404 Media

2026-06-20 13:00:39

Scientists Propose Black Holes Don’t Exist, Are Something Much Stranger

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the stories this week that shook the Earth, birthed a universe, exploded in space, and sought the fountain of lepidopterological youth.

First, a wave from a disastrous earthquake journeyed to the center of the Earth and back, revealing a phenomenon that has never been seen before. Then: a recipe for a gravastar, a light shower of heavenly cremation, and the secrets of butterfly elders.

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 wave that literally moved a nation

Park, Sunyoung et al. “ScS-triggered slip on megathrust interfaces after the 2011 MW 9.0 Tohoku-Oki earthquake.” Science.

The devastating Tohoku-Oki earthquake, which struck east of Japan in 2011, generated a seismic “shear” wave so powerful that it bounced off Earth’s core and hit the surface again 13 minutes later, permanently shifting all of mainland Japan about a quarter-inch east of its original position, according to a new study.

While it is common for seismic waves to ricochet off Earth’s core, scientists have never detected a wave smashing back into the planet’s crust before. But when global navigation satellite system (GNSS) measurements kept indicating that Japan seemed to have shifted slightly east after the quake, scientists realized with “surprise” that a core-reflected wave was the likely cause of the “slip event,” reports the study.

“We report an extraordinary observation of ground motion in Japan after the…Tohoku-Oki earthquake attributed to a multiplate-interface slip event triggered by a shear wave that traveled to the Earth’s core and back,” said researchers led by Sunyoung Park of the University of Chicago.

“This slip event, spanning two plate boundaries, has the broadest rupture area of any single event yet documented,” the team continued. “Its overall length is similar to that of mainland Japan (~3000 km), exceeding the mainshock rupture length by six to seven times and more than doubling that of the 2004 great Sumatra earthquake.”

Even though the seismic uppercut was far less intense than the original quake, the near-simultaneous arrival of the wave across such a huge area caused a slip between continental plate boundaries. As a result, mainland Japan moved about six millimeters toward the Pacific Ocean, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but scientists have never observed a single seismic event moving a large landmass in this way.

The discovery not only reveals a mind-boggling new phenomenon, it serves as a heads-up in preparing for future colossal quakes and assessing their aftermath. The core-reflected wave “is a previously unrecognized source of seismic hazard, which can potentially (re)activate the mainshock area and the broader surrounding megathrust interfaces,” the team concluded.

In other news…

What else can you make with collapsing matter?

Jampolski, Daniel, and Rezzolla, Luciano et al. “Formation of gravastars.” Physical Review D.

Just when you thought black holes couldn’t get any trippier, along comes a “gravastar.” These objects are hypothetical alternatives to black holes that do not contain a singularity or an event horizon, beyond which normal physics breaks down. Instead, physicists theorize that a massive star could collapse into a different type of compact object, dominated by dark energy, which could trigger the birth of a mini-universe inside of it, according to a new study.

“Because a gravastar possesses neither a singularity nor an event horizon, and since its compactness can be brought arbitrarily close to that of a black hole, it has long been argued that it would be difficult to distinguish it from a black hole,” said authors Daniel Jampolski and Luciano Rezzolla of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Germany.

A comparison of black holes and gravastars. Image: Finq

“We here present, for the first time, a model for the creation of a static gravastar following a gravitational collapse of a spherical cloud of matter,” the team added.

The study models a pathway to the formation of a gravastar by imagining a uniform dust cloud collapsing toward a point at the center called a “de Sitter region,” which begins to expand. The inward collapse of the cloud and the outward repulsion of the de Sitter region, which is essentially an expanding mini-universe, results in an equilibrium state that would be virtually indistinguishable from a black hole to outside observers like us.

Finally, a hypothetical object for people who think black holes are not weird enough. Bonus points for the study’s brainy asides, such as this one: “Obviously, if a quantum-gravitational description were possible, the zero-size de Sitter bubble would be naturally replaced by a Planck-size bubble.”

Like, duh!

Stardust to stardust, radioactive ashes to radioactive ashes

Koll, Dominik et al. “The timing of the last r-process event near Earth from interstellar 60Fe, 244Pu and 247Cm deposition on Earth.” Nature Astronomy.

Speaking of the weird corpses left behind by massive stars, Earth is constantly getting sprinkled with their radioactive remains. That’s the finding of a study about a deep sea rock dredged up from nearly 16,000 feet under the Pacific Ocean that scientists found is bedazzled with the ashes of dead stars.

The rock is a chunk of ferromanganese crust, which forms on the ocean floor from minerals that precipitate from seawater. The rocks also capture rare heavy elements—such isotopes of plutonium, iron, and curium—that can only be sourced from cataclysmic cosmic events, such as explosive supernovae, or collisions between existing stellar corpses called neutron stars.
Lead author Dominik Koll with a sample of the ferromanganese crust. Image: Helmholz Zentrum Dresden
Using this rare record, scientists detected radioactive isotopes that suggest Earth has been passing through the fallout of an ancient “kilonova” that occurred when two neutron stars merged more than 100 million years ago. These kilonova mergers, also known as “r-process events,” leave a distant isotopic signature that includes the radioactive isotope plutonium-244, which the team detected in the rock.

“Our measured interstellar signatures suggest the occurrence of an old and rare r-process event leading to a diffuse [plutonium-244] background inside and outside the Local Bubble,” which is the term for our region of the galaxy, said researchers led by Dominik Koll of Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf. “The trajectory of the Solar System through the Galaxy could impact the recorded r-process radionuclide abundance on Earth or the Moon.”

In other words, we are all just casually wafting through the smoke of stellar pyres in our orbit around the galactic center. Hope that adds a little cosmic spice to your day.

May you live to the ripe old age of one year

Foley, Jessica et al. “Evolution of increased longevity and slowed ageing in a genus of tropical butterfly.” Nature Communications.

We’ll close, as all things should, with butterfly Methuselahs. To better understand the processes that drive aging and longevity, scientists looked to the Heliconius family of butterflies, known as heliconians, which are known to live substantially longer than its close relatives, though their lifespans hadn’t been previously examined in depth.
Heliconius butterflies. Image: Repeating Patterns of Mimicry. Meyer A, PLoS Biology, Vol. 4/10/2006, e341
The team was surprised to learn that these butterflies can live for nearly a year whereas their close relatives in their “tribe” live for mere weeks, revealing a “25-fold variation in recorded maximum lifespan across the tribe,” according to a new study.

“This range far exceeds previous estimates, and is among the largest ever recorded for such closely-related taxa (with comparable differences reported only for two groups of fish: rockfishes^, and roughies,” said researchers led by Jessica Foley of the University of Bristol. Indeed, if humans exhibited this range of lifespan diversity, plenty of us would be living past 1,000 years old.

The team also discovered that Myscelia cyaniris, which is not a heliconian, is “the longest-lived butterfly species to date based on data from butterfly exhibitors with a maximum reported lifespan of 380 days,” confirming that many butterfly families have evolved extreme longevity.

Unlike their close relatives, heliconians feed on pollen, which suggests that this special diet is part of the secret to their senescent success. While this discovery sounds like grounds for a grift aimed at the anti-aging movement, let it be known that eating pollen only works as an elixir for butterflies. The pollen can’t make you live forever. Death comes for us all. Happy Summer Solstice!

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

The timing of the last r-process event near Earth from interstellar 60Fe, 244Pu and 247Cm deposition on Earth - Nature Astronomy

By counting single atoms of 60Fe (which have a supernova origin), 244Pu and 247Cm (both formed via the r-process and independent of regular supernovae) in a deep-sea crust, the last actinide-producing r-process event near Earth is found to have occur…

^Nature

404 Media

2026-06-18 18:00:35

A New Fossil Discovery Just Rewrote 150 Years of Evolutionary Theory

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Ancient fossils have revealed that the earliest animals to walk on land more than 300 million years ago did not experience a metamorphosis similar to modern amphibians, a discovery that rewrites the evolutionary history of terrestrial vertebrates, according to a study published on Thursday in Science.

Humans and all other land-dwelling vertebrates descend from four-limbed “tetrapods” that left the seas to roam on land, an evolutionary process that took tens of millions of years. If you can recall your old biology textbook, this is probably what you were taught it looked like: the pioneering tetrapods adapted to land with a life cycle similar to frogs and toads, in which an aquatic larval phase, like a tadpole, is followed by metamorphosis into an amphibious adult form.

A pair of scientists at the Field Museum in Chicago looked at extremely rare fossils of hatchlings that span the “fin-to-limb” transition to identify direct evidence of this metamorphosis, such as the type of external gills seen on tadpoles. To their surprise, the researchers found no evidence of a transient larval phase in the early animals, thereby “falsifying hypotheses of an ancestral origin of metamorphosis,” according to the new study.

“There's still this sense that these [tetrapods] had this gilled larva that is fundamentally and anatomically different from the terrestrial adult,” said Jason Pardo, a research associate at the Field Museum and a postdoctoral fellow at Vilnius University in Lithuania who co-led the study, in a call with 404 Media. “There are a lot of reasons why that would make sense, because it's easier to make that transition from water to land if your baby, when it hatches out of the egg, is still fish-like, more or less. Then, you have this period of transition that allows it to get itself on land.”

“The problem is that we've never actually had direct evidence of that,” he continued. “The assumption has always been, ‘Of course we had a larval stage, and it would transition into an adult.’ But we didn't really have information that went one direction or the other.”

To fill this gap, Pardo and Arjan Mann, the Field Museum’s assistant curator of early tetrapods and the other co-lead of the study, scoured both public museum archives and private collections for fossils that captured the early hatchling phase of primordial tetrapods.

Such specimens are extremely rare because these baby animals were small and had developing bones that required ideal conditions for preservation. But Pardo and Mann were able to track down a handful of particularly intriguing fossils sourced from the Mazon Creek fossil beds in northern Illinois, which has preserved incredibly detailed snapshots of life as it existed about 310 million years ago, during the tail end of the fin-to-limb transition.

These animals included two embolomeres, which were crocodile-like predators, a snake-like aïstopod, and several megalichthyid fish. Some of the tetrapods were so young when they died that their fossils preserve abdominal yolk that the hatchlings were feeding off until they were mature enough to seek their own food.

This selection represents “the most phylogenetically extensive sample of stem tetrapod early developmental stages to date and a definitive documentation of stem tetrapod hatchling anatomy and life history,” according to the study.
Concept art of an embolomere hatchling next to an adult. Image: Gabriel Ugueto
“We've been trying to look at the smallest animals that we can get out of these sites, where we can actually get very early stage babies,” Pardo said. “This is after the initial transition from water to land, but we have animals that span that transition. We have animals that branched off before [the development of] fingers and toes, and animals that branched off after fingers and toes.”

“When we started to look at these fossils, we were expecting that we were going to get something that looked kind of like a metamorphosis,” he added. “What we ended up finding is that there was no such evidence at all.”

External gills, for instance, are a telltale feature of the metamorphosis observed in frogs and toads. They appear on freshly hatched tadpoles and are slowly absorbed into the body to become lungs. But the hatchlings showed no signs of these gills, or anything else on the “checklist” of a transient larval phase, Pardo said.

“It was very striking that none of the structures that we would look at seemed like larval features that we would expect to see,” he said. “It was quite hard to make sense of at first because, at this point, there’s a 150-year tradition of treating these animals as amphibians.”
Some of the early hatchling fossils studied by the team, including detailed preservation of eyes and soft tissues. The scale bar is 10 millimeters. Image: Jason Pardo, Arjann Mann, Lauer Foundation.
“What we ended up finding is that we can't actually justify any claim of metamorphosis in those animals that are transitioning across that water-to-land transition,” he added.

The results suggest that early tetrapods had the same basic anatomy, more or less, throughout their life cycle. This evolutionary strategy may have delayed the transition to land for much longer than previously assumed, as tetrapods slowly acclimated to life in a terrestrial habitat. Amphibian-style metamorphosis probably emerged well after tetrapods established their foothold on land, perhaps to maximize their colonization of diverse new land environments, rather than as a condition for getting out of the seas in the first place.

In addition to overturning conventional wisdom, the fossils offer a glimpse of the ancient trailblazers that took the first steps into a new realm hundreds of millions of years ago, paving the way for the rest of us. As a result of them gradually expanding onto land, these tetrapods became the progenitors of all vertebrate land animals. The exquisite fossils even include eerily preserved eyes in some cases, gazing out from a long-lost past.

“They look like they were around yesterday,” Pardo said. “You can see skin. Sometimes the animals have color patterns preserved. You can see the lenses in their eyes. You can see these really intricate and intimate details of these animals. You can understand this was a living animal. It's there.”

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404 Media

2026-06-13 19:10:27

Scientists Discover Vast Ancient ‘Necropolis’ Teeming With Strange New Creatures

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that died in the deep, let nature call, tossed a galactic salad, and became interstellar voyeurs.

First, there’s a whale necropolis under the sea that is packed with ancient carcasses and teeming with new species. Then: a bygone world preserved in poop, the fruits of the universe’s labor, and a zoom lens for distant planets.

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.

A visit to the cetacean cemetery

Peng, Xiaotong; Zhou, Peng; Song, Xikun; Bianucci, Giovanni; Du. Mengran et al. “A 5.3-million-year-old deep-sea whale necropolis in the Diamantina Zone.” Nature.

Scientists have discovered an unprecedented underwater “necropolis” that contains the remains of hundreds of whales that died over the past five million years, scattered across 745 miles.

During dives in a deep sea submersible, researchers spotted whale bones submerged under more than four miles of the Diamantina Zone in the Indian Ocean, making this site the geographically largest, deepest, and oldest whale necropolis ever found. The graveyard is also teeming with species that may be “new to science” and subsist on these fortuitous “whale falls,” according to a new study.
youtube.com/embed/jYDl4c7ZwhQ?…
“The discovery of whale-fall communities in the Diamantina Zone at depths exceeding 6,700 meters establishes one of the deepest known whale-fall ecosystems in the ocean, extending the known depth range of such habitats by more than 2,500 meters,” said researchers co-led by Xiaotong Peng of China’s Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering.

“This area has a deep and extensive accumulation comprising five modern natural whale-fall communities and 476 fossil cetaceans recorded,” the team said.

Peng and his colleagues first spotted the necropolis during dives in early 2023 using the Fendouzhe submersible, which is capable of bringing crews to depths of nearly seven miles. The team quickly realized they had tapped into a scientific motherlode, complete with an immense fossil archive of extinct animals—mostly deep-diving beaked whales—along with recent whale falls that still support thriving ecosystems of crustaceans, molluscs, worms, and microbes.

“Bone-eating worms, gastropods, vesicomyid bivalves and brittle stars dominate the megafauna (more than several centimetres in size), reaching local densities up to 2,840 individuals per square metre,” the team said. “Most recovered taxa may be new to science.”

As for why this vast necropolis formed, beaked whales may be attracted to these deep waters due to the abundance of prey sources, such as squid and fish. Some might accidentally dive so deep that they experience decompression sickness or fatal exhaustion, becoming bonus bodies for seafloor ecosystems. The sinking carcasses are then funnelled into the Diamantina Zone because of its V-shaped topography, serving up a figurative feast for scientists (and a literal one for marine biota).
Various remains in the necropolis. Image: IDSSE
“As beaked whales are known primarily from rare strandings, their abundance, distribution and ecology remain poorly understood overall,” Peng and his colleagues concluded. “Our discovery of an accumulation of skeletal remains…provides an unparalleled source of information on these largely enigmatic cetaceans.”

Mariners have long dreaded ending up in Davy Jones’ locker, the proverbial resting ground of drowned sailors. It turns out that whales have a whole locker room down in the deep, where the bodies of countless leviathans blossom into fleeting hotspots of life.

In other news…

Bathroom blast from the past

Murchie, Tyler J. et al. “Ground squirrel coprolites preserve complex archives of ancient environmental DNA over 700,000 years.” Nature Communications.

The Klondike region of Canada’s Yukon territory is famous for the 19th-century gold rush that led hopeful prospectors to riches, ruin, and early graves. But now, scientists have found a very different type of valuable nugget in Klondike soil—ancient squirrel poops made by ancient squirrel bums as early as 700,000 years ago.

Scientists sequenced ancient environmental DNA (aeDNA) from these permafrosted scats, thereby opening up a poopy portal into the past. The fossilized feces, known as coprolites, contained genetic traces of mammoth, saber-tooth cat, horse, and bison, suggesting that these Ice Age rodents may have gnawed on the corpses of much larger megafauna. The coprolites also preserved DNA from hundreds of plant species, several insects, and a bevy of microbial and fungal strains.
youtube.com/embed/2HkRFLb-xlY?…
“The diversity and abundance of aeDNA recovered from the permafrost preserved, ground squirrel coprolites presented here underscores the immense value of Arctic rodent middens as repositories of Quaternary ecosystems,” said researchers led by Tyler J. Murchie of the Hakai Institute and McMaster University. “The ecological and evolutionary power of coprolites would appear to exceed that of both bone and sediment.”

As a bonus, the team refers to the rodent behind each coprolite as the “defecator,” in case anyone is seeking inspiration for a disgusting superhero concept.

Eat your galactic green peas

Gupta, Maitrayee et al. “Blueberry and Green Pea galaxies live in low-density environments.” Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The fruits of summer gardens are beginning to ripen here on Earth, but what about the pea patches and berry bushes of outer space? In a new study, astronomers examine a sampling of so-called “Green Pea” and “Blueberry” galaxies, which are small and compact systems that have extremely high star formation (“starburst”) rates.
Images of blueberry galaxies. Image: SDSS and Yang et al.
Named for their green and blue hues, these starry objects are thought by some scientists to be similar to the first galaxies that lit up the universe during the epoch of reionization more than 13 billion years ago, making them useful analogues of primordial galactic evolution.

“Within the diverse tapestry of galaxy populations, Green Pea and Blueberry galaxies represent particularly intriguing classes,” said researchers led by Maitrayee Gupta of the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The galaxies “present an opportunity to gain a unique perspective” on the processes “driving cosmic reionisation,” the team added.

To that end, Gupta and her colleagues observed a selection of these galaxies and found that they “predominantly reside in isolated, low-density environments” which means that their intense starbursts are not driven by interactions with galactic neighbors, such as mergers. Instead, the team concluded that these recent starbursts are driven by internal processes, “reinforcing their role as nearby analogues of young, low-mass galaxies in the early Universe.”

If you’d like a more substantive galactic meal than peas and blueberries, may I recommend the Fried Egg Galaxy or the Hamburger Galaxy? Cap it off with a Milky Way for dessert.

Journey to the magic spyglass in space

Palos, Mario F. et al. “Curved Space Telescope: E-sail concept to the solar gravitational lens focal region.” Advances in Space Research.

There is a sweet spot in the outer wilds of the solar system, about 650 times the distance between Earth and the Sun, where it is theoretically possible to peer across interstellar space and spot surface features of exoplanets—including continents, oceans, or perhaps signs of life.

This phenomenon, known as the solar gravitational lens, is caused by the Sun’s gravity warping light from distant sources, essentially making it a stellar magnifying glass. It could be an incredible observational tool, but schlepping all the way out into the solar sticks is a huge challenge that has inspired a host of futuristic spaceflight concepts.
Concept art of an exoplanet observed through the solar gravitational lens. Image: Slava Turyshev/NASA
Now, scientists have proposed sending “an E-sail propelled spacecraft” called the Curved Space Telescope (CST) powered by the solar wind, a stream of charged particles emitted by the Sun. The probe would cruise through the solar system by deploying metallic tethers that tap into the solar wind and generate thrust from repulsion effects with its particles.

“One of the most interesting scientific objectives for a mission like CST would be the search for proof of extraterrestrial life,” said researchers led by Mario F. Palos of the University of Tartu. The team added that risky maneuvers, like slingshotting close to the Sun, would not be necessary for this mission, unlike previous proposals along these lines.

E-sails have never been tested in space and it’s anyone’s guess whether we’ll ever be able to send a mission to this interesting frontier. Still, it’s amazing to think about capturing close-ups of aliens on faraway exoplanets through a starry lens.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

NGC 3628 - Wikipedia

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404 Media

2026-06-10 13:39:58

Scientists Just Accidentally Discovered a Strange, Hidden Rule of Human Nature

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Scientists have discovered that people walking in crowds tend to spontaneously turn counterclockwise—regardless of the environment, from schoolyards to busy settings—a surprise finding that “may represent a manifestation of a deeper biological principle of symmetry breaking,” according to a study published in Nature Communicationson Wednesday.

The bizarre finding was made essentially by accident; during the Covid-19 pandemic, researchers led by Iñaki Echeverría Huarte, a professor who studies pedestrian dynamics at the University of Navarra in Spain, studied the movements of pedestrians as part of a project to inform public health guidance on social distancing measures. But the videos revealed something unexpected—a consistent pattern of people turning counterclockwise when switching direction.

“The discovery was a serendipitous one (as sometimes happens in science),” Huarte told 404 Media in an email exchange that also included study co-author Claudio Feliciani, a professor who studies crowd dynamics at the University of Tokyo. “Since then, we have completed a series of experiments in Spain to test several hypotheses.”

“Curiously, during a conference where I was presenting the first part of this story, Claudio and I got talking and thought together: why not run an experiment in Japan?” he continued. “We were convinced the rotation would flip there, for several reasons (cultural ones, and the different type of avoidance behaviour that exists in Japan compared with Spain). However...it did not.”

Indeed, over the course of several experiments that took place in different environments in Spain and Japan, the counterclockwise bias persisted, suggesting that the team may have stumbled on a hidden rule of behavior. This preference showed up whether people were walking alone, or as part of a group, suggesting that it emerges from individuals, rather than as a collective phenomenon that is only present in crowds.
Overhead shot of motion in a schoolyard in Spain. Image: ©2026 Echeverría-Huarte et al. CC-BY-ND
“We are now only sure that it is not a collective but an individual bias, and that is very, very robust,” said Feliciani. However, the team stopped short of describing the bias as a “universal law” until more research is conducted, especially in more complex scenarios, such as emergency evacuations or dense crowds.

For this study, the researchers analyzed the movements of hundreds of participants, including adults who were instructed to move freely in different settings, teenagers playing in their schoolyard in Spain, and children at a nursery school in Japan. They accounted for individual variations such as handedness (left or right), age, as well as local social etiquette about expected behavior in crowds.

In each situation, the participants displayed a clear counterclockwise bias in the rotation of their bodies as they moved to a new direction. Each group also contained people who turned predominantly clockwise or showed no rotational bias, but they were fewer in number than the counterclockwise turners. The nursery school children showed an even stronger bias toward counterclockwise turns, suggesting that it may not be a learned behavior, but something biologically rooted.

“It is likely biomechanical, but exactly why is hard to tell,” said Feliciani. He added that this symmetry-breaking motion appears to be unusual in animals, and that “most animals show no bias, and humans are probably the exception or, for sure, a rare case.”

That said, the study outlined a few exceptions, including temnothorax ants, which tend to turn left while exploring, and budgies, which show preferences in certain lateral directions during flight.

Tip Jar

Huarte is working on follow-up studies that use virtual reality to shed light on the bias, but for now, this weird pattern remains unexplained. A better understanding of its origins could be useful for applications in busy settings like airports, museums, shopping centres, and other public spaces. It’s also an example of how unexpected behavior can be hidden in plain sight.

“I believe the real value of our discoveries lies in the fact that it can lead to other discoveries on how we process locomotor information and use them to move,” Feliciani concluded.

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Estimating density limits for walking pedestrians keeping a safe interpersonal distancing - Scientific Reports

Scientific Reports - Estimating density limits for walking pedestrians keeping a safe interpersonal distancing

^Nature

404 Media

2026-06-06 13:36:56

Scientists Discover Hidden Symmetry on Earth That Nobody Can Explain

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that balanced it out, performed evasive maneuvers, decorated a love shack, and bred inside bones.

First, scientists discover a new “triple symmetry” on Earth that nobody can explain. Then: female dolphins keep tabs on coercive males, bowerbirds turn urban trash into urbane treasure, and the housing opportunities provided by dead dinos.

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.

Triple symmetry all across the sky

Zhang, Jianhao et al. “Earth’s east–west albedo symmetry.” Nature.

Scientists have discovered an unexplained “triple symmetry” in Earth’s albedo, meaning its ability to reflect sunlight. The finding deepens the mystery of Earth’s oddly-balanced brightness contrasts, which has been well documented in the near-perfectly matched albedos of the northern and southern hemispheres, despite the very different geographies of these two halves of the planet.

Researchers led by Jianhao Zhang of the University of Colorado Boulder now report the existence of “a unique and persistent east-west (E-W) albedo symmetry: the 27° E meridian divides the planet into an Eastern Hemisphere and a Western Hemisphere that reflect nearly identical amounts of sunlight,” according to the team’s study.

The hemispheres bisected by the 27° E meridian line have nearly-identical amounts of ice-free ocean, cloud cover, as well as planetary albedo, distinguishing this phenomenon as a “triple symmetry” that is distinct from the equatorially divided north-south symmetry, which only has matching albedos.

Zhang and his colleagues discovered the triple symmetry by examining 25 years of data (2001–2025) captured by NASA's Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) program. The satellite-mounted instruments measure the amount of solar energy Earth reflects back into space.

The east-west symmetry persisted over this dataset, with its greatest variations linked to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). For this reason, the team emphasized that the symmetry is essential to accurate projections on a rapidly warming world. Currently, “all models fail to capture…the triple-symmetry feature,” a problem that may be ”contributing to the persistent uncertainty in climate projections,” according to the study.

As for what causes this symmetry, nobody knows. It could be just a strange coincidence, or even weirder, an unknown process of planetary equilibrium. As we reported last year, the north-south albedo symmetry may be fading as both hemispheres get darker, with more pronounced effects in the North, so scientists are leaning toward the weird coincidence hypothesis.

“We cannot yet rule out the possibility that these hemispheric symmetries are simply coincidental features of the present climate state,” the team said in the study. “The importance of the E–W symmetry discovery, however, is beyond the identification of another ‘sweet spot’ of the Earth system.”

“It offers a powerful…constraint on state-of-the-art [Earth system models] and, more broadly, on our fundamental understanding of the Earth climate system,” the researchers concluded.

In other news…

Bottlenose bullies get bad reputations

Bouchard, Alice et al. “Female dolphins use individual vocal labels to track coercive males.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Female dolphins avoid sexually coercive males by keeping track of their signature whistles, according to scientists who observed how wild female Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins reacted to recorded playbacks of male vocalizations in the waters of Shark Bay, Australia.

To secure mating opportunities, coercive males “will bite, hit, or charge the female, chase her…and produce threat vocalizations termed pops—all to intimidate the female and control her movements,” said researchers led by Alice Bouchard of the University of Bristol. “Indeed, pops are only produced by males” and act “as an agonistic ‘come-hither’ signal, inducing the female to stay close to the popping male.”

Who could have guessed the term “popping male” could be so ominous? No wonder female dolphins keep them at fin’s length. Along those lines, the team found that females showed aversive responses to the recorded whistles of males known to have been coercive in the past.

Females appear to use “individual vocal labels to guide reproductive decision-making based on their experience of individual male behavior,” according to the study. Call it a whistle campaign.

Look at this stuff, isn’t it neat? This is how I reproductively compete

Evans, Caitlin F. and Kelley, Laura A. “Urbanization alters courtship signals in male great bowerbirds.” Royal Society Open Science.

For every popping dolphin in the seas, there is a lover bird in the trees. For the male great bowerbird (Chlamydera nuchalis), the key to attracting females isn’t biting or coercion, but the construction of elaborate shelters called bowers decorated with carefully selected trinkets for the enjoyment of potential mates.

Scientists have now discovered that urban bowerbirds may have an edge in their game compared to their rural counterparts, thanks to the dazzling decor options that can be upcycled from their city environments.
Male bowerbird poses in front of his love-nest of urban trinkets. Image: Caitlin Evans
The team catalogued nearly 4,000 decorations collected by Australian bowerbirds at Dreghorn Cattle Station, the rural site, and their urban counterparts in, literally, Townsville (the children’s book writes itself). The results suggest that "urban males may represent an adaptive change to a more attractive display, and that rural males are restricted in their displays by the materials available in their environment.”

“The two most common decorations in rural areas were green glass and green leaves/seeds, and in urban areas the two most common decorations were green glass and red wire,” said authors Caitlin F. Evans and Laura A. Kelley of the University of Exeter, “Decorations on urban bowers were over 10 times more likely to be anthropogenic…than decorations on rural bowers.”

While the city birds may have an easier time finding flashy ornaments, the use of plastics and other human-generated trash have posed dangers, such as entanglement or ingestion, for other species, though it has not been confirmed in bowerbirds. Glass shards and scarlet wires may make for beautiful displays, but never discount the risk of fatal attraction.

I’m so hungry, I could eat a titanosaur

Belaústegui, Zain et al. “The fossil record of insect bone bioerosion: Insights from titanosaur remains at Lo Hueco (Late Cretaceous, Spain) and implications for continental ichnofacies.” Earth-Science Reviews.

We’ll end, as all things should, with a 30,000-pound feast. Titanosaurs, the largest family of animals ever to walk on land, were so enormous as adults that predators basically left them alone (though they made for easy pickings as youngsters).

But once these dinosaurs shuffled off their metric-ton mortal coils, their corpses were devoured by scavengers—including small insects that bore into their bones, leaving permanent structures in their fossilized remains, known as “ichnofacies.”
Beetle chambers carved into titanosaur armor. Image: Belaústegui, Zain et al.
In a new study, paleontologists mapped out the pits, holes, burrows, and trails etched into Cretaceous titanosaur bones deposited in the exquisitely well-preserved Lo Hueco site in Cuenca, Spain. In particular, the results revealed idiosyncratic pupation chambers likely dug out by flesh-eating Cubiculum beetles to deposit larvae. The structures suggest that the dead dinos were exposed to open air for weeks on ancient floodplains as beetles were born and bred in their bones.

“Given the size of the titanosaurs…it is likely that at least part of their carcasses remained dry for long periods of time (several days and even months), and hence, to constitute a perfect scenario for insect colonization,” said researchers led by Zain Belaústegui of the University of Barcelona. “The large size of the carcasses involved (i.e., tons of decaying organic matter) may support specific and stable ecosystems during long periods of time.”

In other words, titanosaur skeletons served as luxury mansions long after their death, with beetle colonies etching in the equivalent of “we were here” notes that have lasted for 70 million years.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Baby Sauropods Were the Potato Chips of the Jurassic Era

Baby Sauropods Were the Potato Chips of the Jurassic Era: “Life was cheap in this ecosystem.”

^{Jake Currie (Nautilus)}

404 Media

2026-06-05 15:28:06

The U.S. Military Quietly Turned GPS Into a Global ‘Numbers Station,’ Evidence Suggests

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The U.S. military has likely been quietly broadcasting codes for its global encryption network using public GPS for nearly 20 years, turning each satellite into a hidden “numbers station,” according to Steven Murdoch, an information security expert, who detailed his findings in a new article in Inside GNSS.

That means every device that uses GPS has been receiving hidden government information for years, and nobody outside the military knew it until now.

Murdoch, a professor of security engineering and head of the Information Security Research Group at University College London, presented evidence that a 176-bit GPS sequence labelled “Subframe 4, Page 17” is encrypted material from the Pentagon’s Over-the-Air Distribution (OTAD) network, which delivers cryptographic keys to military personnel around the world.

“I think the evidence that it's for key transmission—for use in distributing the keys for accessing the military GPS signals—is pretty strong now,” Murdoch said in a call with 404 Media. He noted that the military has “specialized receivers that have the ability to have keys loaded into them” and “presumably have the ability to decrypt these special messages.”

In his new article, Murdoch described how this “forgotten 176-bit slot in the world’s most successful navigation signal turned out to be its quietest and most consequential broadcast.”

Murdoch first spotted the sequence more than a decade ago while he was a graduate student tasked with writing a decoder for raw GPS data while working on a project funded by the European Space Agency.

“I noticed that there was this random-looking data present in the subframe,” he recalled. “I looked at the specification, and thought that was a little bit unusual. I recorded a bunch of it to look for any obvious patterns, but that wasn't the main role of the project, so we moved on.”

From the beginning, he suspected that the subframe field contained encrypted transmissions because the data was so random. “Random data is actually very unusual to get in nature,” Murdoch said. “If you see it, either it's been carefully designed to be random—but then, why is someone sending out random data?—or it's encrypted data. I thought encrypted data is by far the most likely explanation.”

He returned to the subframe on and off over the years, and solicited guesses about its content on Stack Exchange in 2023. Ahmed Kamruddin, a master’s student at UCL, developed the project further in 2025. Then, this year, Murdoch put the last pieces of the puzzle together over several weeks by analyzing open archive Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) recordings collected since 2007 and kept by GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences.

This dataset included more than 12 million observations of Subframe 4, Page 17, yielding 3,994 unique 176-bit messages. Within this corpus, Murdoch pinpointed key-repeating “sentinels” including a pattern that appeared in February 2010 and was broadcast on and off across dozens of satellites for more than a decade.

Murdoch discovered that this particular sentinel was transmitted by all 31 operational satellites within a window of a few hours on May 26, 2011, potentially heralding the activation of a new operational system. He confirmed that this timeline coincided with the rollout of the military’s Over-the-Air Distribution (OTAD) and the Over-the-Air Rekeying (OTAR) by cross-referencing declassified documents, including a 2015 presentation about the dates of the operation.

“There was a perfect match between the timeline and that presentation and the change points that were automatically identified from the data,” Murdoch said. “That was the smoking gun that made me think: This is what it's for.”

These automated systems replaced the cumbersome manual distribution of cryptographic keying material, allowing military GPS receivers around the world to be rekeyed remotely through satellite broadcasts rather than through onsite procedures.

For the next 11 years, this expansive rekeying operation was overlooked in public GPS data. In 2022, the system entered a new phase, according to Murdoch’s analysis. The shift was characterized by a slowing in the message rotation rate. Later, in December 2023, broadcasts carrying a distinctive "TEXT" prefix emerged then gradually spread across the constellation.

Murdoch isn’t sure what explains the recent transition, though it could be a possible modernization of the infrastructure or the introduction of a new protocol. But to him, the bigger takeaway is that the signals were always available for anyone willing to take a closer look, a discovery that suggests that there could be more revelations hidden for the cryptographically curious among us.

“Every receiver in the world decodes Subframe 4, Page 17,” Murdoch said in his new article. “Almost none of them have ever looked at it. The lesson generalizes: There is more to learn from the bytes already arriving at our antennas than from the bytes we wish were specified differently. The data are publicly available. The signal is overhead, twice a day, every day.”

“Every GPS satellite is a numbers station,” he concluded. “The receivers were always listening. We just had not been.”

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Current Issue - Inside GNSS - Global Navigation Satellite Systems Engineering, Policy, and Design

Current online issue of all featured global navigation satellite system related articles.

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404 Media

2026-05-30 13:00:00

‘Highly Plausible’ Aliens on Europa Are Earthlings’ Descendants, Study Says

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the stories this week that spread life across space, went stir crazy for science, held the colony together, and peacefully sat it out.

First, what if we went all the way to Europa only to find that some earthly bacteria already set up shop there? Then: red rum on the Red Planet, the palace intrigue of tropical wasps, and an afterlife in full lotus.

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.

That’s one small step for a dust-borne bacterium…

Osmanov, Zaza. “Earth as a potential source of life for Europa’s subsurface ocean.” International Journal of Astrobiology.

Europa, the ice moon of Jupiter, is considered one of the most promising candidates in the search for extraterrestrial life due to its vast subsurface ocean. But imagine what a trip it would be to not just find aliens on this world, but to learn that they originally hailed from Earth.

That’s the premise of a new study that investigates “the possibility of dust particles containing living bacteria ejected from Earth reaching Europa and landing on its surface,” according to author Zaza Osmanov of the Free University of Tbilisi.

“Life on Earth originated at least 3.55 billion years ago, which implies that for approximately that long, Earth has been shedding life-bearing particles into surrounding space,” Osmanov said in the study. “Hence, if favorable conditions exist elsewhere in the Solar System and can be accessed by dust particles, the transport of life from Earth appears plausible and may have been occurring over the course of several billion years.”

This idea that life might travel between planets, or even star systems, is called panspermia. In addition to Earth life potentially expanding beyond our planet, scientists have previously speculated that life on Earth was itself seeded by microbes from another world, such as Mars.

To game out a scenario in which earthly bacteria might reach Europa, Osmanov estimated the rate at which dust-borne bacteria is dislodged from Earth by impacts and how it might then endure a long journey through space and survive a crash into the icescape of Europa.

He concluded that many trillions of life-bearing dust grains from Earth could have reached the moon’s surface over tens of millions of years. From there, surviving microbes may have spent generations shimmying down through cracks in its ice shell, which is dozens of miles thick, into the dark waters of the ocean below.
A close-up of the fractures in Europa’s ice shell. Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
Though the deck would be stacked against these microbes, the high number of dust particles that Earth sloughs off into space “renders the existence of life on Europa highly plausible,” according to the study.

It’s worth noting that panspermia remains a topic of heated academic debate, in part because there are so many uncertainties about the process. For example, H. Jay Melosh, the late geophysicist and panspermia expert, also assessed the odds that Earth life could relocate to Europa and came to the opposite conclusion as Osmanov.

“If life should be found in the oceans of Europa or Enceladus, it is very likely that it’s indigenous rather than seeded from Earth, Mars or (especially) another solar system," Melosh said while presenting findings at the 2019 meeting of the American Geophysical Union, according to Space.com.

Ultimately, we won’t know until we go! NASA’s Europa Clipper is currently on its way to Jupiter to take a closer look at its namesake moon from orbit, and to scout out potential sites for surface exploration in the future. Perhaps decades from now we’ll finally be able to answer the tantalizing question of whether the seas of Europa are inhabited—and if so, if the aliens are homegrown or descended from spacefaring Earthlings.

In other news…

The Overlook Hotel, but it’s in space

Cantisani, Andrea, Schmutz, Jan B., et al. “Social interactions in isolated, confined, and extreme environments: A study of Antarctic winter teams using wearable sensors.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It’s one thing for a bacterium to make an interplanetary voyage; sending humans across deep space is orders of magnitude harder—and not just because we are flimsy mortal fleshbags. There is also the psychological toll of spending months or years in a confined space on a long-duration mission, such a trip to Mars.

To anticipate these challenges, scientists enlisted 12 crew members on a 10-month overwintering mission at Antarctica’s Concordia Station to self-report feelings of loneliness and paranoia, while wearing proximity sensors that allowed the team to monitor their movements.
The Concordia Station, a French–Italian research facility on the Antarctic plateau. Image: Jessica Struder/ University of Zurich
The results revealed “a progressive deterioration in both individual psychological outcome and team dynamics” in which “loneliness and paranoid thoughts increased over time,” according to researchers co-led by Andrea Cantisani of the University of Bern and Jan Schmutz of the University of Zurich.

The team even singled out one participant who “reported unusually high scores…corresponding to severe levels of paranoid ideation.” Reading the study, it’s hard not to be reminded of John Carpenter's The Thing, or the descent into space madness depicted in movies like Event Horizon or Sunshine.

Indeed, the authors shouted out Stephen King’s The Shining as a fictional precursor to the study’s finding that “prolonged isolation [and] constant proximity does not necessarily strengthen relationships but can instead amplify tension, mistrust, and psychological strain.”

In other words, if astronauts start seeing ghostly masked revelers, murdered children, and mercurial bartenders popping up in their Mars base, it’s time to pack it in and head back to Earth.

Stirring up a wasp’s nest—for science

Corbett, Owen R. et al. “Compensation of labour by noncompetitive individuals mitigates costs of aggressive succession contest in a social wasp.” Animal Behaviour.

Speaking of hostile social dynamics, it’s time to return to the “dynastic violence" beat. Long-time readers of this newsletter will know that I am a sucker for succession battles in eusocial animals such as naked mole rats or matricidal ants—which are ruled over by one breeding female queen.

This week, scientists updated the genre by watching what happens when you remove queens of the tropical wasp species Polistes canadensis, a shift that increased colony-level aggression “approximately tenfold,” according to a new study.

In the ensuing power vacuum, rival females vied for the crown through aggressive behaviors including bites, tackles, stings, and air fights. But even as some females took up arms (and stingers), the team was surprised to observe other wasps stepping into foraging or worker roles they had never occupied before to prevent the colony from collapsing in the chaotic interregnum.
Screenshot from the study. Image: Corbett, Owen R. et al.
“Contrary to our predictions, these findings support the theory that some form of compensatory mechanism exists in this species, buffering the conflict of queen succession,” said researchers led by Owen R. Corbett of University College London. “This system, in which some individuals compete while others compensate, could be what allows species like P. canadensis to maintain colony function despite aggressive contest-based succession.”

To channel Cersei Lannister: When you play the game of thrones, you win or you…compensate. While that doesn’t have quite the same ring as the original quote, the wasp colonies definitely weathered their dynastic struggles better than Westeros in the end.

Live by the lotus, die by the lotus

Sun, Chenshuang et al. Multidisciplinary analysis reveals the genetic and dietary structure of the seated burials from Tang Dynasty Chang’an.” Journal of Archaeological Sciences: Reports.

Last, it’s time to take a seat—for eternity. That’s the idea behind a rare funerary custom called “seated burial,” in which bodies are arranged in an upright sitting posture, in contrast to the far more common practice of being “laid to rest” in a supine pose.

In a new study, archaeologists examined four individuals who lived between the 7th and 9th centuries in what was then called the Chang’an region of northwest China and were buried in seated poses. The study offers “the first direct genetic evidence” to counter predictions that these burials imply a monastic lifestyle or a particular ethnic lineage, according to researchers led by Chenshuang Sun of Fudan University in Shanghai.

“Our genomic data contradicts the hypothesis that seated burials have a unique origin from ancestors in northern or northeastern Asia” as “we find no evidence of significant differences between seated burial individuals and their contemporaries,” the team concluded. “Although Buddhist symbolic artifacts, such as pagoda-shaped jars, were found in one tomb, isotopic evidence contradicts strict adherence to vegetarian Buddhist precepts.”

In addition to refuting the special status of the skeletal sitters, the study also includes interesting asides, such as records of Buddhist monks who ended up in “seated death” after “passing away in the full-lotus position.”

Seated burials have been unearthed across the globe, serving as a reminder to us all that we don’t have to take death lying down.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

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

The remains of Theia are scattered deep inside the Earth and its satellite. By analyzing these remnants, scientists have proposed an origin.

^{Becky Ferreira (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-05-28 15:28:47

The Sun Is Undergoing a Mysterious Change and Nobody Knows Why

The Sun is experiencing “striking” long-term shifts in its behavior that have gone undiscovered for more than a decade, according to a study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on Wednesday.

The Sun passes through a cycle of high and low activity that lasts roughly 11 years and is caused by variations in the star’s magnetic activity. This activity peaks at a solar maximum, producing more frequent sunspots and higher radio flux, which are known as surface “proxies” of intense magnetism, as well as dramatic eruptions like solar flares and coronal mass ejections. At solar minimum, when magnetic activity winds down, the Sun enters a quieter phase. Throughout the cycle, sound waves known as p-modes oscillate near the surface of the Sun, providing clues about its internal structure.

All of the above is well known, but using new tools, astronomers have just discovered a weird mismatch in surface and p-mode signals that emerged more than a decade ago and has become especially pronounced in the current epoch, Cycle 25, which began in 2019.

“Essentially, we can use the p-modes as a proxy and a probe of activity underneath the surface of the Sun, because the frequencies change in response to the changing magnetic field,” said Bill Chaplin, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Birmingham who led the study, in a call with 404 Media.

“The sunspot number and the radio flux are basically proxies of the total amount of magnetic flux,” he continued. “What we're doing with the p-modes is saying: What is actually happening beneath the visible surface?”
Graphic illustrating the p-mode oscillations in recent solar cycles. Image: W.J. Chaplin
To answer that question, Chaplin and his colleagues examined four decades of observations from the Birmingham Solar Oscillations Network (BiSON), a collection of six remote solar observatories located around the world that have tracked the Sun’s oscillations since 1976.

While astronomers have monitored sunspots for centuries, BiSON has enabled researchers to monitor long-term shifts in “helioseismology,” which measures the seismic activity inside the Sun, a dataset that has led to the recent discovery of so-called "glitches" and other previously undetectable solar phenomena.

“There's a tendency to think that because we've only had data on a few cycles, that all cycles look like that, and that they copy and repeat,” Chaplin said. “I think what's becoming clear is that that isn't the case. No cycle is the same as another.”

The new study revealed that Cycle 25 shows stronger high-frequency p-mode activity just below the surface compared to recent cycles, but that it also appears weaker in terms of surface proxies, meaning it is showing comparatively fewer sunspots and reduced radio flux. This discrepancy hints that magnetic activity has become increasingly confined to a region of several hundred miles under the surface with each successive cycle, though the underlying reason for this change is unclear.

“We saw this really clear signal in the high frequency modes,” said Chaplin. “You can see in the high frequency modes that the current cycle is as strong as Cycles 22 and 23 and that the picture looks very different in the proxies.”

The results suggest that surface proxies, while valuable as rough estimates of magnetic activity, don’t provide the full picture of the roiling dynamics playing out under the solar surface. Chaplin and his colleagues note that several other studies have presented evidence for long-term changes in near-surface solar phenomena, though it will take more research to understand what is driving these trends.

To that end, the team plans to continue observing Cycle 25, which just passed its maximum and is expected to close out with a minimum toward the end of the 2020s. The researchers speculated that the structural changes may be linked either to the longer Hale cycle, which is a period covering two solar cycles—roughly 22 years. Since the Sun’s magnetic poles flip after each solar cycle, the Hale cycle measures the time it takes for the Sun to return to its original magnetic state.

These long-term observations are slowly peeling back the enigmatic inner workings of the Sun, especially the solar dynamo—the process that generates its magnetic field—which remains poorly understood. These efforts could help refine forecasts of hazardous space weather near Earth, while also shedding light on the behavior of other stars.

“Getting more robust space weather predictions is important, but also, from the science point of view, there is [a need] for a better understanding of the dynamo, and how the dynamo changes on long timescales,” Chaplin said.

“Helioseismology is important because it enables you to see inside the Sun, which is something that you can't do by any other means,” he concluded.

404 Media

2026-05-23 13:00:55

‘Corpse Point’ In the Arctic Is Melting, Disturbing Centuries-Old Bodies

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that felt the heat, left their mark, survived a cataclysm, and watched cows watch TV.

First, the bones of long-dead whalers are spilling out their Arctic graves due to human-driven climate change. Then: a trip to “where the snakes lost life,” an ur-moon in the ashes, and the facial recognition abilities of cows.

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 thaw at “Corpse Point”

Loktu, Lise, and Brødholt, Elin Therese. “Skeletons in the permafrost: Exploring climate-driven heritage loss and occupational health at the early modern whaling burial site of Likneset, Svalbard.” PLOS One.

The battered bones of beleaguered whalers buried centuries ago in the Arctic are melting out of their permafrost graves due to human-driven climate change, according to a new study. The remains of these men, who lived in the 17th and 18th centuries, reveal the physical toll of whaling on sailors, and highlight the urgent need to preserve cultural heritage as global temperatures rise.

Climate change is an obvious danger to future generations, but it also threatens our link to the past by accelerating the erosion and degradation of its material remains. This problem affects all kinds of different archaeological sites, from ancient artifacts preserved in vanishing Mongolian glaciers to the oldest rock art on record in Indonesia, which is rapidly decaying in the heat 45,000 years after it was painted.
Graves at “Corpse Point” showing some of the textiles have eroded in recent decades. Image: Loktu, Lise, and Brødholt, Elin Therese
Nowhere is more affected by warming trends than the Arctic, where temperatures are rising nearly four times faster than the global average. Now, a pair of researchers has examined the remains of European whalers at the Likneset whaling burial site on Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, also known as “Corpse Point.” The team discovered significant degradation of many burials since they were first documented in the 1970s, a loss that has been sped up by climate change.

“The site has been excavated repeatedly over more than three decades, providing a rare opportunity to examine both preservation change and human skeletal evidence through time and across contrasting burial environments within a single site,” said authors Lise Loktu of the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research and Elin Therese Brødholt of Oslo University Hospital.

“In several cases, coffin lids had collapsed and sideboards were displaced, resulting in partial disturbance of skeletal remains and textiles,” the team said. “One grave (Grave 214) is classified as completely destroyed, with coffin elements and skeletal remains dispersed downslope.”
Textiles were in a better state of preservation in less exposed graves. Image: Loktu, Lise, and Brødholt, Elin Therese
These whalers just can’t get any peace, even in death. Their lives were short and filled with physical hardships, according to the team’s re-examination of the bones. Many individuals endured physical trauma due to chronic strain, and 18 out of 19 of the studied sailors suffered from scurvy. Most of the bones belong to men who died in their 20s or early 30s.

“The predominance of healed injuries indicates survival after traumatic events and suggests that mortality within the assemblage was more closely related to cumulative physiological stress than to acute fatal trauma,” according to the study.

“The results from Likneset…call into question the long-term viability of in situ preservation and managed decay under warming permafrost conditions,” the team concluded. Future work to address this problem “should be guided by clearly defined knowledge priorities: which information must be documented and analysed before it is irretrievably lost?”

In other news…

The mystery of Ndalambiri

Mesfin, Isis et al. "A new archaeological chrono-cultural sequence for the rock art site of Ndalambiri, Cuanza Sul, Angola" Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

For at least 45,000 years, humans have gathered at Ndalambiri, a rockshelter in Angola thought to be named for an Umbundu phrase that means, “This is where snakes lost life.” Its interior wall is adorned with an immense fresco of roughly 1,200 figures painted in white, red, and black, including many anthropomorphic and geometric designs left over the past 2,000 years.

Now, researchers report the first comprehensive excavation of the site in partnership with local communities, an effort that unearthed thousands of artifacts, such as pottery shards, tools, and botanical and faunal remains.
Excavations under the fresco at Ndalambiri. Image: Mesfin, Isis et al.
“The archaeological content of this central rock art and heritage site in Angola has remained poorly documented until now,” said researchers led by Isis Mesfin of the French Museum of Natural History in Paris. “The diversity of archaeological materials discovered at the Ndalambiri shelter makes it a strategic site for raising awareness about heritage preservation and field archaeology training.”

The team discovered the earliest evidence of iron production in Angola in the layers, dating back to the 5th century CE, and speculated that Ndalambiri was often a crossroads of diverse cultural interactions. But despite the wealth of new finds from the excavation, the study noted that “the identity of Ndalambiri’s occupants and painters remains uncertain.”

Though it’s not clear yet who adorned its walls or sought refuge in its space, the rockshelter was clearly a storied gathering place that preserves eerie remnants of untold generations.

Last moon standing

Belyakov, Matthew et al. “Nereid as a regular satellite of Neptune.” Science Advances.

Let’s dispense with human timescales and wind the clock way back to the early solar system, some four billion years ago. There was Neptune, minding its own business, when a pair of Pluto-sized dwarf planets suddenly barged into its way, causing complete orbital chaos.

Neptune gravitationally captured one of the interlopers, which became the moon Triton. But in the fallout of the encounter, Neptune’s original moons were catapulted into deep space or torn into pieces and left to coalesce into a new set of irregular objects.

All, that is, except Nereid. Scientists have discovered that this Neptunian moon, which is about 200 miles in diameter, is likely the sole survivor of this ancient collision of worlds. Using observations from the James Webb Space Telescope, a team found that Nereid doesn’t spectrally match the rest of Neptune’s moons.

“Our proposed regular satellite genesis story for the moon leaves Nereid as the singular intact original satellite of Neptune—Neptune’s innermost moons, such as Proteus, are reaccreted pieces of satellites destroyed by Triton’s capture,” said researchers led by Matthew Belyakov at Caltech. “Future spacecraft exploration of the Neptunian system should search for signs of an early geologic history on Nereid consistent with formation as a regular satellite.”

Talk about a lunar loner. Nereid may offer a rare glimpse of a fleeting era before Triton came crashing into its captured orbit, upending the Neptunian moon system forever.

Cows can tell people apart

Amichaud, Océane et al. “Cows visually discriminate and cross-modally recognise familiar and unfamiliar human faces in videos.” PLOS One.

We’ll end, as all things should, with cows watching TV. To determine whether these animals can recognize human faces, or match voices to faces, scientists played a series of videos for 32 Prim’Holstein cows.

In one experiment, the cows watched a series of muted videos of familiar and unfamiliar male faces. In a second session, the cows watched videos of familiar caretakers speaking in their own voice, or a dubbed version with a different voice. The heart rates of the cows were monitored throughout both experiments.
A graphic demonstrating the experimental setup. Image: Amichaud et al.
The results revealed that “cows looked significantly longer at the unfamiliar person, suggesting that they are able to discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar individuals using only a video of their faces as a cue,” said researchers led by Océane Amichaud of the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment in France. “Cows looked significantly longer at the face that matched the voice, indicating that they are able to associate familiar and unfamiliar voices with the corresponding face.”

While the cows were able to distinguish between individuals, there was no difference in their heart rates when presented with familiar caretakers and strangers. The researchers suggested that future work should explore whether any other bovine behaviors are dependent on their human companions. This has been “cows watching TV” news.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Indonesia: Climate change destroying world's oldest animal painting

Higher temperatures have accelerated build-up of salts, which causes the art to flake off the walls.

^{BBC News}

404 Media

2026-05-21 13:00:28

The Oldest Evidence of Animal Sex Has Been Found, and It’s Mind-Boggling

Scientists have discovered the oldest fossilized evidence of sexual reproduction and locomotion in animals at a remote site in Canada’s Northwest Territories that dates back 567 million years to the Ediacaran period, according to a study published on Wednesday in Science Advances. According to researchers, the finding pushes the origins of animal sex back by 5-10 million years.

The newly unearthed fossils were deposited in a fossil layer known as the White Sea assemblage that is preserved in parts of Russia, Asia, and Australia, but has never been found in North America before.

The discovery offers a snapshot of otherworldly species such as Aspidella, an animal that looked like a flying saucer with concentric ring patterns; Dickinsonia, a mouthless pancake of a creature that absorbed food through its bottom surface, clusters of tubular Funisia animals that offer the oldest evidence of sexual reproduction in animals; and an unidentified anchor-shaped lifeform that may represent a new species. These animals lived in offshore waters at about 600 feet of depth, far from coastal shelves.

“We know, mostly from rocks in Australia, as well as some famous rock units in Russia, that taxa like Dickinsonia could move, and that taxa like Funisia probably reproduce sexually,” said Scott Evans, a curator and professor at the American Museum of Natural History who led the new research, in a call with 404 Media.

“The cool thing about this study is that we're finding those same fossils in rocks that are at least seven million years older than the oldest previously known,” he added. “It's exciting to be able to say that they weren't just around for a blip of time. They were around for a really long period of time in our history.”
Reconstruction of Ediacaran fossil community from the lower Blueflower Formation near Sekwi Brook, Mackenzie Mountains, Northwest Territories, Canada. Image: Illustration by Alex Boersma
The Ediacaran era, which elapsed between 635 to 541 million years ago, marked the transition from microscopic organisms to much larger lifeforms, setting the stage for the Cambrian “explosion” of animal life that directly followed it. But though the Ediacaran was the dawn of truly complex and visible life on Earth, fossils from this time are rare in part because organisms were soft-bodied, lacking bones or shells that are more conducive to preservation.

That said, some Ediacaran ecosystems have been fortuitously entombed in stone molds in assemblages around the world, offering a glimpse of this bizarre lost world. For decades, paleontologists have explored these ancient ecosystems at the Blueflower Formation in the Sekwi Brook area of the Northwest Territories.

In 2024, Evans and study co-author Justin Strauss of Dartmouth College discovered a new site that exposed the first known White Sea fossils in North America, opening a new window into these early ecosystems. For Evans, it was especially thrilling to find the remains of Dickinsonia, an organism he has spent years studying and had never been found in North America before.

“We'd always joke, ‘wouldn't it be crazy if we found Dickinsonia?’” Evans recalled, referring to his past fieldwork in the region. “So, on day one to find it out there was almost comical, but it's because Justin knows the rocks and knew they were right to look for them. That’s the key.”

Sexual reproduction initially evolved in simple microbes some two billion years ago, but Funisia is the oldest example of animal sex that is known from the fossil record (though there were no doubt earlier sexual pioneers that are not preserved). These worm-shaped animals are often found in dense clusters that imply they reproduced through mass spawning events in which they released sperm and egg into the water column, a strategy still used by corals and other marine animals today.

The team’s discovery of Dickinsonia, along with another strange bottom crawler called Kimberella, also offer the earliest fossil evidence of movement in animals.
Fossil locality near Sekwi Brook, Mackenzie Mountains, Northwest Territories, Canada, with co-author Kim Lau. Image: Scott Evans
One of the most evocative finds is a tiny organism that likely represents a new species and genus, though the remains are too indistinct to clearly identify it. It resembles a known organism called Parvancorina, which looks like an anchor came to life, but it will take more specimens to pin down its lineage.

“We don't know what it is,” Evans said. “It's hard because these fossils are soft-bodied things that were buried under sand and compressed. They can be distorted, stretched, and so when you find just one, it's really hard to know that the shape you're seeing is how it's typically preserved, or maybe this is just a weird specimen that got stretched in a certain way.”

“It is very tantalizing to think this is a new species, but we are not ready to name it yet,” he added. “But that's why we'll go back and spend a lot more time crawling over these rocks.”
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Indeed, the team only spent five days at this site last year, so there is plenty of ground left to cover. In addition to looking for new specimens, the researchers hope to understand the broader context of this assemblage.

For example, the fact that these thriving ecosystems emerged in deep offshore waters suggests that these environments may have provided stability for nascent animal life, compared with shallow coastal regions.

Later in the fossil record, it is more common to find organisms that emerge first in shallow waters near the shoreline, and then follow the opposite trajectory by colonizing the deeper ocean. Future fieldwork could reveal more insights into this early flourishing of complex life, and how it laid the groundwork for everything that has happened since.

“This is one of the few places on Earth where we have over a kilometer of rocks that cover this period where we think animals first appear and diversify,” Evans concluded. “The hope is that by continuing to go back to these sites, we'll get a lot more information on patterns of change through that interval.”

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2026-05-16 13:00:34

Scientists Discover Strange New Crystal Formed by Nuclear Blast

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that were long in the tooth, trapped in the lattice, unearthed in Thailand, and entombed in post-apocalyptic waters.

First, scientists discover that even Neanderthals had to go to the dentist. Then: a nuke-born crystal, a 60,000-pound herbivore, and life after the death of most species on the planet.

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.

A trip to the Neanderthal dentist

Zubova, Alisa V. et al. “Earliest evidence for invasive mitigation of dental caries by Neanderthals.” PLOS One.

Neanderthals performed dental interventions at least 59,000 years ago, pushing the timeline of dentistry back by tens of thousands of years, according to a study about a molar from Chagyrskaya Cave in southwestern Siberia.

Early humans used rudimentary dental tools, like toothpicks, for well over a million years. But scientists have now identified evidence that Neanderthals used drills to treat cavities at the Siberian site, performing an Ice Age version of a root canal. Previously, the oldest tooth that showed signs of a dental checkupt belonged to “Villabruna,” a prehistoric human male who lived in Italy 14,000 years ago.

The remnants of the Neanderthal tooth adds to a growing body of research that has overturned the stereotype of Neanderthals as cognitively inferior to Homo sapiens and hints at “cognitive convergence” between the two species, according to the study.
The Chagyrskaya Cave molar. Image: Zubova et al., 2026, PLOS One, CC-BY 4.0
The Chagyrskaya Cave tooth shows “evidence of two distinct types of manipulations requiring different tools, in addition to the drilling/rotating technique, necessitating complex finger movements,” said researchers led by Alisa Zubova from the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera).

The study suggests that Neanderthals at this site “possessed the cognitive capacity to intuit the source of pain, comprehend the feasibility of its elimination, and deliberately select the most efficacious dental intervention,” the team added. “The technical proficiency required for this procedure…reflects a capacity for causal reasoning, anticipatory planning, and volitional endurance, contradicting earlier assumptions regarding Neanderthal behavioral limitations.”

It's not clear if this Neanderthal patient got a complimentary toothpick at the end of the visit, but at the very least, they received some temporary relief from a bad toothache.

In other news…

Now I have become Death, maker of crystals

Bindi, Luca et al. “Extreme nonequilibrium synthesis of a Ca–Cu–Si clathrate during the Trinity nuclear test.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Scientists have discovered a weird new type of crystal in the ashes of the Trinity test, the first detonation of a nuclear bomb, which took place in the early morning of July 16, 1945, in New Mexico.

Trinity’s “gadget” unleashed a powerful fireball that vaporized its test tower and transformed the desert sand into a glassy residue called trinitite. For decades, researchers have found novel and bizarre compounds in the fallout. A new study now reports the first known instance of a clathrate structure—a crystal lattice that can trap “guest” molecules inside its cagelike scaffolding—in red trinitite.
The sample of red trinitite that contained the clathrate. Image: Bindi, Luca et al.
“The discovery of this phase represents the first crystallographically confirmed identification of a clathrate structure among the solid-state products of a nuclear explosion,” said researchers led by Luca Bindi of the University of Florence.

“This work underscores how rare, high-energy events—such as nuclear detonations, lightning strikes, and hypervelocity impacts—serve as natural laboratories for producing unexpected crystalline matter,” the team added.

In addition to being one of the most pivotal split-seconds in history, the Trinity test spun sand into exotic materials that are still generating discoveries more than 80 years later.

A huge new Thai-nosaur

Sethapanichsakul, Thitiwoot and Khansubha, Sasa-On et al. “The first sauropod dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous Khok Kruat Formation of Thailand enriches the diversity of somphospondylan titanosauriforms in southeast Asia.” Scientific Reports.

Meet the largest dinosaur ever found in Southeast Asia: Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis, a hulking sauropod that lived more than 100 million years ago in what is now Thailand.

Weighing in at an estimated 60,000 pounds and measuring nearly 90 feet from head to tail-tip, this massive herbivore belonged to the titanosaur family, the largest animals ever to walk on land.
Schematic representation of the skeleton of Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis with preserved bones highlighted in yellow. The bar is one meter. Image: Sethapanichsakul, Thitiwoot and Khansubha, Sasa-On et al.
“We estimate a body mass of 25–28 tonnes for Nagatitan, and suggest it was part of a broader middle Cretaceous body size increase in Asian titanosauriforms, facilitated by rising temperatures and expanded suitable habitat,” said researchers co-led by Thitiwoot Sethapanichsakul of University College London and Sasa-On Khansubha of Sirindhorn Museum in Thailand.

“The discovery of Nagatitan expands the known diversity of Southeast Asian sauropods and improves our understanding of titanosauriform biogeography within the region,” the team added.

While it’s mind-boggling to imagine a 90-foot-long, 25-tonne animal casually ambling around, Nagatitan is only mid-sized for a titanosaur. The biggest behemoths in this family may have exceeded 120 feet in length and boasted 130,000 pounds of fully plant-powered body mass.

With that said, the all-time heavyweight champion of the animal kingdom is our own contemporary, the blue whale, which tips the scales at an astonishing 400,000 pounds. Have you ever felt so puny in your life?

Life goes on, re-gar-dless

Wilson, Jacob D. et al. “The skull and pectoral girdle of a large gar that lived ∼2000 years after the Cretaceous/Paleogene mass extinction event.” Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The last titanosaurs were wiped out by the asteroid that brought the age of dinosaurs to a sudden and brutal end 66 million years ago, killing off about two-thirds of all species on Earth. But though the space rock eradicated the land giants, some animals managed to pull through, including a large fish that lived within 2,000 years of the impact.

Scientists led by Jacob Wilson of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science described the anatomy of a gar and weighed in on its possible taxonomy, building on the initial 2022 study that first reported the specimen. Measuring about five feet in length, this gar inhabited a post-apocalyptic world that is preserved within the Fort Union Formation of North Dakota.
Diagram of fossils, with scale model. Image: Brownstein, Chase Doran et al., 2022
The specimen “is notable both for its size (more than 1 meter) and its precise stratigraphic placement 18 centimeters above the Cretaceous/Paleogene (K/Pg) boundary clay,” the team said. “Our conclusions support the inference that gars were prominent members of freshwater ecosystems and, in turn, freshwater ecosystems were capable of supporting large-bodied predators within ∼2000 years after the K/Pg extinction.”

This gar hatched into an eerily empty ecosphere, mere centuries after a planetary nightmare, yet it still grew into a fisherman’s dream catch. It’s a testament to the resilience of life on Earth, which could not be fully stomped out even by a direct cosmic punch to the face.

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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2026-05-14 18:00:56

DOGE Cuts Unleashed a Deadly Wave of Violence Across Africa, Study Finds

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The sudden shuttering of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) by DOGE in 2025 is associated with a rise in violent conflicts across Africa, according to a study published on Thursday in Science.

Days into Donald Trump’s second term, his administration began rapidly dismantling USAID, which had, up until that point, been the world’s largest national humanitarian donor. Elon Musk, who spearheaded the Department of Government Efficiency, announced that his team had fed the agency “into the woodchipper” in February 2025. Tracking models suggest the collapse of USAID may have already caused 762,000 preventable deaths, of which 500,000 are children, and the cuts could lead to more than nine million preventable deaths by 2030, according to a study published in February 2026.

Now, a team reports “the earliest evidence of the impact of cuts to USAID on the incidence of violent events” which suggests that “the radical cuts…led to an increase in conflict in the regions that received the most aid from the United States,” according to the new study.

“What we find is that with the USAID shutdown, there was a rapid increase in the likelihood of violence, the severity of violence, and the lethality of violence across nearly one thousand subnational administrative units across Africa,” said Austin L. Wright, study co-author and associate professor and director of strategic initiatives at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, in a call with 404 Media.

In regions that received the most support from USAID, the cuts were associated with a 6.5 percent probability of any conflict event, compared to regions that received no aid. To get a sense of the devastating impact of that statistic, here’s what the study reports:

“The probability of protests and riots was 10% greater, the number of conflict events increased by 10.6%, battle counts increased by 6.9%, and battle-related fatalities increased by 9.3%. Event-study analysis confirmed no preexisting differences in conflict trends between high- and low-exposure regions before the shutdown. Effects are of similar size, with a 12.3% relative increase in the number of conflict events.“

Between 2021 and 2024, USAID is estimated to have saved 91 million lives, about a third of which are children under 5 years old. The agency was created by John F. Kennedy in 1961 and, in the years preceding Trump’s shutdown of the agency, accounted for less than 1 percent of total U.S. federal spending.

The impact of aid on communities is complex and context-dependent. Aid may reduce conflicts in cases where the opportunity costs of violence are mitigated by an influx of resources, known as the “opportunity cost effect.” But aid can also fuel conflicts over the handling and distribution of those resources, known as the “rapacity effect.”

The collapse of USAID, which is unprecedented in its scale and speed, has produced the worst of both worlds, according to the new study.
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“When those funds rapidly go away, it's a shock to the opportunity cost, and now it becomes more and more attractive to participate in what we might call the unproductive part of the economy, which is participating in violence, engaging in crime, and other activities,” Wright said. “But because the shutdown was so rapid, it didn't really have an opportunity to bind on the rapacity effect, because it's not as if the bridges, roads, or full-on infrastructure went away. The things that individuals or groups might fight over were still present.”

“It’s a bit of a ticking time bomb, because you're both removing the conflict-reducing side of aid, while leaving behind the conflict-enhancing part of aid,” he added.

To quantify the impact of the cuts on violence, Wright and his colleagues examined the Geocoded Official Development Assistance Dataset (GODAD), which monitors geolocated information regarding foreign aid disbursements, alongside the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED), which tracks violent events.

The overlapping datasets revealed macro-level patterns between aid distribution and violence in the wake of the cuts, including significant upticks of violence in areas that had previously received large amounts of aid, or where the population had less control over their government due to weaker executive constraints.

Moreover, this increase in conflict has persisted over the course of months and may continue in areas that fall into “conflict traps” defined by self-perpetuating cycles of violence.

These impacts are catastrophic for people who had relied on USAID, as evidenced by the estimated death tolls, and the increased risk of violent conflicts and upheavals. They also present new vulnerabilities for the United States and its allies. Though USAID had an altruistic mission, the agency also served as a vector of soft power and an early-warning system for tracking public health risks, like pandemics. The loss of the agency has already caused national security issues for the U.S., such as the seizure of discarded USAID supplies by Iran-backed Houthi groups in Yemen.

“Those insecurities don't stay where they're created; they travel,” Wright said. “That unfortunately means that the vulnerabilities that are being created at the moment will likely have long-run consequences of creating insecurity that directly impacts the safety of Americans.”

Moreover, Trump’s demolition of USAID prompted many allies in Europe to pull back on their own foreign aid, exacerbating the effects. Though other humanitarian organizations are struggling to mitigate the consequences, the loss of trust caused by the shutdown of USAID is likely permanent, with ominous long-term consequences.

“Even if you reactivated USAID and pretended as if it never went away, you can't reverse these effects because you've already communicated your bad faith behavior,” Wright said. “There is nothing quite like the reputational bomb of simply shutting down an agency, and what that does to the reputation that the U.S. might have if it ever wanted to reinitiate its interventions.”

“From the soft power lens, and a global lens, the reputational effects, I think, are tremendous and will create a bunch of wedges and inefficiencies,” he concluded. “If one simply wanted to restart USAID, it's going to cost much more to rebuild than simply the same budget all over again.”

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ACLED

ACLED is an independent, impartial conflict monitor providing realtime data and analysis for all violent conflict and protests in all countries and territories across the world.

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2026-05-09 13:00:26

Scientists Studied 906 Mafia Marriages and Found Something Surprising

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that got ID’d, caught on camera, internally probed, and married off.

First, scientists have confirmed the identities of four sailors who died in a grisly Victorian voyage. Then: the sights and sounds of an Arctic seafloor, a glimpse into the guts of ice giants, and a wedding kiss of death.

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.

Putting a face, and names, to lost Arctic sailors

Stenton, Douglas R. et al. “DNA identifications of three 1845 Franklin expedition sailors from HMS Erebus.” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

Stenton, Douglas R. et al “‘Some very hard ground to heave’: DNA identification of Harry Peglar, Captain of the Foretop, HMS Terror.” Polar Record.

Scientists have identified four men who died in Sir John Franklin’s disastrous expedition of 1845, a British mission to chart a passage through the Arctic that ended in misery, starvation, and cannibalism, leaving no survivors.

“Since the late nineteenth century the coast of Erebus Bay on King William Island, Nunavut, has been a focal point for historical and archaeological investigations of the 1845 Franklin Northwest Passage expedition,” said researchers led by Douglas Stenton of the University of Waterloo. “Its significance comes from the nature and volume of materials derived from an extraordinary and ultimately tragic event: the fatal attempt by 105 surviving sailors to escape their icebound ships in the spring of 1848 by walking hundreds of kilometres south to the mainland of North America.”
Graves at Franklin Camp on Beechey Island, Nunavut, Canada that memorialize Franklin expedition crew members. Image: Gordon Leggett
Using DNA extracted from skeletal remains, a study has confirmed that the 180-year-old bones belong to the able seaman William Orren, the ship's boy David Young, the officers' steward John Bridgens, and captain of the foretop Harry Peglar. Orren, Young, and Bridgens served on HMS Erebus, the expedition’s flagship, and their remains ended up in Erebus Bay on Canada’s King William Island.

The remains of Peglar, who served on the secondary vessel HMS Terror, were found nearly 80 miles away from the others and are reported in a separate study led by Stenton. Stenton’s team has previously identified the Erebus engineer John Gregory as well as the Captain of Erebus, James Fitzjames, whose remains were subject to cannibalism.

The researchers matched the DNA of these sailors to samples provided by living descendants or relatives to conclusively confirm their identities. In addition to solving a scientific mystery, this process literally puts a face to one man as the team included a reconstructed portrait of David Young, who was around 20 when he died.
David Young, Boy 1st Class from the HMS Erebus, in a 2D Forensic Facial Reconstruction. Image: Diana Trepkov, Investigative Forensic Artist
The results also help to piece together key details of the nightmarish fates that befell these sailors as they endured starvation, exposure, disease, and despair.

“For their descendants, the identifications of John Bridgens, David Young, and William Orren reveal that, like John Gregory, they had survived the first three years of the expedition,” the researchers said. “They also unveil the locations where their deaths occurred, and the fact that none of the men were alone when they died.”

Peglar did die alone, however, and he remains the only member of the Terror crew who has been identified. In the study about his farflung remains, the team concludes with a passage Peglar wrote a few days before the survivors abandoned their stuck vessels and embarked on the retreat that would ultimately kill them all.

Peglar noted the need to procure new boots as “we have got some very hard ground to heave.”

In other news…

Scenes from an Arctic seafloor

Podolskiy, Evgeny A. et al. “Seafloor video-acoustic monitoring in a Greenlandic glacial fjord records hyperbenthos, backward-swimming fish, and narwhals.” PLOS One.

Though the Arctic has many deadly perils, this region is also home to some of the most amazing lifeforms found anywhere on the planet. Scientists have now captured rare footage and recordings of “a highly turbulent environment” on the seafloor of a glacial fjord in northwest Greenland, according to a study.

Here, at depths of about 850 feet, the songs of narwhals reverberate along the seafloor, crustaceans called copepods move in sudden hops, and “marine snow” made of particulate matter falls in blizzardlike bursts. A snailfish was also caught on tape making a particularly memorable exit.
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“One snailfish showed peculiar backward swimming, passively drifting backward with the current,” said researchers led by Evgeny A. Podolskiy of Hokkaido University. “It curled its tail and remained motionless for at least 16 seconds before disappearing from view.”

You’ve heard of the Irish Goodbye and the Minnesota Goodbye, but I’m not sure anything can top the Greenlandic Glacial Fjord Snailfish Goodbye.

The flavorful fillings of ice giants

Ramirez, Vanesa et al. “Reassessing planetary composition: Evidence of rock-dominated envelopes in Uranus and Neptune.” Astronomy & Astrophysics.

What’s inside Uranus? Or Neptune, for that matter? Nobody really knows, and we have to rely on models until someone can figure out how to get a direct look inside the guts of these ice giants.

To that end, researchers ran simulations of the possible evolution and composition of the two planets’ interiors based in part on observations of their atmospheres. The results suggest that “the deep interiors of the two planets exhibit distinct compositions” with Neptune having “relatively rock-rich mantles…whereas Uranus is inferred to have more ice-rich mantles,” according to researchers led by Vanesa Ramirez of Leiden University.

“Our results indicate fundamental differences in the internal architectures of Uranus and Neptune, challenging the traditional view of these planets as compositional twins,” the team added.

To put in confectionary terms, Neptune appears to be more of a rocky road, while Uranus may be a refreshing ice slushy. Either way, the study underscores how much there is left to learn about these solar system worlds.

Mob Wives, but it’s science

Catino, Maurizio et al. “Marrying for power: Gendered alliances in mafias.” PLOS One.

In a genuinely gangster new study, scientists took a whack at unraveling the marital power dynamics at work within the 'Ndrangheta mafia syndicate, an infamous crime ring built around familial ties.

“Interfamily marriages have long been recognized as a strategic resource in mafia organizations,” said researchers led by Maurizio Catino of the University of Milano-Bicocca. “Drawing on judicial records documenting…906 marriages among 623 ’Ndrangheta clans, we analyze how matrimonial ties relate to power and cohesion within the organization.”

While nuptials between the most powerful clans are important for group cohesion, the team found that the marriages among less influential families were the real “load-bearing” relationships in the network. In part, this is because boss families tended to be “associated with redundant, overlapping unions” whereas there is more elasticity in the outer circles.
Say hello to my little chart. Image: Catino, Maurizio et al.
The study is packed with wild and often disturbing anecdotes—and some that seem directly lifted from a Scorsese flick.

For instance, take the case of Emanuele Mancuso, whose aunt tried to dissuade him from cooperating with law enforcement with this pitch-perfect guilt trip: “How is your mother doing? She’s not well! She knows she no longer has a son, how do you think she feels?”

It’s stressful enough to plan a wedding without the additional pressure of figuring out how you will fit into an international criminal syndicate. You can only hope the union will end in holy (not holey) matrimony.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

An Update on the End of the World

Cannibalism, the cheese mummy, and a star-broiled Earth.

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2026-05-07 04:01:26

Scientists Gave ‘Aggressive’ Fish Psychedelic Drugs. A Breakthrough Came Next

Move over, coked-up salmon. Fish dosed with psilocybin, the psychoactive component found in magic mushrooms, showed less aggression toward peers compared to their normal behavior in laboratory experiments, according to a study published on Thursday in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.

Scientists have studied the effects of psilocybin on humans and a variety of other mammals, but fish offer unique insights into the effects of this compound due to their wide varieties of social structures and activity levels. The research is the first to “demonstrate that psilocybin reduces aggression in any animal model,” according to the study, and opens the door to future studies that might pin down the neural mechanisms that underlie these behavioral changes.

Scientists Gave a Bunch of Salmon Cocaine. This Is What Happened Next
Salmon exposed to cocaine and its byproduct swam farther than unexposed fish, raising alarms about drug pollution in aquatic ecosystems.
404 MediaBecky Ferreira

The mangrove rivulus fish (Kryptolebias marmoratus) is particularly intriguing as a highly aggressive fish with incredible adaptations, including the ability to survive out of water for months at a time. It is also a rare hermaphroditic species that reproduces mainly through self-fertilization, producing clones that remove genetic variation as a factor in experiments.

“Each lineage that we have is essentially genetically identical, and between lineages, they are genetically distinct,” said Dayna Forsyth, a research associate at Acadia University in Nova Scotia who led the study, in a call with 404 Media. “So, we eliminate the genetic factor, and just focus on the behavioral effect.”

To determine how psilocybin influences behavior in these fish, Forsyth and her colleagues placed two undosed fish on opposite sides of a tank with a fiberglass mesh barrier that allowed the fish to see and smell each other, but prevented physical interactions. Then, the “focal fish” was removed and exposed to a low psilocybin dose in a separate tank for 20 minutes, and was later transferred back to the partitioned tank where its responses to the undosed “stimulus fish” were observed.

“We really had no idea what we were getting ourselves into,” Forsyth said. “We didn't have much to go off of before. My research question throughout was just: ‘does psilocybin affect fish behavior?’ We had no idea when we first started this, because there weren't too many papers out there on fish.”
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As it turned out, psilocybin had a noticeable impact on the behavior of these fish. Mangrove rivulus fish express aggression by suddenly darting at peers in swimming bursts, but these charges were noticeably reduced in the psilocybin-treated fish. However, the fish still interacted in less overtly hostile ways—such as performing lateral and head-on displays meant to size up peers—regardless of whether they had been dosed.

“We definitely predicted that all aggressive behaviors, including those lateral and head-on displays, would be decreased,” Forsyth said. “We really did not expect it to just target that highly aggressive and more energetically costly behavior, rather than the low-energy behaviors. That was definitely a surprise.”

The study adds to a growing body of research about the impacts of psychoactive compounds on fish, including a recent study in Current Biology about salmon that were exposed to cocaine.

Similar experiments could eventually yield insights about the effects of psilocybin, and other substances, on humans, given that we share some neural anatomy with fish. Forsyth is also interested in how an increased dose might affect fish, or whether they might develop a long-term tolerance to the compound that might shift their behavior back to a normal aggressive state.

“In terms of toxicology studies and exposing fish to a compound for a medicinal aspect, you always want the lowest dose that creates the outcome,” she said. “But it would be interesting to increase that dose and see if it almost reverses the effects. We don't know, but it would be interesting to see what that tolerance is for the dose, maybe even with repeated exposures over time.”

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2026-05-02 13:00:40

This Personality Trait Makes Dreams More Bizarre, Scientists Discover

Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the stories this week that dared to dream, slinked through the city, mourned their mothers, and visited ancient graveyards.

First, scientists studied thousands of dream reports and discovered that world events—like the COVID-19 pandemic—can manifest in our vespertine visions. Then: the science of urban snake rescues, the lonely lives of orphaned dolphins, and scientists fiddle with Rome’s ancient DNA.

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 dream of understanding dreams

Elce, Valentina et al. “Individual traits and experiences predict the content of dreams.” Communications Psychology.

Why do we dream? It’s a question that has kept people up at night for thousands of years. Now, scientists have taken a new crack at the mystery by collecting and analyzing more than 3,700 reports from 207 participants who described both their dreams and waking experiences between 2020 to 2024, as well as 80 participants who reported their dreams during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic from April to May 2020.

The results revealed possible links between personality traits and dream experiences, and suggested that dreams are influenced by external events such as the pandemic.

“During lockdown, dreams showed increased references to limitations and heightened emotional intensity, effects that gradually normalized over the following years,” said researchers led by Valentina Elce of IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca. “These findings demonstrate that stable individual traits and incidental experiences jointly shape dream semantics.”

For the main dataset, Elce and her colleagues recruited 207 Italian adults ranging from 18 to 70 years old who were assessed for their psychological and cognitive traits, demographics, and sleep patterns. These participants recorded recollections of their dreams as soon as they woke up using a scale of descriptive elements, such as bizarreness, vividness, valence (emotional tone), and the level of agency they had over events in the dream. This sample of dreamers was also prompted to record their waking experiences throughout the day.
Figure 1 of the study illustrates descriptive statistics of report content across vigilance states (i.e., wakefulness and dream). Image: Elce, Valentina et al.
The team used natural language processing models to quantitatively analyze the semantic structure of the dream reports and correlations between individual traits and dream experiences. For example, people who let their mind wander in their waking hours reported having more bizarre dreams.

“Our findings indicate that dream bizarreness is associated with a higher tendency of the individuals to mind-wander, which also drives frequent shifts in narrative settings,” the team said. “This is in line with accounts suggesting that dreaming and mind-wandering may share a common neural and cognitive foundation.”

The lockdown group, meanwhile, was composed of 60 women and 20 men who recorded their dreams in diaries during spring 2020. By comparing the two samples, the researchers suggest that “external emotionally salient events, in this case the COVID-19 pandemic, might affect dream experiences and how such effects develop over long time spans,” according to the study.

“Notably, themes concerning healthcare, which were heavily represented in daily life during the pandemic, showed no significant changes,” the researchers said. “However, in a continuous line with what was happening in the daylight world, the actions of the individuals while they were dreaming were described as limited by physical or metaphorical constraints and the recalled emotional states carried a stronger intensity.”

Godspeed to the oneirologists—the term for scientists who study dreams—for finding new ways to probe these ephemeral experiences that constantly elude explanation.

In other news…

Hey, I’m slithering here!

Visvanathan, Avinash C. et al. “Urban snake ecology revealed through the lens of decadal data on snake rescues in a megacity.” Global Ecology and Conservation.

In cities with urban snake populations, such as Hyderabad in India, millions of people live alongside venomous snakes—including deadly Indian cobras and Russell’s vipers—that have been displaced by rapid habitat loss.

To discourage people from just killing these cosmopolitan cobras, an organization called the Friends of Snakes Society performs “snake rescues” with trained handlers who remove snakes and transport them to safer locations. By analyzing 55,467 snake rescue records in Hyderabad from 2013 to 2022, a team found that snake rescues rose nearly 17 percent over the decade, and that about 54 percent (n = 30,189) of rescues involved venomous snakes.
Venomous Indian cobras were the most common snakes to be rescued, making up 49 percent of all cases (27,132 snakes). Image: Pavan Kumar N
“Snakes have either become locally extinct or have adapted to the city as their habitat, resulting in intensified human–wildlife interactions in Hyderabad and its neighboring areas,” said researchers led by Avinash Visvanathan of the Friends of Snakes Society. “The dataset demonstrates that standardized snake rescue operations not only mitigate immediate risks but also generate valuable ecological information.”

As always, The Simpsons already did it with the 1993 episode “Whacking Day,” though in that case, a mass snake rescue was made possible by the dulcet tones of Barry White rather than a helpline. Perhaps the efficacy of baritone vocals in urban snake management could offer a future avenue of study.

Orphans of the sea

Cristina Vicente-Sánchez et al. “Two Cases of Early Orphan Survival in Indo-Pacific Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops aduncus) From the Adelaide Dolphin Sanctuary, South Australia.” Marine Mammal Science.

Dolphins, like humans, invest a lot of maternal care into their young, typically nursing calves for two to three years. But scientists now discovered that months-old orphaned calves can survive the deaths of their mothers—though they are negatively impacted by their losses.

Ali, an Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin born in February 2011, suddenly lost her mother Millie in October that same year; Rocket, a member of the same species born in February 2022, was orphaned at seven months old after her mother Ripple disappeared.
Ali photographed shortly before becoming an orphan in 2011 in (a) and (b) and with her newborn calf in March 2025. Images: Barbara Saberton (a) and Cristina Vicente Sanchez (b).
Ali is probably still alive and birthed her own calf in 2025, though it sadly died of blunt force trauma at a few weeks old, possibly due to infanticide or a boat strike. Rocket endured for three years, and was sometimes spotted with a mother-calf pair that may have cared for her, before she was killed by a boat strike last year. Both Ali and Rocket displayed maladaptive behavior, especially getting too close to boats.

The study “provides rare empirical evidence that young-of-year calves can persist without maternal care,” said researchers led by Cristina Vicente-Sánchez of Flinders University.

It’s a bittersweet finding, demonstrating that when young calves are forced to sink or swim, some can make it—but they may bear lifelong signs of bereavement.

The fall of Rome, according to DNA

Blöcher, Jens, Vallini, Leonardo et al. “Demography and life histories across the Roman frontier in Germany 400–700 ce.” Nature.

Oceans of ink have been spilled on the rise and fall of the Roman empire, but scientists have now read the story that is written in the genomes of people who lived in the aftermath.

A new study analyzed ancient DNA from 258 individuals found at grave sites in southern Germany who died between the years 400 and 700. These reconstructed lineages “reveal a major demographic shift coinciding with the late fifth century collapse of Roman state structures, when a founding population of northern European ancestry mixed with genetically diverse Roman provincial groups” said researchers co-led by Jens Blöcher and Leonardo Vallini of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.

These intermarriages eventually formed ”a population resembling modern Central Europeans by the early seventh century,” and reflected the rise of “Christian ideals such as lifelong monogamy, with minimal divorce or remarriage after widowhood” and “strict incest avoidance,” according to the study.

While this time of transition “has traditionally been framed as a conflict between northern ‘barbarians’ and a Roman Empire in decline, newer studies reveal a multifaceted transformation,” the team added.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, so the saying goes, and its flamboyant collapse is arguably still in motion, inspiring new interpretations and never-ending material for history podcasters.

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

2026-04-28 17:19:29

Scientists Investigated a Frequency Linked to ‘Paranormal’ Encounters. The Results Were Unsettling.

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If you’ve ever visited a haunted house or a paranormal hotspot, you may have experienced a weird sense of unease that you couldn’t quite explain. While it’s tempting to imagine that these feelings signal the presence of ghosts or other supernatural entities, they may actually be caused by acoustic frequencies below 20 hertz, known as infrasound, according to a study published on Monday in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.

The human ear is not tuned to pick up infrasound, yet a growing body of research has shown that exposure to these frequencies nonetheless causes negative feelings in humans and many other animals. Now, scientists have probed this mysterious link with a new experimental approach involving 36 volunteers who self-reported their moods while listening to various musical styles that sometimes included infrasound.

In addition, the volunteers provided saliva samples for measuring their cortisol levels, which provided empirical evidence that they were more stressed when exposed to infrasound. The results clearly demonstrate that “infrasound may be aversive to humans, acting as a potential environmental irritant and contributing to more negative subjective experience,” according to the study.

“A lot of the literature seemed to tackle either one side of the conversation or the other, where people are looking at surveys and doing interviews with people, or they're looking into the physiology,” said Kale Scatterty, a PhD student at the Neuroscience and Mental Health Institute at the University of Alberta who led the study, in a call with 404 Media. “We wanted to use this as a first step in combining those approaches to get a whole picture of exactly what was happening with this effect.”

“It was surprising and exciting to see a significant difference in cortisol when the infrasound was turned on,” added Trevor Hamilton, a professor of psychology at MacEwan University who co-authored the study, in the same call.

For decades, scientists have linked infrasound to negative effects on humans and many other animals, though it is still not known how humans pick up on these sounds, or why we might have evolved an aversion to this frequency range. Given that natural sources of infrasound include dangerous events like volcanic eruptions, landslides, avalanches, intense storms, or stampeding animals, researchers speculate that humans and other species may have learned to interpret infrasound as a warning sign for incoming disaster.

Babies Born from Dead Parents Will Increase with New Tech. Are We Ready?
Reproductive technologies have enabled children to be posthumously conceived from the frozen eggs and sperm of deceased parents, raising legal, ethical, and practical questions.
404 MediaBecky Ferreira

But, you may be asking yourself, where do the ghosts come in? Infrasound is also produced by a wide range of human-caused noise pollution, such as industrial machinery, wind farms, air conditioning units, busy roads and railways, or military activity in war zones. For this reason, many scientists have wondered if locations that are considered haunted or cursed in some way may sometimes be polluted by infrasound.

Rodney Schmaltz, a co-author of the study and a professor of psychology at MacEwan University, even organizes classes around taking his students to paranormal hotspots, such as the haunted house Deadmonton, to search for scientifically-grounded explanations of their spooky allure. These fun field experiments revealed that playing infrasound at Deadmonton motivates visitors to move more rapidly through the house.
A graphic of the experimental set up. Image: Scatterty et al.
In the new study, the interdisciplinary team combined their expertise by recruiting 36 undergraduate psychology students at MacEwan University (27 women and nine men). Each participant sat in a room alone while calming or unsettling music was played, and gave saliva samples before and after their session. Half of the participants were exposed to infrasound at 18 hertz while listening to both types of music. The participants were asked to report their feelings, their emotional rating of the music, and whether they thought infrasound had been played in their session.

Tip Jar

The participants couldn’t consciously tell whether infrasound was played, but the elevated cortisol levels in the exposed group suggests that some part of their brain picked up on the frequencies, regardless of the type of music that accompanied it. Unlike many past studies, this research didn’t link infrasound exposure to heightened anxiety, though the exposed group reported more irritability, less interest in the music, and a sense that the music was sadder with infrasound.

The sample size of 36 is relatively small due to budget constraints—salivary cortisol tests are not cheap—but Scatterty’s team hopes their study offers a roadmap toward similar experiments that aim to pinpoint the mechanisms that cause infrasound to raise our hackles.

Scientists Create Plant That Produces Ayahuasca, Shrooms, and Toad Psychedelics All At Once
The proof-of-concept system produces psilocybin, DMT, and other compounds in leaves of the tobacco plant, potentially easing pressure on wild species and preserving Indigenous traditions.
404 MediaBecky Ferreira

“We get very excited when we find something really positive like this, but for every single question we answer, we tend to have five more questions come up,” Scatterty said. “It's really hard to give any definitive answers. But for those who have curious minds, it's exciting to see where this kind of work could go. People who are interested in haunted houses and the paranormal might be having something to chew into here. People who are looking at the ecological side of things might interpret it as a noise pollutant for either humans or animals in nature.”

“It's really exciting for the potential it offers for future research,” he concluded.

Frontiers | Infrasound exposure is linked to aversive responding, negative appraisal, and elevated salivary cortisol in humans

IntroductionInfrasound describes sound wave frequencies below 20 Hz, which are typically imperceptible to humans. Some animals perceive and demonstrate avers...

^{Kale R. Scatterty (Frontiers)}

404 Media

2026-04-25 13:00:48

A Mysterious Golden Orb Was Discovered Under the Sea. We Finally Know What It Is.

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the stories this week that battled rivals, devoured sharks, solved riddles, and left fingerprints in the sky.

First, scientists chronicle the victories of a jousting champion unlike any other in all of history. Then: it turns out that krakens are real, the mystery of the Golden Orb is solved, and the Northern winds are changing.

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.

Peak Beak: The Bruce Story

Grabham, Alexander A. et al. “A disabled kea parrot is the alpha male of his circus.” Current Biology.

Meet Bruce, a kea parrot that lost the top half of his beak about 12 years ago. Despite his injury, Bruce is the undisputed alpha male of his “circus,” the term for a group of kea. He remains undefeated in dominance battles with rivals, allowing him to live a life of luxury in his long-time home at Willowbank Wildlife Reserve in New Zealand.

Now, Bruce has inspired one of the most delightful questions ever asked in an academic paper: “How does the kea missing his upper beak win every fight and not get stressed?”

The answer is Bruce’s invention of “beak jousting,” a set of moves that has ruffled feathers among his “intact” rivals, allowing him to ascend to the top of the pecking order.

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“Bruce deployed his exposed lower beak in jousting thrusts, both at close range, with an extension of his neck, and from afar, with a run or jump that left him overbalanced forward with the force of motion,” said researchers led by Alexander Grabham of the University of Canterbury.

“Bruce has therefore weaponised his disability through behavioural innovation: jousting is a behaviour not observed in other kea, with different motor patterns, that targets a wider range of body parts,” the team said.

In this way, Bruce has maintained his position as the ringleader of the circus, a position that comes with appreciable benefits. The other birds give him dibs at all feeders in the preserve where he eats undisturbed, plus, he is the only male that is groomed by other males as opposed to female mates. He has been observed enjoying these “allopreening” services from his excellently-named male subordinates Taz, Megatron, Joker, and Neo.
Bruce being Bruce. Image: Alex Grabham
“This provides evidence of up-hierarchy allopreening: it was exclusive to the alpha and generally increased in frequency inversely to dominance, with the highest frequency of allopreening done by the lowest-ranking male,” the team said (Taz is bottom of the heap, in case you’re curious). “This is likely a key factor in why Bruce exhibits the lowest stress: allopreening is associated with reduced glucocorticoids.”

Alpha males in other species normally have higher stress levels than their subordinates, but Bruce has found a way to kick back and chill out. Indeed, this isn’t the first time he’s been the subject of scientific fascination; a 2021 study reported Bruce’s use of pebbles as tools of self-care. The fact that he displays such immense behavioral flexibility and resilience “brings into question whether well-intentioned prosthetic assistance for physically impaired animals will always improve positive animal welfare,” according to the study.

“The bird missing his upper beak has rewritten what disability means for behaviourally complex species,” the team concluded.

In other news…

Who left all these fingerprints in the extratropical zone?

Blackport, Russell, and Sigmond, Michael. The Emergence of a Human Fingerprint in the Boreal Winter Extratropical Zonal Mean Circulation.” Geophysical Research Letters.

Everyone wants to change the world, and well, we did it folks. Scientists have discovered “a human fingerprint” in the atmospheric circulation of the Northern hemisphere during winter, according to a new study.

In other words, the impact of human-driven climate change is measurably causing the structure of Northern jet streams to shift over time, a trend that can be observed across multiple different datasets, and which may be a blind spot in our current climate models.

“We find that the pattern or ‘fingerprint’ of wind changes caused by increased greenhouse gases predicted by the models matches with observed changes and that random variability cannot explain the changes,” said authors Russell Blackport and Michael Sigmond of the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis.

“If the models are underestimating the human-caused response, we expect the circulation trends to continue at a faster rate than models predict,” the team added. “Understanding the cause of these discrepancies will be crucial for obtaining accurate projections of regional climate change.”

While this is not your typical biometric data, we are still leaving figurative prints in the skies. The good news is that at least there are experts and instruments monitoring these shifts—for now.

Release the Cretaceous krakens

Ikegami, Shin and Iba, Yasuhiro et al. “Earliest octopuses were giant top predators in Cretaceous oceans.” Science.

April has been a very octopusian month, featuring new discoveries about octopus sex and octopus imposters. How fitting to round it out with an amazing tale of real-life “krakens”—octopuses that may have exceeded 60-feet in length (!)—that once prowled the Cretaceous seas as apex predators.

“With a calculated total length of ~7 to 19 meters, these octopuses may represent the largest invertebrates thus described, rivaling contemporaneous giant marine reptiles,” said researchers co-led by Shin Ikegami and Yasuhiro Iba of Hokkaido University. “Their position in the food chain, however, has remained completely unknown since direct evidence such as the stomach contents of these giants has not been found to date.”
Concept art of Cretaceous kraken Nanaimoteuthis haggarti. Image: Yohei Utsuki: Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Hokkaido University
In the absence of any preserved octopus guts, the team looked at wear-and-tear on jaw fossils of these extinct giants for insights about their diet. The results revealed ample evidence of “a powerful bite” and “dynamic crushing of hard skeletons.” In other words, these krakens may not have only rivaled iconic ocean predators of this age—such as sharks or giant mosasaurs—they may have devoured them as well.

These ancient giants “probably consumed large prey with their long arms and jaws, playing the role of top predators in Cretaceous marine ecosystems,” the team concluded.

I think I have a new idea for a cryptid, in case anyone wants to spin up some lore.

Solved! The case of the Golden Orb

Auscavitc, Steven et al. “The Curious Case of the Golden Orb — Relict of Relicanthus daphneae (Cnidaria, Anthozoa, Hexacorallia), a deep sea anemone.” bioRxiv.

While there are no longer giant krakens prowling the seas (that we know of), the modern ocean is still home to plenty of bizarre creatures. Case in point: The Golden Orb, a strange object of indeterminate origin first glimpsed in 2023 by a robotic submersible more than two miles under Alaskan waters as part of a NOAA expedition with the ship Okeanos Explorer.

This orb completely baffled the scientific community. Was it an egg mass? A dead sponge? A biofilm? Theories abounded. But now, scientists think they have finally solved the riddle after a thorough lab analysis, according to a new preprint study that has not yet been peer-reviewed.

The verdict is that the orb is a clump of dead cells from the deep-sea anemone Relicanthus daphneae—put another way, these are basically gilded toe-nails.
youtube.com/embed/FUXrvirtdB8?…
“During the course of Okeanos Explorer expeditions, it is not uncommon that encountered organisms are not immediately recognized,” said researchers led by Steven Auscavitch of Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. ”However, sometimes real mysteries exist and imagery alone only raises questions. Such is the case of the Golden Orb.”

“Fortunately, the specimen was collected using a suction sampler…and we have determined that the Golden Orb is the organic remnant of Relicanthus daphneae,” the team concluded.

Like the old saying goes, one anemone’s trash is a laboratory’s treasure.

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

2026-04-20 19:40:33

Scientists Gave a Bunch of Salmon Cocaine. This Is What Happened Next

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Salmon exposed to cocaine swim farther and behave differently than unexposed fish, according to the first study to observe the effects of cocaine on fish in the wild rather than a laboratory setting.

Many waterways around the world are contaminated with a host of legal and illegal substances that are consumed by humans and then excreted into sewage systems. As global demand for cocaine skyrockets, traces of the drug—including its main metabolite, benzoylecgonine—are flowing into lakes and rivers where they can be absorbed by wildlife, such as Atlantic salmon.

Previous research in laboratory conditions has already linked cocaine exposure to behavioral changes in aquatic species, but this connection has never been explored in fish in the wild. Now, scientists have demonstrated that cocaine and benzoylecgonine “can accumulate in the brains of exposed Atlantic salmon—an ecologically and economically important species of high conservation concern—and disrupt the movement and space use of these fish in the wild,” according to a study published on Monday in Current Biology.

“We were motivated by a major gap in the scientific literature: almost everything that was known about the impacts of cocaine pollution on animal behaviour relies on data that has been collected in laboratory settings,” said Michael Bertram, an author of the study and an associate professor in the department of wildlife, fish, and environmental studies at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, in an email to 404 Media.

“We wanted to know whether environmentally realistic exposure to cocaine and its major metabolite, benzoylecgonine, actually changes how fish move in the wild under real ecological and environmental conditions,” he continued.

To fill this knowledge gap, Bertram and his colleagues obtained more than a hundred Atlantic salmon “smolts”—the term for young fish—that were raised in a hatchery until they were two years old. The team divided them into three groups of 35 fish each and equipped every fish with an implant and tracking tags. The “cocaine group” received a slow-release chemical implant of cocaine, the “metabolite group” received a slow-release benzoylecgonine implant, and a third “control group” carried a dummy implant with no chemicals.
Graphical abstract outlining the team’s approach. Image: Brand, Jack et al.
The three groups were released simultaneously on April 12, 2022 at the same site on the south-western side of Lake Vättern in Sweden, alongside 200 other smolts that were not involved in this experiment. Over the course of roughly two months, the exposed groups moved much more than the control group, especially the metabolite group; they traveled 1.9 times farther per week than the unexposed smolts.

“We expected an effect of contaminant exposure on the movement of salmon, but the scale of the changes seen still surprised us,” Bertram said. “The strongest response was close to a two-fold increase in movement, and the most unexpected result was that benzoylecgonine, the main metabolite of cocaine, produced the clearest effect rather than cocaine itself.”

Indeed, the study found that the metabolite group swam almost nine miles farther per week than the control week in the final two weeks of the 8-week experiment, whereas the control group was more settled down by that point.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that environmental levels of a cocaine metabolite that is commonly found in aquatic ecosystems can alter the space use and swimming activity of fish in the wild,” the team said in the study.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
It’s not clear why the metabolite group was so restless, given that benzoylecgonine is considered psychoactively inactive in humans. The compound is a long-lived byproduct of cocaine made by the liver and excreted in urine, which makes it the easiest biomarker to look for in a typical drug test. The possibility that this metabolite may have a greater impact on some species in the wild is disturbing, in part because it is frequently found in higher concentrations in natural environments than its parent compound (cocaine).

“The results suggest that benzoylecgonine may be more biologically important than it is often assumed to be,” Bertram said. “Our findings raise new questions about whether metabolites can sometimes be as disruptive as, or even more disruptive than, the parent compound in aquatic wildlife.”

The team emphasized that much more research is required to understand the pressures that cocaine and other substances might be introducing both to individual species and to whole ecosystems.

“The next steps are to work out the mechanisms by which cocaine and its metabolite disrupt behaviour and movement in fish in the wild, test how general this effect is across other species and systems, and use higher-resolution tracking to see whether these movement changes affect predation risk, migration, reproduction, or survival,” Bertram said. “That is really the key question now: not just whether behaviour changes, but what those changes mean ecologically.”

For example, this particular study focused on hatchery-raised smolts that were released into the wild, but future studies could test out the effects of these contaminants on fully wild populations as well, which have their own unique behavioral characteristics. Unraveling the effects of these human-sourced substances is even more urgent given that the global use of illicit drugs increased by roughly 20 percent over the last decade, suggesting that “the environmental impact of these substances is likely to grow,” according to the study.

“The behaviour and movement of wildlife underpin habitat use, feeding, predator exposure, and population connectivity, so altering these processes could have wider consequences for food webs and population dynamics,” Bertram concluded. “For species already under pressure, an added stressor like this could be highly detrimental, although the long-term effects on fisheries and ecosystems still need to be tested directly.”

Effects of chronic cocaine, morphine and methamphetamine on the mobility, immobility and stereotyped behaviors in crayfish - PubMed

The worth of crayfish as a model system for studies of addiction was not previously recognized because a drug-reward phenomenon had not been documented in this model system.

^PubMed

404 Media

2026-04-18 13:00:34

Babies Born from Dead Parents Will Increase with New Tech. Are We Ready?

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Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.

Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that peacefully passed the crown, predicted trouble on the horizon, gave life after death, and coastally shelved an idea.

First, scientists watch a succession story play out for years in a naked mole rat colony. Then: prediction markets as a public health threat, the thorny questions of posthumous reproduction, and a walk on the shores of an ancient alien seas.

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.

Digging into the palace intrigue of a rodent realm

Abeywardena, Shanes C., M. Schraibman, Alexandria et al. “Peaceful queen succession in the naked mole rat.” Science Advances.

Murderous queens. Bloody power struggles. Strictly enforced hierarchies. I’m speaking, of course, of naked mole rats, a bizarre species of rodent that becomes embroiled in violent conflicts over the succession of one breeding queen to the next.

Though aggression in succession is the norm for these animals, scientists now report a rare peaceful transition of power from one queen to her daughter in a captive colony.

The discovery suggests that “the less common peaceful trajectory to queen succession…is possible under some conditions” especially when “aggression-based enforcement may be insufficient or unnecessary and when the cost of a ‘war’ may be too high,” according to the new study.

As we’ve covered before on the Abstract, mole rats (both the naked kind and the non-naked kind) are the only mammals to live in eusocial colonies similar to bees or ants, meaning they are reigned over by one breeding queen and her subordinate workers. In addition to this unique social structure, mole rats display a number of fascinating behavioral and genetic adaptations, including long lifespans and low rates of cancer, which has made them a popular species for research.

Naked mole rats may not look all that intimidating, but when it’s time to anoint a new queen, the fur starts to fly (or it would, if these animals had any fur). If a queen dies or is deposed by rivals, subordinate females in the colony battle to take the throne.

But scientists co-led by Shanes Abeywardena and Alexandria M. Schraibman of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies observed a different succession story that unfolded over many years in the Amigos captive colony housed in San Diego.

Starting in 2019, a queen named Teré reigned over the colony and produced many healthy pups. Once the colony became crowded, with nearly 40 members, Queen Teré began delivering litters with no surviving pups. When the researchers removed half of the members, she began to produce surviving pups again, though not many. The team then deliberately introduced another stressor by moving the colony to a new facility in 2022, which ceased Queen Teré’s fertility.
Summary of the Amigos colony’s succession story. Image: Abeywardena, Shanes C., M. Schraibman, Alexandria et al.
In response, Alexandria, one of Teré’s daughters, became pregnant in 2023 and 2024, but her litters also produced no survivors, and she had to be euthanized in 2024 due to a uterine torsion. Finally, the long reproductive hiatus was ended after three years by the ascension of Alexandria’s sister, Arwen, who became Queen Arwen upon her delivery of healthy pups in October 2025.

“Aside from a single incident on 6 February 2025 in which one animal was found with a superficial bite wound and dried blood around the face, an injury that resolved without recurrence, no aggression or dominance related conflict was observed,” the researchers said. “Instead, Queen Teré was reported to exhibit ‘guarding’ behavior of Arwen and her litter. No other signs of social instability, behavioral escalation, or colony-wide distress were documented.”

“Together, these observations indicate that following the decline of Queen Teré’s reproductive capacity and the loss of the intermediary breeder Alexandria, Arwen successfully assumed the reproductive role without eliciting aggression from the reigning queen or from other colony members,” the team concluded.

The study is an antidote to the story we covered last week about a lethal chimp “civil war,” demonstrating that animals with strict dominance structures choose peace over violence in some cases. My only note is that Teré’ be given the honorific Queen Mother for her service.

In other news…

The over/under on predication markets

Packin, Nizan Geslevich and Rabinovitz, Sharon. “Prediction markets as a public health threat.” Science.

Prediction markets (PMs) are exploding in popularity, but researchers warn that the “addictive design, vulnerable users, and permissive regulatory environments” that characterize these markets “are a well-established formula for population-level harm,” according to the Policy Forum section of the journal Science.

PMs operated by companies like Kalshi or Polymarket “pose underappreciated threats to democratic integrity” and are linked to “addictive behaviors,” according to authors Nizan Geslevich Packin of Baruch College Zicklin School of Business and Sharon Rabinovitz of the University of Haifa. For instance, PMs can enable insider trading about classified government information and expose millions of users to the risk of addiction and major financial losses.

“A public health approach reframes PM risks as predictable outcomes of environmental design, analogous to tobacco control’s success in treating smoking as population-level exposure rather than individual vice,” the team argued in the article.

“The window for precautionary action is closing,” the researchers emphasized. “Each week of billion-dollar PM activity…prolongs a large uncontrolled experiment on users.”

It remains to be seen whether this warning about the dangers of a wild new industry will materialize into meaningful regulatory action. Want to make a bet?

Creating new life after death

Bamford, Sandra Carol. “Spectral Connections: Anthropological Engagements with Posthumous Reproduction.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal.

Posthumous children—children born after the death of one or both parents—are popular in myth and fiction, from the Greek Dionysus to more modern characters like John Connor or Daenerys Targaryen.

But this is also a real demographic of people that may evolve in interesting ways as reproductive technologies enable larger numbers of posthumous conceptions—in which the sperm and egg donors for an embryo may be deceased, such as the case of a boy born in 2018 whose mother and father had both died years earlier in a car crash.

In this way, “frozen sperm, eggs (or embryos) are, at one and the same time, both alive and dead,” said Sandra Bamford of the University of Toronto in a new anthropological study of the topic. “Through their frozen gametes and the potential of new kin connections in the future, the dead remain as active participants influencing the lives of the living.”

The study, which is part of a broader journal issue exploring kinship, pulls together many intriguing case studies, including the “Nuer ghost marriage” practices of Sudan, in which a deceased man can be considered the father of a kinsman’s children, or the case of William Kane, who bequeathed frozen sperm to his girlfriend, sparking a legal battle with his adult children after his death by suicide.

In other words, the legal, ethical, and practical implications of posthumous conception are still very much in flux, raising thorny questions about when, and how, the dead can produce new life. For instance: the ambiguities over judging the consent of a deceased person over the use of their posthumous gametes; the rights of posthumously conceived children to be named heirs of estates; and the possible emotional and psychological toll on posthumously conceived children, along with their family members.

The Rime of the Really Ancient Mariner

Zaki, Abdallah S. and Lamb, Michael P. “Identifying the topographic signature of early Martian oceans.” Nature.

We’ll close, as all things should, with waves lapping on long-lost alien shores. The surface of Mars is etched with the memory of rivers, lakes, and perhaps even an expansive ocean that may have covered much of its northern hemisphere between three and four billion years ago.

Scientists have already mapped out the rough contours of what may be an ancient Martian shoreline, but a new study throws the seas into sharper relief by identifying topographic signs of a possible coastal shelf. The team argued in their study that these shelf features may be a better indicator of a past ocean than shoreline features, based on similar observations on Earth.
An illustration taken from orbiter data identifying the coastal shelf region on Mars. Image: A. Zaki
“Our results indicate that long-lived ancient oceans on presently arid planets may be best identified not only through discrete shorelines but also through…a global coastal shelf,” said researchers led by Abdallah Zaki and Michael Lamb of Caltech University. The study supports “the presence of an ancient ocean on the northern plains of Mars that was bounded by a coastal shelf.”

While this ocean dried up long ago, its topographic remnants are a reminder of a time when Mars was warm, wet, and perhaps, wriggling with life.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Chinese baby born four years after parents' death

A surrogate mother gave birth as the biological parents had frozen embryos before they died in a car crash.

^{BBC News}

404 Media

2026-04-17 13:00:36

The Destroyed Remnants of a Lost World Are Falling to Earth, Scientists Discover

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The remnants of a bizarre long-lost world that fell apart before our planet was fully formed are falling to Earth in the form of meteorites, according to a new study in Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

For decades, scientists have puzzled over the origin of angrites, a rare class of about 70 meteorites with unique volcanic compositions that suggest they were forged in a large ancient object with differentiated layers, including a metallic core and a magma ocean.

Scientists have long assumed that this object, the so-called angrite parent body (APB), was roughly a few hundred miles across, similar in size to the asteroid 4 Vesta. But researchers recently raised the tantalizing possibility that the APB might have been much larger, perhaps on the scale of Earth’s moon.

Now, a team led by Aaron Bell, an experimental petrologist and an assistant research professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, has discovered “the first unequivocal evidence supporting the large angrite parent body hypothesis, which posits that the angrites are samples derived from a protoplanet that was catastrophically disrupted during the earliest evolutionary stages of the inner solar system,” according to the new study.

“It probably got destroyed in the early solar system, so [angrites] are remnants of a lost protoplanet,” Bell said in a call with 404 Media. “A few pieces broke off and are now in the asteroid belt, and a few of them have come to Earth, and we’ve picked them up.”

Angrites date back about 4.56 billion years, making them among the oldest known volcanic rocks. They belong to a class of stony “achondritic” meteorites that contain the crystalized signatures of melted rock, such as basalts, hinting that they originate in larger bodies that underwent some degree of planetary processing and layered differentiation, even if those early planetary embryos never accreted into full planets.

“Angrites are interesting in that they don't have a known parent body,” Bell said. “It's never been definitively identified, and that's one of the mysteries.”

“There are a bunch of arguments about why angrites are so geochemically unusual,” he added. “They're kind of this oddity.”

Most models of early planetary accretion predict that relatively small objects formed within the first few million years of the solar system, which is why the APB was assumed to be an asteroid-sized object, rather than a much larger nascent planet.

While working on a previous study, Bell became interested in an aluminum-rich angrite from Northwest Africa, known as NWA 12,774, which was classified in 2019. The meteorite is one of a handful of unusual primitive angrites that appear to have been crystallized at high pressure within the APB, indicating that it formed deep under the surface and therefore might shed light on the size of this bygone world.

“Even among angrites, there's only four or five that have these primitive compositions,” Bell said, adding that the meteorite had “off-the-charts aluminum content, which is really very unusual.”

Bell and his colleagues developed a geobarometer—a tool that calculates the pressures at which rocks and minerals formed—-that estimated it would take at least 1.7 gigapascals to account for the rock’s special properties. This pressure corresponds to an object with a minimum radius of 620 miles (1,000 kilometers), which is just under the size of Pluto. The APB may even have been as large as the Moon, which has a roughly 1000-mile radius.

“Clearly, within the first few million years of solar system evolution, you could grow planetary embryos that were 1,000-plus kilometers” in radius, Bell said. “We're talking within three million years of the condensation of the first solids in the solar system, so it’s right at the beginning.”

The discovery suggests that the APB may have been a first-generation protoplanet that coalesced and shattered millions of years before the familiar worlds of our solar system took full shape. Judging by the strange properties of angrites, the APB was also on track to be a very different kind of world than Earth and its neighbors, had it survived the chaotic environment of its infancy.

Angrites are “geochemically fundamentally different, and that's why people were interested in the first place—because they were odd,” Bell said. “They don't look like garden-variety

basalts you get from Mars or the Moon or Earth.”

“It's sort of this path not taken—or maybe it was, but we just have a couple pieces of it that tell us something we didn't know,” he concluded. “There were once large bodies that, maybe, didn’t look like the terrestrial planets.”

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2026-04-11 13:00:06

The Oldest Octopus Fossil Ever Isn’t An Octopus At All, Scientists Discover

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that were ritually sacrificed, kicked out of the galaxy, taxonomically revised, and wore many hats.

First, scientists shed light on human sacrifice and cousin sex using ancient DNA from the bones of people who lived in fifth-century Korea. Then: the yeeting of a star, an octopus imposter, and the indignities of a bare head.

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.

All in the Family (this time with human sacrifice)

Moon, Hyoungmin, and Kim, Daewook et al. “Ancient genomes reveal an extensive kinship network and endogamy in a Three-Kingdoms period society in Korea.” Science Advances.

Ready or not, it’s time to visit an ancient burial ground packed with the bones of sacrificed families. Welcome to the Imdang-Joyeong site in Korea, which contains a cluster of 1,500-year-old tombs from the tumultuous Three Kingdoms period.

As the name suggests, this era was dominated by a trio of warring dynastic factions called the Goguryeo, Baekjae, and Silla. Historical and archaeological evidence suggests that the Silla kingdom followed unique customs, including the practice of “Sunjang,” a coburial of sacrificed people with an elite grave owner, as well as consanguineous marriages—marriages between close blood relatives.

Now, researchers have now sequenced ancient DNA from 78 deceased individuals to corroborate the findings with confirmed lineages. The results revealed that consanguineous marriages were indeed common, and that adult women were often buried together with their own kin, which is a rarity in ancient graveyards around the world.
The three main geographical locations of the tombs consisting of the Imdang-Joyeong burial complex with separate zoom-in panels (i to iii). The green gradient represents elevation, and the green circles represent the position of dirt mounds of the tombs. Image: Moon, Hyoungmin, and Kim, Daewook et al.
“Silla is thought to have practiced different marital customs from that of its neighbors, such as Goguryeo,” said researchers co-led by Hyoungmin Moon of Seoul National University and Daewook Kim of Yeungnam University. “Most notably, Silla royal elites are documented to have practiced consanguineous marriage, which is rarely observed in Goguryeo and Baekjae records. Historical accounts of consanguineous marriage are thought to be related to the consolidation of the rank and social status within Silla royals and local elites.”

“However, because of limited ancient genome studies in Korea, no corroborating genomic evidence so far has been reported regarding the marriage customs of the Three-Kingdoms period Koreans,” the team added. “Our research is the first to analyze the genome-wide composition of closely related individuals from an ancient Three-Kingdoms period of Korea.”
From left to right, a Baekje, Goguryeo, and Silla envoy depicted in a 6th-century painting.
Many tombs at this site include separate chambers for elite grave owners, and for sacrificed people, which often included entire families that may have been ritually sacrificed and buried alongside their masters. Both elites and sacrificed individuals were often born from unions between first or second cousins, suggesting that consanguineous marriages were common across class lines.

“We found decisive evidence of three cases of families in which parents and their offspring were sacrificed together in the same grave,” the team said. “Our genetic findings are the first to confirm the acts of Sunjang of an entire household and suggest that these practices might be common for sacrificial burials of the Three-Kingdoms period.”

In addition, some adult women were buried alongside their parents and grandparents, a pattern that is rare in most other ancient burial grounds in which women tend to be buried alongside their husbands and in-laws. The study offers a rare glimpse of a society with idiosyncratic customs that is ready-made to be the setting of a new HBO prestige series.

In other news…

♩ It’s a shooting star leaping through the sky ♩

Bhat, Aakash et al. “Discovery of a runaway star likely ejected by a Type Iax supernova.” Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Some space explosions go so hard that they can kick a star right out of a galaxy. Scientists report the serendipitous discovery of one of these so-called “runaway stars” that was likely ejected from the galaxy approximately 2.8 million years ago “with an ejection velocity exceeding 600 kilometers per second”—or about 1.3 million miles per hour—according to a new study.

This cosmic sprinter is a white dwarf, the collapsed remains of a star, that was accelerated to ludicrous speed by a “Type Iax” supernovae, a type of stellar kablooey that occurs in some binary star systems.

This runaway star “is notably hotter than previously studied members of this class,” said researchers led by Aakash Bhat of the University of Potsdam. “Kinematic analysis indicates that the star has a high probability of being unbound from the Galaxy.”

So long, runaway star, and safe travels through intergalactic space.

A 300-million-year-old case of mistaken identity

Clements, Thomas et al. “Synchrotron data reveal nautiloid characters in Pohlsepia mazonensis, refuting a Palaeozoic origin for octobrachians.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Prepare to be ink-pilled, because it turns out that the oldest known octopus fossil ever found—a 300-million-year old species called Pohlsepia mazonensis—is not an octopus at all. It is a member of the nautilus family that just ended up looking sort of like an octopus in part because its shell fell off during the decomposition process.
Concept art of dead Pohlsepia mazonensis with its shell off. Image: Dr Thomas Clements, University of Reading
“We present the first comprehensive reassessment of this enigmatic fossil, alongside multiple new specimens, using a suite of advanced analytical techniques,” said researchers led by Thomas Clements of the University of Reading. During this process, the team discovered a special “radula”—a feeding organ lined with rows of teeth—that matched the nautilus family.

As a result, P. mazonensis “represents the oldest known fossil soft tissue nautiloid (albeit without its shell),” the team concluded. The finding is a boon to octopus scientists (a.k.a. Doc Ocks) who have been perplexed for years by this specimen, given that the fossil record otherwise suggests that octopuses emerged much later in time, during the age of dinosaurs.

It just proves the old adage: Don’t believe everything you hear about the evolutionary origins of octopuses.

We’re all mad hatters here

Capp, Bernard. “The Cultural, Social, and Ideological Role of the Hat in Early Modern England.” The Historical Journal.

We’ll cap off with a hat tip to a study that chronicles hat etiquette across early modern England, roughly spanning the 1400s to 1700s.

Authored by the aptly-named Bernard Capp of the University of Warwick, the work is packed with madcap anecdotes about hats as signifiers of identity, instruments of shame, tools for salutations, and even makeshift toilets in the most ribald tales.

“The ‘Pleasant History’ of Hodge tells of a simpleton humiliated by a maidservant who claps on his head the hat in which she had just defecated,” Capp noted in the study. “Such behaviour, moreover, was not confined to fiction; in 1747 a Wiltshire man admitted snatching a rival’s hat, pissing in it, and clapping it back on the victim’s head.”
Roundhead and cavalier soldiers, wearing partisan hats, face each other and urge their dogs to attack each other. Image: John Taylor (attributed), A dialogue, or, Rather a parley betweene Prince Ruperts dogge whose name is Puddle, and Tobies dog whose name is Pepper (1643).
Other highlights include the Cap Act of 1571, which allowed offenders “to be prosecuted for wearing hats to church;” jokes about fine ladies wearing towering ribboned hats that spooked local livestock; and a man named Thomas Ellwood who was rendered unable to leave his house for months in 1659 because his father confiscated all his hats, because who would dare, in his words, to “run about the Country bare-headed, like a Mad-Man”?

Hats off to this heady historical work, and beware the bareheaded Mad-Men.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

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2026-04-09 18:00:46

World’s Largest Group of Chimps Waging Deadly ‘Civil War,’ Scientists Discover

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Scientists have observed an extremely rare chimpanzee “civil war,” a conflict that has killed at least seven adults and 17 infants, and which sheds new light on the nature of warfare in humans, according to a study published on Thursday in Science.

Male chimpanzees are often aggressive to outsiders, but it is unusual for chimps to kill former members of their own social groups. Though Jane Goodall and her colleagues observed one famous example—the Gombe Chimpanzee War of the 1970s, which resulted in seven adult deaths—it’s estimated that these violent episodes occur only once every 500 years, based on genetic analyses of chimpanzee lineages.

Now, a team led by Aaron Sandel, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, has reported a far more deadly “group fissure” among the Ngogo chimpanzees of Uganda. This population exceeded 200 individuals at one point, making it the largest group of chimpanzees ever observed in the wild. But over the past decade, the chimps have fractured into two factions, one of which has staged multiple lethal raids on the other.

“Certainly, these are not strangers,” said Sandel in a call with 404 Media. “These are chimps that once knew each other, and we know that for certain.”

The Ngogo group has been studied since the 1970s by primatologists like Thomas Struhsaker, and have been intensively observed since 1995 as part of the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project set up by David Watts and John Mitani. For more than three decades, researchers from around the world have convened to watch the group during summer field expeditions, while Ugandan research assistants have maintained a continuous presence at the site.

Because of this longstanding observation, Sandel said, researchers were able to be on the ground “witnessing every moment” as the deadly chimp war unfolded.

Chimpanzees from different clusters socialized together before the group fissure in 2015. Image: Aaron Sandel

This group has always had distinct subpopulations that spent more time together, including the Western and Central clusters. Even so, before the fissure, the clusters regularly overlapped for shared activities like grooming, patrolling, and interbreeding.

Sandel vividly remembers the exact day that this dynamic had noticeably shifted: June 24, 2015. He was following the Western cluster, which was at the center of its “neighborhood” territory, he said.

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Video credit: Aaron Sandel

“They hear chimps from the Central neighborhood nearby, and they go quiet,” he recalled. “They seem nervous. They're touching each other with this reassurance that they typically do when they hear the outsider chimps, but I was just alone with them. I remember, just in that moment, being really puzzled and focused, like ‘what’s going on?’”

“They could have reunited and done what's typical—screaming and charging around, maybe some slapping, and then come together, sit together, groom, maybe go their separate ways after, because they'd already started to be a bit more disconnected,” Sandel continued. “But instead of reuniting in typical chimpanzee fusion fashion, the Western chimpanzees ran and the Central chimps chased them.”

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Video credit: Aaron Sandel

What started as a weird vibe transformed into a weeks-long chill between the groups, followed by a temporary thaw. Ultimately, the tension spiraled into bloody conflicts.

“You act like a stranger, you become a stranger,” Sandel said. “It seemed like that planted the seed of polarization.”

Over the course of the next few years, the males in each cluster began to treat each other like outsiders. The last offspring that had parents from different clusters was conceived in March 2015. The Western and Central chimps were fully separated by 2018.

The Western chimps, despite being smaller in number, have since amped up hostilities by staging 24 violent attacks against their former kin, killing at least seven mature males and 17 infants from the Central cluster. The death toll may well be higher, but some deaths and disappearances cannot be conclusively attributed to the conflict.

Sandel and his colleagues proposed a few possible causes of this “civil war,” a term that specifically refers to human conflicts, but that may have parallels in other species. First, the unusually large size of the group may have amplified feeding competition among individuals, even in their lush forest habitat. Social networks within the group may have also been disrupted by a wave of six deaths in 2014—five adult males and one adult female—some of whom likely died from disease.

The beginning of the fissure also coincides with the rise of a new alpha male, Jackson, who replaced the previous alpha, Miles. Sandel recalled Miles grunting in submission to Jackson on the same day that the Western cluster ran away from the Central cluster. Such transitions between alphas can introduce social instabilities as the dominance hierarchy is upended, a process that can take several months.

Indeed, Miles reacted violently toward other members of the group in the wake of his displacement. Jackson, who led the Central cluster, ended up as one the casualties of the conflict; he died from injuries inflicted by the Western cluster in 2022.

Whatever the cause of the rupture, this group of former kin have now become hostile enemies. It’s always dicey to draw broad comparisons between the behavior of humans and other animals, but the team speculates in the study that one possible takeaway is that "it may be in the small, daily acts of reconciliation and reunion between individuals that we find opportunities for peace.”

“If we study chimpanzees in detail and start to understand the mechanisms driving their cooperation, their conflict, and something as complex as one group becoming polarized, splitting, and engaging in ongoing lethal conflict, then we might gain insights into similar dynamics that are happening in humans,” Sandel said.

“If chimps are able to do this complex process in the absence of ethnicity, language, and religion—the things we often attribute to human warfare—chimps don't have those narratives and those excuses,” he concluded. “They're stripped away of those cultural dimensions. It must be their interpersonal social bonds and daily conflicts, reconciliations, and avoidances—all those dynamics. If that's the case with chimps, to what extent is it the case in humans? It’s a hypothesis to be tested.”

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Gombe Chimpanzee War - Wikipedia

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2026-04-04 13:00:42

Gambling Is Thousands of Years Older Than We Thought, Rewriting Human Evolution

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that rolled with it, went out on a limb, gravitationally waved, and spotted relics in our midst.

First, hundreds of prehistoric dice sets shed light on the dawn of gambling. Then: these disembodied arms are horny, the forbidden fruits of supernovae, and baby food for the Milky Way.

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.

Rolling the dice in the Ice Age

Madden, Robert J. “Probability in the Pleistocene: Origins and Antiquity of Native American Dice, Games of Chance, and Gambling.” American Antiquity.

Thousands of years before prediction markets, sports betting, and poker nights, Native Americans were playing the odds with dice and other games of chance.

An analysis of nearly 300 ancient artifacts related to gambling—especially two-sided dice known as “binary lots”—has revealed that Native Americans have played games of chance for at least 12,000 years, many millennia before any other known cultures in the world.

“Historians of mathematics frequently identify the invention of dice and games of chance as a crucial early step in humanity’s evolving discovery and understanding of randomness and the probabilistic nature of the universe,” said study author Robert Madden of Colorado State University.

“The findings presented here suggest that some of the earliest steps on this intellectual journey were taken not by complex societies in the Near East and Eastern Europe around 5,500 years ago but rather by Native American hunter-gatherers in western North America in the waning centuries of the Pleistocene, no later than 12,000 years ago,” he continued.
Examples of prehistoric Native American dice. Image: Courtesy of Robert Madden
Scholars have marveled at the prevalence of Native American games of chance for more than a century, but Madden is the first to systematically trace their origins. He set out to study prehistoric dice in museum collections at the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Wyoming Archaeological Repository, and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, which were documented in a landmark compendium called Games of the North American Indians published in 1907 by the ethnographer Stewart Culin.

The most common dice games involved players taking turns throwing sets of binary lots, with a score that was assigned based on a count of the “up”-facing side thrown by each player on their turn. Cumulative scores were tracked with counting sticks; the first to reach a predesignated number were the winners.

Madden identified dice at 57 archaeological sites across 12 states, with the oldest appearing in the territories of western Great Plains cultures. The finds clearly indicate a complex understanding of probability, which played a role not only in social cohesion, but also in cosmologies.

“Numerous ethnographic accounts of Native American traditions depict dice playing as a sacred activity that was inherently pleasing to the gods and celestial powers (who were themselves dice players), with ceremonial and secular dice games being played at festivals and seasonal events,” Madden said.

The study chronicles many fascinating myths and legends about gods playing dice on the surface of Earth and the creation of humans as the outcome of a cosmic dice game. Albert Einstein famously remarked that god “does not throw dice” in response to the probabilistic realm of quantum physics. It would seem these prehistoric cultures were way ahead of the game on this point.

In other news…

Eight-armed and ready

Villar, Pablo S., Jiang, Hao et al. “A sensory system for mating in octopus.” Science.

Male octopuses are real suckers for sex, reports a new study about the “hectocotylus,” which is a special arm that serves a dual purpose as both sensory and mating organ.

During copulation, males use the hectocotylus to probe the female’s intricate oviducts in order to deposit sperm, but the mechanisms behind this strategy have been shrouded in tentacled mystery. To get a better handle on the process, scientists coated tubes with different substances and discovered that octopuses only released sperm when sucker cups on the hectocotylus made contact with progesterone, a female hormone produced in the ovaries.

“Whereas nonmating arms are used for chemotactile exploration and predation, the hectocotylus is almost exclusively used for mating and often even protected during hunting,” said researchers co-led by Pablo S. Villar of Harvard University and Hao Jiang of the University of California San Diego.

In a wild twist, the hectocotylus can even work its magic when it is entirely severed from the male’s body, allowing detached arms to autonomously inseminate females! It’s proof that romance is not dead, it’s just occasionally dismembered.

Mind the black hole gap

Tong, Hui et al. “Evidence of the pair-instability gap from black-hole masses.” Nature.

You’ve heard of forbidden planets, but what about forbidden black holes? For years, scientists have theorized that black holes with masses between approximately 50 and 130 times the mass of the Sun fall into a “forbidden range” that cannot exist.

The reason is that colossal stars that are 100 to 260 times more massive than the Sun experience a special kind of stellar death known as “pair‑instability supernovae” in which they completely self-destruct, preventing the formation of black holes. Stars that are both bigger and smaller than this range, in contrast, explode in supernovae that do collapse into black holes.

Now, scientists have discovered evidence for this gap using dozens of gravitational waves, which are ripples in spacetime formed by cataclysmic events such as mergers of black holes. In binary black holes—systems where two of these massive objects orbit each other—the smaller objects never fell into this range. Some of the larger black holes had forbidden masses, but that’s likely because they had merged with other black holes in the past, not because they were initially at that mass after the deaths of their progenitor stars.

“We interpret these findings as evidence for a subpopulation of hierarchical mergers: binaries in which the primary component is the product of a previous black-hole merger and thus populates the gap,” said researchers led by Hui Tong of Monash University. “As the number of detections increases, it will be possible to gain new insights into the pair-instability gap.”

From my perspective, all black holes are forbidden, because they are terrifying cosmic death traps. But it’s nice to know that the universe has limits, too.

I’m so hungry, I could eat a galaxy

Sestito, Federico et al. “An ancient system hidden in the Galactic plane?” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Last, it’s time to pay respect to our stellar elders. A new study reveals that a weird population of 20 stars orbiting within a few thousand light years of the Sun have basically no metals, the astronomical term for elements that are heavier than hydrogen and helium. Since new generations of stars become more enriched with metals over time, these stars must be extremely ancient relics. So where did they come from?

Scientists think they have the answer: These metal-light Methusalehs are the last remnants of an ancient dwarf galaxy, which the team dubs “Loki.” Despite its powerful Norse namesake, Loki appears to have been swallowed by the Milky Way early on in our galaxy’s 13-billion-year history. While it is common to find very metal-poor (VMP) stars orbiting all around our galaxy’s core, it’s much rarer to find them all the way out here in the galactic exurbs, hidden in the “plane” (the flattened disk of a galaxy).

“This work provides, for the very first time, a dedicated detailed chemical abundance analysis of a sample of VMP stars with orbits close to the Milky Way plane,” said researchers led by Federico Sestito of the University of Hertfordshire. “A plausible scenario, supported by cosmological zoom-in simulations, is the early accretion of a single system.”

It goes without saying that eating a whole galaxy is pretty metal, even if the stars within it are not.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

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2026-03-21 13:00:07

Scientists Narrow Down the Hunt for Aliens to 45 Planets

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that visited strange new worlds, broke the adorability scale, pigged out, and took in an alien light show.

First, scientists sift through thousands of planets to find the best possible sites for life. Then: meet a Cretaceous cutie, check out some python blood, and travel to the biggest moon in the solar system.

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 best of all possible worlds

Bohl, Abigail et al. “Probing the limits of habitability: a catalogue of rocky exoplanets in the habitable zone.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Scientists have discovered more than 6,000 exoplanets, which are planets that orbit other stars, but most of these worlds are hopelessly inhospitable to life. To home in on the best candidates for habitability, a team combed through the catalogue of exoplanets to identify the best potential alien homes.

The short-list includes 45 rocky worlds that are no bigger than twice the size of Earth and orbit within the habitable zone (HZ) of their stars, which is the region where liquid water might exist on the surface. The most exciting destinations include four planets that orbit the red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1, about 40 light years away, or Proxima Centauri b, which is the closest known exoplanet, located just four light years from Earth.

“To assess the limits of surface habitability, it is critical to characterize rocky exoplanets in the HZ,” said researchers led by Abigail Bohl of Cornell University. “Observations of known rocky exoplanets on the edges of the HZ can now empirically explore these boundaries.”

“The resulting list of rocky exoplanet targets in the HZ will allow observers to shape and optimize search strategies with space- and ground-based telescopes… and design new observing strategies and instruments to explore these worlds, addressing the question of the limits of exoplanet surface habitability,” the team added.
A diagram depicting habitable zone boundaries across star type with rocky exoplanets.
While previous studies have compiled similar lists, this work includes updated observations and also organizes the planets according to key properties such as age, orbital characteristics, radiation exposure, and ease of observation from Earth. In this way, the researchers pave the way toward testing individual factors that influence habitability, such as whether older planets seem to be more hospitable to life.

It could also be useful to compare planets that orbit at the edges of the habitable zone to planets right smack dab in the middle. After all, in our own solar system, Venus and Mars are at the inner and outer edges of the solar system, while Earth is vibing right in the Goldilocks zone.

It may be that planets in other star systems are similarly limited in their habitability as they approach the edge of the zone—or maybe not! We won’t know until we look. And now, we know where to start. To the observatory!

In other news…

Forever young at 100 million years old

Jung, Jongyun et al. “A new dinosaur species from Korea and its implications for early-diverging neornithischian diversity.” Fossil Record.

It is my great pleasure to inform you that an incredibly cute baby dinosaur has been discovered in South Korea, where dinosaur fossils are very rare. Meet Doolysaurus, named for the popular Korean cartoon character Dooly the Little Dinosaur. This little infant lived in the mid-Cretaceous period, about 100 million years ago, and represents a new species of thescelosaurid, a type of bipedal dinosaur.
The skeletal anatomy of a juvenile Doolysaurus huhmini. The graphic highlights the fossil bones that were found with the dinosaur. Image: Janet Cañamar, adapted from Jung et al 2026.
“Here, we describe a small, well-preserved skeleton…recognized as the holotype of a new genus and species, Doolysaurus huhmini” which includes “the first diagnostic cranial material of a dinosaur from Korea,” said researchers led by Jongyun Jung of the University of Texas at Austin. “It contributes novel insights into the diversity of the Korean dinosaur fauna, which has previously been known primarily from ichnofossil and egg fossil records.”
An artist’s interpretation of a juvenile Doolysaurus huhmini. Image: Jun Seong Yi
To top it off, this dinosaur might have sported a fuzzy coat. Jurassic Park has primed me not to trust any tech billionaire that wants to resurrect dinosaurs for public spectacle, but I’ll make an exception for Doolysaurus.

The right stuff for being stuffed

Xiao, S., Wang, M., Martin, T.G. et al. “Python metabolomics uncovers a conserved postprandial metabolite and gut–brain feeding pathway.” Nature Metabolism.

At dinnertime, pythons go whole hog—often literally. These huge snakes can devour their own body weight in a single meal, allowing them to fast for more than a year between feedings. In a new study, scientists probe these extreme eaters by analyzing the blood of Burmese pythons during their “postprandial” (after-gulp) phase.

“Burmese pythons display a remarkable array of postprandial responses, including more than 40-fold increase in energy expenditure, sustained tissue protein synthesis and more than 50 percent increase in the size of most organs,” said researchers co-led by Shuke Xiao of Stanford University, Mengjie Wang of the University of South Florida, and Thomas G. Martin of the University of Colorado, Boulder.
A Burmese python held by an author of the study. Image: Patrick Campbell/CU Boulder
In other words, the snakes “undergo extensive gastrointestinal remodelling” that truly put humanity’s best competitive eaters to shame. Joey Chestnut would have to simultaneously swallow over 2,000 hot dogs to even rival their sublime engorgement, just in case you are interested in some mustard-smeared napkin math (his world record is a measly 83).

Ganymede gets a glow-up

Cao, Xin et al. “Auroral Emissions on Ganymede: New Constraints on Their Electron Energy Dependence.” Geophysical Research Letters.

We’ll close, as all things should, with an extraterrestrial aurora. This week, let’s gaze into the glowing skies of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system and the only one endowed with its very own magnetic field.

Now, scientists discovered that “Ganymede's auroras are brighter than previously thought,” according to a study based on new atmospheric measurements and laboratory data.

Ganymede “mini-magnetosphere [is] embedded within Jupiter's powerful magnetospheric environment,” said researchers led by Xin Cao of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. “This unique configuration allows for auroral processes similar in morphology to those observed on magnetized planets, but driven by different external and internal conditions.”

The research illuminates the complex magnetic interactions between Ganymede and Jupiter, which will be studied more in depth by future missions, such as the European Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) that is currently on its way to the gas giant, aiming for a 2031 arrival. I hope this news of cosmic radiance adds some sparkle to your weekend.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Python metabolomics uncovers a conserved postprandial metabolite and gut–brain feeding pathway - Nature Metabolism

Leveraging pythons as an extreme model of feeding and fasting behaviour, this study uncovers para-tyramine-O-sulphate as a conserved postprandial metabolite that links nutrient intake to energy balance by activating hypothalamic neurons and suppressi…

^Nature

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

2026-02-21 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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Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.

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}