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2026-01-30 16:42:07

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

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

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

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

Blast from the Cambrian past

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In other news…

Microraptor: the original early bird

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

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

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

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

Grub’s up

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

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

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

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

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

A glimpse of alien auroras

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

First Contact

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

^{Hachette Book Group}

404 Media

2026-01-26 22:13:10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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2026-01-24 14:00:33

Scientists Discovered a Cow That Uses Tools Like a Chimpanzee

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

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

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

Cows use tools? You herd it here first

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now that’s something to ruminate on.

In other news…

Hands of ancients

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zoo animals get long in the tooth

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

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

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

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

Bust out the bursty bulk flow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

First Contact

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

^{Hachette Book Group}

404 Media

2026-01-22 19:00:38

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

^plos.io

404 Media

2026-01-17 14:00:31

Scientists Make Stunning Find Inside Prehistoric Wolf’s Stomach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In other news…

Save wildlife, stay off the menu

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

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

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

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

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

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

Same-sex sexual behavior plays many roles in primates

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t be deceived by the asexual yams

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

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

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

^{Dálete Cássia Vieira Alves (Frontiers)}

404 Media

2026-01-14 19:46:53

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

^Nature

404 Media

2026-01-10 14:00:07

‘Gifted’ Dogs Learn Human Language, Study Finds

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

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

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

You don’t want to be on this Cloud-9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In other news…

Big star go boom soon

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

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

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

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

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

Learn with doggo-lingo

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

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

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

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

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

Jellyfish naps > cat naps

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

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

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

^{NASA Hubble Mission Team (NASA Science)}

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2026-01-06 20:28:53

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

^Nature

404 Media

2026-01-04 17:57:17

Scientists Discover One of the World’s Oldest Cremations

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

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

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

An ancient cremation comes to light

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In other news…

The inexplicable Uranian chillout

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

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

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

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

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

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

When pigs sail…

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

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

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

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

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

A glimpse of a sunless Saturn

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

First Contact

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

^{Hachette Book Group}

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2026-01-02 19:00:09

Scientists Identify Remains of the Earliest Human Ancestor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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^{404 Media}

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2025-12-27 14:00:50

Scientists May Have Spotted Light from the First Stars

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

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

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

The Vindication of Nanotyrannus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In other news…

I can haz seas-burger?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The search for the ur-stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

A swing-kle in time

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comet 3I/ATLAS

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

^{dghernandez (NASA Science)}

404 Media

2025-12-25 14:00:22

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

^Nature