverse havens that are resistant to climate change. To better assess the role of beavers in the climate crisis, researchers reviewed the reported behavioral beaver-related restoration (BRR) projects across North America.

“Climate change is projected to impact streamflow patterns in western North America, reducing aquatic habitat quantity and quality and harming native species, but BRR has the potential to ameliorate some of these impacts,” said researchers led by Jesse A. S. Burgher of Washington State University.

The team reports “substantial evidence that BRR increases climate resiliency…by reducing summer water temperatures, increasing water storage, and enhancing floodplain connectivity” while also creating “fire-resistant habitat patches.”

So go forth and get busy, beavers! May we survive this crisis in part through the skin of your teeth.

One big happy stellar family

Boyle, Andrew W. et al. “Lost Sisters Found: TESS and Gaia Reveal a Dissolving Pleiades Complex.” The Astrophysical Journal.

Visible from both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, the Pleiades is the most widely recognized and culturally significant star cluster in the night sky. While this asterism is defined by a handful of especially radiant stars, known as the Seven Sisters, scientists have now tracked down thousands of other stellar siblings born from the same clutch scattered across some 2,000 light years.
Wide-field shot of Pleiades. Image Antonio Ferretti & Attilio Bruzzone
“We find that the Pleiades constitutes the bound core of a much larger, coeval structure” and “we refer to this structure as the Greater Pleiades Complex,” said researchers led by Andrew W. Boyle of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “On the basis of uniform ages, coherent space velocities, detailed elemental abundances, and traceback histories, we conclude that most stars in this complex originated from the same giant molecular cloud.”

The work “further cements the Pleiades as a cornerstone of stellar astrophysics” and adds new allure to a cluster that first exploded into the skies during the Cretaceous age. (For more on the Pleiades, check out this piece I wrote earlier this year about the deep roots of its lore).

Getting inside your head(er)

Zamorano, Francisco et al. “Brain Mechanisms across the Spectrum of Engagement in Football Fans: A Functional Neuroimaging Study.” Radiology.

Scientists have peered into a place I would never dare to visit—the minds of football fans during high-stakes plays. To tap into the neural side of fanaticism, researchers enlisted 60 healthy male fans from the ages of 20 to 45 to witness dozens of goal sequences from matches involving their favorite teams, rival teams, and “neutral” teams while their brains were scanned by an fMRI machine.

The participants were rated according to a “Football Supporters Fanaticism Scale (FSFS)” with criteria like “violent thought and/or action tendencies” and “institutional belonging and/or identification.” The scale divided the group up into 38 casual spectators, 19 committed fans, and four deranged fanatics (adjectives are mine for flourish).
Rendering of the negative effect of significant defeat. Image: Radiological Society of North America (RSNA)
“Our key findings revealed that scoring against rivals activated the reward system…while conceding to rivals triggered the mentalization network and inhibited the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC)”—a region responsible for cognitive control and decision-making—said researchers led by Francisco Zamorano of the Universidad San Sebastián in Chile. “Higher Football Supporters Fanaticism Scale scores correlated with reduced dACC activation during defeats, suggesting impaired emotional regulation in highly engaged fans.”

In other words, it is now scientifically confirmed that football fanatics are Messi bitches who love drama.

Diplomacy served up fresh

Cabral, Óscar et al “Power for dinner. Culinary diplomacy and geopolitical aspects in Portuguese diplomatic tables (1910-2023).”

We’ll close, as all things should, with a century of fine Portuguese dining. In yet another edition of “yes, this can be a job,” researchers collected 457 menus served at various diplomatic meals in Portugal from 1910 to 2023 to probe “how Portuguese gastronomic culture has been leveraged as a culinary diplomacy and geopolitical rapprochement strategy.”

As a lover of both food and geopolitical bureaucracy, this study really hit the spot. Highlights include a 1957 “regional lunch” for Queen Elizabeth II that aimed to channel “Portugality” through dishes like lobster and fruit tarts from the cities of Peniche and Alcobaça. The study is also filled with amazing asides like “the inclusion of imperial ice cream in the European Free Trade Association official luncheon (ID45, 1960) seems to transmit a sense of geopolitical greatness and vast governing capacity.” Ice cream just tastes so much better when it’s a symbol of international power.
Menu of the “Luncheon in honour of her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and his Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh” held in Alcobaça (Portugal) on February 20th, 1957. Image: Cabral et al., 2025.
The team also unearthed a possible faux pas: Indian president Ramaswamy Venkataraman, a vegetarian who was raised Hindu, was served roast beef in 1990. In a footnote, Cabral and his colleagues concluded that “further investigation is deemed necessary to understand the context of ‘roast beef’ service to the Indian President in 1990.” Talk about juicy gossip!

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Power for dinner. Culinary diplomacy and geopolitical aspects in Portuguese diplomatic tables (1910-2023)

IntroductionThis paper examines how diplomatic meals in Portugal (1910–2023) have been shaped by Portuguese foreign policy and geopolitical contexts, and con...

^{Óscar Cabral (Frontiers)}

404 Media

2025-11-11 17:45:56

Remnants of Lost Continents Are Everywhere. Now, We Finally Know Why.

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Tiny remnants of long-lost continents that vanished many millions of years ago are sprinkled around the world, including on remote island chains and seamounts, a mystery that has puzzled scientists for years.

Now, a team has discovered a mechanism that can explain how this continental detritus ends up resurfacing in unexpected places, according to a study published on Tuesday in Nature Geoscience.

When continents are subducted into Earth’s mantle, the layer beneath the planet’s crust, waves can form that scrape off rocky material and sweep it across hundreds of miles to new locations. This “mantle wave” mechanism fills in a gap in our understanding of how lost continents are metabolized through our ever-shifting planet.

“There are these seamount chains where volcanic activity has erupted in the middle of the ocean,” said Sascha Brune, a professor at the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences and University of Potsdam, in a call with 404 Media. “Geochemists go there, they drill, they take samples, and they do their isotope analysis, which is a very fancy geochemical analysis that gives you small elements and isotopes which come up with something like a ‘taste.’”

“Many of these ocean islands have a taste that is surprisingly similar to the continents, where the isotope ratio is similar to what you would expect from continents and sediments,” he continued. “And there has always been the question: why is this the case? Where does it come from?”

These continental sprinkles are sometimes linked to mantle plumes, which are hot columns of gooey rock that erupt from the deep mantle. Plumes bring material from ancient landmasses, which have been stuck in the mantle for eons, back to the light of day again. Mantle plumes are the source of key hot spots like Hawai’i and Iceland, but there are plenty of locations with enriched continental material that are not associated with plumes—or any other known continental recycling mechanisms.

The idea of a mantle wave has emerged from a series of revelations made by lead author Tom Gernon, a professor at the University of Southampton, along with his colleagues at GFZ, including Brune. Gernon previously led a 2023 study that identified evidence of similar dynamics occurring within continents. By studying patterns in the distribution of diamonds across South Africa, the researchers showed that slow cyclical motions in the mantle dislodge chunks off the keel of landmasses as they plunge into the mantle. Their new study confirms that these waves can also explain how the elemental residue of the supercontinent Gondwana, which broke up over 100 million years ago, resurfaced in seamounts across the Indian Ocean and other locations.

In other words, the ashes of dead continents are scattered across extant landmasses following long journeys through the mantle. Though it’s not possible to link these small traces back to specific past continents or time periods, Brune hopes that researchers will be able to extract new insights about Earth’s roiling past from the clues embedded in the ground under our feet.

“What we are saying now is that there is another element, with this kind of pollution of continental material in the upper mantle,” Brune said. “It is not replacing what was said before; it is just complementing it in a way where we don't need plumes everywhere. There are some regions that we know are not plume-related, because the temperatures are not high enough and the isotopes don't look like plume-affected. And for those regions, this new mechanism can explain things that we haven't explained before.”

“We have seen that there's quite a lot of evidence that supports our hypothesis, so it would be interesting to go to other places and investigate this a bit more in detail,” he concluded.

Update: This story has been update to note Tom Gernon was a lead author on the paper.

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Enriched mantle generated through persistent convective erosion of continental roots - Nature Geoscience

Convective erosion and lateral transport of metasomatized continental keels may generate enriched mantle geochemical domains sampled by oceanic volcanism, according to a geodynamic modelling study.

^Nature

404 Media

2025-11-08 16:14:30

A Fundamental ‘Constant’ of the Universe May Not Be Constant At All, Study Finds

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that took a bite out of life, appealed to the death drive, gave a yellow light to the universe, and produced hitherto unknown levels of cute.

First, it’s the most epic ocean battle: orcas versus sharks (pro tip: you don’t want to be sharks). Then, a scientific approach to apocalyptic ideation; curbing cosmic enthusiasm; and last, the wonderful world of tadpole-less toads.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.

Now, to the feast!

I guess that’s why they call them killer whales

Higuera-Rivas, Jesús Erick et al. “Novel evidence of interaction between killer whales (Orcinus orca) and juvenile white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) in the Gulf of California, Mexico.” Frontiers in Marine Science.

Orcas kill young great white sharks by flipping them upside down and tearing their livers out of their bellies, which they then eat family-style, according to a new study that includes new footage of these Promethean interactions in Mexican waters.

“Here we document novel repeated predations by killer whales on juvenile white sharks in the Gulf of California,” said researchers led by Jesús Erick Higuera Rivas of the non-profit Pelagic Protection and Conservation AC.

“Aerial videos indicate consistency in killer whales’ repeated assaults and strikes on the sharks,” the team added. “Once extirpated from the prey body, the target organ is shared between the members of the pods including calves.”
Sequence of the killer whales attacking the first juvenile white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) on 15^th of August 2020. In (d) The partially exposed liver is seen on the right side of the second shark attacked. Photos credit: Jesús Erick Higuera Rivas.

I’ll give you a beat to let that sink in, like orca teeth on the belly of a shark. While it's well-established that orcas are the only known predator of great white sharks aside from humans, the new study is only the second glimpse of killer whales targeting juvenile sharks.

This group of orcas, known as Moctezuma’s pod, has developed an effective strategy of working together to flip the sharks over, which interrupts the sharks’ sensory system and puts them into a state called tonic immobility. The authors describe the pod’s work as methodical and well coordinated.

“Our evidence undoubtedly shows consistency in the repeated assaults and strikes, indicating efficient maneuvering ability by the killer whales in attempting to turn the shark upside down, likely to induce tonic immobility and allow uninterrupted access to the organs for consumption, " the team said. Previous reports suggest that “the lack of bite marks or injuries anywhere other than the pectoral fins shows a novel and specialized technique of accessing the liver of the shark with minimal handling of each individual.”

An orca attacking a juvenile great white shark. Image: Marco Villegas

Sharks, by the way, do not attack orcas. Just the opposite. As you can imagine based on the horrors you have just read, sharks are so petrified of killer whales that they book it whenever they sense a nearby pod.

“Adult white sharks exhibit a memory and previous knowledge about killer whales, which enables them to activate an avoidance mechanism through behavioral risk effects; a ‘fear’- induced mass exodus from aggregations sites,” the team said. “This response may preclude repeated successful predation on adult white sharks by killer whales.”

In other words, if you’re a shark, one encounter with orcas is enough to make you watch your dorsal side for life—assuming you were lucky enough to escape with it.

In other news…

Apocalypse now plz

Albrecht, Rudolf et al. “Geopolitical, Socio-Economic and Legal Aspects of the 2024PDC25 Event.” Acta Astronautica.

You may have seen the doomer humor meme to “send the asteroid already,” a plea for sweet cosmic relief that fits our beleaguered times. As it turns out, some scientists engage in this type of apocalyptic wish fulfillment professionally.

Planetary defense experts often participate in drills involving fictional hazardous asteroids, such as the 2024PDC25, a virtual object “discovered” at the 2025 Planetary Defense Conference. In that simulation, 2024PDC25 had a possible impact date in 2041.

Now a team has used that exercise as a jumping off point to explore what might happen if it hit even earlier, channeling that “send the asteroid already” energy.. The researchers used this time-crunched scenario to speculate about the effect on geopolitics and pivotal events, such as the 2028 US Presidential elections.

“As it is very difficult to extrapolate from 2025 across 16 years in this ‘what-if’ exercise, we decided to bring the scenario forward to 2031 and examine it with today’s global background,” Rudolf Albrecht of the Austrian Space Forum. “Today would be T-6 years and the threat is becoming immediate.”

As the astro-doomers would say: Finally some good news.

Big dark energy

Son, Junhyuk et al. “Strong progenitor age bias in supernova cosmology – II. Alignment with DESI BAO and signs of a non-accelerating universe.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

First, we discovered the universe was expanding. Then, we discovered it was expanding at an accelerating rate. Now, a new study suggests that this acceleration might be slowing down. Universe, make up your mind!

But seriously, the possibility that the rate of cosmic expansion is slowing is a big deal, because dark energy—the term for whatever is making the universe expand—was assumed to be a constant for decades. But this consensus has been challenged by observations from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) in Arizona, which became operational in 2021. In its first surveys, DESI’s observations have pointed to an expansion rate that is not fixed, but in flux.

Together with past results, the study “suggests that dark energy may no longer be a cosmological constant” and “our analysis raises the possibility that the present universe is no longer in a state of accelerated expansion,” said researchers led by Junhyuk Son of Yonsei University. “This provides a fundamentally new perspective that challenges the two central pillars of the [cold dark matter] standard cosmological model proposed 27 years ago.”

It will take more research to constrain this mystery, but for now it’s a reminder that the universe loves to surprise.

And the award for most squee goes to…

Thrane, Christian et al. “Museomics and integrative taxonomy reveal three new species of glandular viviparous tree toads (Nectophrynoides) in Tanzania’s Eastern Arc Mountains (Anura: Bufonidae).” Vertebrate Zoology

We’ll end, as all things should, with toadlets. Most frogs and toads reproduce by laying eggs that hatch into tadpoles, but scientists have discovered three new species of toad in Tanzania that give birth to live young—a very rare adaptation for any amphibian, known as ovoviviparity. The scientific term for these youngsters is in fact “toadlet.” Gods be good.

“We describe three new species from the Nectophrynoides viviparus species complex, covering the southern Eastern Arc Mountains populations,” said researchers led by Christian Thrane of the University of Copenhagen. One of the new species included “the observation of toadlets, suggesting that this species is ovoviviparous.”
One of the newly described toad species, Nectophrynoides luhomeroensis. Image: John Lyarkurwa.

Note to Nintendo: please make a very tiny Toadlet into a Mario Kart racer.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Museomics and integrative taxonomy reveal three new species of glandular viviparous tree toads (Nectophrynoides) in Tanzania’s Eastern Arc Mountains (Anura: Bufonidae)

Abstract For the last century, herpetologists have referred to any Nectophrynoides Noble, 1926 toad characterized by a large, robust body, with large, distinct parotoid glands, as Nectophrynoides viviparus (Tornier, 1905).

^{Christian Thrane (Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung)}

404 Media

2025-11-07 14:26:49

Advanced 2.5 Million-Year-Old Tools May Rewrite Human History

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After a decade-long excavation at a remote site in Kenya, scientists have unearthed evidence that our early human relatives continuously fashioned the same tools across thousands of generations, hinting that sophisticated tool use may have originated much earlier than previously known, according to a new study in Nature Communications.

The discovery of nearly 1,300 artifacts—with ages that span 2.44 to 2.75 million years old—reveals that the influential Oldowan tool-making tradition existed across at least 300,000 years of turbulent environmental shifts. The wealth of new tools from Kenya’s Namorotukunan site suggest that their makers adapted to major environmental changes in part by passing technological knowledge down through the ages.

“The question was: did they generally just reinvent the [Oldowan tradition] over and over again? That made a lot of sense when you had a record that was kind of sporadic,” said David R. Braun, a professor of anthropology at the George Washington University who led the study, in a call with 404 Media.

“But the fact that we see so much similarity between 2.4 and 2.75 [million years ago] suggests that this is generally something that they do,” he continued. “Some of it may be passed down through social learning, like observation of others doing it. There’s some kind of tradition that continues on for this timeframe that would argue against this idea of just constantly reinventing the wheel.”

Oldowan tools, which date back at least 2.75 million years, are distinct from earlier traditions in part because hominins, the broader family to which humans belong, specifically sought out high-quality materials such as chert and quartz to craft sharp-edged cutting and digging tools. This advancement allowed them to butcher large animals, like hippos, and possibly dig for underground food sources.

When Braun and his colleagues began excavating at Namorotukunan in 2013, they found many artifacts made of chalcedony, a fine-grained rock that is typically associated with much later tool-making traditions. To the team’s surprise, the rocks were dated to periods as early as 2.75 million years ago, making them among the oldest artifacts in the Oldowan record.

“Even though Oldowan technology is really just hitting one rock against the other, there's good and bad ways of doing it,” Braun explained. “So even though it's pretty simple, what they seem to be figuring out is where to hit the rock, and which angles to select. They seem to be getting a grip on that—not as well as later in time—but they're definitely getting an understanding at this timeframe.”
Some of the Namorotukunan tools. Image: Koobi Fora Research and Training Program
The excavation was difficult as it takes several days just to reach the remote offroad site, while much of the work involved tiptoing along steep outcrops. Braun joked that their auto mechanic lined up all the vehicle shocks that had been broken during the drive each season, as a testament to the challenge.

But by the time the project finally concluded in 2022, the researchers had established that Oldowan tools were made at this site over the course of 300,000 years. During this span, the landscape of Namorotukunan shifted from lush humid forests to arid desert shrubland and back again. Despite these destabilizing shifts in their climate and biome, the hominins that made these tools endured in part because this technology opened up new food sources to them, such as the carcasses of large animals.

“The whole landscape really shifts,” Braun said. “But hominins are able to basically ameliorate those rapid changes in the amount of rainfall and the vegetation around by using tools to adapt to what’s happening.”

“That's a human superpower—it’s that ability we have to keep this information stored in our collective heads, so that when new challenges show up, there's somebody in our group that remembers how to deal with this particular adaptation,” he added.

It’s not clear exactly which species of hominin made the tools at Namorotukunan; it may have been early members of our own genus Homo, or other relatives, like Australopithecus afarensis, that later went extinct. Regardless, the discovery of such a long-lived and continuous assemblage may hint that the origins of these tools are much older than we currently know.

“I think that we're going to start to find tool use much earlier” perhaps “going back five, six, or seven million years,” Braun said. “That’s total speculation. I've got no evidence that that's the case. But judging from what primates do, I don't really understand why we wouldn't see it.”

To that end, the researchers plan to continue excavating these bygone landscapes to search for more artifacts and hominin remains that could shed light on the identity of these tool makers, probing the origins of these early technologies that eventually led to humanity’s dominance on the planet.

“It's possible that this tool use is so diverse and so different from our expectations that we have blinders on,” Braun concluded. “We have to open our search for what tool use looks like, and then we might start to see that they're actually doing a lot more of it than we thought they were.”

Early Oldowan technology thrived during Pliocene environmental change in the Turkana Basin, Kenya - Nature Communications

Here, the authors present archaeology of the Namorotukunan site in Kenya’s Turkana Basin that demonstrates adaptive shifts in hominin tool-making behaviour spanning 300,000 years and increasing environmental variability.

^Nature

404 Media

2025-10-30 18:00:37

Chimps Are Capable of Human-Like Rational Thought, Breakthrough Study Finds

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Chimpanzees revise their beliefs if they encounter new information, a hallmark of rationality that was once assumed to be unique to humans, according to a study published on Thursday in Science.

Researchers working with chimpanzees at the Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Uganda probed how the primates judged evidence using treats inside boxes, such as a “weak” clue—for example, the sound of a treat inside a shaken box—and a "strong" clue, such as a direct line of sight to the treat.

The chimpanzees were able to rationally evaluate forms of evidence and to change their existing beliefs if presented with more compelling clues. The results reveal that non-human animals can exhibit key aspects of rationality, some of which had never been directly tested before, which shed new light on the evolution of rational thought and critical thinking in humans and other intelligent animals.

“Rationality has been linked to this ability to think about evidence and revise your beliefs in light of evidence,” said co-author Jan Engelmann, associate professor at the department of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, in a call with 404 Media. “That’s the real big picture perspective of this study.”

While it’s impossible to directly experience the perspective of a chimpanzee, Engelmann and his colleagues designed five controlled experiments for groups of anywhere from 15 to 23 chimpanzee participants.

In the first and second experiments, the chimps received a weak clue and a strong clue for a food reward in a box. The chimpanzees consistently made their choices based on the stronger evidence, regardless of the sequence in which the clues were presented. In the third experiment, the chimps were shown an empty box in addition to the strong and weak clues. After this presentation, the box with the strong evidence was removed. In this experiment, the chimpanzees still largely chose the weak clue over the empty box.

In the fourth experiment, chimpanzees were given a second “redundant” weak clue—for instance, the experimenter would shake a box twice. Then, they were given a new type of clue, like a second piece of food being dropped into a box in front of them. They were significantly more likely to change their beliefs if the clue provided fresh information, demonstrating an ability to distinguish between redundant and genuinely new evidence.

Finally, in the fifth experiment, the chimpanzees were presented with a so-called “defeater” that undermined the strong clue, such as a direct line of sight to a picture of food inside the box, or a shaken box containing a stone, not a real treat. The chimps were significantly more likely to revise their choice about the location of the food in the defeater experiments than in experiments with no defeater. This experiment showcased an ability to judge that evidence that initially seems strong can be weakened with new information.

“The most surprising result was, for sure, experiment five,” Engelmann said. “No one really believed that they would do it, for many different reasons.”

For one thing, he said, the methodology of the fifth experiment demanded a lot of attention and cognitive work from the chimpanzees, which they successfully performed. The result also challenges the assumption that complex language is required to update beliefs with new information. Despite lacking this linguistic ability, chimpanzees are somehow able to flexibly assign strength to different pieces of evidence.

Speaking from the perspective of the chimps, Engelmann outlined the responses to experiment five as: “I used to believe food was in there because I heard it in there, but now you showed me that there was a stone in there, so this defeats my evidence. Now I have to give up that belief.”

“Even using language, it takes me ten seconds to explain it,” he continued. “The question is, how do they do it? It’s one of the trickiest questions, but also one of the most interesting ones. To put it succinctly, how to think without words?”

To hone in on that mystery, Engelmann and his colleagues are currently repeating the experiment with different primates, including capuchins, baboons, rhesus macaques, and human toddlers and children. Eventually, similar experiments could be applied to other intelligent species, such as corvids or octopuses, which may yield new insights about the abundance and variability of rationality in non-human species.

“I think the really interesting ramification for human rationality is that so many people often think that only humans can reflect on evidence,” Engelmann said. “But our results obviously show that this is not necessarily the case. So the question is, what's special about human rationality then?”

Engelmann and his colleagues hypothesize that humans differ in the social dimensions of our rational thought; we are able to collectively evaluate evidence not only with our contemporaries, but by consulting the work of thinkers who may have lived thousands of years ago. Of course, humans also often refuse to update beliefs in light of new evidence, which is known as “belief entrenchment” or “belief perseveration” (many such cases). These complicated nuances add to the challenge of unraveling the evolutionary underpinnings of rationality.

That said, one thing is clear: many non-human animals exist somewhere on the gradient of rational thought. In light of the recent passing of Jane Goodall, the famed primatologist who popularized the incredible capacities of chimpanzees, the new study carries on a tradition of showing that these primates, our closest living relatives, share some degree of our ability to think and act in rational ways.

Goodall “was the first Western scientist to observe tool use in chimpanzees and really change our beliefs about what makes humans unique,” Engelmann said. “We're definitely adding to this puzzle by showing that rationality, which has so long been considered unique to humans, is at least in some forms present in non-human animals.”

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