Why is the human penis so big? Scientists probed the evolution of penis size through sexual selection and mate competition in a first-of-its-kind study#TheAbstract
Scientists Got Men to Rate Penises by How Intimidating They Are. This Is What They Found.
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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.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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Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.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
Scientists sequenced the genome of an extinct woolly rhinoceros that was found in a wolf belly that lived 14,400 years ago.#TheAbstract
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 birdsFirst, 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
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
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
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
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)
Scientists have debated the origin of the dots for years. Now, researchers say they’re “cocoons” for the youngest black holes we’ve ever seen.
Scientists have debated the origin of the dots for years. Now, researchers say they’re “cocoons” for the youngest black holes we’ve ever seen.#TheAbstract
Strange ‘Little Red Dots’ in Space Have a Mind-Boggling Explanation, Scientists Discover
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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.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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Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.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
Scientists discovered that some dogs, known as Gifted Word Learners, can passively pick up language and may possess toddler-level cognitive skills.#TheAbstract
‘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
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
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
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
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)
“It is a massive surprise,” said one astronomer who measured the high temperatures of gas in galaxy cluster that existed 12 billion years ago.#TheAbstract
Astronomers Discovered Something Near the Dawn of Time That Shouldn’t Exist
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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.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
Hunter-gatherers cremated a small woman in Malawi 9,500 years ago, revealing a glimpse of their capabilities and practices.#TheAbstract
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
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
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…
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
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
After years of debate, scientists found a telltale sign that an ancient ape walked on two legs, making it the oldest known human relative.#TheAbstract
Scientists Identify Remains of the Earliest Human Ancestor
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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.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.”
Astronomers think they may have captured starlight from the first generation of stars, which shone more than 13 billion years ago.#TheAbstract
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
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.”
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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?
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
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
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)
More than two miles under the Greenland Sea, tubeworms, snails, crustaceans, and microbes live on gas hydrate seeps that leak crude oil and methane.#TheAbstract
In the Dark Arctic Deep, Scientists Find a Hidden Oasis of Strange Life
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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.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 OceanPanieri 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 OceanGas 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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Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.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
An exoplanet located 750 light years from Earth has an atmosphere unlike anything previously known.#TheAbstract
Scientists Discover ‘Black Widow’ Exoplanet That Defies Explanation
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that defied expectations, broke barriers, made trash into shelter, and lived to swear another day.First, there’s a giant, lemony, diamond-studded, black widow in space. I’ll explain. Then: electrons get ready for a close-up, the ultimately tiny home, and why expletives are the hottest new workout hack.
As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.
“Lemonworld”
Astronomers have observed a Jupiter-sized planet more than 700 light years from Earth that is unlike anything spotted before and defies explanation.
Known as PSR J2322-2650b, the exoplanet is shaped like a lemon, boasts baffling skies, and may have hidden troves of diamonds in its belly. The distant world closely orbits a pulsar, a type of hyper-dense dead star that is tugging on the gassy planet, giving it the distended shape.
Pulsar companions are normally other stars. These are called “black widow” systems because winds from the pulsar weather down the stellar companion, eventually destroying it, similar to the deadly embrace of the namesake spider. It is very rare to see a black widow system with a planet as the pulsar companion.
Curious about this unusual exoplanet, astronomers observed it with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), thereby “unveiling a bizarre atmosphere that raises more questions than it answers,” according to their new study.
“PSR J2322–2650b is different from other ultralight pulsar companions, being the only pulsar companion with a mass, a density, and a temperature similar to those of hot Jupiters,” said researchers led by Michael Zhang of the University of Chicago. “The atmosphere of such an object has never been observed.”
“In stark contrast to every known exoplanet orbiting a main-sequence star, we find an atmosphere rich in molecular carbon (C3, C2) with strong westward winds,” they said.
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Molecular carbon is unusual in planetary atmospheres because carbon atoms tend to bind to other elements, producing more familiar compounds like carbon dioxide. The atmosphere is so carbon-dominated, and so depleted in oxygen and nitrogen, that it doesn’t neatly line up with any known planetary formation scenarios. In a sparkling twist, its dense carbon atmosphere may produce soot clouds that then solidify into diamonds, bedazzling its core.Is this a long-lived gas giant that survived the transformation of its star into a pulsar? Or was it born from the debris of the supernova that created the pulsar? And will this black widow system end as others do, with a slow death by pulsar winds? Nobody knows!
“Our findings pose a challenge to the current understanding of black-widow formation” and it will take more observations of similar systems “to determine whether PSR J2322–2650b’s composition is unusual or representative of the class.”
In other news…
An attofirst for attoseconds
Scientists have created the shortest X-ray light pulse ever produced, a breakthrough that could resolve the previously hidden motions of electrons and other particles at subatomic scales.
These newly-demonstrated soft X-ray pulses last for just 19.2 attoseconds, where an attosecond is equal to one quintillionth (10−18) of a second. In other words, an attosecond is to a second as a second is to 31.69 billion years, more than twice the age of the universe.
This is where the science happened. Image: ICFO
“Excitation, scattering, and electron relaxation are crucial processes that control how matter interacts with light,” said researchers led by Fernando Ardana-Lamas of the Institute of Photonic Science (ICFO) in Spain. “Their timing influences how chemical bonds form or break, how charge and energy move, and how properties of molecules and materials emerge. Understanding these dynamics requires attosecond resolution, as electronic excitations and dynamics occur on timescales of tens of attoseconds.”“We demonstrated the generation of coherent attosecond [short X-ray] pulses with a duration of 19.2 as, significantly shorter than the atomic unit of time,” a milestone that offers “exciting new opportunities to investigate atomic, molecular, and solid-state physics,” the team concluded.
This high pulse speed is necessary for the development of instruments that could capture the mysterious dynamics of particles on subatomic timescales. Other experimental technologies are still required to make these ultrafast cameras a reality, but for now, here’s to shattering the shutter speed record.
My other house is a tooth socket
Here’s a question for prospective home owners: have you ever considered living in a clump of regurgitated bones? This solution worked out well for Caribbean cave bees that lived some 20,000 years ago, according to a new study that reports the discovery of the first known fossilized bee nests built inside skeletal remains.
Scientists found the honeycombed bones buried in a cave on the island of Hispaniola that was once also inhabited by owls. Since owls regularly barf up pellets—gnarly globs of half-digested prey—the solitary bee species had a ready-made supply of skeletal remains, which were apparently a perfect place to raise offspring.
A part of a fossilized mammal skull, with sediment in a tooth socket that turned out to be a nest built by a prehistoric bee. Image: Courtesy of Lazaro Viñola López.
“Isolated brood cells…were found inside cavities of vertebrate remains,” including tooth sockets and the spinal canal, said researchers led by Lázaro Viñola López of the Field Museum in Chicago. “The high abundance of nests throughout the deposit indicated that this cave was used for a long period as a nesting aggregation area by this solitary bee.”There’s nothing like getting the skeleton keys to your new skeleton house.
A prescription for profanity
Cussing is discouraged in polite company, but it may actually be good for your health and performance, according to a new study that confirms swearing alleviates inhibitions and provides increased endurance during physical challenges.
Psychologists recruited nearly 200 volunteers to hold themselves in a sustained chair pushup while repeating either a swear word of their choice, or a neutral word, every two seconds. The results revealed a consistent “swearing advantage” characterized by “significant performance improvements in the swearing condition.”
“These effects have potential implications for athletic performance, rehabilitation, and contexts requiring courage or assertiveness,” said researchers led by Richard Stephens of Keele University. “As such, swearing may represent a low-cost, widely accessible psychological intervention to help individuals ‘not hold back’ when peak performance is needed.”
At long last, science has vindicated the foul-spoken, the pottymouths, the salty-tongued, and the vulgarians. So go forth, ye cursers, and f*ck that sh*t up! It’s the doctor’s orders, after all.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
First Contact
A narrative and visual exploration of humanity’s age-old search for and fixation with extraterrestrials.First Contact explores the ancient idea—and epic ...Hachette Book Group
Scientists found submerged stone structures off Brittany that date back at least 7,000 years, which may have been used as fish traps and protective cover for prehistoric people.#TheAbstract
Scientists Discover Massive Underwater Ruins That May Be a Lost City of Legend
Scientists have discovered the underwater ruins of huge stone structures erected by humans at least 7,000 years ago in the coastal waters of France, according to a new study published in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.The submerged granite ruins near Sein Island, a Breton island in the Atlantic Ocean, are among the oldest large stone structures ever found in France, and may have inspired an ancient local legend about a city called Ys that vanished under the waves.
The structures vary in size from small stone dams, which were probably fish traps, to large monoliths and slabs that protrude six feet from the seafloor and extend 400 feet in length, which perhaps once served as a protective seawall.
Yves Fouquet, a geologist who works with the Society for Maritime Archaeology and Heritage (SAMM), first noticed hints of these long-lost megaliths in LiDAR data collected by the Litto3D program, a national initiative to create a precise 3D digital reconstruction of the entire French coastline. Fouquet and his colleagues confirmed the existence of the mysterious structures, and mapped out their locations, across dozens of dives carried out by ten SAMM divers between 2022 and 2024.
“The detailed analysis of these maps to redraw the underwater geological map of this area (faults, rock types) has made it possible to identify structures that did not appear natural to a geologist,” Fouquet said in an email to 404 Media.
Brittany, a peninsular region of northwest France, is home to the oldest megaliths in the nation and some of the earliest in Europe, which date back some 6,500 years. The team estimated that the submerged stone structures off Sein Island may predate these early megaliths in Brittany by about 500 years, based on their estimation of when the stones would have last been above sea level. But it will take more research to home in on the exact age of the megaliths.
“We plan to continue the exploration and carry out more detailed work to understand the architecture and precise the age of the structures,” Fouquet said.
The discovery of these stones opens a new window into the societies living in Brittany during the Mesolithic/Neolithic Transition, a period when hunter-gatherers began to shift toward settled lifestyles involving fishing, farming, and the construction of megaliths and other buildings.
Photos of the structures in Figure 7 of the study. Image: SAMM, 2023
The peoples who made these structures must have been both highly organized and relatively abundant in population in order to erect the stones. They were also sophisticated marine navigators, as the waters around Sein Island are notoriously dangerous—prone to swells and strong currents—which is one reason its underwater heritage has remained relatively poorly explored.“Our results bear witness to the possible sedentary lifestyle of maritime hunter-gatherers on the coast of the extreme west of France from the 6th millennium onwards,” said Fouquet and his colleagues in the study. “The technical know-how to extract, transport, and erect monoliths and large slabs during the Mesolithic/Neolithic transition precedes by about 500 years the megalithic constructions in western France in the 5th millennium.”
The discovery raises new questions about the origins of these megalithics structures, which may have had a symbolic or religious resonance to these past peoples. the team added. “This discovery in a high hydrodynamic environment opens up new perspectives for searching for traces of human settlement in Brittany along the submerged coastline of the period 6000–5000 years cal. BCE.”
The researchers also speculate about a possible link between these structures, and the prehistoric people who made them, and local legends about sunken cities that may date back thousands of years.
“Legends about sunken cities, compared with recent data on rising sea levels, shows that the stories of ancient submergences, passed down by oral tradition, could date back as far as 5,000 to 15,000 years,” the team said, citing a 2022 study. “This suggests that oral traditions that may have preserved significant events in memory that could well be worthy of scientific examination. These settlements described in legend reveal the profound symbolic significance of maritime prehistory, which should not be overlooked.”
In particular, the people of Brittany have long told tales of the lost city of Ys, a sunken settlement thought to be located in the Bay of Douarnenez, about six miles east of Sein Island. The sunken megaliths off Sein Island “allow us to question the origin of the history of the city of Ys, not from the historical legends and their numerous additions, but from scientific findings that may be at the origin of this legend,” the team said.
It’s extremely tantalizing to imagine that the long-hidden ruins of these peoples, who appear to have been expert seafarers and builders, are the source of tales that date back for untold generations in the region. But while the researchers raise the possibility of a link between the stones and the story, they cannot conclusively confirm the connection.
“Legend is legend, enriched by all the additions of human imagination over the centuries,” Fouquet said in his email. “Our discoveries are based on what can be scientifically proven.”
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Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.Accueil - Archéologie sous-marine, les Epaves et naufrages en Manche et Atlantique
Société d’Archéologie et de Mémoire Maritime Plongez dans l’histoire maritime. Vous recherchez sur le littoral Manche-Atlantique un navire, un naufrage, un ancêtre […]Archéologie sous-marine, les Epaves et naufrages en Manche et Atlantique
Normally, it’s bad news to be next to an exploding star. But ancient supernovae may have aided the formation of our home world—and perhaps Earthlike planets elsewhere.#TheAbstract
Earth-Like Planets Are More Common Than We Thought, Study Says
Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that got hosed with star spray, mounted a failed invasion, declined to comment, and achieved previously unknown levels of adorability.First, a study about how the solar system wasn’t destroyed 4.5 billion years ago (phew!). Then: a human touch on an ancient boat, the duality of posters and lurkers, and an important update on toadlets.
As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliensor subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.
Sink into a warm cosmic-ray bath
Earth was cosmically conceived in part by a massive shockwave from a nearby supernova, which seeded our home world and neighboring rocky planets with telltale radioactive signatures, according to a new study.
The solar system’s rocky planets contain short-lived radionuclides (SLRs), which are ancient elements that were likely barfed out from exploding stars. For this reason, scientists have long suspected that stars must’ve detonated next to the gassy disk that gave rise to the solar system. The heat generated from these radioactive elements helped the building blocks of the rocky planets—Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars—melt together so they could become whole worlds, which means we owe our existence to these ancient supernovas.
Now, a team has developed a new model to explain how the primordial pyrotechnics didn’t just blow up the nascent solar system. The results suggest that rocky Earth-like worlds may be common in the universe, with potential implications for the search for extraterrestrial life.
“A key question in astronomy is how ubiquitous Earth-like rocky planets are,” said researchers led by Ryo Sawada of the University of Tokyo. “The formation of terrestrial planets in our Solar System was strongly influenced by the radioactive decay heat of SLRs, particularly aluminum-26, likely delivered from nearby supernovae.”
“However, the supernova injection scenario faces an unresolved problem in that existing supernova models could not reproduce both the relative and absolute abundances of SLRs without disrupting the protosolar disk,” an event that “would likely prevent the Solar System formation altogether,” the team added.
In other words, it’s hard to explain how the solar system got its high abundance of SLRs without killing it in the cradle. Sawada and his colleagues propose a solution that involves at least one star exploding about three light years of the disk, sparking a shockwave that created a cosmic-ray “bath.”
Schematic picture of the system assumed in this study. Image: Sawada et al., Sci. Adv. 11, eadx7892
In this “immersion mechanism,” energetic cosmic rays trapped in the bath triggered SLR-producing reactions directly within the disk. This contrasts with the hypothesis that the SLRs were largely injected and then mixed up in the disk through some unknown process. This new solution can account both for the high abundance of certain SLRs, like aluminum-26, and the fact that the solar system was not destroyed, as evidenced by its apparent continued existence.“Our results suggest that Earth-like, water-poor rocky planets may be more prevalent in the
Galaxy than previously thought,” the team said, noting that many disks are rocked by similar supernova-shockwaves. “This challenges previous interpretations that classified the Solar System as an outlier with a particularly high [aluminum-26] abundance.”
In addition to offering a new hypothesis for an old astronomical problem, the study gets bonus points for its extremely poetic title: “Cosmic-ray bath in a past supernova gives birth to Earth-like planets.” If you say this enchanted phrase three times, somewhere an Earth-like world will be born.
In other news…
The biometrics of a Baltic boatsman
Stars aren’t the only things leaving their dirty fingerprints in unexpected places this week. Archeologists working on the mysterious Hjortspring boat, a 2,400-year-old Scandinavian vessel, discovered a tantalizing partial human fingerprint in its caulking, providing “a direct link to the ancient seafarers who used this boat,” according to the study.
Photo of caulking fragment showing fingerprint on the left and high-resolution x-ray tomography scan of fingerprint region on the right. Image: Photography by Erik Johansson, 3D model by Sahel Ganji
The ridges of the fingerprint “fall within average distributions for both adult male and females as well as for juvenile adults, making it difficult to say much about the individual who produced the print,” said researchers led by Mikael Fauvelle of Lund University. “The most likely interpretation, however, is that it was made during repairs by one of the crew members on the boat itself, providing a direct link to the seafarers of the ancient vessel.”Regardless of this person’s identity, their voyage didn’t end well. Researchers think the crew of the Hjortspring boat probably sailed from the eastern Baltic Sea to attack the Danish island of Als, where they were defeated. “The victors [deposited] the weapons of their vanquished foes together with one of their boats into the bog,” where they remained for millennia until they were rediscovered in the 1880s, the team said.
It’s a timeless reminder for would-be invaders: Don’t get caulky.
Long-time lurker, first-time poster
At last, scientists have investigated the most elusive online demographic: the humble lurker. A team recruited 520 Redditors in the U.S. to participate in small subreddits focused on a variety of political topics during the summer of 2024. The aim was to probe why some people became prolific “power-users” that post with voluminous confidence, while others remained wallflowers.
“Online political discussions are often dominated by a small group of active users, while most remain silent,” said researchers led by Lisa Oswalt of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. “This visibility gap can distort perceptions of public opinion and fuel polarization.”
The team found that “lurking (posting nothing) was most common among users who perceived discussions as toxic, disrespectful, or unconstructive.” Lurkers were offered small payments to post in the experiment, which succeeded in motivating some to contribute to discussions. As a result, the study concluded that “future interventions may be able to make online political discussions more representative by offering more positive social rewards for lurkers to post.”
At last, an opportunity to unionize the lurkers of the world. Solidarity (in silence) forever.
It’s the great pumpkin toadlet, Charlie Brown
We will close, as we have before, with an impossibly cute toadlet. Scientists have discovered this new species of “pumpkin toadlet” in the “cloud forests” of Brazil, a sentence so twee that it’s practically its own fairy tale. The tiny toad Brachycephalus lulai, pictured below on a pencil tip, belongs to a family of “flea toads” that are among the smallest vertebrates on Earth.
Basically it is very smol: Brachycephalus lulai is a tiny pumpkin toadlet measuring less than 14 mm in length. Photo: Luiz Fernando Ribeiro. Image credit 1: Luiz Fernando Ribeiro, CC-BY 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/b…)
“Our team sought to better document the individual variation of all Brachycephalus species in southern Brazil, looking for them in the field over the past seven years,” said researchers led by Marcos R. Bornschein of São Paulo State University. “As a result of this work, we discovered and herein described a population collected on the eastern slope of Serra do Quiriri as a new species.”The team also reported that the toads are actively colonizing newly formed cloud forests, which are high-altitude woods shrouded in mist. The researchers propose making these unique habitats into refuges for the adorable anurans.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
First Contact
A narrative and visual exploration of humanity’s age-old search for and fixation with extraterrestrials.First Contact explores the ancient idea—and epic ...Hachette Book Group
The discovery of fire-cracked handaxes and sparking tools in southern Britain pushes the timeline of controlled fires back 350,000 years.#TheAbstract
Scientists Discover the Earliest Human-Made Fire, Rewriting Evolutionary History
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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.Humans made fires as early as 400,000 years ago, pushing the timeline of this crucial human innovation back a staggering 350,000 years, reports a study published on Wednesday in Nature.
Mastery of fire is one of the most significant milestones in our evolutionary history, enabling early humans to cook nutritious food, seek protection from predators, and establish comfortable spaces for social gatherings. The ability to make fires is completely unique to the Homo genus that includes modern humans (Homo sapiens) and extinct humans, including Neanderthals.
Early humans may have opportunistically exploited wildfires more than one million years ago, but the oldest known controlled fires, which were intentionally lit with specialized tools, were previously dated back to about 50,000 years ago at Neanderthal sites in France.
Now, archaeologists have unearthed the remains of campfires ignited by an unidentified group of humans 400,000 years ago at Barnham, a village near the southern coast of the United Kingdom.
“This is a 400,000-year-old site where we have the earliest evidence of making fire—not just in Britain or Europe, but in fact, anywhere else in the world,” said Nick Ashton, an archaeologist at the British Museum who co-authored the study, in a press briefing held on Tuesday.
“Many of the great turning points in human development, and the development of our civilization, depended on fire,” added co-author Rob Davis, also an archaeologist at the British Museum. “We're a species who have used fire to really shape the world around us—in belief systems, as well. It's a very prominent part of belief systems across the world.”
Artifacts have been recovered from Barnham for more than a century, but the remnants of this ancient hearth were identified within the past decade. The researchers were initially tipped off by the remains of heated clay sediments, hydrocarbons associated with fire, and fire-cracked flint handaxes.
But the real smoking gun was the discovery of two small fragments of iron pyrite, a mineral commonly used to strike flint to produce sparks at later prehistoric campfires such as the French Neanderthal sites.
Discovery of the first fragment of iron pyrite in 2017 at Barnham, Suffolk Image: Jordan Mansfield, Pathways to Ancient Britain Project.
“Iron pyrite is a naturally occurring mineral, but through geological work in the area over the last 36 years, looking at 26 sites, we argue that pyrite is incredibly rare in the area,” said Ashton. “We think humans brought pyrite to the site with the intention of making fire.”The fire-starters were probably Neanderthals, who were known to be present in the region at the time thanks to a skull found in Swanscombe, about 80 miles northeast of Barnham. But it’s possible that the fires were made by another human lineage such as Homo heidelbergensis, which also left bones in the U.K. around the same period. It was not Homo sapiens as our lineage emerged in Africa later, about 300,000 years ago.
Regardless of this group’s identity, its ability to make fire would have been a major advantage, especially in the relatively cold environment of southern Britain at the time. It also hints that the ability to make fire extends far deeper into the past than previously known.
“We assume that the people who made the fire at Barnham brought the knowledge with them from continental Europe,” said co-author Chris Stringer, a physical anthropologist at the Natural History Museum. “There was a land bridge there. There had been a major cold stage about 450,000 years ago, which had probably wiped out everyone in Britain. Britain had to be repopulated all over again.”
“Having that use of fire, which they must have brought with them when they came into Britain, would have helped them colonize this new area and move a bit further north to places where the winters are going to be colder,” he continued. “You can keep warm. You can keep wild animals away. You get more nutrition from your food.”
Excavation of the ancient campfire, removing diagonally opposed quadrants. The reddened sediment between band B’ is heated clay. Image: Jordan Mansfield, Pathways to Ancient Britain Project.
Although these humans likely had brains close in size to our own, the innovation of controlled fire would have amplified their cognitive development, social bonds, and symbolic capacities. In the flickering light of ancient campfires, these humans shared food, protection, and company, passing on a tradition that fundamentally reshaped our evolutionary trajectory.“People were sitting around the fires, sharing information, having extra time beyond pure daylight to make things, to teach things, to communicate with each other, to tell stories,” Stringer said. “Maybe it may have even fueled the development of language.”
“We've got this crucial aspect in human evolution, and we can put a marker down that it was there 400,000 years ago,” he concluded.
Earliest evidence of making fire - Nature
Baked sediment, heat-shattered artefacts and introduced pyrite in a 400,000-year-old Palaeolithic occupation site in Suffolk, UK provide evidence of intentional fire-making, marking a pivotal moment in human development.Nature
Scientists found sugars that are essential for life on asteroid Bennu, which has a 1 in 2,700 chance of hitting Earth in 2182.#TheAbstract
An Asteroid Threatening Earth Is Teeming With Ingredients for Life, Scientists Discover
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that fought for their food, took one for the team, passed the extraterrestrial sugar, and got lost in an ancient haze.First, a story about the spiciest meatball in the animal kingdom. Then: ants are being interesting again, a new discovery about an old rock, and a walk in an ancient sulfur rainstorm.
As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.
Pond frog versus murder hornet
Most animals don’t eat hornets, because dinner is just not as fun if it comes with a side of deadly venom and stab wounds. But a scientist has now observed an incredible exception to the rule with the humble black-spotted pond frog (Pelophylax nigromaculatus), which will straight-up house a hornet and ask for seconds.
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Hornets have occasionally been found in the bellies of pond frogs, suggesting that the amphibians can tolerate their intense stings, but not much else is known about this unusual predator-prey relationship. To remedy the situation, Shinji Sugiura of Kobe University went out to the prefecture of Hyogo in Central Japan and netted a bunch of hornets from grasslands and forests—including the infamous “murder hornet” Vespa mandarinia, the largest in the world. He then captured pond frogs from wetlands with paddy fields and ponds in Hyogo and Shimane prefectures. Then, he let them duke it out in the lab in the world’s gnarliest series of cage matches.“When a frog opened its mouth and its tongue made contact with a hornet, the action was classified as an attack on the hornet,” Sugiura said in the study. “If the frog did not stop the attack, spit out, or regurgitate the hornet, it was considered to have successfully consumed the hornet.”
The results revealed that most frogs made short work of the hornets (Videos S2) even though their meals were actively stinging them in their faces, eyes, tongues, palates, or throats of the frogs during attacks (Figure 3c,d).
“None of the frogs regurgitated the hornets after swallowing them,” Sugiura noted. “All frogs that swallowed hornets excreted the undigested body parts of the hornets as feces 2–4 days after ingestion.”
Lets just sit with that mental image of poopy undigested hornets for a second. What a nightmare. But what’s truly wild about this study is that the insects are known to inject lethal doses of venom into much larger animals, like mice, so the frogs clearly have some unknown defense against their attacks.
“Although many frogs were stung repeatedly by [hornets] in this study…none of the frogs died, and all individuals resumed normal behavior shortly after being stung,” Suguira said. “Moreover, despite repeated stings, most of the frogs ultimately consumed hornet workers…indicating a high level of predation success even against the largest hornet species.”
We humans are so lucky that when we sit down to dinner, our food generally does not try to kill us with repeated venomous needlepoint impalements. Count your blessings!
In other news…
Meet the ant-y Christs
Dawson, Erika H. “Altruistic disease signalling in ant colonies.” Nature Communications.We’ll move now from death by frog munchies to death by team spirit. Scientists have discovered that ant pupae (baby ants) will sacrifice themselves if they are sick, lest they risk the health of the entire colony.
“Here we show…that sick ant pupae instead actively emit a chemical signal that in itself is sufficient to trigger their own destruction by colony members,” said researchers led by Erika H. Dawson of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria. “Our data suggest the evolution of a finely-tuned signalling system…that triggers pupal signalling for sacrifice. This demonstrates a balanced interplay between individual and social immunity that efficiently achieves whole-colony health.”
In other words, if an ant gets bitten by a zombie in a movie, it would immediately let everyone know and offer its life for the good of the group. Do what you will with this information.
Do you take sugar in your asteroid?
Furukawa, Yoshihiro et al. “Bio-essential sugars in samples from asteroid Bennu.” Nature Geoscience.Scientists have found bio-essential sugars, including ribose and glucose, in samples of an asteroid called Bennu that were brought to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission in 2023. The discovery marks the first time key sugars have been found in any extraterrestrial sample. Ribose is an essential ingredient of RNA (ribonucleic acid), making it a particularly significant find in the quest to understand how life arose on Earth, and if it exists elsewhere.
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“All five of the canonical nucleobases in DNA and RNA, and phosphate, were previously found in Bennu samples,” said researchers led by Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University. “Our detection of ribose means that all the components of RNA are present in Bennu.”“Our confident detection in Bennu of abundant glucose—the hexose molecule that is life’s common energy source—and other hexoses indicates that they were present in the early solar system,” the team added. “Thus, all three crucial building blocks of life”— bio-essential sugars, nucleobases, and protein-building amino acids—”would have reached the prebiotic Earth and other potentially habitable planets.”
While Bennu bears the stuff of life, it may also be an omen of death: It has a 1 in 2,700 chance of hitting Earth on September 24, 2182. These are very low odds, but the risk is high enough to classify Bennu as potentially hazardous. So while visions of sugar plums may dance in your head this season, beware the nightmares about sugar-asteroids.
It’s raining sulfur—hallelujah!
I’ve made you walk through many valleys of death in this newsletter, but we’ll close with some unadulterated life. Scientists have discovered that many of the sulfur molecules that help make up all modern organisms may have rained down from the hazy skies of the Archean period four billion years ago.
Assuming the results are confirmed in future research, it would mean that these sulfur molecules could have predated life, upending a leading hypothesis that they were a product of life and thus emerged later.
The work challenges “the assumption that life must have ‘invented’ sulfur biomolecules during evolution…by demonstrating the production of a variety of sulfur biomolecules, including cysteine, in laboratory experiments mimicking the atmospheric chemistry of the early Earth,” said researchers led by Nathan Reed of NASA, who conducted the work while at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
“The results presented here imply that an atmospheric organic haze is a potential powerhouse in providing a diversity of essential biomolecules in sufficient quantities for a budding global biosphere,” the team concluded.
Taken together with the Bennu study, it looks as if early Earth was positively marinating in life juices from multiple sources, including the sky and extraterrestrial impactors. Though this still doesn’t explain how living things sprang up from the prebiotic stew, it provides further confirmation that the ingredients of life as we know it are spread far and wide here in our solar system, and beyond.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
First Contact
A narrative and visual exploration of humanity’s age-old search for and fixation with extraterrestrials.First Contact explores the ancient idea—and epic ...Hachette Book Group
AI models can meaningfully sway voters on candidates and issues, including by using misinformation, and they are also evading detection in public surveys according to three new studies.#TheAbstract #News
Scientists Are Increasingly Worried AI Will Sway Elections
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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.Scientists are raising alarms about the potential influence of artificial intelligence on elections, according to a spate of new studies that warn AI can rig polls and manipulate public opinion.
In a study published in Nature on Thursday, scientists report that AI chatbots can meaningfully sway people toward a particular candidate—providing better results than video or television ads. Moreover, chatbots optimized for political persuasion “may increasingly deploy misleading or false information,” according to a separate study published on Thursday in Science.
“The general public has lots of concern around AI and election interference, but among political scientists there’s a sense that it’s really hard to change peoples’ opinions, ” said David Rand, a professor of information science, marketing, and psychology at Cornell University and an author of both studies. “We wanted to see how much of a risk it really is.”
In the Nature study, Rand and his colleagues enlisted 2,306 U.S. citizens to converse with an AI chatbot in late August and early September 2024. The AI model was tasked with both increasing support for an assigned candidate (Harris or Trump) and with increasing the odds that the participant who initially favoured the model’s candidate would vote, or decreasing the odds they would vote if the participant initially favored the opposing candidate—in other words, voter suppression.
In the U.S. experiment, the pro-Harris AI model moved likely Trump voters 3.9 points toward Harris, which is a shift that is four times larger than the impact of traditional video ads used in the 2016 and 2020 elections. Meanwhile, the pro-Trump AI model nudged likely Harris voters 1.51 points toward Trump.
The researchers ran similar experiments involving 1,530 Canadians and 2,118 Poles during the lead-up to their national elections in 2025. In the Canadian experiment, AIs advocated either for Liberal Party leader Mark Carney or Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre. Meanwhile, the Polish AI bots advocated for either Rafał Trzaskowski, the centrist-liberal Civic Coalition’s candidate, or Karol Nawrocki, the right-wing Law and Justice party’s candidate.
The Canadian and Polish bots were even more persuasive than in the U.S. experiment: The bots shifted candidate preferences up to 10 percentage points in many cases, three times farther than the American participants. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why the models were so much more persuasive to Canadians and Poles, but one significant factor could be the intense media coverage and extended campaign duration in the United States relative to the other nations.
“In the U.S., the candidates are very well-known,” Rand said. “They've both been around for a long time. The U.S. media environment also really saturates with people with information about the candidates in the campaign, whereas things are quite different in Canada, where the campaign doesn't even start until shortly before the election.”
“One of the key findings across both papers is that it seems like the primary way the models are changing people's minds is by making factual claims and arguments,” he added. “The more arguments and evidence that you've heard beforehand, the less responsive you're going to be to the new evidence.”
While the models were most persuasive when they provided fact-based arguments, they didn’t always present factual information. Across all three nations, the bot advocating for the right-leaning candidates made more inaccurate claims than those boosting the left-leaning candidates. Right-leaning laypeople and party elites tend to share more inaccurate information online than their peers on the left, so this asymmetry likely reflects the internet-sourced training data.
“Given that the models are trained essentially on the internet, if there are many more inaccurate, right-leaning claims than left-leaning claims on the internet, then it makes sense that from the training data, the models would sop up that same kind of bias,” Rand said.
With the Science study, Rand and his colleagues aimed to drill down into the exact mechanisms that make AI bots persuasive. To that end, the team tasked 19 large language models (LLMs) to sway nearly 77,000 U.K. participants on 707 political issues.
The results showed that the most effective persuasion tactic was to provide arguments packed with as many facts as possible, corroborating the findings of the Nature study. However, there was a serious tradeoff to this approach, as models tended to start hallucinating and making up facts the more they were pressed for information.
“It is not the case that misleading information is more persuasive,” Rand said. ”I think that what's happening is that as you push the model to provide more and more facts, it starts with accurate facts, and then eventually it runs out of accurate facts. But you're still pushing it to make more factual claims, so then it starts grasping at straws and making up stuff that's not accurate.”
In addition to these two new studies, research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last month found that AI bots can now corrupt public opinion data by responding to surveys at scale. Sean Westwood, associate professor of government at Dartmouth College and director of the Polarization Research Lab, created an AI agent that exhibited a 99.8 percent pass rate on 6,000 attempts to detect automated responses to survey data.
“Critically, the agent can be instructed to maliciously alter polling outcomes, demonstrating an overt vector for information warfare,” Westwood warned in the study. “These findings reveal a critical vulnerability in our data infrastructure, rendering most current detection methods obsolete and posing a potential existential threat to unsupervised online research.”
Taken together, these findings suggest that AI could influence future elections in a number of ways, from manipulating survey data to persuading voters to switch their candidate preference—possibly with misleading or false information.
To counter the impact of AI on elections, Rand suggested that campaign finance laws should provide more transparency about the use of AI, including canvasser bots, while also emphasizing the role of raising public awareness.
“One of the key take-homes is that when you are engaging with a model, you need to be cognizant of the motives of the person that prompted the model, that created the model, and how that bleeds into what the model is doing,” he said.
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Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.Persuading voters using human–artificial intelligence dialogues - Nature
Human–artificial intelligence (AI) dialogues can meaningfully impact voters’ attitudes towards presidential candidates and policy, demonstrating the potential of conversational AI to influence political decision-making.Nature
Scientists found that major celebrities died four years earlier than their less famous peers, hinting that fame itself can be a mortality risk.#TheAbstract
Being Famous Can Shorten Your Lifespan, Scientists Find
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that hit the books, bottled alien lightning, reared wolf cubs, and tallied the price of fame.First, we’ve got a centuries-long history of an Indian savannah told through songs, folktales, and screaming peacocks. Then: Mars gets charged, the secrets of Stora Karlsö, and the epidemiology of stardom.
As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.
When folk tales are field guides
It has happened again: Researchers have turned to the annals of literature to address a scientific question. Longtime readers of the Abstract will recall that this is a simply irresistible category of research to me (see: China’s porpoise corpus, Transylvanian weather reports, and milky seas). To the library!
In this edition of Science from the Stacks, researchers probed the origins of the tropical savannah in western Maharashtra, India, by collecting references to plants in 28 stories and songs dating back at least 750 years. The aim was to reconstruct a vegetation history that could hint at shifts in the region between forest and savannah biomes.
“Ttraditional literature—for example, myths, folk songs and stories—is a culturally resonant, yet underutilized line of evidence to understand ecological histories and foster biodiversity conservation,” said researchers led by Ashish N. Nerlekar of Michigan State University.
A folio from an early 19th-century manuscript of the Bhaktavijaya mentioning the taraṭī tree. Image: Nerlekar, Ashish N. et al.
“We found that descriptions of both the landscape and specific plants point to an open-canopy savanna in the past rather than a forest,” the team said. “Of the 44 wild plant species recorded (i.e. omitting exclusively cultivated plants), a clear majority (27 species) were savanna indicators, 14 were generalists, and only three were forest indicators. Our ecological reconstructions from traditional literature complement data from archival paintings, revenue records, plant and animal fossils, and dated molecular phylogenies of endemic biodiversity—all attesting to the antiquity of India's savannas.”It’s an out-of-the-box way to reconstruct the natural history of a region. But the highlights of these studies are always the excerpts from the literature, like the amazing origin story of this village:
“A folk tale illustrates the founding myth of Kolvihire village near Jejuri. The tale is about a robber-murderer named Vālhyā Koḷī, who lived near Kolvihire. Upon meeting a sage, Vālhyā Koḷī introspected on his wrongdoings and performed penance for 12 years. After completion of the penance, as a living testimony to Vālhyā Koḷī's sincere devotion, leaves sprouted from his stick, which he had used to hit and kill travellers to loot their money. Eventually, Vālhyā Koḷī became the sage-poet Vālmikī. According to the tale, the sprouted stick grew into a pāḍaḷa tree, and the tree still exists in Kolvihire.”
You have to love a good botanical redemption story. Another standout line is this memorable description of a thorny patch in the savannah from the early 16th century: “Such is this thorny forest | it is highly frightening | this forest is empty | peacocks scream here.”
I don’t know exactly why, but “peacocks scream here” is just about the scariest description I’ve ever heard of a place. Shout out to this ancient poet for capturing some legendary bad vibes.
In other news…
Extraterrestrial electricity
Chide, Baptiste et al. “Detection of triboelectric discharges during dust events on Mars.” Nature.Lightning is a big deal on Earth, inspiring awe, fear, and some of the naughtiest deities imaginable. But lightning also strikes on other planets, including Jupiter and Saturn. For years, scientists have suspected that Mars might host its own bolts, but detecting them has remained elusive.
Now, scientists have finally captured lightning on Mars thanks to “serendipitous observations” from the SuperCam microphone aboard the Perseverance rover.
“Fifty-five events have been detected over two Martian years, usually associated with dust devils and dust storm convective fronts,” said researchers led by Baptiste Chide of the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie in Toulouse, France. “Beyond Mars, this work also reinforces the prospect of triboelectric discharges associated with wind-blown sediment on Venus and Titan.”
It goes to show that even a very dead world like Mars can still crackle and zap now and then.
The wolves of Stora Karlsö
About 4,000 years ago on a small island in the Baltic sea, people cared for two wolves — perhaps as pets — feeding them fish, seals, and other marine fare. That’s the cozy portrait presented in a new study that analyzed the remains of ancient wolves buried in the Stora Förvar cave on the Swedish island of Stora Karlsö.
While dogs are commonly buried at ancient human sites, wolves and humans rarely mix in the archaeological record. But the wolves at Stora Karlsö were unlikely to have reached the island without the aid of humans, and their primarily seafood diet—unusual for wild wolves—suggests they were also fed by people. Moreover, one of the animals suffered from a pathology that might have limited its mobility, hinting that it was kept alive by humans.
The cave where the wolf remains were found. Image: Jan Storå/Stockholm UniversityThe study presents the “possibility of prehistoric human control of wolves,” said researchers led by Linus Girdland-Flink of the University of Aberdeen. “Our results provide evidence that extends the discourse about past human–wolf interactions and relationships.”
Fame! I’m going to live forever (or not)
Celebrity may literally be to die for, according to a new study that evaluated fame as a comorbidity.
Scientists collected a list of 324 big music stars active between 1950 and 1990, including Elvis Presley, Kurt Cobain, Sam Cooke, and Janis Joplin. Those heavy-hitters were then matched with 324 “twin” musicians that were not household names, but otherwise shared many characteristics of the celebs, including gender, nationality, genre, and roughly similar birth dates. The idea was to directly compare the lifespans of A-listers and B-listers to isolate the extent to which fame itself is a mortality risk factor, rather than the lifestyle of a musician.
The study suggests that famous singers die four years earlier, on average, compared to their B-list peers, demonstrating “a 33% higher mortality risk compared with less famous singers,” said researchers led by Johanna Hepp of the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany. “This study provides new evidence suggesting that fame may be associated with increased mortality risk among musicians, beyond occupational factors.”
Lady Gaga had it right, as if there were ever any doubt: Under the glitz, the Fame Monster is always waiting.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
The Ocean Spectacle that Has Entranced Sailors for Centuries
“It was like we were in the ‘Twilight Zone’ and peering at a negative of the real world,” said one mariner.Becky Ferreira (404 Media)
“It was like playing the lottery,” said astronomer Tomonori Totani, adding that he hopes other scientists will verify the possible detection of a new dark matter signature.#TheAbstract
A Lone Astronomer Has Reported a Dark Matter ‘Annihilation’ Breakthrough
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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.An astronomer has reported a possible new signature of dark matter, a mysterious substance that makes up most of the universe, according to a study published on Tuesday in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.
Dark matter accounts for 85 percent of all matter in the universe, but its existence has so far been inferred only from its indirect effects on the familiar “baryonic” matter that makes up stars, planets, and life.
Tomonori Totani, a professor of astronomy at the University of Tokyo and the author of the study, believes he has spotted novel indirect traces of dark matter particles in the “halo” surrounding the center of our galaxy using new observations from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. When these speculative particles collide—a process called dark matter annihilation—the crash is predicted to emit bright gamma rays, which is the light that Totani thinks he has identified.
“The discovery was made possible by focusing on the halo region (excluding the galactic center), which had received little attention, and by utilizing data accumulated over 15 years from the Fermi satellite,” Totani told 404 Media in an email. “After carefully removing all components other than dark matter, a signal resembling dark matter appeared.”
“It was like playing the lottery, and at first I was skeptical,” he added. “But after checking meticulously and thinking it seemed correct, I got goosebumps!”
If the detection is corroborated by follow-up studies, it could confirm a leading hypothesis that dark matter is made of a hypothetical class of weakly interacting massive particles, or “WIMPs”—potentially exposing the identity of this mysterious substance for the first time. But that potential breakthrough is still a ways off, according to other researchers in the field.
“Any new structure in the gamma-ray sky is interesting, but the dark matter interpretation here strikes me as quite preliminary,” said Danielle Norcini, an experimental particle physicist and
assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University, in an email to 404 Media.
Gamma-ray intensity map excluding components other than the halo, spanning approximately 100 degrees in the direction of the Galactic center. The horizontal gray bar in the central region corresponds to the Galactic plane area, which was excluded from the analysis to avoid strong astrophysical radiation. Image: Tomonori Totani, The University of Tokyo
Dark matter has flummoxed scientists for almost a century. In the 1930s, astronomer Fritz Zwicky observed that the motions of galaxies hinted that they are much more massive than expected based solely on visible baryonic matter. Since then, astronomers have confirmed that dark matter, which accumulates into dense halos at the centers of galaxies, acts like a gravitational glue that holds structures together. Dark matter is also the basis of a vast cosmic web of gaseous threads that links galaxy clusters across billions of light years.But while dark matter is ubiquitous, it does not interact with the electromagnetic force, which means it does not absorb, reflect, or emit light. This property makes it difficult to spot with traditional astronomy, a challenge that has inspired the development of novel instruments designed to directly detect dark matter such as the subterranean LUX-ZEPLIN in South Dakota and the forthcoming DAMIC-M in France.
For years, scientists have been probing possible emission from dark matter annihilation at the center of the Milky Way, which is surrounded by a halo of densely-clustered dark matter. Those previous studies focus on an excess emission pattern of about 2 gigaelectronvolts (GeV). Tontani’s study spotlights a new and different pattern with extremely energetic gamma rays at 20 GeV.
“A part of the Fermi data showed a peculiar excess that our model couldn't explain, leading me to suspect it might be due to radiation originating from dark matter,” he said. “The most difficult part is removing gamma-ray emissions of origins other than dark matter, such as those from cosmic rays and celestial objects.”
This tentative report may finally fill in a major missing piece of our understanding of the universe by exposing the true nature of dark matter and confirming the existence of WIMPs. But given that similar claims have been made in the past, more research is needed to assess the significance of the results.
“For any potential indirect signal, the key next steps are independent checks: analyses using different background models, different assumptions about the Milky Way halo, and ideally complementary data sets,” Norcini said.
“Gamma-ray structures in the halo can have many astrophysical origins, so ruling those out requires careful modeling and cross-comparison,” she continued. “At this point the result seems too new for that scrutiny to have played out, and it will take multiple groups looking at the same data before a dark matter interpretation could be considered robust.”
Though Totani is confident in his interpretation of his discovery, he also looks forward to the input of other dark matter researchers around the world.
“First, I would like other researchers to independently verify my analysis,” he said. “Next, for everyone to be convinced that this is truly dark matter, the decisive factor will be the detection of gamma rays with the same spectrum from other regions, such as dwarf galaxies. The accumulation of further data from the Fermi satellite and large ground-based gamma-ray telescopes, such as the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO) will be crucial.”
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The remains of Theia are scattered deep inside the Earth and its satellite. By analyzing these remnants, scientists have proposed an origin.#TheAbstract
A Lost Planet Created the Moon. Now, We Know Where It Came From.
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that overthrew the regime, survived outer space, smashed planets, and crafted an ancient mystery from clay.First, a queen gets sprayed with acid—and that’s not even the most horrifying part of the story. Then: a moss garden that is out of this world, the big boom that made the Moon, and a breakthrough in the history of goose-human relations.
As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.
What is this, a regime change for ants?
Every so often, a study opens with such a forceful hook that it is simply best for me to stand aside and allow it to speak for itself. Thus:
“Matricide—the killing of a mother by her own genetic offspring—is rarely observed in nature, but not unheard-of. Among animal species in which offspring remain with their mothers, the benefits gained from maternal care are so substantial that eliminating the mother almost never pays, making matricide vastly rarer than infanticide.”
“Here, we report matricidal behavior in two ant species, Lasius flavus and Lasius japonicus, where workers kill resident queens (their mothers) after the latter have been sprayed with abdominal fluid by parasitic ant queens of the ants Lasius orientalis and Lasius umbratus.”
Mad props to this team for condensing an entire etymological epic into three sentences. Such murderous acts of dynastic usurpation were first observed by Taku Shimada, an ant enthusiast who runs a blog called Ant Room. Though matricide is sometimes part of a life cycle—like mommy spiders sacrificing their bodies for consumption by their offspring—there is no clear precedent for the newly-reported form of matricide, in which neither the young nor mother benefits from an evolutionary point of view.
youtube.com/embed/YarIl8JU-6A?…
In what reads like an unfolding horror, the invading parasitic queens “covertly approach the resident queen and spray multiple jets of abdominal fluid at her”—formic acid, as it turns out—that then “elicits abrupt attacks by host workers, which ultimately kill their own mother,” report Shimada and his colleagues.“The parasitic queens are then accepted, receive care from the orphaned host workers and produce their own brood to found a new colony,” the team said. “Our findings are the first to document a novel host manipulation that prompts offspring to kill an otherwise indispensable mother.”
My blood is curdling and yet I cannot look away! Though this strategy is uniquely nightmarish, it is not uncommon for invading parasitic ants to execute queens in any number of creative ways. The parasites are just usually a bit more hands-on (or rather, tarsus-on) about the process.
“Queen-killing” has “evolved independently on multiple occasions across [ant species], indicating repeated evolutionary gains,” Shimada’s team said. “Until now, the only mechanistically documented solution was direct assault: the parasite throttles or beheads the host queen, a tactic that has arisen convergently in several lineages.”
When will we get an ant Shakespeare?! Someone needs to step up and claim that title, because these queens blow Lady MacBeth out of the water.
In other news…
That’s one small stem for a plant, one giant leaf for plant-kind
Scientists simply love to expose extremophile life to the vacuum of space to, you know, see how well they do out there. In a new addition to this tradition, a study reports that spores from the moss Physcomitrium patens survived a full 283 days chilling on the outside of the International Space Station, which is generally not the side of an orbital habitat you want to be stuck on.
A reddish-brown spore similar to those used in the space exposure experiment. Image: Tomomichi Fujita
Even wilder, most of the spacefaring spores were reproductively successful upon their return to Earth. “Remarkably, even after 9 months of exposure to space conditions, over 80% of the encased spores germinated upon return to Earth,” said researchers led by Chang-hyun Maeng of Hokkaido University. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report demonstrating the survival of bryophytes”—the family to which mosses belong—”following exposure to space and subsequent return to the ground.”Congratulations to these mosses for boldly growing where no moss has grown before.
Hints of a real-life ghost world
Hopp, Timo et al. “The Moon-forming impactor Theia originated from the inner Solar System.” Science.Earth had barely been born before a Mars-sized planet, known as Theia, smashed into it some 4.5 billion years ago. The debris from the collision coalesced into what is now our Moon, which has played a key role in Earth’s habitability, so we owe our lives in part to this primordial punch-up.
KABLOWIE! Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Scientists have now revealed new details about Theia by measuring the chemical makeup of “lunar samples, terrestrial rocks, and meteorites…from which Theia and proto-Earth might have formed,” according to a new study. They conclude that Theia likely originated in the inner solar system based on the chemical signatures that this shattered world left behind on the Moon and Earth.“We found that all of Theia and most of Earth’s other constituent materials originated from the inner Solar System,” said researchers led by Timo Hopp of The University of Chicago and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research. “Our calculations suggest that Theia might have formed closer to the Sun than Earth did.”
Wherever its actual birthplace, what remains of Theia is buried on the Moon and as giant undigested slabs inside Earth’s mantle. Rest in pieces, sister.
Goosebumps of yore
You’ve heard of the albatross around your neck, but what about the goose on your back? A new study reports the discovery of a 12,000-year-old artifact in Israel that is the “earliest known figurine to depict a human–animal interaction” with its vision of a goose mysteriously draped over a woman’s spine and shoulders.
The tiny, inch-high figurine was recovered from a settlement built by the prehistoric Natufian culture and it may represent some kind of sex thing.
An image of the artifact, and an artistic reconstruction. Image: Davin, Laurent et al.
“We…suggest that by modeling a goose in this specific posture, the Natufian manufacturer intended to portray the trademark pattern of the gander’s mating behavior,” said researchers led by Laurent Davin of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “This kind of imagined mating between humans and animal spirits is typical of an animistic perspective, documented in cross-cultural archaeological and ethnographic records in specific situations” such as an “erotic dream” or “shamanistic vision.”First, the bizarre Greek myth of Leda and the Swan, and now this? What is it about ancient cultures and weird waterfowl fantasies? In any case, my own interpretation is that the goose was just tired and needed a piggyback (or gaggle-back).
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
First Contact
A narrative and visual exploration of humanity’s age-old search for and fixation with extraterrestrials.First Contact explores the ancient idea—and epic ...Hachette Book Group
Kissing is ubiquitous among many animals, especially primates, suggesting deep evolutionary roots of the behavior.#TheAbstract
Scientists Discover the Origin of Kissing — And It’s Not Human
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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.Kissing is one of humanity’s most cherished rituals—just think of the sheer variety of smooches, from the “wedding kiss” to the “kiss of death.” Now, scientists have discovered that the origins of this behavior, which is widespread among many primates, likely dates back at least 21 million years, according to a study published on Tuesday in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.
In other words, our early primate relatives were sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G, in the early Miocene period. Moreover, the deep evolutionary roots of kissing suggest that Neanderthals likely smooched each other, and probably our human ancestors as well. The new study is the first attempt to reconstruct the evolutionary timeline of kissing by analyzing a wealth of observations about this behavior in modern primates and other animals.
“It is kind of baffling to me that people haven't looked at this from an evolutionary perspective before,” said Matilda Brindle, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford who led the study, in a call with 404 Media. “There have been some people who have put ideas out there, but no one's done it in a systematic way.”
“Kissing doesn't occur in all human cultures, but in those that it does, it's really important,” she added. “That's why we thought it was really exciting to study.”
A collage of mouth-to-mouth contact across species. Image: Brindle, Matilda et al.
The ritual of the “first kiss” is a common romantic trope, but tracking down the “first kiss” in an evolutionary sense is no easy feat. For starters, the adaptive benefits of kissing have long eluded researchers. Mouth-to-mouth contact raises the odds of oral disease transfer, and it’s not at all clear what advantages puckering up confers to make it worth the trouble.“Kissing is kind of risky,” Brindle said. “You're getting very close to another animal's face. There could be diseases. To me, that suggests that it is important. There must be some benefits to this behavior.”
Some common explanations for sex-related kissing include mate evaluation—bad breath or other red flags during a smoochfest might affect the decision to move on to copulation. Kissing may also stimulate sexual receptiveness and perhaps boost the odds of fertilization. In platonic contexts, kissing could serve a social purpose, similar to grooming, of solidifying bonds between parents and offspring, or even to smooth over conflicts between group members.
“We know that chimpanzees, when they've had a bit of a bust up, will often go and kiss each other and make up,” Brindle said. “That might be really useful for navigating social relationships. Primates are obviously an incredibly social group of animals, and so this could be just a social lubricant for them.”
Though most of us have probably never considered the question, Brindle and her colleagues first had to ask: what is a kiss? They made a point to exclude forms of oral contact that don’t fall into the traditional idea of kissing as a prosocial behavior. For example, lots of animals share food directly through mouth-to-mouth contact, such as regurgitation from a parent to offspring. In addition, some animals display antagonistic behavior through mouth-to-mouth contact, such as “kiss-fighting” behavior seen in some fish.
The team ultimately defined kissing as “a non-agonistic interaction involving directed, intraspecific, oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer.” Many animals engage in kissing under these terms—from insects, to birds, to mammals—but the researchers were most interested in primates.
To that end, they gathered observations of kissing across primate species and fed the data into models that analyzed the timeline of the behavior through the evolutionary relationships between species. The basic idea is that if humans, bonobos, and chimpanzees all kiss (which they do) then the common ancestor of these species likely kissed as well.
The results revealed that the evolutionary “first kiss” likely occurred among primates at least 21 million years ago. Since Neanderthals and our own species, Homo sapiens, are known to have interbred—plus they also shared oral microbes—the team speculates that Neanderthals and our own human ancestors might have kissed as well.
While the study provides a foundation for the origins of kissing, Brindle said there is not yet enough empirical data to test out different hypotheses about its benefits—or to explain why it is important in some species and cultures, but not others. To that end, she hopes other scientists will be inspired to report more observations about kissing in wild and captive animal populations.
“I was actually surprised that there were so few data out there,” Brindle said. “I thought that this would be way better documented when I started this study. What I would really love is, for people who see this behavior, to note it down, report it, so that we can actually start collecting more contextual information: Is this a romantic or a platonic kiss? Who were the actors in it? Was it an adult male and an adult female, or a mother and offspring? Were they eating at the time? Was there copulation before or after the kiss?”
“These sorts of questions will enable us to pick apart these potential adaptive hypotheses,” she concluded.
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Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.
The newly sequenced RNA is 25,000 years older than the previous record-holder, opening a new window into genetic evolution and revealing a surprise about a famous mammoth mummy.#TheAbstract
Scientists Make Genetic Breakthrough with 39,000-Year-Old Mammoth RNA
Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that reached back through time, flooded the zone, counted the stars, scored science goals, and topped it all off with a ten-course meal.First, scientists make a major breakthrough thanks to a very cute mammoth mummy. Then: the climate case for busy beavers; how to reconnect with 3,000 estranged siblings; this is your brain on football; and last, what Queen Elizabeth II had for lunch on February 20, 1957.
As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.
The long afterlife of Yuka the mammoth
Scientists have sequenced RNA—a key ingredient of life as we know it—from the remains of a mammoth that lived 39,000 years ago during the Pleistocene “Ice Age” period, making it by far the oldest RNA on record.
The previous record holder for oldest RNA was sourced from a puppy that lived in Siberia 14,300 years ago. The new study has now pushed that timeline back by an extraordinary 25,000 years, opening a new window into ancient genetics and revealing a surprise about a famous mammoth mummy called Yuka.
“Ancient DNA has revolutionized the study of extinct and extant organisms that lived up to 2 million years ago, enabling the reconstruction of genomes from multiple extinct species, as well as the ecosystems where they once thrived,” said researchers led by Emilio Mármol Sánchez of the Globe Institute in Copenhagen, who completed the study while at Stockholm University.
“However, current DNA sequencing techniques alone cannot directly provide insights into tissue identity, gene expression dynamics, or transcriptional regulation, as these are encoded in the RNA fraction.”
“Here, we report transcriptional profiles from 10 late Pleistocene woolly mammoths,” the team continued. “One of these, dated to be ∼39,000 years old, yielded sufficient detail to recover…the oldest ancient RNA sequences recorded to date.”
DNA, the double-stranded “blueprint” molecule that stores genetic information, is far sturdier than RNA, which is why it can be traced back for millions of years instead of thousands. Single-stranded RNA, a “messenger” molecule that carries out the orders of DNA, is more fragile and rare in the paleontological record.
In addition to proving that RNA can survive much longer than previously known, the team discovered that Yuka—the mammoth that died 39,000 years ago—has been misgendered for years (yes, I realize gender is a social construct that does not apply to extremely dead mammoths, but mis-sexed just doesn’t have the same ring).
Yuka was originally deemed female according to a 2021 study that observed the “presence of skin folds in the genital area compatible with labia vulvae structures in modern elephants and the absence of male-specific muscle structures.” Mármol Sánchez and his colleagues have now overturned this anatomical judgement by probing the genetic remnants of Yuka’s Y chromosome.
In fact, as I write this on Thursday, November 13—a day before the embargo on this study lifts on Friday—Yuka is still listed as female on Wikipedia.
Just a day until you can live your truth, buddy.In other news…
Leave it to beavers
Every era has a champion; in our warming world, eager beavers may rise to claim this lofty title.
These enterprising rodents are textbook “ecosystem engineers” that reshape environments with sturdy dams that create biodiverse havens that are resistant to climate change. To better assess the role of beavers in the climate crisis, researchers reviewed the reported behavioral beaver-related restoration (BRR) projects across North America.
“Climate change is projected to impact streamflow patterns in western North America, reducing aquatic habitat quantity and quality and harming native species, but BRR has the potential to ameliorate some of these impacts,” said researchers led by Jesse A. S. Burgher of Washington State University.
The team reports “substantial evidence that BRR increases climate resiliency…by reducing summer water temperatures, increasing water storage, and enhancing floodplain connectivity” while also creating “fire-resistant habitat patches.”
So go forth and get busy, beavers! May we survive this crisis in part through the skin of your teeth.
One big happy stellar family
Visible from both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, the Pleiades is the most widely recognized and culturally significant star cluster in the night sky. While this asterism is defined by a handful of especially radiant stars, known as the Seven Sisters, scientists have now tracked down thousands of other stellar siblings born from the same clutch scattered across some 2,000 light years.
Wide-field shot of Pleiades. Image Antonio Ferretti & Attilio Bruzzone
“We find that the Pleiades constitutes the bound core of a much larger, coeval structure” and “we refer to this structure as the Greater Pleiades Complex,” said researchers led by Andrew W. Boyle of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “On the basis of uniform ages, coherent space velocities, detailed elemental abundances, and traceback histories, we conclude that most stars in this complex originated from the same giant molecular cloud.”The work “further cements the Pleiades as a cornerstone of stellar astrophysics” and adds new allure to a cluster that first exploded into the skies during the Cretaceous age. (For more on the Pleiades, check out this piece I wrote earlier this year about the deep roots of its lore).
Getting inside your head(er)
Scientists have peered into a place I would never dare to visit—the minds of football fans during high-stakes plays. To tap into the neural side of fanaticism, researchers enlisted 60 healthy male fans from the ages of 20 to 45 to witness dozens of goal sequences from matches involving their favorite teams, rival teams, and “neutral” teams while their brains were scanned by an fMRI machine.
The participants were rated according to a “Football Supporters Fanaticism Scale (FSFS)” with criteria like “violent thought and/or action tendencies” and “institutional belonging and/or identification.” The scale divided the group up into 38 casual spectators, 19 committed fans, and four deranged fanatics (adjectives are mine for flourish).
Rendering of the negative effect of significant defeat. Image: Radiological Society of North America (RSNA)
“Our key findings revealed that scoring against rivals activated the reward system…while conceding to rivals triggered the mentalization network and inhibited the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC)”—a region responsible for cognitive control and decision-making—said researchers led by Francisco Zamorano of the Universidad San Sebastián in Chile. “Higher Football Supporters Fanaticism Scale scores correlated with reduced dACC activation during defeats, suggesting impaired emotional regulation in highly engaged fans.”In other words, it is now scientifically confirmed that football fanatics are Messi bitches who love drama.
Diplomacy served up fresh
We’ll close, as all things should, with a century of fine Portuguese dining. In yet another edition of “yes, this can be a job,” researchers collected 457 menus served at various diplomatic meals in Portugal from 1910 to 2023 to probe “how Portuguese gastronomic culture has been leveraged as a culinary diplomacy and geopolitical rapprochement strategy.”
As a lover of both food and geopolitical bureaucracy, this study really hit the spot. Highlights include a 1957 “regional lunch” for Queen Elizabeth II that aimed to channel “Portugality” through dishes like lobster and fruit tarts from the cities of Peniche and Alcobaça. The study is also filled with amazing asides like “the inclusion of imperial ice cream in the European Free Trade Association official luncheon (ID45, 1960) seems to transmit a sense of geopolitical greatness and vast governing capacity.” Ice cream just tastes so much better when it’s a symbol of international power.
Menu of the “Luncheon in honour of her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and his Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh” held in Alcobaça (Portugal) on February 20th, 1957. Image: Cabral et al., 2025.
The team also unearthed a possible faux pas: Indian president Ramaswamy Venkataraman, a vegetarian who was raised Hindu, was served roast beef in 1990. In a footnote, Cabral and his colleagues concluded that “further investigation is deemed necessary to understand the context of ‘roast beef’ service to the Indian President in 1990.” Talk about juicy gossip!Thanks for reading! See you next week.
Power for dinner. Culinary diplomacy and geopolitical aspects in Portuguese diplomatic tables (1910-2023)
IntroductionThis paper examines how diplomatic meals in Portugal (1910–2023) have been shaped by Portuguese foreign policy and geopolitical contexts, and con...Óscar Cabral (Frontiers)
Waves within Earth’s mantle can carry traces of past continents across hundreds of miles, explaining why their chemical fingerprints appear in unlikely places.#TheAbstract
Remnants of Lost Continents Are Everywhere. Now, We Finally Know Why.
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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.Tiny remnants of long-lost continents that vanished many millions of years ago are sprinkled around the world, including on remote island chains and seamounts, a mystery that has puzzled scientists for years.
Now, a team has discovered a mechanism that can explain how this continental detritus ends up resurfacing in unexpected places, according to a study published on Tuesday in Nature Geoscience.
When continents are subducted into Earth’s mantle, the layer beneath the planet’s crust, waves can form that scrape off rocky material and sweep it across hundreds of miles to new locations. This “mantle wave” mechanism fills in a gap in our understanding of how lost continents are metabolized through our ever-shifting planet.
“There are these seamount chains where volcanic activity has erupted in the middle of the ocean,” said Sascha Brune, a professor at the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences and University of Potsdam, in a call with 404 Media. “Geochemists go there, they drill, they take samples, and they do their isotope analysis, which is a very fancy geochemical analysis that gives you small elements and isotopes which come up with something like a ‘taste.’”
“Many of these ocean islands have a taste that is surprisingly similar to the continents, where the isotope ratio is similar to what you would expect from continents and sediments,” he continued. “And there has always been the question: why is this the case? Where does it come from?”
These continental sprinkles are sometimes linked to mantle plumes, which are hot columns of gooey rock that erupt from the deep mantle. Plumes bring material from ancient landmasses, which have been stuck in the mantle for eons, back to the light of day again. Mantle plumes are the source of key hot spots like Hawai’i and Iceland, but there are plenty of locations with enriched continental material that are not associated with plumes—or any other known continental recycling mechanisms.
The idea of a mantle wave has emerged from a series of revelations made by lead author Tom Gernon, a professor at the University of Southampton, along with his colleagues at GFZ, including Brune. Gernon previously led a 2023 study that identified evidence of similar dynamics occurring within continents. By studying patterns in the distribution of diamonds across South Africa, the researchers showed that slow cyclical motions in the mantle dislodge chunks off the keel of landmasses as they plunge into the mantle. Their new study confirms that these waves can also explain how the elemental residue of the supercontinent Gondwana, which broke up over 100 million years ago, resurfaced in seamounts across the Indian Ocean and other locations.
In other words, the ashes of dead continents are scattered across extant landmasses following long journeys through the mantle. Though it’s not possible to link these small traces back to specific past continents or time periods, Brune hopes that researchers will be able to extract new insights about Earth’s roiling past from the clues embedded in the ground under our feet.
“What we are saying now is that there is another element, with this kind of pollution of continental material in the upper mantle,” Brune said. “It is not replacing what was said before; it is just complementing it in a way where we don't need plumes everywhere. There are some regions that we know are not plume-related, because the temperatures are not high enough and the isotopes don't look like plume-affected. And for those regions, this new mechanism can explain things that we haven't explained before.”
“We have seen that there's quite a lot of evidence that supports our hypothesis, so it would be interesting to go to other places and investigate this a bit more in detail,” he concluded.
Update: This story has been update to note Tom Gernon was a lead author on the paper.
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Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.Enriched mantle generated through persistent convective erosion of continental roots - Nature Geoscience
Convective erosion and lateral transport of metasomatized continental keels may generate enriched mantle geochemical domains sampled by oceanic volcanism, according to a geodynamic modelling study.Nature
New research “suggests that dark energy may no longer be a cosmological constant” and that the universe’s expansion is slowing down.#TheAbstract
A Fundamental ‘Constant’ of the Universe May Not Be Constant At All, Study Finds
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that took a bite out of life, appealed to the death drive, gave a yellow light to the universe, and produced hitherto unknown levels of cute.First, it’s the most epic ocean battle: orcas versus sharks (pro tip: you don’t want to be sharks). Then, a scientific approach to apocalyptic ideation; curbing cosmic enthusiasm; and last, the wonderful world of tadpole-less toads.
As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.
Now, to the feast!
I guess that’s why they call them killer whales
Orcas kill young great white sharks by flipping them upside down and tearing their livers out of their bellies, which they then eat family-style, according to a new study that includes new footage of these Promethean interactions in Mexican waters.
“Here we document novel repeated predations by killer whales on juvenile white sharks in the Gulf of California,” said researchers led by Jesús Erick Higuera Rivas of the non-profit Pelagic Protection and Conservation AC.
“Aerial videos indicate consistency in killer whales’ repeated assaults and strikes on the sharks,” the team added. “Once extirpated from the prey body, the target organ is shared between the members of the pods including calves.”
Sequence of the killer whales attacking the first juvenile white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) on 15th of August 2020. In (d) The partially exposed liver is seen on the right side of the second shark attacked. Photos credit: Jesús Erick Higuera Rivas.
I’ll give you a beat to let that sink in, like orca teeth on the belly of a shark. While it's well-established that orcas are the only known predator of great white sharks aside from humans, the new study is only the second glimpse of killer whales targeting juvenile sharks.
This group of orcas, known as Moctezuma’s pod, has developed an effective strategy of working together to flip the sharks over, which interrupts the sharks’ sensory system and puts them into a state called tonic immobility. The authors describe the pod’s work as methodical and well coordinated.
“Our evidence undoubtedly shows consistency in the repeated assaults and strikes, indicating efficient maneuvering ability by the killer whales in attempting to turn the shark upside down, likely to induce tonic immobility and allow uninterrupted access to the organs for consumption, " the team said. Previous reports suggest that “the lack of bite marks or injuries anywhere other than the pectoral fins shows a novel and specialized technique of accessing the liver of the shark with minimal handling of each individual.”
An orca attacking a juvenile great white shark. Image: Marco VillegasSharks, by the way, do not attack orcas. Just the opposite. As you can imagine based on the horrors you have just read, sharks are so petrified of killer whales that they book it whenever they sense a nearby pod.
“Adult white sharks exhibit a memory and previous knowledge about killer whales, which enables them to activate an avoidance mechanism through behavioral risk effects; a ‘fear’- induced mass exodus from aggregations sites,” the team said. “This response may preclude repeated successful predation on adult white sharks by killer whales.”
In other words, if you’re a shark, one encounter with orcas is enough to make you watch your dorsal side for life—assuming you were lucky enough to escape with it.
In other news…
Apocalypse now plz
You may have seen the doomer humor meme to “send the asteroid already,” a plea for sweet cosmic relief that fits our beleaguered times. As it turns out, some scientists engage in this type of apocalyptic wish fulfillment professionally.
Planetary defense experts often participate in drills involving fictional hazardous asteroids, such as the 2024PDC25, a virtual object “discovered” at the 2025 Planetary Defense Conference. In that simulation, 2024PDC25 had a possible impact date in 2041.
Now a team has used that exercise as a jumping off point to explore what might happen if it hit even earlier, channeling that “send the asteroid already” energy.. The researchers used this time-crunched scenario to speculate about the effect on geopolitics and pivotal events, such as the 2028 US Presidential elections.
“As it is very difficult to extrapolate from 2025 across 16 years in this ‘what-if’ exercise, we decided to bring the scenario forward to 2031 and examine it with today’s global background,” Rudolf Albrecht of the Austrian Space Forum. “Today would be T-6 years and the threat is becoming immediate.”
As the astro-doomers would say: Finally some good news.
Big dark energy
First, we discovered the universe was expanding. Then, we discovered it was expanding at an accelerating rate. Now, a new study suggests that this acceleration might be slowing down. Universe, make up your mind!
But seriously, the possibility that the rate of cosmic expansion is slowing is a big deal, because dark energy—the term for whatever is making the universe expand—was assumed to be a constant for decades. But this consensus has been challenged by observations from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) in Arizona, which became operational in 2021. In its first surveys, DESI’s observations have pointed to an expansion rate that is not fixed, but in flux.
Together with past results, the study “suggests that dark energy may no longer be a cosmological constant” and “our analysis raises the possibility that the present universe is no longer in a state of accelerated expansion,” said researchers led by Junhyuk Son of Yonsei University. “This provides a fundamentally new perspective that challenges the two central pillars of the [cold dark matter] standard cosmological model proposed 27 years ago.”
It will take more research to constrain this mystery, but for now it’s a reminder that the universe loves to surprise.
And the award for most squee goes to…
We’ll end, as all things should, with toadlets. Most frogs and toads reproduce by laying eggs that hatch into tadpoles, but scientists have discovered three new species of toad in Tanzania that give birth to live young—a very rare adaptation for any amphibian, known as ovoviviparity. The scientific term for these youngsters is in fact “toadlet.” Gods be good.
“We describe three new species from the Nectophrynoides viviparus species complex, covering the southern Eastern Arc Mountains populations,” said researchers led by Christian Thrane of the University of Copenhagen. One of the new species included “the observation of toadlets, suggesting that this species is ovoviviparous.”
One of the newly described toad species, Nectophrynoides luhomeroensis. Image: John Lyarkurwa.
Note to Nintendo: please make a very tiny Toadlet into a Mario Kart racer.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
Museomics and integrative taxonomy reveal three new species of glandular viviparous tree toads (Nectophrynoides) in Tanzania’s Eastern Arc Mountains (Anura: Bufonidae)
Abstract For the last century, herpetologists have referred to any Nectophrynoides Noble, 1926 toad characterized by a large, robust body, with large, distinct parotoid glands, as Nectophrynoides viviparus (Tornier, 1905).Christian Thrane (Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung)
Early humans crafted the same tools for hundreds of thousands of years, offering an unprecedented glimpse of a continuous tradition that may push back the origins of technology.#TheAbstract
Advanced 2.5 Million-Year-Old Tools May Rewrite Human History
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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.After a decade-long excavation at a remote site in Kenya, scientists have unearthed evidence that our early human relatives continuously fashioned the same tools across thousands of generations, hinting that sophisticated tool use may have originated much earlier than previously known, according to a new study in Nature Communications.
The discovery of nearly 1,300 artifacts—with ages that span 2.44 to 2.75 million years old—reveals that the influential Oldowan tool-making tradition existed across at least 300,000 years of turbulent environmental shifts. The wealth of new tools from Kenya’s Namorotukunan site suggest that their makers adapted to major environmental changes in part by passing technological knowledge down through the ages.
“The question was: did they generally just reinvent the [Oldowan tradition] over and over again? That made a lot of sense when you had a record that was kind of sporadic,” said David R. Braun, a professor of anthropology at the George Washington University who led the study, in a call with 404 Media.
“But the fact that we see so much similarity between 2.4 and 2.75 [million years ago] suggests that this is generally something that they do,” he continued. “Some of it may be passed down through social learning, like observation of others doing it. There’s some kind of tradition that continues on for this timeframe that would argue against this idea of just constantly reinventing the wheel.”
Oldowan tools, which date back at least 2.75 million years, are distinct from earlier traditions in part because hominins, the broader family to which humans belong, specifically sought out high-quality materials such as chert and quartz to craft sharp-edged cutting and digging tools. This advancement allowed them to butcher large animals, like hippos, and possibly dig for underground food sources.
When Braun and his colleagues began excavating at Namorotukunan in 2013, they found many artifacts made of chalcedony, a fine-grained rock that is typically associated with much later tool-making traditions. To the team’s surprise, the rocks were dated to periods as early as 2.75 million years ago, making them among the oldest artifacts in the Oldowan record.
“Even though Oldowan technology is really just hitting one rock against the other, there's good and bad ways of doing it,” Braun explained. “So even though it's pretty simple, what they seem to be figuring out is where to hit the rock, and which angles to select. They seem to be getting a grip on that—not as well as later in time—but they're definitely getting an understanding at this timeframe.”
Some of the Namorotukunan tools. Image: Koobi Fora Research and Training Program
The excavation was difficult as it takes several days just to reach the remote offroad site, while much of the work involved tiptoing along steep outcrops. Braun joked that their auto mechanic lined up all the vehicle shocks that had been broken during the drive each season, as a testament to the challenge.But by the time the project finally concluded in 2022, the researchers had established that Oldowan tools were made at this site over the course of 300,000 years. During this span, the landscape of Namorotukunan shifted from lush humid forests to arid desert shrubland and back again. Despite these destabilizing shifts in their climate and biome, the hominins that made these tools endured in part because this technology opened up new food sources to them, such as the carcasses of large animals.
“The whole landscape really shifts,” Braun said. “But hominins are able to basically ameliorate those rapid changes in the amount of rainfall and the vegetation around by using tools to adapt to what’s happening.”
“That's a human superpower—it’s that ability we have to keep this information stored in our collective heads, so that when new challenges show up, there's somebody in our group that remembers how to deal with this particular adaptation,” he added.
It’s not clear exactly which species of hominin made the tools at Namorotukunan; it may have been early members of our own genus Homo, or other relatives, like Australopithecus afarensis, that later went extinct. Regardless, the discovery of such a long-lived and continuous assemblage may hint that the origins of these tools are much older than we currently know.
“I think that we're going to start to find tool use much earlier” perhaps “going back five, six, or seven million years,” Braun said. “That’s total speculation. I've got no evidence that that's the case. But judging from what primates do, I don't really understand why we wouldn't see it.”
To that end, the researchers plan to continue excavating these bygone landscapes to search for more artifacts and hominin remains that could shed light on the identity of these tool makers, probing the origins of these early technologies that eventually led to humanity’s dominance on the planet.
“It's possible that this tool use is so diverse and so different from our expectations that we have blinders on,” Braun concluded. “We have to open our search for what tool use looks like, and then we might start to see that they're actually doing a lot more of it than we thought they were.”
Early Oldowan technology thrived during Pliocene environmental change in the Turkana Basin, Kenya - Nature Communications
Here, the authors present archaeology of the Namorotukunan site in Kenya’s Turkana Basin that demonstrates adaptive shifts in hominin tool-making behaviour spanning 300,000 years and increasing environmental variability.Nature
In a series of experiments, chimpanzees revised their beliefs based on new evidence, shedding light on the evolutionary origins of rational thought.#TheAbstract
Chimps Are Capable of Human-Like Rational Thought, Breakthrough Study Finds
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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.Chimpanzees revise their beliefs if they encounter new information, a hallmark of rationality that was once assumed to be unique to humans, according to a study published on Thursday in Science.
Researchers working with chimpanzees at the Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Uganda probed how the primates judged evidence using treats inside boxes, such as a “weak” clue—for example, the sound of a treat inside a shaken box—and a "strong" clue, such as a direct line of sight to the treat.
The chimpanzees were able to rationally evaluate forms of evidence and to change their existing beliefs if presented with more compelling clues. The results reveal that non-human animals can exhibit key aspects of rationality, some of which had never been directly tested before, which shed new light on the evolution of rational thought and critical thinking in humans and other intelligent animals.
“Rationality has been linked to this ability to think about evidence and revise your beliefs in light of evidence,” said co-author Jan Engelmann, associate professor at the department of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, in a call with 404 Media. “That’s the real big picture perspective of this study.”
While it’s impossible to directly experience the perspective of a chimpanzee, Engelmann and his colleagues designed five controlled experiments for groups of anywhere from 15 to 23 chimpanzee participants.
In the first and second experiments, the chimps received a weak clue and a strong clue for a food reward in a box. The chimpanzees consistently made their choices based on the stronger evidence, regardless of the sequence in which the clues were presented. In the third experiment, the chimps were shown an empty box in addition to the strong and weak clues. After this presentation, the box with the strong evidence was removed. In this experiment, the chimpanzees still largely chose the weak clue over the empty box.
In the fourth experiment, chimpanzees were given a second “redundant” weak clue—for instance, the experimenter would shake a box twice. Then, they were given a new type of clue, like a second piece of food being dropped into a box in front of them. They were significantly more likely to change their beliefs if the clue provided fresh information, demonstrating an ability to distinguish between redundant and genuinely new evidence.
Finally, in the fifth experiment, the chimpanzees were presented with a so-called “defeater” that undermined the strong clue, such as a direct line of sight to a picture of food inside the box, or a shaken box containing a stone, not a real treat. The chimps were significantly more likely to revise their choice about the location of the food in the defeater experiments than in experiments with no defeater. This experiment showcased an ability to judge that evidence that initially seems strong can be weakened with new information.
“The most surprising result was, for sure, experiment five,” Engelmann said. “No one really believed that they would do it, for many different reasons.”
For one thing, he said, the methodology of the fifth experiment demanded a lot of attention and cognitive work from the chimpanzees, which they successfully performed. The result also challenges the assumption that complex language is required to update beliefs with new information. Despite lacking this linguistic ability, chimpanzees are somehow able to flexibly assign strength to different pieces of evidence.
Speaking from the perspective of the chimps, Engelmann outlined the responses to experiment five as: “I used to believe food was in there because I heard it in there, but now you showed me that there was a stone in there, so this defeats my evidence. Now I have to give up that belief.”
“Even using language, it takes me ten seconds to explain it,” he continued. “The question is, how do they do it? It’s one of the trickiest questions, but also one of the most interesting ones. To put it succinctly, how to think without words?”
To hone in on that mystery, Engelmann and his colleagues are currently repeating the experiment with different primates, including capuchins, baboons, rhesus macaques, and human toddlers and children. Eventually, similar experiments could be applied to other intelligent species, such as corvids or octopuses, which may yield new insights about the abundance and variability of rationality in non-human species.
“I think the really interesting ramification for human rationality is that so many people often think that only humans can reflect on evidence,” Engelmann said. “But our results obviously show that this is not necessarily the case. So the question is, what's special about human rationality then?”
Engelmann and his colleagues hypothesize that humans differ in the social dimensions of our rational thought; we are able to collectively evaluate evidence not only with our contemporaries, but by consulting the work of thinkers who may have lived thousands of years ago. Of course, humans also often refuse to update beliefs in light of new evidence, which is known as “belief entrenchment” or “belief perseveration” (many such cases). These complicated nuances add to the challenge of unraveling the evolutionary underpinnings of rationality.
That said, one thing is clear: many non-human animals exist somewhere on the gradient of rational thought. In light of the recent passing of Jane Goodall, the famed primatologist who popularized the incredible capacities of chimpanzees, the new study carries on a tradition of showing that these primates, our closest living relatives, share some degree of our ability to think and act in rational ways.
Goodall “was the first Western scientist to observe tool use in chimpanzees and really change our beliefs about what makes humans unique,” Engelmann said. “We're definitely adding to this puzzle by showing that rationality, which has so long been considered unique to humans, is at least in some forms present in non-human animals.”
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Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.
A massive black hole feasting on a star outside of a galactic nucleus was observed in bright radio waves for the first time.#TheAbstract
Scientists Discover Rogue Star-Eating Black Hole Far From Home
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that mounted a defense, felt out of place, found new life, and resurrected the gods of yore.First, a tale of pregnant stinkbugs, parasitic wasps, and fungi weapons that is fit for a rebooted Aesop fable. Then, a fast food stop for an errant black hole; a new cast of worms, mollusks, and “tusk-shells” from the deep sea; and a friendly reminder to REPENT, SINNERS, or suffer divine wrath.
I also wanted to give another quick shoutout to my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, which is now out in the wild. And if you’d like to keep up with news about the book, alien lore, and my other goings-on, subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.
And now, to the science!
Painting eggs (with protective fungi)
Nishino, Takanori et al. “Defensive fungal symbiosis on insect hindlegs.” Science.For years, scientists assumed that the weird lumps on the hindlegs of some female stinkbugs were used as auditory organs to perceive sound. A new study reveals that the function of these “tympanum” organs is, in fact, way weirder: They are miniature fungi farms that the “gravid” (pregnant) females use to culture “hyphae” (fungal filaments) to grow anti-wasp coatings for their eggs.
“To address the question of the function of the tympanum, we investigated the Japanese dinidorid stinkbug Megymenum gracilicorne and discovered that this stinkbug’s hindleg organ is not auditory but a previously unknown type of symbiotic organ,” said researchers led by Takanori Nishino of the University of Tsukuba.
“We observed that the gravid females laid eggs in a row, and when each egg was deposited, the females rhythmically scratched the fungus-covered hindleg organ with the tarsal claws of the opposite hindleg and rubbed the egg surface, smearing the fungi onto the eggs,” the team said. “Within a few days, the fungal hyphae grew to cover the entire egg mass. On hatching, the hyphae attached to the body surface of newborn nymphs, although the fungi were subsequently lost as the nymphs molted and grew.”
Image: Nishino, Takanori et al.
Don’t you just love the smell of fungus-covered eggs in the morning? Probably not, and that’s the point. Parasitic wasps like to go around ovipositing (laying their young) inside the eggs of other bugs, but the team discovered they were repeatedly thwarted by the stinkbug shield.“In the experimental arena, the female wasps approached both the fungus-removed eggs and the fungus-covered eggs,” the researchers said. “Immediately after antennal drumming on the egg surface, the female wasps only oviposited on the cleaned eggs… It is notable that wasps still approached egg masses fully covered by fungal hyphae, despite showing intense self-grooming, which suggested that the hyphae were adherent.”
That’s what these wasps get for trying to mooch off stinkbug eggs: a faceful of sticky fungal goo that’s going to take some very intense self-grooming to remove. To that end, the team concluded that “the fungi selectively cultured on the female’s hindleg organ of M. gracilicorne are transferred to eggs to act as a physical defense against parasitic wasp attack.”
As the old adage goes, never judge a stinkbug by her conspicuous tympanal organs.
In other news…
Who left a supermassive black hole all the way over here?
When stars wander too close to black holes, they are torn apart by extreme tidal forces, producing radiant light shows called tidal disruption events (TDEs). Astronomers have witnessed these events countless times near the central nucleus of distant galaxies, which are occupied by supermassive black holes, but a team has now captured an unprecedented glimpse of an “off-nuclear” TDE far from the galactic core.
The event, called AT 2024tvd, involved a black hole with a possible mass of up to 10 million Suns. While it’s a pretty typical enormous black hole, what’s weird is that it was spotted eating a star about 2,600 light years from the nucleus of a distant galaxy, which produced the unusual TDE. Scientists have seen a few dim hints of these off-nuclear events, but this is the first to be clearly captured in bright radio waves.
“AT 2024tvd is the first radio-bright, bona fide off-nuclear TDE, and it is also the TDE with the fastest evolution observed to date,” said researchers led by Itai Sfaradi of the University of California, Berkeley.
The team speculate that the black hole might have been gravitationally kicked into the galaxy after a dust-up with other, bigger black holes elsewhere. While that sounds like a tumultuous backstory, at least this black hole was able to grab a stellar bite along the way.
Here be mollusks, worms, and chitons
Meet the newest invertebrates on the deep-ocean block in a study that identified 14 previously unknown species from remote marine regions around the world. These taxonomic newcomers include the carnivorous sombrero-shaped mollusk Myonera aleutiana, the gummy-bear-esque worm Spinther bohnorum, and the aptly nicknamed “tusk shell” (it looks like a tusk) Laevidentalium wiesei.
“Despite centuries of exploration, marine invertebrate biodiversity remains notably under-described,” said researchers with theSenckenberg Ocean Species Alliance (SOSA), an international collaboration that was “founded to help meet this challenge.”
Ferreiraella charazata. Image: Senckenberg Ocean Species Alliance
While all of the newly identified species are fascinating, I have a selfish soft spot for Ferreiraella charazata (no relation to me, or any of the two million Ferreiras in the world). This deep-sea chiton species belongs to a broader genus established by researcher A.J. Ferreira several decades ago.The new Ferreiraella chiton was found in some sunken wood two miles under the sea and is described as having a “very large girdle” and “epibiotic tubeworms on its tail valves,” bringing extra pizazz to the family name.
Old-world solutions to new-world problems
Here’s an out-of-the-box idea to save the environment: Bring back vengeful gods and spirits. In a truly delightful study, scientists explore the benefits of perceived supernatural punishment on the preservation of natural ecosystems with mathematical game theory outlined in the following illustration:
A visual summary of the game theory approach. Image: Shibasaki, Shota et al.
“Japanese folklore includes episodes where spirits of nature (e.g., mountains and trees) punish or avenge people who develop or overuse natural resources,” said researchers led by Shota Shibasaki of Doshisha University. “Similarly, the Batak people of Palawan Island in the Philippines believe in the forest spirits that punish people who overexploit or waste forest resources. Itzá Maya, Guatemala, also views forest spirits as punitively protecting local forests against exploitation.”This is the most galaxy-brained math paper I’ve ever read. Ultimately, the results suggest that “supernatural beliefs could play an important role in achieving sustainability.” So let’s break out the talismans and start casting eco-friendly spells because I, for one, welcome our divine treehugging overlords.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
Ocean Species Discoveries 13–27 — Taxonomic contributions to the diversity of Polychaeta, Mollusca and Crustacea
Despite centuries of exploration, marine invertebrate biodiversity remains notably under-described. The majority of species in major marine groups are still unnamed, limiting our ability to understand and conserve ecosystems facing rapid environmenta…Senckenberg Ocean Species Alliance (SOSA) (Pensoft Publishers)
Plus, when did claret get so good and why did Shackleton's ship Endurance sink? Historical updates aplenty.
Plus, when did claret get so good and why did Shackletonx27;s ship Endurance sink? Historical updates aplenty.#TheAbstract
Iberian harvester ant queens clone males of a different species in a never-before-seen case of reproduction and domestication.#TheAbstract
The Biological Rulebook Was Just Rewritten—by Ants
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that transgressed the rules, explored extraterrestrial vistas, and went with the flow.First, ants are doing really strange things again. I don’t even want to spoil it—you’ll just have to read on! Then, plan your trip to the latest hot exoplanet destination (literally, in the case of the lava planets), and check out Saturn’s new bling on the way. Lastly, all aboard on a trip to the riverboats of the past.
Same mama, different species
Scientists have discovered a gnarly reproductive strategy that is unlike anything ever documented in nature: Ant queens that produce offspring from two entirely different species by cloning the “alien genome” of males from another lineage. This unique behavior has been dubbed “xenoparity,” according to a new study.
Researchers were first tipped off to this bizarre adaptation after they kept finding builder harvester ants (Messor structor) in the colonies of Iberian harvester ants (Messor ibericus). Field and laboratory observations revealed that, in addition to mating with males of their own species, M. ibericus queens mate with M structor. The queens store and clone this sperm to produce hybrids with M. structor genomes and M. ibericus mitochondria. Even though these two ant species diverged five million years ago and don’t share the exact same range, the queens rely on M. structor males exclusively for its worker caste, suggesting a “domestication-like process,” the study reports.
“Living organisms are assumed to produce same-species offspring,” said researchers co-led by Y. Juvé, C. Lutrat, and A. Ha of the University of Montpellier. “Here, we report that this rule has been transgressed by Messor ibericus ants, with females producing individuals from two different species.”
“M. ibericus queens strictly depend on males of M. structor, which is a well-differentiated, non-sister species,” the team added. “To our knowledge, females needing to clone members of another species have not previously been observed.”
youtube.com/embed/H-Y6-j8FlIQ?…
Iberian harvester queens only produce females when they mate within their own species, which may have prompted this cross-species adaptation. By producing cloned M. structor males, the queens ensure the continuation of a worker caste as well as a supply of male mates for later generations of queens.“At the intraspecific level, several cases of ants cloning males from their own species’ sperm have been observed,” the researchers noted. “Here, our results imply that this phenomenon has crossed species barriers.”
“Taken together, these results further support the idea that clonal males should be characterized as a domesticated lineage of M. structor,” they continued. “Although matching all criteria of domestication, the relationship we describe is both more intimate and integrated than the most remarkable examples known so far.”
What’s next, dogs giving birth to whales? Probably not, but still, these transgressive queens have rewritten the reproductive rulebook in a truly astonishing way.
In other news…
Vacationing really far abroad
In 2015, NASA released a bunch of splashy retro posters that imagined exoplanets as travel destinations, as part of a collaborative project between scientists and artists. A new study dissects the huge success of that campaign, which engaged the public in the burgeoning field of exoplanet research and helped scientists visualize their distant observational targets.
Exoplanet posters. Image: NASAThe Exoplanet Travel Bureau posters “were not images designed to be understood by the public as objectively ‘real’ or ‘scientific’, yet they were still scientifically informed,” said author Ceridwen Dovey of Macquarie University. “As tourism posters proposing travel to extremely distant exoplanets, they were not pretending to be direct images of astronomical objects, yet they were also not pure speculation or fantasy. They sat very comfortably—and alluringly—somewhere in between.”
There’s always a fine line to tread when depicting alien exoplanets, given how little we know about what it is really like on these distant worlds. But since interstellar travel does not seem to be coming anytime soon, the NASA posters served as a powerful imaginative stopgap for thinking about these new worlds—even if their amenities remain unknown.
Saturn has ‘strange dark arms’ and beads to match its rings
The James Webb Space Telescope is most famous for peering farther back in space and time than ever before, revealing amazing insights about the early universe. But JWST is also shedding light on planets right in our own backyard, as evidenced by a new study about “dark beads” and “strange dark arms” that showed up in its observations of Saturn.
These features arise from Saturn's stratosphere and ionosphere, which were captured in "unprecedented detail” by JWST’s near-infrared instruments. The “arms” are methane-gas structures that extend down from the poles toward the equator while the beads emerge “in a variety of sizes and shapes” on one side of the ionosphere.
“This stratospheric structure is again unlike anything previously observed at other planets,” said researchers led by Tom Stallard of Northumbria University. “While we do not understand how or why these dark arms are generated, it is perhaps noteworthy that they occur in a region where the underlying atmosphere is also disturbed, suggesting this stratospheric layer might be influenced from below.”
Given its famous rings and now its beads, my prediction is that they will discover a bedazzled bangle on Saturn next.
Up history’s creek without a paddle
Rivers are often employed as metaphors for the passage of time into the future, but a new study is paddling upstream into the past. The goal was to reconstruct the navigability of rivers in ancient times, which is important information for understanding past trade networks, migrations, and social connections. However, it is difficult to pinpoint how ancient peoples traversed these waterways using only archeological sites and historical documents.
“The very notion of a navigable river seems problematic, as the possibilities for navigation on a river are highly dependent on the section considered, the type of boat, the climate and seasonal cycles,” said researchers led by Clara Filet of the Bordeaux Montaigne University.
To address this gap, the researchers developed an algorithm that searched for flat and calm stretches of a river, called “plain sections.” They tested out their approach on dozens of rivers used by cultures in ancient Gaul and Roman and concluded that it “provides a good approximation of navigable sections.”
“Applying this method offers a new perspective on navigable areas in the Roman world, providing a reasonable first guess that could guide future empirical research into the navigability of ancient rivers,” the team concluded.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants - Nature
In a case of obligate cross-species cloning, female ants of Messor ibericus need to clone males of Messor structor to obtain sperm for producing the worker caste, resulting in males from the same mother having distinct genomes and morphologies.Nature
Glaciers in Central Asia have remained intact even as other parts of the world have seen rapid glacial loss. A new study shows that may be changing.#TheAbstract
They Were Some of Earth’s Last Stable Glaciers. Now, They’re Melting.
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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.Scientists have long been puzzled by the sturdy glaciers of the mountains of central Asia, which have inexplicably remained intact even as other glaciers around the world rapidly recede due to human-driven climate change. This mysterious resilience may be coming to an end, however.
The glaciers in this mountainous region—nicknamed the “Third Pole” because it boasts more ice than any place outside of the Arctic and Antarctic polar caps— have passed a tipping point that could set them on a path to accelerated mass loss, according to a new study. The end of this unusual glacial resilience, known as the Pamir-Karakoram Anomaly, would have major implications for the people who rely on the glaciers for water.
Scientists suggested that a recent decline in snowfall to the region is behind the shift, but it will take much more research to untangle the complicated dynamics of these remote and under-studied glaciers, according to a study published on Tuesday in Communications Earth & Environment.
“We have known about this anomaly since the early 2000s,” said study co-author Francesca Pellicciotti, a professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), in a call with 404 Media. “In the last 25 years, remote-sensing has really revolutionized Earth sciences in general, and also cryospheric sciences.”
“There is no definite answer yet for why those glaciers were quite stable,” said Achille Jouberton, a PhD student at ISTA who led the study, in the same call. “On average, at the regional scale, they were doing quite well in the last decade—until recently, which is what our study is showing.”
This space-down view of the world’s glaciers initially revealed the resilience of ice and snowpack in the Pamir-Karakoram region, but that picture started to change around 2018. Many of these glaciers have remained inaccessible to scientists due to political instabilities and other factors, leaving a multi-decade gap in the research about their curious strength.
To get a closer look, Jouberton and his colleagues established a site for monitoring snowfall, precipitation, and water resources at Kyzylsu Glacier in central Tajikistan in 2021. In addition to this fieldwork, the team developed sophisticated models to reconstruct changes within this catchment since 1999.
While the glaciers still look robust from the outside, the results revealed that snowfall has decreased and ice melt has increased. These interlinked trends have become more pronounced over the past seven years and were corroborated by conversations with locals. The decline in precipitation has made the glacier vulnerable to summer melting, as there is less snowpack to protect it from the heat.
“It will take a while before these glaciers start looking wasted, like the glaciers of the Alps, or North America, or South America,” said Pellicciotti.
While the team pinpointed a lack of snowfall as a key driver of the shift, it’s unclear why the region is experiencing reduced precipitation. The researchers are also unsure if a permanent threshold has been crossed, or if these changes could be chalked up to natural variation. They hope that the study, which is the first to warn of this possible tipping point, will inspire climate scientists, atmospheric scientists, and other interdisciplinary researchers to weigh in on future work.
“We don't know if this is just an inflection in the natural cycle, or if it's really the beginning of a trend that will go on for many years,” said Pellicciotti. “So we need to expand these findings, and extend them to a much longer period in the past and in the future.”
Resolving these uncertainties will be critical for communities in this region that rely on healthy snowpack and ice cover for their water supply. It also hints that even the last stalwart glacial holdouts on Earth are vulnerable to climate change.
“The major rivers are fed by snow and glacier melts, which are the dominant source of water in the summer months, which makes the glaciers very important,” concluded Jouberton. "There’s a large amount of people living downstream in all of the Central Asian countries that are really direct beneficiaries of those water and meltwater from the glaciers.”
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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.Snowfall decrease in recent years undermines glacier health and meltwater resources in the Northwestern Pamirs - Communications Earth & Environment
The recent decline in glacier health and reduced runoff generation in the Northwestern Pamirs is primarily driven by substantially lower snowfall and snow depth since 2018, according to land-surface model reconstructions from 1999–2023 combining in-s…Nature
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This Stunning Image of the Sun Could Unlock Mysterious Physics
Welcome back to the Abstract! What an extreme week it has been in science. We’ve got extreme adaptations and observations to spare today, so get ready for a visually spectacular tour of deep seas, deep time, and deep space.First up, a study with an instant dopamine hit of a title: “Extreme armour in the world’s oldest ankylosaur.” Then, stories about two very different marine creatures that nonetheless share a penchant for brilliant outfits and toxic lifestyles; a baby picture that requires a 430-light-year zoom-in; and lastly, we must once again salute the Sun in all its roiling glory. Enjoy the peer-reviewed eye-candy!
Ankylosaurs: Swole from the start
Maidment, Susannah et al. “Extreme armour in the world’s oldest ankylosaur.” Nature.
Paleontologists have discovered an ankylosaur that is epic even by the high standards set by this family of giant walking tanks. Partial remains of Spicomellus—the oldest known ankylosaur, dating back 165 million years—reveal that the dinosaur had much more elaborate body armor than later generations, including a collar of bony spikes up to three feet long, and fused tail vertebrae indicating an early tail weapon.
Ankylosaurs are known for their short-limbed frames, clubbed tail weapons, and thick-plated body armor that puts Batman to shame. These dinosaurs, which could reach 30 feet from beak to club, are mostly known from Late Cretaceous fossils. As a consequence “their early evolution in the Early–Middle Jurassic is shrouded in mystery due to a poor fossil record” and “the evolution of their unusual body plan is effectively undocumented,” according to a new study.
“Bring it.” Concept art of Spicomellus. Image: © Matthew Dempsey
In October 2022, a local farmer in the Moroccan badlands discovered a partial skeleton that fills in this tantalizing gap. The fossils suggest that the plates, spikes, and weaponized tails were features of ankylosaurian anatomy from the Jurassic jump.“The new specimen reveals extreme dermal armour modifications unlike those of any other vertebrate, extinct or extant,” said researchers led by Susannah Maidment of the National History Museum in London. “Given that Spicomellus is an early-diverging ankylosaur or ankylosaurid, this raises the possibility that ankylosaurs acquired this extravagant armour early in their evolutionary history, and this was reduced to a simpler arrangement in later forms.”
The Spicomellus puzzle set. Image: © Matthew Dempsey/ Maidment et al.
As you can see, this early ankylosaur was the living embodiment of the phrase “try me.” Two huge spikes, one of which is almost entirely preserved, flanked the “cervical half-ring” on the animal's neck. The fossils are so visually astonishing that at first glance, they almost look like an arsenal of spears, axes, and clubs from an ancient army.The team doesn’t hide their amazement at the find, writing that “no known ankylosaur possesses any condition close to the extremely long pairs of spines on the cervical half-ring” and note that the fossils overturn “current understanding of tail club evolution in ankylosaurs, as these structures were previously thought to have evolved only in the Early Cretaceous.”
This incredible armor may have initially evolved as a sexual display that was adapted for defensive purposes by the rise of “multitonne predators” like T. rex. That might explain why the ornaments seemed to have simplified over time. Whatever the reason, the fossils demonstrate that ankylosaurs, as a lineage, were born ready for a fight.
In other news…
Now you sea(horse) me
We’ll move now from the extremely epic to the extremely twee. Pygmy seahorses, which measure no more than an inch, mimic the brightly-colored and venomous gorgonian corals that they symbiotically inhabit. Scientists have now discovered that these tiny animals achieved their extraordinary camouflage in part by discarding a host of genes involved in growth and immune response, perhaps because their protective coral habitats rendered those traits obsolete.
Basically we are very smol. Image: South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
“We analyzed the tiny seahorse’s genome revealing the genomic bases of several adaptations to their mutualistic life,” said researchers led by Meng Qu of the South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. The analysis suggests “that the protective function of corals may have permitted the pygmy seahorse to lose an exceptionally large number of immune genes.”Living in a toxic environment can have its benefits, if you’re a seahorse. And that is the perfect segue to the next story…
When life hands you arsenic, make lemon-colored skin
After a long day, isn’t it nice to sink into a scalding bath of arsenic and hydrogen sulfide? That’s the self-care routine for Paralvinella hessleri, a deep sea worm that “is the only animal that colonizes the hottest part of deep-sea hydrothermal vents in the west pacific,” according to a new study.
Paralvinella hessleri. Wang H, et al., 2025, PLOS Biology, CC-BY 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/b…)
So, how are these weirdos surviving what should be lethally toxic waters that exceed temperatures of 120°F? The answer is a "distinctive strategy” of “fighting poison with poison,” said researchers led by Hao Wang of the Center of Deep-Sea Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences. The worm stores the arsenic in its skin cells and mixes it with the sulfide to make a dazzling mineral, called orpiment, that provides its bright yellow hue.“This process represents a remarkable adaptation to extreme chemical environments,” the researchers said. “The yellow granules observed within P. hessleri’s epithelial cells, which are the site of arsenic detoxification, appear to be the key to this adaptation.”
My own hypothesis is that this worm offers an example of convergent evolution with Freddie Mercury’s yellow jacket from Queen’s legendary 1986 Wembley Stadium performance.
Mind the protoplanetary gap
Your baby photos are cute and all, but it’s going to be hard to top the pic that astronomers just snapped of a newborn planet 430 light years from Earth. This image marks the first time that a planet has been spotted forming within a protoplanetary disk, which is the dusty gassy material from which new worlds are born.
The protoplanet WISPIT 2b appears as a purple dot in a dust-free gap. Image: Laird Close, University of Arizona
Our “images of 2025 April 13 and April 16 discovered an accreting protoplanet,” said researchers led by Laird Close of the University of Arizona. “The ‘protoplanet’ called WISPIT 2b “appears to be clearing a dust-free gap between the two bright rings of dust—as long predicted by theory.”If Earth is the pale blue dot, then WISPIT 2b is the funky purple blob. Though stray baby planets have been imaged before in the cavity between their host stars and the young disks, this amazing image offers the first glimpse of the most common mode of planetary formation, which occurs inside the dusty maelstrom.
Welcome to the Arcade of Coronal Loops
We’ll close with yet another cosmic photoshoot—this time of everyone’s favorite star, the Sun. from the Daniel K Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) in Hawaii. The telescope captured unprecedented pictures of a decaying solar flare at a key hydrogen-alpha (Hα) wavelength of 656.28 nanometers.
The images show coronal loops—dramatic plasma arches that can spark flares and ejections—at resolutions of just 13 miles, making them the smallest loops that have ever been observationally resolved. The pictures are mesmerizing, filled with sharp features like the “Arcade of Coronal Loops” (and note that the scale is measured in planet Earths) But they also represent a new phase in unlocking the mysterious physics that fuels solar flares and coronal mass ejections.
“This is initial evidence that the DKIST may be capable of resolving the fundamental scale of coronal loops,” said researchers led by Cole Tamburri of the University of Colorado Boulder. “The resolving power of the DKIST represents a significant step toward advancing modern flare models and our understanding of fine structure in the coronal magnetic field.”
May your weekend be as energetic as a coronal loop, but hopefully not as destructive.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
Extreme armour in the world’s oldest ankylosaur - Nature
The ankylosaurian dinosaur Spicomellus afer possessed a tail weapon and uniquely elaborate dermal armour.Nature
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