Welcome back to the Abstract! 

It’s hard to keep up with all the news about all the giant gassy orbiters out there. I’m speaking, of course, about hot Jupiters, a class of planets that takes the concept of “inhospitable” to dazzling and creative new levels, and which had an epic news week.

Then, what did scientists find in cores taken from deep-sea trenches? The answer might surprise you. Next, mice administer “first aid.” Last, fish can see you for who you really are (though yummy treats will certainly not be refused). 

Hot Jupiters Are So Hot Right Now (and at All Other Times)

Seidel, Julia et al. “Vertical structure of an exoplanet’s atmospheric jet stream.” Nature.

Hot Jupiters are the low-hanging fruit of exoplanet discoveries. As the name implies, they are Jupiter-sized worlds that orbit extremely close to their stars, a proximity that makes them—you guessed it—hot. 

Given that they are both giant in scale and have short years lasting only hours or days, hot Jupiters are the easiest exoplanets to spot, which is why our catalog of distant worlds is packed with them. In fact, a study came out just this week that identified seven new ones.

But while it’s not all that novel to discover these worlds (which is kind of amazing in itself), scientists have now peered deep into the atmosphere of the hot Jupiter WASP-121, nicknamed Tylos, which is about 850 light years from Earth. It’s the first time several distinct atmospheric layers and processes have been observed on an exoplanet.   

“Ultra-hot Jupiters, an extreme class of planets not found in our solar system, provide a unique window into atmospheric processes,” said researchers led by Julia Seidel of the European Southern Observatory (ESO). “Here we show a dramatic shift in atmospheric circulation in an ultra-hot Jupiter” including “the first vertical characterization of a high-altitude, super-rotational atmospheric jet stream.”  

Tylos is slightly bigger than Jupiter, but it is so close to its star that its year lasts only 30 hours. As a consequence, it is tidally locked, meaning that one side is always facing the star, and the other always faces away. The star-lit side is about 2,300°C (4,200°F) which is, as advertised, quite hot. Using the ESO’s Very Large Telescope, the researchers spotted the aforementioned equatorial jet stream and saw flows of hot gas moving from the hot day side to the cooler night side—which is still pretty hot at around 700°C (1,340°F). 

The weather report on Tylos is permanently fatal with a chance of titanium rain, according to a third study that came out this week (that’s a hot Jupiter hat-trick). Taken together, the research represents a new emerging era of exoplanet observations in which astronomers can peek under the hood of these distant atmospheres and start to get a real vertical cross-section of otherworldly skies. 

Down the line, this will lead to better characterizations of the atmospheres of potentially habitable exoplanets, which could contain detectable signs of alien life. But for now, on this late winter weekend, let's be satisfied with warming ourselves  into certain oblivion in the bellies of hot Jupiters. 

From the Hadal to the Grave 

Hovikoski, Jussi et al. “Bioturbation in the hadal zone.” Nature Communications.

To cool off, we shall now dive straight into the deepest parts of the ocean, the hadal zone, where strange things are inherently afoot. Scientists took sediment cores from seafloors at depths of over 4.6 miles in the Japan Trench which is, in my opinion, asking for trouble. But in this case, the results revealed an activity that you might not expect to find in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth—farming.   

I should just say, the “farmers” are probably invertebrates, like sea cucumbers or bivalves, that cultivate microbes that help break down organic matter for them. Still, a basic form of “agrichnial” farming is preserved in trace fossils, like burrows, the team found in the cores. 

“The hadal zone, >6 km deep, remains one of the least understood ecosystems on Earth,” said researchers led by Jussi Hovikoski of the Geological Survey of Finland. The cores open a rare window into this otherworldly region and reveal “slender spiral, lobate and deeply penetrating straight and ramifying burrow systems…interpreted to include burrows of microbe farming and chemosymbiotic invertebrates.” 

The study also gets points for its title, “Bioturbation in the hadal zone,” which sounds like an early aughts prog rock album. \m/ 

Somebody Call an EMT! (Emergency Mouse Technician)

Sun, Wenjian et al. “Reviving-like prosocial behavior in response to unconscious or dead conspecifics in rodents.” Science.

Humans produce a lot of selfish psychos, if you hadn’t noticed, but one nice thing about our species is we generally share a prosocial instinct to help people during a medical crisis. As it turns out, we’re not alone in this behavior, according to a new study that monitored the reactions of mice to ailing, unconscious, or dead conspecifics. 

“Anecdotal observations across several species in the wild, including nonhuman primates, dolphins, and elephants have reported intriguing behaviors of animals toward unresponsive conspecifics that have collapsed because of sickness, injury, or death,” said researchers led by  Wenjian Sun of the University of Southern California. “These animals…display various behavioral responses, including touching, grooming, nudging, and sometimes even more intense physical actions, such as striking, toward the collapsed peers. Some of these actions toward incapacitated conspecifics are reminiscent of human emergency responses, especially those involving sensory stimulation.”

To bring these anecdotal reports in an experimental setting, the team videotaped mice responding to cagemates that had been anesthetized into unconsciousness, as well as their reactions  to dead mice. The r mice interacted with unconscious cage-mates  about ten times as much as with an active partner, and may have even performed basic versions of first aid.

“Our results suggest that the actions of mouth/ tongue biting and tongue pulling may have rescue-like effects, reminiscent of human first aid efforts in reviving unconscious individuals with physical stimulation and airway maintenance,” the researchers said.  

“The consequences of the behaviors, such as improved airway opening or clearance and expedited recovery, are clearly beneficial to the recipient,” they added, though they also cautioned that “it is challenging to determine the motivational needs behind these distinctive ‘reviving-like’ behaviors.”  

Familiarity played a strong role in the experiment's outcome; mice heaped much more attention on dead or unconscious cage-mates that they knew well compared to strangers. At the risk of anthropomorphizing, it’s kind of sad to think about these mice being confronted with their passed-out or dead friends, but the silver lining is an empirical validation of widespread prosocial behaviors. 

I’m also going to assume it means that the Disney franchise The Rescuers, starring mice humanitarians, is a documentary.

The Adventures of Left Hump and Friends

Tomasek, Maëlan and Soller, Katinka et al. “Wild fish use visual cues to recognize individual divers.” Biology Letters. 

The next time you go for an ocean swim, why not introduce yourself to some neighboring fish? They might learn to recognize you as an individual and start following you around, especially if you give them something nice to eat. That’s the conclusion of a new study that found fish can tell individual divers apart based on visual cues—and that they rapidly learn which divers are generous with treats (in this case: shrimp).

Researchers Maëlan Tomasek and Katinka Soller conducted several dives at the STARESO research station in Corsica, France. Soller was the designated shrimp dispenser, and the wild fish “volunteers” rapidly learned to distinguish her visually from Tomasek, the shrimp miser.

“Two species voluntarily took part in our experiments: saddled sea bream O. melanura and black sea bream S. cantharus,” said the researchers. “Of specific individuals, the saddled bream (Bernie) was first identified at dive 5 of the training, four black bream at dives 12 (Left Hump), 15 (Kasi), 19 (Alfi), 21 (Julius) and the last black bream (Geraldine) on the first session of experiment 1. Note that this marks the moment from which we were able to reliably identify them (i.e. identify with absolute certainty at each apparition from one dive to the next) but that they most likely appeared several days prior to this.”

First of all, fantastic names. I’m already shipping Julius and Geraldine as a celebrity fish couple called Juladine. Left Hump will officiate the wedding. But setting aside the fish fanfic, the team demonstrated that the fish learned to visually tell the researchers apart, leading to a clear preference for following Soller. 

“The fact that wild bream can discriminate between divers adds scientific evidence to the numerous accounts suggesting differentiated relationships between fish and specific humans,” the team said. “Our study thus encourages a reappraisal of the methodological avenues to study cognitive abilities of wild fish under natural conditions.” 

“It also demonstrates a potential difficulty when conducting such experiments that could be disturbed by fish following specific experimenters,” the researchers said, concluding with an implied wink: “Researchers might not always want to be followed all around by fish, but if they do, they will not be disappointed.”

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Welcome back to the Abstract, 404 Media's weekly roundup of scientific studies to distract us from our present dystopia!

This week, we are traveling back in time to 16th century Transylvania, so please make sure you are up to date on your bubonic plague shots. A study reconstructed wild weather events through the eyes of record-keepers during this fraught period, opening a tantalizing window into climate extremes unleashed by a vengeful God (according to contemporary reports).

Then: making love the medaka way (get those anal fins ready). Next, the chillest insect in Antarctica (also: the only one). Finally, these turtles will dance for food, and yes, it’s very cute.

The Haunting Weather Reports of 16th Century Transylvania

Gaceu. Ovidiu Răzvan et al. “Reconstruction of climatic events from the 16th century in Transylvania: interdisciplinary analysis based on historical sources.” Frontiers in Climate.

Rejoice, for this week has delivered one of the best varieties of study: Science via historical documents. Sure, ice cores and geological strata are great for reconstructing past climates, but nobody can bitch about the weather better than a good old-fashioned red-blooded member of team Homo sapien. 

To that end, researchers searched for mentions of weird weather across a trove of diaries, monastery records, travel notes, and other documents from 16th century Transylvania, during a “pivotal moment in climate history” when a centuries-long cooling event called the Little Ice Age intensified, according to researchers led by Ovidiu Răzvan Gaceu of the University of Oradea. 

These types of studies are packed with colorful human testimonies that can corroborate natural records. More importantly, though, they are just fun to read, especially during such an evocative time and place, freshly haunted by the vampiric spirit of Vlad the Impaler. Some highlights:

In August 1526, heavy rainfall caused freak floods in Braşov that “washed the walls of the fortress, demolished the main gate, and the fish also got caught in the big church,” according to the Annals of Brașov. Fish in the church! The ultimate baptism. 

 In autumn 1553, people in the city of Cluj reported unusual weather events including “October strawberries.” For real, October is for pumpkins, get out of here with the strawbs. Turned out it was a bad omen—there was a plague the following winter. Keep that in mind if you see any late autumn strawberries: Kill on sight.

Naturally, a lot of these accounts are heartbreaking. Locusts “sometimes covered the whole sky and destroyed grain crops” and caused terrible famines. A storm-related fire “killed 14 people and made 60 poor.” On September 29, 1582, “there was such a big storm, as it was said that it had never been seen before in the city of Cluj, which uprooted the trees and raised the roofs of the houses, people believed that it is sent by divinity to punish the crimes committed by them.” 

I mean, I’m not saying these people weren’t doing crimes. It’s 16th century Transylvania. Do what you gotta do. But that's not why there is extreme weather. You’re just in the Little Ice Age. 

The study ultimately identified “multiple pieces of evidence associated with extreme weather events, including 40 unusually warm summers and several years of excess precipitation or drought.” Taken together with natural archives, the documents paint a picture of troubled times, exacerbated by an unstable climate and possible emergent vampires. Relatable! 

Fish Spawn Wild

Kondo, Yuki et al. “Medaka (Oryzias latipes) initiate courtship and spawning late at night: Insights from field observations.” PLOS One. 

Valentine’s Day is over, but the romantic mood is still in the air—or in the water, if you’re a medaka (flawless segue). Scientists have discovered that wild medaka, also known as Japanese rice fish, are fans of late-night booty calls, which is a behavior that has not been observed in captivity.

“Although medaka and other model organisms are invaluable in laboratories, their ecology in the wild remains largely unknown,” said researchers led by Yuki Kondo of Osaka Metropolitan University. “This study showed that medaka in the wild initiate spawning during late nocturnal hours and exhibit vigorous courtship behavior at midnight.”

Kondo and her colleagues recorded this vigorous courtship by placing GoPros into streams over the course of several summer nights in Gifu, Japan. The tapes revealed that medaka like to spawn in the dark, possibly to avoid predators during copulation. The results “provide the first empirical evidence that medaka mating begins significantly earlier than previously reported in the laboratory.”  

For anyone who feels clueless about courtship, may I offer a page from the Medaka Sutra: 

“The spawning behavior of medaka follows a sequence of events: the male chases the female (following), the male swims rapidly around the female (quick circle), the male wraps his dorsal and anal fins around the female (wrapping), the female releases eggs, the male releases sperm (egg and sperm release), and the male leaves the female (leaving),” according to Kondo’s team.

The only true love language is, indeed, spoken with anal fins.

Major bonus points also go to Osaka Metropolitan University’s press team for throwing together this version of Edward Hopper’s famous “Nighthawks” painting with medaka getting drinks at a bar that is also named Medaka. It is genuinely one of the most inspired public relations efforts I have ever seen, and I’m going to get a print of it to hang on my wall.

The Insect at the Edge of Earth

Yoshida, Mizuki et al. Obligate diapause and its termination shape the life-cycle seasonality of an Antarctic insect. Scientific Reports. 

Belgica antarctica, or the Antarctic midge, is the only insect that lives year-round on its namesake continent. Do you know how weird you have to be to be the only insect somewhere? But this midge doesn’t care. It just lives out its bug life, which lasts two years, in an otherwise bugless wasteland. 

Humans definitely care about the midge, though—how could we not? What is it doing there? How is it not dead? What can it teach us about cryopreservation? These questions are addressed in a new study that resolved mysteries about the animal’s interesting life cycle.

“Freeze tolerance and cryoprotective dehydration are cold tolerance strategies used by various invertebrate species in polar regions and indeed, B. antarctica utilises both for overwintering,” said researchers led by Mizuki Yoshida of the Ohio State University, who completed the project while at Osaka Metropolitan University (OMU killing it this week). 

“Larvae that are frozen in ice and cryoprotectively dehydrated readily survived 32 days of simulated overwintering,” the team said. “Unlike many insects restricted to highly specific microhabitats, B. antarctica larvae inhabit a remarkably diverse range of substrates that differ in vegetation, substrate type, slope, drainage, and thermal and hydric conditions.”

I love the phrasing of “readily survived” as if the midges were eager to show off their cryoprotective superpowers. After this 32-day period they emerged with “That all you got?” energy. By studying the bugs in these simulated conditions, the researchers confirmed that they rely on multiple overwintering strategies, including a state of arrested development called “obligate diapause.” 

“Diapause has long been assumed to be uncommon in Antarctic species, but the present study reveals that B. antarctica utilises diapause for seasonal adaptation, as in many temperate species,” Yoshida and her colleagues said. 

In addition to being the only endemic Antarctic insect, this midge has the smallest genome of any known insect while also being the largest fully terrestrial animal on the continent, even though it’s only a few millimeters long. In other words, it is the biggest animal in Antarctica that doesn’t fly or swim. Okay, Antarctic midge. You just keep doing you.

Everyone Do the Turtle

Goforth, Kayla et al. Learned magnetic map cues and two mechanisms of magnetoreception in turtles. Nature.

Last, turtles do a little victory dance when they find food. Yes, it is cute. Yes, there is a video.

The footage (along with this extended clip) is part of a study that tested if turtles could distinguish the magnetic signatures of two geographical areas. When the turtles were exposed to signatures associated with an area they associated with food, they danced in anticipation of a meal, demonstrating that they could tell the signals apart—and party accordingly.  

“Hallmarks of the behaviour include some or all of the following: tilting the body vertically, holding the head near or above water, opening the mouth, rapid alternating movement of the front flippers, and, occasionally, even spinning in place, hence the name ‘turtle dance,’” said researchers led by Kayla Goforth of Texas A&M University. “Turtles exhibited significantly higher levels of turtle dance behaviour when experiencing the field in which they had been fed.”

With that, let’s all tilt vertically, spin in place, and shell-abrate the long weekend. 

Thanks for reading! See you next week.  

Welcome back to the Abstract! 

Since we are all super-chill and bereft of any existential dread these days, let’s take a moment to envision the grand-daddy of all apocalyptic scenarios: Death by asteroid. We have a small rock potentially incoming in December 2032 and a big rock potentially incoming in September 2182. Pick your fighter! 

Then, want to make two Grand Canyons in ten minutes? I know a trick. Finally, time to calm down with some whale songs and a fish fry with libations. We’ve earned it by surviving this long in a cosmic shooting gallery. Bottoms up!

Sir Bennu the Bummer

Dai, Lan et al. “Climatic and ecological responses to Bennu-type asteroid collisions.” Science Advances.

We all know the tale of the giant dino-killing asteroid, a freak deathbringer that measured about 10 miles wide and delivered a TKO to most life on Earth. Fortunately, asteroid impacts of that scale are extremely rare, occurring once every 150 million years or so. It’s far more likely that we will get roughed up by a medium-sized asteroid, measuring a half-mile or smaller, which crash into Earth once every 150,000 years on average.

Indeed, recently scientists have been tracking 2024 YR4, a rock that is about 200 feet across and has roughly a 1 in 50 (2%) chance of hitting Earth on December 22, 2032 (Merry Christmas!). Those are very high odds for an asteroid impact, which is actually good news, because they are objectively low odds. Hazardous asteroids are extremely unlikely to hit Earth in the near term, and most never break 1% risk. 

In other words, 2024 YR4 will almost certainly NOT strike Earth in seven years. But if it did, it would explode in the atmosphere and produce a powerful airburst that could kill millions of people if it occurred near a populated area (it would be the Chelyabinsk meteor on roids). As terrifying as that is to imagine, a rock the size of 2024 YR4 would still only deal regional damage and casualties could be mitigated by evacuation efforts among other preparations. 

Scientists are more worried about asteroids the size of Bennu, a rock that measures a third of a mile and has a 0.037% chance of impacting Earth on September 24, 2182 (Save the date!). Obviously, that is just a teeny tiny sliver of a chance—1 in 2,700 odds—but a study this week outlines why we should take it seriously nonetheless.

“Depending on the collision parameters, an impact between a medium-sized asteroid and Earth could cause regional to large-scale devastation,” including “non-negligible threats to the habitability of our planet,” said researchers led by Lan Dai of Pusan National University.

“Beyond immediate effects such as thermal radiation, earthquakes, and tsunamis, asteroid impacts would have long-lasting climatic effects by emitting large quantities of aerosols and gases into the atmosphere,” the researchers continued. 

More specifically, the team used advanced climate simulations to predict that a run-in with Bennu would inject up to 400 million tons of dust into Earth’s atmosphere. Global temperatures would subsequently plummet by about 4°C and precipitation rates would fall by about 15%. The ozone would be depleted by about 32%, exposing life on our world to high doses of harmful UV radiation. 

“The initial reductions in ecosystem productivity on land and in the ocean would disrupt food availability and threaten global food security.” the researchers said. “The abrupt cooling and ecosystem collapses caused by asteroid collisions would severely reduce the habitat suitability for humans, wildlife, and terrestrial ecosystems,” 

In simpler terms: we ded (skull emoji). At least, a lot of people would perish in this scenario. Of course, by the year 2182, we are all going to be pushing daisies anyway, except the Peter Thiel types that have managed to subsist on the blood of the young. 

Still, I am not paying inordinate sums for daycare just to have my future descendents get whacked by some space rock. To that end, NASA has already visited Bennu with its OSIRIS-REx mission, which returned samples from the asteroid back to Earth in 2023 to get a better sense of its composition. NASA also memorably punched an asteroid in the face with the DART mission in 2022, which shifted the rock’s orbit. 

These missions (among others) are building the know-how to knock dangerous asteroids off-course with spacecraft impactors, as part of a “redirect” strategy. If the odds of an impact with Bennu get higher, we may ultimately have to send a spacecraft out to give it an uppercut that will push it away from a collision course.  

Deadly impacts do not make for light reading, but they are a reminder that we only exist at the mercy of weird gravitational perturbations in the asteroid belt. We are in more or less the same bind as T-rex, and Triceratops, and Mosasaurus, and all the other fantastic beasts felled by an extraterrestrial rock 66 million years ago. We may share their fate, or perhaps take a cue from the intelligent hadrosaurs who escaped that extinction (source: Star Trek: Voyager). 

In any case, if you’re interested in keeping tabs on deadly space rocks (including 2024 YR4), I recommend following Robin George Andrews, who is an expert on killer asteroids and killing asteroids—a double whammy.  

The Moon Has Grand Canyons to Spare

Kring, David et al. “Grand Canyons on the Moon.” Nature Communications.

Hey, want a break from thinking about space rocks crashing into things and wreaking havoc? Hahaha, not a chance. I’m a sadist and I have been given too much power! 

Don’t worry, the next impact I want to bring to your attention happened a long time ago (about 3.8 billion years in the past) and affected a location where humans are only occasionally present: the Moon. A new study reconstructed the catastrophic backstory of the Schrödinger impact basin, which stretches across 200 miles of the lunar south pole. 

“Schrödinger basin is the best analog surface expression for Earth’s buried Chicxulub impact crater, which is linked to the extinction of dinosaurs and most life at the end of the Cretaceous,” said researchers led by David Kring of the Lunar and Planetary Institute. “The Schrödinger impact basin is remarkable for streams of rocky debris that it ejected, carving two canyons that are comparable to Earth’s Grand Canyon in width and depth.”  

Kring and his colleagues used photogeologic mapping of the canyons, Vallis Schrödinger and Vallis Planck, to reconstruct their catastrophic backstory. The team’s models suggest that they were forged by rays of rocky ejecta traveling at about 2,800 miles per hour, which violently tore gashes into the lunar landscape within ten minutes of impact. Ten minutes! Imagine blasting out two Grand Canyons in the time it takes to boil an egg. You have to hand it to space rocks: They know how to make a lasting impression. 

Fun fact: Schrödinger crater is also the location of the fictional Schwarze Sonne, a Nazi Moon fortress that is literally shaped like a swastika, featured in the 2012 film Iron Sky. Now you know.

Look Who’s Talking Too (It’s Whales)

Youngblood, Mason. “Language-like efficiency in whale communication.” Science Advances.

After all that rough-and-tumble, I shall offer you the best relief planet Earth can offer: Whale songs. Is there any better salve for a mind troubled by cosmic collisions than the choruses of our oceanic cousins? It’s well-known that cetaceans, the group that includes whales and dolphins, have evolved complex acoustic repertoires that include clicks, whistles, screeches, serenades, and pulses. Often, they even have regional or familial dialects. 

Now, a researcher has shown that the vocalizations of some cetaceans obey two linguistic patterns, known as Menzerath’s law and Zipf’s law, that measure linguistic efficiency. By analyzing more than 65,000 sequences from 16 cetacean species, Mason Youngblood of Stony Brook University has now confirmed that many whale songs are as efficient—if not more efficient—than human languages, revealing another layer of complexity to cetacean communication.

“One of the simplest ways to increase efficiency is by reducing vocalization time. Individuals who convey the same information in less time incur lower metabolic costs and are less likely to be detected by predators and potential prey,” Youngblood said in a new study.

“On average, whales tend to shorten elements and intervals toward the end of sequences, although this varies by species,” he noted. “Overall, the results of this study suggest that the vocalizations of many cetacean species have undergone compression for increased efficiency in time.”

Whales: They’re just like us! Well, mostly like us, except for living in the sea and being absolutely ginormous. But hey, we’ve all got lactation and linguistic efficiencies in common and that’s a good start!

Party at Patos Lagoon

Admiraal, Marjolein et al. “Feasting on fish. Specialized function of pre-colonial pottery of the Cerritos mound builders of southern Brazil.” PLOS One.

Last, time to go back in time 2,000 years to party with the pre-Columbian peoples of Patos Lagoon in southern Brazil. This coastal wetland region is one of many places where ancient communities built earthen mounds called Cerritos that are packed with pottery shards, human and animal remains, and agricultural byproducts like seeds and beans.

A team has now analyzed residues preserved in 54 pottery shards recently retrieved from two cerritos dating back 1,200 and 2,300 years, which are affiliated with the Charrua and Minuano cultures. The results suggest that these pots held cooked fish and may have even been vessels for alcoholic beverages made from fermented crops, such as maize. The researchers speculate that these ancient peoples may have timed boozy festivals to coincide with seasonal runs of migrating fish, such as the Whitemouth croaker.

“Intriguingly…food residues from Cerritos ceramics show that vessels were used for either cooking estuarine fish, or plant products,” said researchers led by Marjolein Admiraal at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (the research was conducted during her previous position at the University of York).

“Microbial-derived lipids were predominantly associated with the latter, suggesting that plants were fermented, presumably to make alcoholic beverages,” the team said. “We suggest that these sites, at least in part, functioned as prominent monuments in a frequently flooded landscape conducive to seasonal mass capture of fish, and that social aggregation and ritual feasting were major activities.”

There’s nothing like social aggregation and ritual feasting around earthen mounds to start off the weekend. Let the good vibes drown out the bad.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Welcome back to the Abstract! 

This week, we’re serving up some much-needed good news about global biodiversity! Well, it’s more like a silver lining, but in the Anthropocene you have to take what you can get. As you may have noticed, humans are highly annoying and deadly to many other lifeforms on Earth, a condition that is driving a global decline of biodiversity. But there are bright spots in this dark trend, as conservation efforts continue to yield results around the world. 

Then, just how radioactive was that Saharan dust cloud that engulfed Europe in 2022? Scientists found answers, and they were weird! Next, the effects of Daylight Savings Time…on dogs. Finally, it’s time to warm up in the balmy gassy vistas of ancient Mars.  

Biodiversity Loss Is Staggering, but Conservation Pays Off 

Shaw, Robyn and Farquharson, Katherine et al. “Global meta-analysis shows action is needed to halt genetic diversity loss.” Nature.

It is understandable to feel overwhelmed by the escalating consequences of human activity on our planet and its inhabitants. In fact, it is a sign that your brain is good at recognizing reality, even at its own peril. But there were welcome rays of hope from conservation science this week: It turns out trying to stop biodiversity loss actually works sometimes!

On Wednesday, scientists published a massive meta-analysis of genetic diversity that encompasses decades of data collected from 628 species of animals, plants, and fungi across every land environment and most maritime regions on the planet. It is “the most comprehensive investigation of within-population genetic diversity change to date,” according to the study.

“Here we report an overall global decline in intraspecific genetic diversity,” said researchers co-led by Robyn Shaw of the University of Canberra and Katherine Farquharson of the University of Sydney. “In birds and mammals in particular, the evidence for genetic diversity decline is clear.”

“Genetic diversity accumulates over evolutionary timescales through mutation and once lost, is difficult to restore,” the team continued. “However, we also show that we have the theoretical and technical means, as well as the on-ground conservation management approaches, to prevent further loss if we act now.”

The study points to many success stories about targeted conservation that have reversed genetic diversity in species as diverse as the Hine’s emerald dragonfly to the Golden bandicoot. As it happens, two unrelated case studies were also published this week about the recovery of wolverines across their historic Scandinavian range, and the recovery of tigers in India, both of which offer inspiration from gains made with these iconic carnivores.

“We provide pervasive evidence for successful expansion of the wolverine population from the refuge-like alpine range into boreal forest, which was previously considered suboptimal habitat for wolverines in Scandinavia,” said researchers led by Ehsan Moqanaki of the University of Montana. “The ongoing recovery of the Scandinavian wolverine demonstrates that coexistence of apex predators with humans on multiuse landscapes is possible.”

Meanwhile, the study on tigers found that India’s recovery efforts “offers cautious optimism for megafauna recovery, particularly in the Global South.”

“Tiger occupancy increased by 30% (at 2929 square kilometers per year) over the past two decades, leading to the largest global population occupying ~138,200 square kilometers,” said researchers led by Yadvendradev Jhala of the Wildlife Institute of India. “The success of tiger recovery in India offers important lessons for tiger-range countries as well as other regions for conserving large carnivores while benefiting biodiversity and communities simultaneously. It rekindles hope for a biodiverse Anthropocene.”

Of course, these studies are not presenting an altogether rosy picture; the global trends of biodiversity loss are still incredibly concerning and there’s no doubt humans are fueling a major spike in extinction rates. But it’s much better to know that conservation efforts, if we make them, do pay off, and that we’re not just pissing in the wind. So let's take the win and stick it up our noses or ears or wherever you’re supposed to put hopium these days.

Oops! It’s a Radioactive Saharan Dust Cloud

Xu-Yang, Yangjunjie et al. “Radioactive contamination transported to Western Europe with Saharan dust.” Science Advances

In the beginning, Cilllian Murphy invented nuclear weapons. For decades afterward, governments around the world came up with the flimsiest excuses to make them go boom. Hmm, should we nuke a battleship? Yeah. Nuke the sky? Hell yeah. Nuke the Sahara? Oui (because France did that one).  

In a twist, the spectre of those Saharan nukes literally visited itself upon Europe in March 2022, when a desert storm blew dust clouds from the Algerian test site across the continent. The event raised concerns that radioactive particles from the four atmospheric detonations, which were performed over Reggane in 1960 and 1961, may have contaminated those nations, potentially posing a public health threat.

To investigate the risk, researchers enlisted citizen sciences to collect more than 100 dust samples from six countries in Western Europe, which they tested for plutonium isotope signatures. In yet another twist, the team found that there was detectable radioactive contamination in the particles from the 2022 storm, but it mostly didn’t come from the French atmospheric tests. It was dominated by the global fallout signature of the atmospheric tests conducted by the United States and the Soviet Union before sky nukes were banned in 1963. 

“Radionuclide signatures detected in Saharan dust collected in 2022 remained in the range of the global fallout found as a background signal in soils worldwide, and they significantly differed from the characteristics of the French atmospheric nuclear tests conducted in Southern Algeria,” said researchers led by Yangjunjie Xu-Yang of Université Paris-Saclay.

The team concluded that the contamination didn’t pose a public health threat, but it’s still a little disconcerting to be reminded that the planet is covered in a film of radioactive dust. As the sage Nelson Muntz once proclaimed: Gotta nuke something.

Spring Forward, Fall Back, Shake a Paw

Nagendran, Lavania et al. “The impact of Daylight Saving Time on dog activity.” PLOS One.

Dogs are thrown off by Daylight Savings Time (DST) too, at least if they are gainfully employed. That’s the conclusion of the first study to examine how DST affects all the good boys and good girls out there.

To accomplish this feat, the team put accelerometers into the collars of 25 sled dogs and 29 companion dogs living around Ontario during the fall time change in 2020 and 2021 respectively. By measuring the activity of the dogs, they were able to determine that sled dogs were more sensitive to time changes because of their rigid working schedules.  

“Recognizing that DST is an extreme form of anthropogenic intervention on the effects of natural light on circadian rhythm regulation, we aim to investigate how this abrupt shift in the timing of human activity affects companion animals,” said researchers led by Lavania Nagendran of the University of Toronto.

“Sled dogs took one day to adjust to the time shift,” the researchers concluded. “In companion dogs, we did not find evidence for any changes in morning onset activity following DST.”

In other words, the coalition ban time changes may have just earned a powerful new bloc: Huskies and malamutes. These dogs will make great political allies, assuming they can take some time away from other important business (digging holes, chasing squirrels, and yowling discordantly). 

The Lost Water World of Mars 

Adams, Danica et al. “Episodic warm climates on early Mars primed by crustal hydration.” Nature Geoscience.

Mars was once a warm world of gushing rivers and huge lakes that may have supported microbial life. But just how Mars remained toasty enough to produce these balmy conditions is a matter of some debate; the Sun was dimmer four billion years ago, when Mars was habitable, plus the red planet receives less sunlight than Earth due to its orbital distance, so solar radiation alone cannot account for its liquid water.

Scientists now propose that Mars was partly warmed by its own farts—or, in more scientific terms, its crustal outgassing. Hydrogen gas released by water sinking into the crust could have helped “to transiently foster warm, humid climates” according to researchers led by Danica Adams of Harvard University.

These events of outgassing due crustal hydration would have been short-lived, lasting tens of millions of years. This scenario adds more evidence to the idea that Martian climate, and thus its habitability, fluctuated until about three billion years ago, when the planet permanently transformed into the cold dry husk we like to put our best robots on today.

Adams and her colleagues note that these models will be put to the test once samples from Mars are returned to Earth (though the Mars Sample Return mission is currently experiencing  setbacks). For now, we’ll have to be satisfied with this glimpse of a gassy ancient Mars and the possible organisms that may have flourished during its warm spells.  

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Welcome back to the Abstract! What a week. It kicked off with Blue Monday, a date considered the most depressing of the year in the Northern Hemisphere for dubious reasons (in short: it was invented, like most of our reality, by an ad campaign). 

This column will channel the latent crappy vibes with a parade of grotesqueries from the grand world of excrement research. Then, scientists are bringing back the ‘80s with new bioluminescent hues worthy of a Lite-Brite pegboard. Last, if you actually are feeling blue, I recommend Norwegian wood. Not the song. Not the novel. I’m talking about real pine trees in Norway. They see all. They will understand.

Monkey See (Pee), Monkey Do (Pee)

Onishi, Ena et al. “Socially contagious urination in chimpanzees.” Current Biology.

It’s time to put the “pee” in chimpanzee by watching pee come out of chimpanzees. That’s what researchers in Japan did for more than 600 hours to find out if urination is a form of social contagion in chimps. In other words, they observed 20 adult captive chimpanzees (16 males and 4 females) at the Kumamoto Sanctuary of Kyoto University to assess whether they were more likely to pee if they saw other chimps pee.

“The decision to urinate involves a complex combination of both physiological and social considerations,” said researchers led by Ena Onishi of Kyoto University. “However, the social dimensions of urination remain largely unexplored.”

First of all, let’s all congratulate ourselves for performing this complex physiological and social decision multiple times a day. I didn’t even realize we were such pros. 

But back to the study: the team meticulously recorded the number and timing of “urination events” along with the relative distances between “the urinator and potential followers.” The results revealed that urination is, in fact, socially contagious for chimps and that low-dominant individuals were especially likely to pee after watching others pee. Call it: pee-r pressure.

The study gets extra points for including depictions of contagious urination in art history as part of its supplemental information, like those disconcerting fountain statues that pee out water. But the “number one” standout is a 1784 sketch by Thomas Rowlandson entitled “Sympathy, or A Family On A Journey Laying The Dust.” 

Cups runneth over in this contagious urination event that even encompasses dogs and horses. I’m frankly surprised the buggy isn’t also engaged in gushing urination. 

In addition to documenting a unique phenomenon, this artwork is nature’s call to revive the euphemism “laying the dust” for (I assume?) urination. You’re no longer going to the restroom; you are laying the dust. It just goes to show you never know what you’ll learn from a study about contagious chimp urination.

San Francisco’s Best Eats (for Coyotes) 

Caspi, Tal et al. “Impervious surface cover and number of restaurants shape diet variation in an urban carnivore.” Ecosphere.

You’ve seen the pee study, now here’s the number two follow-through. A study out this week reconstructed the diets of coyotes in San Francisco by collecting more than 1,000 scats from 2019 to 2022. Of that initial poopy haul, 707 bonafide coyote dumps were analyzed with metabarcoding and genotyping to reveal what these streetwise canines were eating.

“We collected scats from urban green spaces, including parks, golf courses, and gardens across San Francisco,” said researchers led by Tal Caspi of the University of California, Davis. “We only collected scats that we estimated to be less than 1 week old given their appearance and time since last visit.” 

By analyzing this dookie-base, the team found that coyotes in densely populated neighborhoods were more reliant on human food scraps than coyotes in greener neighborhoods that had access to prey in parks. That finding seems intuitive, given that coyotes are opportunistic omnivores that will eat whatever’s available, but it’s still fascinating how much coyote diets varied, even with packs living just a few blocks away from each other.

“The greatest dietary differences were between Presidio and Coit Tower, even though a coyote can easily traverse the 3-km distance between them,” the team said. “The Presidio is the largest green space in San Francisco (6 km2) and has many native plant communities, sprawling grasslands, and a low percent cover of impervious surfaces. Conversely, Coit Tower is a tourist attraction in the densely populated Telegraph Hill neighborhood and, in part as a result of historical redlining, has less plant cover and lower species richness than formerly greenlined neighborhoods such as the Presidio.”

It's the age-old story of the city coyote and the just-a-bit-less city coyote. But while there were interesting variations in diet, all of these Bay Area coyotes were dining on a daily dim sum of chicken, pork, beef, and fish from human sources. As a cat lover, it pains me to report that domestic cats were commonly detected in the poops, though at low levels. That said, my general feeling is that a predator is skilled enough to catch a cat—animals that I have seen, with my own eyes, defy physics—it kind of deserves to eat it.

Lite-Brites in a Petri Dish 

Hattori, Matsuru et al. “Creating coveted bioluminescence colors for simultaneous multi-color bioimaging.” Science Advances.

Congratulations: You’ve waded through some sewage, and it’s time to wipe those eyeballs out. Fortunately, scientists published a spectacular new rainbow of bioluminescent hues this week. Call it a palette cleanser. 

Just look at these laboratory lite-brites! This study has clearly earned its keep based on aesthetic value alone, but the authors helpfully put some science in there too. Bioluminescence is the biological ability to generate light through chemical reactions, which is why some creatures can glow in the dark. This mesmerizing superpower is also a helpful tool in labs, as certain cells or research targets can be labelled with bioluminescent hues to aid observation.

“Bioluminescence, an optical marker that does not require excitation by light, allows researchers to simultaneously observe multiple targets, each exhibiting a different color,” said researchers led by Mitsuru Hattori of Osaka University. “Notably, the colors of the bioluminescent proteins must sufficiently vary to enable simultaneous detection.” 

The team’s innovation in this study was to debut a method that expanded the color variation, allowing “simple and simultaneous observation of multiple biological targets and phenomena.” To prove their point, they made the Tron mouse pictured above. 

Has science gone too far? Yes. But boy, does it look cool doing it.

Cruel Summer (Scots Pine Version)

Buchwald, Agata et al. “Blue rings in trees and shrubs as indicators of early and late summer cooling events at the northern treeline.” Frontiers in Plant Science.

It’s well-known that trees are nature’s librarians, meticulously keeping records of climate and environmental changes dating back centuries. But over the past decade, scientists have discovered a special type of blue ring in conifers that specifically memorializes cold summers. Low temperatures prevent lignification of the cell walls in the wood, creating the color pattern.

“Blue Rings (BRs) are a relatively newly described anatomical feature in conifers,” said researchers led by Agata Buchwald of Adam Mickiewicz University. “In the current literature, the formation of BRs is associated with cold growing season conditions” in various pine species, though “the potential of BRs in shrubs for paleoclimate studies still has to be explored.”

With that in mind, there was only one thing to do: Hike up Mount Iškoras in Norway and see what the Scots pines and Juniper shrubs had to say. The team took cores from dozens of plants high in the treeline, and discovered blue rings from the year 1902 and, to a lesser degree, in 1877, indicating that summers in those years were colder than average. 

The testimony of the trees not only lines up with historical temperature records, it also coincides with major volcanic events. In the spring of 1902, for instance, Mount Pelée erupted on the Caribbean island of Martinique, killing 30,000 people in one of the worst volcanic disasters on record. The reverberations of this tragedy were etched in blue in the hearts of trees 8,000 miles away on Nordic mountaintops. Reality is so wild and enchanting; it’s a shame it can’t compete with ad campaigns.

Regardless of whether you are as blue as a non-lignified tree ring, thanks for reading. See you next week!

Welcome back to the Abstract! 

This week, we’re going to the movies. For 77 hours straight. At the end, we’ll know whether we are doomed to villainy or driven to heroism. These are the only two options! 

Then, you’re not going to believe this, but the global trade for exotic ornamental plants is a bit sus. Next, OCTOPUS BRAINS! Last, scientists solve the mystery of the missing Moon craters, which has been a cold case for about four billion years. 

May you all be burdened with glorious purpose.

With Great Power Comes Great Reproducibility

Wigmore, Julia et al. “Are adverse childhood experiences scores associated with heroism or villainy? A quantitative observational study of Marvel and DC Cinematic Universe characters.” PLOS ONE.

Losing parents. Survivng genocide. Having your home planet explode. Superheroes and supervillains sure go through a lot of trauma. Now, this emotionally manipulative trope has undergone scientific scrutiny in a new study that assessed whether traumatic experiences in childhood predict heroism or villainy in superhero movies.

Put another way, researchers devised a professional justification for watching 33 films from the Marvel and DC cinematic universes, totaling 77 hours and 5 minutes. By scoring 28 characters—19 men, 8 women, and a gender-fluid Loki—the team established that trauma has no impact on whether a character becomes a hero or a villain. 

“No one is doomed to be a villain just because of early childhood experiences,” concluded researchers led by Julia Wigmore of the University of Calgary.

In other words: Magneto, no more excuses, dude. Stop murdering people with metal. Go touch grass.

Naturally, characters like Harley Quinn and Loki were head-scratchers, given that they can swing both ways (I’m officially coining the term: bimoral). The team categorized Harley as a hero, because she has a redemption arc after dumping the Joker. Loki is classified as a villain because he spends most of his screentime making mischief. I don’t get the distinction here and think it should be contested in future academic literature. 

The study includes some interesting context about how therapists use superhero stories to help children process grief and trauma, and other Serious Stuff. But mostly, I’m here for the authors’ cheeky little flourishes, letting us know that they really got away with this one. 

“No superheroes or villains were involved in this research study,” the team said, presumably while winking in synchronous harmony. “If anyone could connect us with them, we would be happy to conduct a follow up study to overcome this limitation.”

Snakes (in a Pot) on a Plane

Hinsley et al. “Understanding the environmental and social risks from the international trade in ornamental plants.” BioScience. 

The next time you decide to order an ornamental plant from overseas, a thing I assume we are all constantly doing, make sure to check it for hitchhikers. A study this week revealed that the multi-billion dollar trade in ornamental plants—including olive trees, cut roses, and exotic shrubs—is opening up new vectors for invasive species, such as insects, frogs, geckos, and snakes. 

“Given the number and diversity of vertebrates, including fragile ones such as tropical frogs, reported live in imported products, the number of imported invertebrate pests is likely underestimated, and more consistent measures are needed to provide an accurate understanding of the true implications of trade and how they might be managed,” said researchers led by Amy Hinsley of the University of Oxford.  

People are straight-up bagging plants that still have a bunch of creepy crawlies still on them, and flying them out to customers in other continents. The authors of the study outline a range of actions to help mitigate the risks, including introducing “plant passports.”  

Ultimately, though, we might have to break out the big guns and get Samuel L. Jackson to reprise his role as the globetrotting FBI agent Neville Flynn, who could solve this problem, like all others, with eruptive profanity. Because I, for one, have had it with these (bleep) biosecurity risks due to (bleep) under-regulated industries in this (bleep) complex integrated global economy.

Octopuses Map Their World Through “Suckerotopy”

Olson, Cassady et al. “Neuronal segmentation in cephalopod arms.” Nature Communications.

Scientists have confirmed once again, and to the surprise of nobody, that octopuses are epic. While it’s well-established that these charismatic mollusks basically have prehensile brains, a team has now zoomed in on the axial nerve cords that animate the tentacles, revealing some of the mechanics behind their coordination of such segmented anatomy.

“The octopus has a motor control challenge of enormous complexity,” said researchers led by Cassady Olson of the University of Chicago. “Each of its eight arms is a muscular hydrostat, a soft-bodied structure that lacks a rigid skeleton and moves with near infinite degrees of freedom.”

“Even with this complexity, octopuses control behaviors effectively along the length of a single arm, across all eight arms and between suckers,” the team said. “The neural circuits underlying these behaviors have been unexplored with modern molecular and cellular methods.”

By studying the nervous system of the California two-spot octopus (Octopus bimaculoides) the researchers discovered that axial cords nerves “form a spatial topographic map” for each sucker, which they call “suckerotopy.” In other words, octopuses generate topographic maps of their own suckers, which helps them coordinate the immense motor and sensory input from these appendages.  

Bonus points to the authors for including video footage of octopuses doing neat stuff, like playing with a baseball and emerging from what looks like ancient Greek pottery. Mother Nature gets a 10/10, would evolve eight-limbed intelligent molluscs again.

The Moon is a Harsh Viscous 

Zhu, Meng-Hua et al. “Obliteration of ancient impact basins on the Moon by viscous relaxation.” Nature Astronomy.

The Moon was born in the cataclysmic fallout of a crash between Earth and a Mars-sized object—and that was the easy part. Earth and the Moon were bombarded with a heavy flux of space rocks for hundreds of millions of years after they formed (talk about a traumatic childhood!). 

Earth has erased most craters from this time because it moisturizes daily, but the Moon is an airless inactive world that should have preserved an estimated 300 craters with diameters greater than 185 miles. Yet there are only about 40 ancient crater basins on this massive scale on the lunar surface. What gives? Who ate all the craters?

This week, scientists presented a new explanation for the mysterious discrepancy: Viscous relaxation. It sounds like something Gwynth Paltrow wants to sell you, but it is actually a geological process that smooths out terrestrial surfaces over time. In the case of the Moon, the team found that viscous relaxation from high temperatures in the crust, fueled in part by radioactive elements, could have obliterated hundreds of impact basins.

This scenario offers “a realistic explanation for the low number of basins observed on the Moon,” said Meng-Hua Zhu of the Macau University of Science and Technology. “The substantial relaxation of early basins suggests that terrestrial planets…may have suffered far more impacts than the basin records indicate” but those “early epochs are obliterated.”

And with that, it’s time for all of us to experience the substantial relaxation of the weekend. Obliterate responsibly.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Welcome back to the Abstract! 

This week, it’s time to demand a new planet. Don’t we deserve it? Haven’t we been good? Fortunately, we may be on the cusp of finally discovering whether the solar system has, indeed, been hiding a massive world up its sleeve. Can you imagine the fight over naming this world, if it actually is discovered? I’m already exhausted. Let’s just skip the fuss and call it Becky.

Then, we’ll hang around the outer system for a while to check in on Pluto and Charon. How did they meet? Violently, it turns out! Next, scientists confirm that saber teeth are extremely efficient at converting living things into dead things. Last, meet Punk and Emo, founding members of the mollusc underground. It’s a week of deep space and deep time; enjoy the ride.

All I Want for Christmas 2025 is A GIANT PLANET

Siraj, Amir et al. “Orbit of a Possible Planet X.” The Astrophysical Journal.

For nearly a decade, scientists have speculated that an undiscovered giant planet lurks in the distant reaches of the solar system. The existence of this unconfirmed “Planet X” or “Planet Nine” could explain strange observations of objects far beyond Neptune, known as trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). 

These TNOs appear to be being gravitationally influenced by some unknown entity, though there is a lot of debate about the origin of the anomalies—or whether they are “real” at all. Planet X is one popular hypothesis, but scientists have also speculated that the anomalies could point to an expansive disk of smaller objects, or even a primordial black hole. The effects may also just be a temporary coincidence that does not require the invocation of some hidden hulking entity.

To help constrain these possibilities, scientists have presented new predictions about Planet X, assuming it exists, in part by expanding the sample of TNOs from 11 objects to 51. The results suggest that a hypothetical Planet X would be about 4.4 times as massive as Earth, and occupy an orbit about 300 times farther from the Sun than Earth..

Most importantly, the study’s projected orbit places Planet X right into the sights of Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), a major new astronomical facility in Chile. LSST is expected to begin operating later this year, and it will be especially adept at illuminating the “here be space dragons” parts of our solar system map.

“Nearly all of the parameter space for the unseen planet proposed here falls within LSST’s field of view and detection limits, so if such a planet exists, it is likely to be discovered early on in the survey,” said researchers led by Amir Siraj of Princeton University. “LSST will simultaneously reveal whether the observed clustering of distant TNOs…is real, an observational selection effect, or a statistical fluke, given the large number of expected TNO discoveries.”

In other words, we may genuinely be on the cusp of adding a new planet to our solar family—or, perhaps, learning that Planet X was just an astronomical mirage. LSST is poised to answer the riddle, one way or another. 

In addition to the exciting prospect, the new study offers other tantalizing predictions. The team found that the planet’s projected orbit is probably aligned with the plane of the solar system, a result that contrasts with past studies that predicted the planet would orbit at an angle. The angle of the orbit has implications for the origins of the planet; a world aligned to the plane of the solar system is more likely to be a homegrown member of our solar family, whereas a planet with a more inclined orbit could have been gravitationally captured by the Sun after making an interstellar journey from its native star system. 

Look, we’re living through an overwhelming time of climate disasters, political strife, and obscene inequities. I really think we deserve a new planet, as a treat. I’ll even take a primordial black hole, if that’s what’s on offer. Given that LSST is not set to start running until the back-end of 2025, it will probably be at least a year before the existence of a planet is confirmed or refuted. But if anyone starts a betting market on this long-sought mystery, put me down for Planet X.  

‘Kiss-and-Capture’: The Pluto-Charon Story

Denton, C. Adeene et al. “Capture of an ancient Charon around Pluto.” Nature Geoscience.

Speaking of TNOs, let’s talk about the most famous of them all: Pluto. This farflung world was the OG Planet Nine before it was officially downgraded to a dwarf planet in 2006, a decision that ignited an astronomical culture war. But though Pluto and its moon Charon aren’t big enough to count as planets, they are giants for TNOs; indeed, the Pluto-Charon system is the largest binary in the known TNO population. (Pluto is about two thirds the size of Earth’s Moon, and Charon is about half the size of Pluto.)

Scientists have long suspected that the system formed in the wake of a collision between two icy bodies billions of years ago, but the dynamics behind this event have defied easy explanation.

Now, scientists have developed a new formation model for this system that they call the “kiss-and-capture” regime. In this scenario, the two parent bodies of Pluto-Charon collided and then kind of just merged together for about 10 to 15 hours, before separating into the distinct bodies we see today. 

“Kiss-and-capture leaves the bodies mostly intact; however, it does result in the resurfacing of Charon and a large portion of Pluto,” said researchers led by Adeene Denton of the University of Arizona. The scenario provides “a new foundation for the accumulation of geological features observed today, including Charon’s widespread fracture network and Pluto’s ancient ridge–trough system, which reflects early and widespread extension.”

Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer when kisses keep the bodies mostly intact. Given that Pluto has a giant heart-shaped region on its surface, this binary is really shaping up to be the most romantically coded system in the solar system.

Brushing Up on Saber Teeth  

Pollock, Thalia et al. “Functional optimality underpins the repeated evolution of the extreme “saber-tooth” morphology.” Current Biology.

You don’t need anyone to tell you that saber teeth are rad. They are deadly weapons that grow out of skulls. The allure is self-evident. But just in case you wanted empirical proof to back it up, scientists have now demonstrated that “extreme saber teeth” are functionally optimal for killing bites, which explains why they have independently evolved at least five times in mammals and mammal ancestors (including gorgonopsians).

To assess the advantages of saber teeth versus other canine morphologies, researchers examined 95 teeth from carnivorous mammals, including 25 from saber-toothed animals like Smilodon, Homotherium, and Thylacosmilus. The team concluded that saber teeth “optimize puncture performance at the expense of breakage resistance,” meaning that these dental daggers evolved to deliver swift death.

Predatory scenarios for saber-toothed animals “favor a killing bite through penetration causing tissue damage and blood loss over the suffocation through clamp-and-hold bite of conical-toothed pantherine felids,” such as snow leopards, said researchers led by Tahlia Pollock of the University of Bristol. 

The most recent saber-toothed cat, Smilodon, went extinct only 10,000 years ago, so our ancestors would have encountered it. In fact, saber-toothed cats may have occasionally preyed on humans. But those iconic canines are no longer spilling blood and severing arteries out there in the wild anywhere, suggesting that “the niche(s) they once occupied do not exist in the modern context,” according to the study.

It’s bittersweet to live in an era devoid of saber teeth. While I wouldn’t want to see these fatal fangs up close, the world is undoubtedly duller without them.

Punk is Dead! Like…Really, Really Dead

Sutton, Mark et al. “New Silurian aculiferan fossils reveal complex early history of Mollusca.” Nature.

A nice bonus of discovering a new species is that you typically get to name it. Scientists have been having fun with this responsibility for decades, which is why we have spiders called Hotwheels sisyphus, fungus called Spongiforma squarepantsii, and wasps called Aha ha. 

Now, scientists have continued this tradition with two new mollusc species identified from fossils that date back 430 million years ago. Everyone, meet Punk (Punk ferox) and (Emo vorticaudum).  

Punk is named for the “fancied resemblance of the spicule array to the spiked hairstyles associated with the punk rock movement” paired with ferox (Latin) meaning “wild, bold, defiant,” said researchers led by Mark Sutton of Imperial College London. 

Emo is named “after the emo musical genre related to punk rock, whose exponents canonically bear long ‘bangs’ or fringes” which is reminiscent of the fossilized mollusc’s exoskeleton, the team added. In addition, Emo’s “anterior valves” resemble “studded clothing.”  

There you have it: mohawks, devilocks, studs, and other punk culture mainstays were pioneered by rabble-rousing molluscs all the way back in the Silurian period, long before animals ever walked—let alone crowd-surfed—on land. 

Now all we need is to discover a new species of screeching weasel to really round out the punk biological kingdom.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Let’s start 2025 off strong by avoiding it entirely and escaping a thousand years into the past to an Amazonian civilization of forest islands, garden cities, and duck tales. From there, we’ll flee even farther from the present, though we’ll keep the “enchanted forest” vibe going strong. 

Then, the BATS are SURFING. What else do you want to know? Close up shop; we’ve reached the pinnacle of enlightenment. And finally, want to see some robots hula hoop? You came to the right place.

Happy New Year to all who acknowledge the passage of time, and congratulations to anyone who has managed to transcend it.

The Ancient Garden Cities of Llanos de Mojos 

Hermengildo, Tiago et al. “Stable isotope evidence for pre-colonial maize agriculture and animal management in the Bolivian Amazon.” Nature Human Behaviour.

It’s unwise to romanticize any past society or culture. Humans are reliably humans, with all that this entails, across time and continents. But when you encounter tales of garden cities linked by vast causeways and populated by people and their pet ducks, it can be a little hard not to indulge in daydreams about life there. 

That’s the scene unveiled in a new study on the Casarabe culture, who lived in the Llanos de Mojos region of the Bolivian Amazon between 500 and 1400, before the arrival of Europeans. Over the centuries, these people built roughly 200 monumental mounds linked by more than 600 miles of canals and causeways. The sprawl included primary urban centers and small forest islands, which are cultivated patches of trees amid the wetland plains. 

“The sheer volume of sites and their architectural layout, divided into a four-tier settlement system…indicate that the people of the Casarabe culture created a new social and public landscape through monumentality, leading to low-density urbanism,” said researchers led by Tiago Hermengildo of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology. “The extent and complexity of the Casarabe settlement network present a unique context in the South American lowlands.”

To better understand the diets and lifestyles of these people, Hermengildo and his colleagues collected isotope data from the remains of 86 humans and 68 animals (including mammals, reptiles, birds, and fish) that lived in Llanos de Mojos between 700 and 1400. The results revealed that maize was the central staple of the Casarabe diet—both for its people, and its ducks.

“We provide evidence that muscovy ducks (Cairina moschata), the only known domesticated vertebrate in the South American lowlands, had substantial maize intake suggesting intentional feeding, or even their domestication, from as early as 800 CE,” said the team. “Similar isotopic evidence indicative of maize feeding practices was also reported in muscovy duck from Panama, suggesting that maize was a key element in the domestication of ducks throughout the American continent.”

Feeding ducks: a meditative passtime for the ages. Though the birds were raised for sustenance, I like to imagine a few charismatic drakes and hens earned a role as companions. 

But regardless of the charm quotients of bygone ducks, these findings are part of a wave of emerging research revealing that ancient cultures in the Amazon Basin were far more complex and extensive than previously realized—and researchers have only started to scratch the surface of many of these sites. Get your brain checked now, because this field is going to be throwing out head-spinners and mind-bogglers for years to come.

Yellowstone’s Lost Woods 

Pederson, Gregory T. et al. “Dynamic treeline and cryosphere response to pronounced mid-Holocene climatic variability in the US Rocky Mountains.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As global temperatures rise, alpine snowpack and glaciers are receding, a pattern that often exposes fossils, artifacts, and other relics that have been locked in ice for millennia. 

For instance, scientists recently discovered an eerily well-preserved forest of whitepark pines that melted out of an ice patch on Yellowstone’s Beartooth Plateau. This forest stand thrived about 5,500 years ago, but the ice left it in such pristine condition that scientists were able to measure tree rings and reconstruct the climate these trees experienced over five centuries.

“The extraordinary quality of wood preservation at the…ice-patch site provides an opportunity to generate a multicentury, mid-Holocene record of high-elevation temperature during the life of the forest stand, and to elucidate the climate conditions that contributed to the stand’s demise and subsequent growth of the ice patch,” said researchers led by Gregory Pederson of the U.S. Geological Survey. 

The treeline in the Beartooth Mountains was at a much higher elevation 5,500 years ago due to a multi-century warm spell. Then, around 5,100 years ago, Iceland went on an epic volcanic bender, as it is prone to do from time to time, causing a “summer cooling anomaly” that “led to rapid ice-patch growth and preservation of the trees,” according to the study.

In other words, Iceland’s stinky lava breath likely killed off this forest all the way in Wyoming by cooling the Northern Hemisphere, which entombed the stand in ice. 

The study notes that the treeline is likely to creep back up the slopes again as anthropogenic climate change melts ice off at high elevations. Pines may grow once more on the ancestral grounds of this ancient forest, as a consequence of human activity.   

BATS SURF

Hurme, Edward et al. “Bats surf storm fronts during spring migration.” Science. 

Bats surf. 

Let that sentence breathe. Just two words, yet it may well be the shortcut to nirvana. Dust to dust. Hallelujah. BATS SURF.

In addition to being my new incantation for 2025, “bats surf” is a scientific discovery reported this week. Researchers outfitted 71 female common noctule bats (Nyctalus noctule) with tags and followed their spring migration across Europe, which lasted about 46 days and covered nearly 700 miles. Some of these batgirls covered an astonishing 237 miles in just a single night, much farther than previously recorded flights. 

The noctules were able to achieve these distances by timing their flights to coincide with warm fronts that buoyed them along with strong winds. In other words, bats surf the tropospheric waves. This skill is especially important for female noctules, as they must navigate migrations at the same time they are gestating future surfer pups in their bellies.  

“Females are generally pregnant in spring and can delay the embryo’s development through torpor,” said researchers led by Edward Hurme of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior.

“As these bats wait for the right migration conditions, they must either invest in their embryo while increasing their own energetic cost of flight or delay the development of the embryo, possibly affecting the pup’s survival,” the team said. “This phenological flexibility may be key for their long-term survival and maintenance of migration.”

Parenthood is hard enough without having to worry getting literally weighed down by your brood on the road. There’s no hanging loose for these bats; they are truly on a journey of surf-ival. 

Robots Taking Hula Hoop Jobs

Zhu, Xintong et al. “Geometrically modulated contact forces enable hula hoop levitation.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

You might be a scientist if you look at a hula hoop and think “this familiar playtime activity can serve as an archetype of the challenging class of problems involving parametric excitation by driven supports and the mechanics of dynamic contact points with frictional and normal forces.”

That’s a quote from a new study that investigated the complex dynamics behind “hula hoop levitation,” which describes how skilled hoopers synchronize their body movements in ways that appear to defy gravity. The study belongs to one of my favorite research traditions—the earnest examination of an outwardly trivial item, a class that also includes the nano-pasta work we recently covered and a legendary 2022 breakdown of the fluid dynamics of Oreos. 

“Seemingly simple toys and games often involve surprisingly subtle physics and mathematics,” said researchers led by Xintong Zhu of New York University. “The physics of hula hooping was first studied as an excitation phenomenon soon after the toy became a fad, and more recent interest has come during its renewed popularity as a form of exercise and performance art.”

In addition to outlining the physical underpinnings of levitation, the authors took the inspired step of experimenting with a variety of hula-hooping robots. The study is punctuated by frankly delightful footage of these machines hooping their cold metal hearts out. See for yourself; the study will be open-access for six months.

The upshot: We now have experimental confirmation that people (or robots) with “sufficiently curvy” figures have a hooping advantage. The team notes that “an hourglass-shaped body of hyperboloidal form successfully suspends the hoop.” 

Shout out to all you hyperboloids out there! Happy hooping.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Welcome back to a very special holiday edition of the Abstract! I hope this week brought you all the seasonal mirth to which you are entitled. 

As the year winds to a close, I’m sharing five studies that stood out to me in 2024. They are not judged by any specific criteria other than general mind bogglery. We’ll start with banana galaxies; no further explanation needed. Then, the new record-holders for brightest thingummy and biggest genome. Next, we are living in an RNA world and we are all RNA girls. And to close out 2024, a vision of life in the lunar underground. 

It’s Bananas All the Way Down

Pandya, Viraj et al. “Galaxies Going Bananas: Inferring the 3D Geometry of High-redshift Galaxies with JWST-CEERS.” The Astrophysical Journal.

The James Webb Space Telescope, launched on Christmas Day 2021, has been looking at weird space stuff for over two years now, yielding a constant stream of insights about the early universe, alien exoplanets, and whatever else it sets its unprecedented sights on.

To that end, 2024 kicked off with the landmark discovery that baby galaxies from the dawn of time were…bananas. Scientists reported in January that galaxies at high redshifts—meaning they were observed in the very ancient universe—often seem to take on a “banana-like” shape. 

“In this paper, we place new constraints on the 3D shapes of high-redshift galaxies using JWST observations from the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) survey,” said researchers led by Viraj Pandya of Columbia University. “We will illustrate how this curved ‘banana-like’ joint distribution” arises from galaxies “with intrinsically elongated 3D shapes.” 

The results suggest that many galaxies go through an awkward “prolate” phase of morphological elongation before maturing into more familiar galactic shapes we see today, like clusters and disks. And while Pandya and his colleagues see bananas in space, these shapes have also been described as pickles or cigars. It all depends on what kind of treat you want to see at the edge of the universe.  

A Sun a Day Keeps the Doctor Away

Wolf, Christian et al. “The accretion of a solar mass per day by a 17-billion solar mass black hole.” Nature Astronomy. 

2024 had its fair share of dark moments, but there was one very literal bright spot: Scientists identified the most radiant object known in the universe, which is a quasar called J0529−4351. Quasars are pyrotechnic galactic cores and the most ludicrously luminous entities in space. Their “implausibly huge output of light,” as it is described in the above study, is generated by intense gravitational interactions between supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies, and forms of matter (gas, dust, doomed civilizations) that accrete around those holes.  

“In terms of luminosity and likely growth rate, J0529−4351 is the most extreme quasar known,” said researchers led by Christian Wolf of Australian National University. “The black hole in this quasar accretes around one solar mass per day onto an existing mass of ∼17 billion solar masses.”

In other words, J0529−4351 is eating the equivalent of a whole Sun every single day. It’s the Gaston of quasars. As a consequence of this insane diet, J0529−4351 is 500 trillion times more luminous than the Sun. Just utterly incomprehensible radiance. What’s wild is that the record for brightest quasar has been repeatedly broken in recent years, so it’s possible that even J0529−4351—an unprecedented light-barfing marvel—may be outshone in the near future. 

Big Genome Energy

Fernández, Pol et al. "A 160 Gbp fork fern genome shatters size record for eukaryotes." Cell.

Pop quiz: What species has the biggest genome ever found? You would be forgiven for not guessing that it is (drumroll) some random fern in New Caledonia. And yet, in May, scientists reported that Tmesipteris oblanceolata, a tropical fork fern that appears totally inconspicuous, bears the most “obese genome” ever discovered. 

The fern’s genome contains 160 billion base pairs, making it 50 times bigger than a human genome and 7 percent bigger than the genome of the Japanese andromeda, a flowering plant that previously held the record. 

“Here, we present the discovery of the largest eukaryotic genome so far reported,” said researchers led by Pol Fernández of the Institut Botanic de Barcelona. “This record-breaking genome challenges current understanding and opens new avenues to explore the evolutionary dynamics of genomic gigantism.”

“It cannot be completely ruled out that even larger genomes may be uncovered in the future,” the team concluded. “Nevertheless, the multiple physiological, ecological, and evolutionary costs associated with genomic expansions at such gigantic scales most likely suggest that if the upper limit has not been reached yet, that of Tmesipteris oblanceolata must be very close to it.”

In other words, this species may well be the world's genomic heavyweight champion. And it’s just some tropical fern! Nature: an inscrutable weirdo.

It’s a Mad (RNA) World 

Papastavrou, Nikolaos et al, “RNA-catalyzed evolution of catalytic RNA.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

How did life first arise on Earth? There are lots of compelling mythological answers to this question, such as “the Sky and Earth Hooked Up” and “Magic Dirt.” The question has also inspired a number of tantalizing scientific hypotheses, including what’s known as “RNA World.” In this leading scenario, the first Earthlings were self-replicating molecules of ribonucleic acid (RNA) that emerged about four billion years ago, before the emergence of proteins or deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).

In March, scientists bolstered support for RNA World by developing an RNA enzyme that can perform some of the functions associated with these early speculative molecules, including making accurate copies of RNA strands and introducing variants over time. This discovery is a stepping stone toward recreating forms of primordial evolution in laboratory conditions, where they can be directly probed for clues about the origins of life, known as abiogenesis.

“At some point during the early history of RNA-based evolution, it is thought that RNA evolved the ability to catalyze its own replication, acting as an RNA-dependent RNA polymerase,” said researchers led by Nikolaos Papastavrou of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. “This study demonstrates the critical importance of replication fidelity for maintaining heritable information in an RNA-based evolving system, such as is thought to have existed during the early history of life on Earth.”

The study offers a new piece of a puzzle that has enraptured untold generations: How can life spring up from non-living materials? What kind of cosmic magic trick is that? Enchanted dirt may genuinely not be far off from the truth, in the end.

You Can Take the Human Out of the Cave, But…

Carrer, Leonardo et al. “Radar evidence of an accessible cave conduit on the Moon below the Mare Tranquillitatis pit.” Nature Astronomy. 

Humans simply cannot resist a cozy cave. Caves were our starter homes; spaces used not just as shelters but as canvases for our imaginations and hubs of social and ritual activity (see: tortoise parties). So perhaps it’s no surprise that as we expand our exploratory efforts into outer space, we still cannot pass up a snug subterranean pad, even if it is on the Moon.

To that end, scientists reported in July that the Mare Tranquillitatis pit (MPT), a 330-foot-deep opening about 250 miles away from the Apollo 11 landing site, may be the entrance to an underground cave system made of ancient lava tubes. The team was able to map out this structure, which is the deepest known pit on the Moon, with radar reflections from NASA’s  Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

“We find that a portion of the radar reflections originating from the MTP can be attributed to a subsurface cave conduit tens of metres long, suggesting that the MTP leads to an accessible cave conduit beneath the Moon’s surface,” said researchers led by Leonardo Carrer of the University of Trento. “This discovery suggests that the MTP is a promising site for a lunar base, as it offers shelter from the harsh surface environment and could support long-term human exploration of the Moon.”

It would be hilarious if all of those lofty human aspirations of a spacefaring techno-utopia culminated in us becoming cavemen again, just on a different world. The study also gets extra points for occasionally sounding like a high-end real estate listing, describing the pit as “an elliptical skylight with vertical or overhanging walls and a sloping pit floor that seems to extend further underground.” Dang, finally a Moon cave with the right specs—though it comes unfurnished and lacks desirable amenities (including breathable air).  Who’s up for some space spelunking?

That’s a wrap on the Abstract for 2024. Thanks so much for reading, and Happy New Year! 

Welcome back to the Abstract! 

In the spirit of catching up with relatives over the holidays, I’d like to introduce you to a member of your extra-extended family: The Saber-toothed Gorgonopsian from Mallorca. Get acquainted with your great-great-great (insert about 100 million greats here) grandmother’s cousin. It’s probably not going to behave well at the dinner table. 

Then, the grim prognoses of Disney princesses are outlined in one of the world’s premiere medical journals. Next, I’m back on the cannibalism beat; I just can’t help myself. Finally, an archaeological adventure a world away.

Happy winter solstice to all who thrive in darkness. If you’re in the Southern Hemisphere, say hi to the Sun for us.

Wet Hot Pangean Summer

Matamales-Andreu, Rafel et al. “Early–middle Permian Mediterranean gorgonopsian suggests an equatorial origin of therapsids.” Nature Communications.

If you trace your lineage far back enough, you will eventually reach therapsid ancestors. Mammals sprouted out of this ancient group of creatures some 225 million years ago, around the same time that dinosaurs were ascending to world domination. But though therapsids were abundant during the Permian era, the period before the emergence of mammals and dinosaurs, gaps in the fossil record have made it difficult to reconstruct the origins of this ancestral group.

Enter: DA21/17-01-01, a fossil specimen that dates back at least 270 million years, making it likely the oldest therapsid ever found. The dog-sized animal was a “gorgonopsian,” a group of therapsid carnivores with saber-like teeth reminiscent of later mammals, but that still maintained more reptilian features, including oviparity (they laid eggs rather than birthing live offspring). 

Paleontologists were surprised to discover this gorgonopsian on the Spanish island of Mallorca, which was located in the equatorial region of the supercontinent Pangaea during the Permian. Almost all other gorgonopsian remains are preserved in locations like Russia and South Africa that would have been at higher latitudes, nearer to the poles. Previous work has suggested that therapsids originated at higher latitudes and then radiated into equatorial regions, but DA21/17-01-01 hints that the reverse may be true.

“The gorgonopsian from Mallorca provides the first unequivocal evidence that therapsids were indeed present in the summer wet biomes of equatorial Pangaea during the early–middle Permian transition, suggesting that the group may have originated in lower, tropical latitudes, rather than in the higher latitudes where nearly all of their fossils are known,” said researchers led by Rafel Matamales-Andreu of the Museu Balear de Ciències Naturals. 

“If therapsids originated in the tropics, this has implications for metabolic evolution in the clade,” the team added.

First off, let’s acknowledge that “the gorgonopsian from Mallorca” is a sublime phrase. It should be the title of a Criterion Collection classic. But more importantly, the discovery of this “unambiguously early” therapsid in the Pangean tropics offers a fleeting glimpse of a “ghost lineage” of mammal precursors. Ghost lineages are branches of the evolutionary tree that are presumed to exist based on circumstantial evidence, but that didn’t leave direct traces in the fossil record. Therapsid fossils proliferate in the middle and upper Permian, but scientists have long suspected that they originated much earlier, more than 300 million years ago.

“We confirm the traditional understanding that there was a relatively long ghost lineage of about 15 million years between the origin of ‘total-group’ therapsids and the radiation of the major therapsid clades,” around 278 million years ago, the team said. 

“This discovery opens the door for findings that may fill in the early therapsid fossil gap in the lower Permian, not in high latitude sites as traditionally thought, but in the so far poorly explored lower–middle Permian areas of palaeoequatorial Pangaea. Those locations hold the potential to elucidate the early evolution of therapsids and the origins of mammalian features.”

In other words, it’s worth searching for more of these early therapsids at overlooked sites, like the Balearic Islands. Some features that distinguish us as mammals today have their roots in what the study describes, somewhat luxuriously, as the “ancient summer wet biome of equatorial Pangaea.”

Death Becomes Disney Princesses 

Van Dijk, Sanne et al. “Living happily ever after? The hidden health risks of Disney princesses,” The British Medical Journal.

Every December, the British Medical Journal publishes a Christmas issue filled with parody studies and light-hearted editorials. My favorite example this year confronts the pressing health problems of Disney princesses, such as Cinderella’s risk of respiratory illness, Belle’s exposure to rabies, and Pocahontas’ bone-shattering penchant for diving off high cliffs.

But perhaps the best case study is Jasmine, whose social isolation is described in these devastating terms: “While the Genie might sing ‘you ain’t never had a friend like me,’ the truth is that Jasmine has no friends at all,” according to researchers led by Sanne van Dijk of the University of Twente. 

Wow, the medical consensus about Jasmine is pretty harsh. To add insult to injury, the editorial notes that Jasmine’s one companion, the tiger Rajah, “poses a risk of zoonotic infection as well as craniofacial and cervical spinal injuries” adding that “although Rajah seems like a sweet tiger, its natural instincts could lead to a dangerous and potentially fatal situation—a true Arabian nightmare.”

Please Disney, listen to these experts and start showing the real-life consequences of the princess lifestyle. We need a rabid Belle foaming at the mouth, Pocahontas in a full body cast, and Rajah brutally mauling Jasmine. Otherwise, we are sending a message to young people that it is safe to hang out with captive tigers and chimeric beasts while jumping off Niagara Falls. 

I will note that the study has nothing to say about Moana, who I will hereafter conclude is the healthiest Disney princess. We salute a physiologically robust chief.

Massacre at Charterhouse Warren

Schulting, Rick et al. ‘The darker angels of our nature’: Early Bronze Age butchered human remains from Charterhouse Warren, Somerset, UK.” Antiquity.

Steel yourself for some bad vibes, because this is a story about an unhinged cannibalistic massacre that occurred 4,000 years ago. Archaeologists working at Charterhouse Warren, an English Bronze Age burial site, have discovered evidence of a grotesque attack designed to “other” its many victims through butchery and consumption of flesh.

“Some 37 men, women and children—and possibly many more—were killed at close quarters with blunt instruments and then systematically dismembered and defleshed, their long bones fractured in a way that can only be described as butchery,” said researchers led by Rick Schulting of the University of Oxford. “Body parts were deposited in what was probably a single event between 2210 and 2010 BC, in a partly infilled shaft that was still 15 meters deep.”

“While evidence for interpersonal violence is not unknown in British prehistory, nothing else on this scale has been found,” the team noted.

It’s unlikely that these acts were motivated by either “culinary cannibalism,” embodied by Hannibal Lecter, or “survival cannibalism,” the desperate acts of starvation typified by tragedies like the Donner Party. The cruel and unusual treatment of the victims, even after their deaths, suggests a deliberate attempt at dehumanization.

The events “may be best interpreted as an extreme form of ‘violence as performance,’ in which the aim was to not only eradicate another group, but to thoroughly ‘other’ them in the process,” according to the study. “While the remains themselves seem to have been removed from view soon afterwards (to judge from the paucity of carnivore scavenging), an event of this scale could not be hidden, and no doubt resonated across the wider region and over time. In this sense it was a political statement.”

My advice is to steer clear of political statements that demand ritualistic cannibalism, but I’m open to the marketplace of ideas.

It Belongs in a Marseum

Holcomb, Justin A et al. “The emerging archaeological record of Mars.” Nature Astronomy.

Let’s close out with an archaeology story that doesn’t involve dehumanizing bloodbaths; we will need to travel to another planet to accomplish this task. No massacres have occurred on Mars at the time of this writing, but the red planet is home to plenty of archaeological sites and artifacts, which I shall hereafter refer to as Martifacts. 

Technological relics on Mars, such as dead rovers or spent heat shields, are part of the human archaeological record, raising questions about the culture and heritage value of Martifacts.      

“Some scientists have referred to this cultural material as ‘space trash’ or ‘galactic litter,’ implying that it may have limited scientific value and could cause environmental problems and put future missions at risk,” said researchers led by Justin Holcomb of the Kansas Geological Survey. 

“We agree that these concerns warrant further investigation, but we argue that the objects need to be evaluated as important cultural heritage in need of protection because they record the legacy of space exploration by our species,” the team said. 

The article reminds me of the heartrending xkcd comic that portrays NASA’s Spirit rover coming to terms with its abandonment on Mars. Space archaeology can seem esoteric but it is relevant to consider values about our off-Earth heritage at a time when visions of Martian colonization are culturally ascendent. There is more to this extraterrestrial archaeological record than the sum of its dusty metal parts. 

Also, I’m calling dibs on the remains of the Opportunity rover right now and we all know that dibs are legally binding.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Welcome back to the Abstract! 

How are you? Do you feel emotionally stable? Just checking because our main story this week is about the odds that our dear blessed Sun will release a superflare that wipes out global infrastructure—or worse! TW: Heliophysics.

Then, a palate cleanser with the Firefly Sparkle, its Best Friend, its New Best Friend, and the Canadians we met along the way (it will make sense, I promise). Next, a spotlight on the small but consequential poops that could help fight climate change. Last, there’s a party at tortoise rock, but your RSVP is 35,000 years too late. There’s some real hair-raisers and heart-warmers this week. Enjoy!

Can the Sun Produce Apocalyptic Superflares? IMO Might Be GTK!

Vasilyev, Valeriy et al. “Sun-like stars produce superflares roughly once per century.” Science.

Once again, it is time to salute the almighty Sun. This week, scientists made new strides in addressing a longstanding and rather unsettling mystery: Does the Sun ever produce “superflares,” which are stellar outbursts that are thousands of times more destructive than a typical solar flare? It’s a great question to ask if you are interested in the odds that the Sun might obliterate civilization, and perhaps a whole lot else, within our lifetimes.

Now, new research based on observations of more than 56,000 Sun-like stars suggests that they produce superflares around once every century on average, which is a much higher rate than previous estimates. But before you start drawing up blueprints for a subterranean fortress, let me emphasize that the study does not conclude that the Sun necessarily shares this predilection for carnage. We just do not yet know enough about the risk of solar superflares, which was one motivation for the new study.

“Solar flares have been observed for less than two centuries,” said researchers led by Valeriy Vasilyev of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research. The team noted that the strongest impact in this brief record is the Carrington Event, a massive solar storm in the year 1859 that reached a total energy exceeding 10³² erg (an erg is a very small unit in the centimetre-gram-second system for measuring energy; there are 10 million ergs in one joule). 

The Carrington number falls well below the threshold of superflares observed around other main sequence stars like the Sun, which range from 10³⁴ erg to 10³⁶ erg. I don’t have a handy comparison here, but this is the type of energy that could potentially mess with a planet’s atmosphere, wreak havoc on ecosystems, and melt the ice on outer solar system moons.

“It is unknown whether the Sun can unleash [...] superflares, and if so, how frequently that could happen,” the researchers said. “The period of direct solar observation is too short to reach any firm conclusions.”

One window into this mystery is the cosmogenic isotope record, which is an earthly archive of solar activity that shows up in natural sources like ice cores and tree rings (for more details about this record, check out the lead story in a previous column). This record has exposed five confirmed (and three candidate) extreme solar events over the past 10,000 years that would have caused major technological disruptions if they happened today. But there’s no recent evidence that the Sun has unleashed superflares powerful enough to trigger, for instance, an extinction event.  

In their study, Vasilyev and his colleagues amassed a huge dataset of Sun-like stars observed by NASA’s retired Kepler space telescope. The team is not the first to plumb the Kepler archive for superflares around Sun-like stars. But the new study is based on a larger observation set  that includes objects left out of previous work, such as stars with unknown rotation periods and stars that are not in isolated positions in the sky. 

The 56,000+ stars in this sample flare at frequencies that are approximately two orders of magnitude higher than previous measurements, averaging out at once a century. But it will take more research to understand whether the Sun shares this propensity with members of its stellar class, or if superflares only occur in certain circumstances that (hopefully) don’t currently apply to the Sun.

“We cannot exclude the possibility that there is an inherent difference between flaring and non-flaring stars that was not accounted for by our selection criteria,” Vasilyev and his colleagues said. “If so, the flaring stars in the Kepler observations would not be representative of the Sun.” 

“If, instead, our sample of Sun-like stars is representative of the Sun’s future behavior, it is substantially more likely to produce a superflare than was previously thought,” they concluded.

There’s one possible solution to the Fermi paradox. Hahaha…sleep tight! 

The Adventures of the Firefly Sparkle and Friends 

Mowla, Lamiya and Iyer, Kartheik et al. “Formation of a low-mass galaxy from star clusters in a 600-million-year-old Universe.” Nature.

Once upon a time, there was a baby galaxy called the Firefly Sparkle. It sounds like it hails from the My Little Pony universe, but the Firefly Sparkle was born during cosmic dawn, an era that unfolded a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. New observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed incredible details about this galactic infant, including the presence of two neighboring galaxies called Firefly-Best Friend and Firefly-New Best Friend. 

“The Firefly Sparkle exhibits traits of a young, gas-rich galaxy in its early formation stage,” said researchers co-led by Lamiya Mowla of Wellesley University and Kartheik Iyer of Columbia University. “These observations provide our first spectrophotometric view of a typical galaxy in its early stages, in a 600-million-year-old Universe.”

Because looking deep into space means looking back in time, we can only observe the version of the Firefly Sparkle and its Best Friends that existed at cosmic dawn. In this early era, the Firefly Sparkle was about 10,000 times less massive than the present Milky Way, but it’s possible that it has ultimately evolved into a galaxy similar to our own somewhere out there beyond our observational limits.

In addition to being a mind-boggler, the study gets extra points for its basis on the Canadian Unbiased Cluster Survey, or CANUCS, which is a specialized JWST experiment run by Canadian researchers. We stand on guard for a top-tier acronym. o7

The Tiny Poops that Could Help Save the World

Sharma, Diksha et al. “Organoclay flocculation as a pathway to export carbon from the sea surface.” Scientific Reports.

I never would have expected the phrase “fecal pellet density” to lift my spirits, but research into the salvatory power of zooplankton poop has managed to do just that this week. 

Zooplankton, a diverse group of tiny aquatic animals, are a key valve in the so-called “biological pump” that removes greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and stores it in seafloor sediments. One speculative solution to the climate crisis is to make this pump more efficient in order to lock away more of the gasses that are contributing to global warming. 

Now, scientists have discovered that sprinkling a little bit of clay dust over an algal bloom, which is a food source for zooplankton, provides some heft to the animals’ excrement. As a consequence, more carbon gas gets pulled down by the clay poop anchors to ocean depths conducive to sequestration.

One zooplankton species produced “denser fecal pellets with 1.8- to 3.6-fold higher sinking velocity compared to controls,” said researchers led by Diksha Sharma of Dartmouth College. “These findings provide insights into how atmospheric dust-derived clay minerals interact with marine microorganisms to enhance the biological carbon pump, facilitating the burial of organic carbon at depths where it is less likely to exchange with the atmosphere.”

And that’s why my vote for Time’s Person of the Year is: Fecal Pellets.

There’s a Party at Tortoise Rock and Your Ancestors Are Invited

Barzilai, Omry et al. “Early human collective practices and symbolism in the Early Upper Paleolithic of Southwest Asia.” Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences. 

Some 35,000 years ago, dozens of people gathered for communal rituals around an engraved tortoise in a hidden chamber of Manot Cave in Israel. That’s the conclusion reached by archaeologists who discovered what they believe is a concealed “ritual compound…in the deepest and darkest part of Manot Cave” that was centered around a geometric depiction of a tortoise on a dolomite boulder.  

“Thus far, Manot Cave is the only site in the Levant to yield clear evidence for the existence of a communal ritual compound in the Upper Paleolithic,” a period that spans approximately 50,000 to 12,000 years ago, said researchers led by Omry Barzilai of the University of Haifa. 

“The reasoning behind the Manot artist’s choice to represent the tortoise in a semi-abstract and symbolic manner remains unknown,” the team added. “Beyond their dietary importance, tortoises probably played a major role in the spiritual world of the Paleolithic people, possibly because of the resemblance in form and function between the shell and the cave, both providing shelter and protection. In the Epipaleolithic period, tortoise remains have also been associated with burial practices.”

The study is worth a look for the images, as well as the slick 3D reconstruction of Manot Cave. This site was discovered quite recently, in 2008, after a bulldozer broke through its roof, but it has already yielded major finds about its human occupants as far back as 55,000 years ago.

Move over, tinsel and string lights: This holiday season, we’re bringing back ritual engraved tortoises. Sometimes, the old ways are best.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Welcome back to the Abstract! This week, mammoth is the main item on the menu—or at least, it was 13,000 years ago in Montana. Scientists reconstructed the diet of a mother who ate like a scimitar-tooth cat and nursed her infant, whose bones are the last human remnant of a once expansive population.

Then, a team delivers a blow to the dream of a habitable Venus, even as another team demonstrates that the early solar system was awash in watery mist. Last, there are spiders using their webs as slingshots, and you ought to know about it. Enjoy! 

The Son of the Mammoth-Eaters

Chatters, James and Potter, Ben et al. “Mammoth featured heavily in Western Clovis diet.” Science Advances.

Some 13,000 years ago, a group of dynamic hunter-gatherers rapidly swept south across North America, which was then a landscape of receding glaciers and gigantic game, like mammoths and American camels. These peoples, known today as the Clovis culture, left behind a wealth of archaeological remains, such as camps filled with tools, sharp weapons, and the butchered remains of their prey (including the Wyoming site mentioned in last week’s story about bone needles). 

But though signs of this enterprising culture are scattered across the continent, only one Clovis individual has been discovered and identified so far in the archaeological record. Anzick-1, who is named after the Montana burial site where he was carefully interred by his people, was between the ages of one and two when he died some 12,900 years ago. His remains have inspired a series of discoveries, especially once he became the first ancient Native American to have his genome fully sequenced about a decade ago. In the wake of that major breakthrough, Anzick-1 was laid to rest again as part of an intertribal burial ceremony during the summer of 2014.

Now, scientists have resolved a major question about the Clovis culture from samples of Anzick-1’s skull, a project that was conducted “in consultation with and support of regional Native American tribes in Montana and Wyoming” according to a new study. It’s clear that these ancient peoples hunted mammoths, but scientists have sparred about the extent to which the Clovis diet centered on extinct proboscideans compared to other available food sources.

“Some researchers contend that Clovis populations were megafaunal specialists to some extent, focusing particularly on mammoth (Mammuthus columbi), while others have argued that such an adaptation was not viable, and thus, Clovis populations were more likely broad-spectrum foragers, regularly incorporating in their diet small game, plants, and perhaps fish,” said researchers co-led by James Chatters of McMaster University and Ben Potter at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

“The resolution of this debate has profound implications for reconstructing the adaptive strategies that allowed rapid expansion of Paleoindians throughout the Western Hemisphere and assessing the impact of that expansion on megafaunal extinctions during the terminal Pleistocene,” the team said.

In other words, the Clovis diet can shed light on how these people managed to spread across immense distances within a few centuries, while also helping to resolve the controversy over the role played in megafaunal extinctions that occurred across the Americas at the tail end of the last Ice Age.  

To that end, the team analyzed the elemental composition of Anzick-1’s bones for clues about what he ate before his early death. The results reveal that he was mostly breastfed, while eating some supplementary meat, a discovery that amazingly opens a window into his mother’s diet while she was nursing him. 

As it turns out, Mama was a mammoth-eater. Subtle isotopic differences in the skull sample indicate that her meals overwhelmingly consisted of mammoth meat, though she likely also ate elk, bison, and Camelops, an extinct North American camel. Her diet is a close match to scimitar-tooth cats that still prowled the continent at this time, according to the study.

“Anzick-1’s maternal diet can be directly compared with diets of other secondary consumers that occupy specific niches and have preferred prey,” the team said. “She is most similar to Homotherium, the scimitar-tooth cats, widely interpreted as juvenile mammoth specialists.”

“While we do not interpret the results from this one individual as bearing directly on the cause(s) of widespread megafaunal extinctions in the Americas at the Pleistocene/Holocene boundary, we do suggest that predation of some megafaunal species by Clovis populations with effective distance weapons may have played a role,” the researchers added. “The loss of this taxon may have played a role in behavioral shifts and the end of Clovis as a distinct cultural tradition in the Americas.”

It is incredible that tiny isotopes in the fragmented skull of a small child can expose macro insights about the sudden obliteration of ancient colossal creatures. But this study also presents an intimate image of a mother nursing her child more than a dozen millennia ago, a timeless act of bonding that left elemental traces of her milk in his bones. Anzick-1 sadly didn’t get to live a long life, but he does have an extraordinary afterlife as the sole corporeal representative of a vast and sprawling culture. 

It reminds me of the following quote from the archaeologist Kathryn Denning, which speaks to the limitations we face in connecting with people of the past.

“What can be said from the vantage point of archaeology is that there is wisdom in knowing the empty spaces—in knowing the difference between what we might someday recover and what we never will ” Denning said in her essay “Impossible Predictions of the Unprecedented.” 

“We will never see an ancient parent’s smile or hear their child’s laugh, except in a dream. We must simply live with that silence. Once in a long while, we discover small red handprints on a cave ceiling that tell us that long ago, a 5-year-old was once lifted up on someone’s shoulders to reach up high, or we find a carefully made toy which bears the marks of baby teeth. Those traces of love and laughter have to be enough.”

Visions of a Venusian Ocean Fade into a Mirage

Constantinou, Tereza et al. “A dry Venusian interior constrained by atmospheric chemistry.” Nature Astronomy.

Bad news this week for anyone invested in the dream of a once-habitable Venus (ahem: me). Scientists studied the atmospheric composition of Venus’s atmosphere to search for clues about water content in its interior. Their results suggest that Venus is internally desiccated, and probably has been for most of its history, casting doubt on longstanding hopes that our neighboring world hosted liquid water oceans billions of years ago.

“A dry Venusian interior is not consistent with Venus having had surface oceans or, by extension, a conventionally habitable climate,” said researchers led by Tereza Constantinou of the University of Cambridge. “These results indicate that Venus probably never experienced conditions conducive to ocean condensation.” 

“Consequently, Venus-like exoplanets or planets within the Venus zone, which the James Webb Space Telescope can characterize, are unlikely to be cool enough to condense liquid water if they formed in situ,” the team added. “This makes these planets improbable candidates for liquid-water habitable conditions.”

You have to hand it to Venus: It seems really committed to inhospitality. 

A Giant Misty Splash Park in the Early Solar System  

Kral, Quentin et al. “An impact-free mechanism to deliver water to terrestrial planets and exoplanets.” Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The Venus story was the shot, but here’s a watery chaser. Another study this week tackled the unsolved mystery of how Earth, and worlds like it, end up hosting liquid water, which is the most essential catalyst for life as we know it. 

One major hypothesis is that Earth received its water primarily from hydrated asteroids that struck its surface more than four billion years ago. But scientists have now proposed an alternate mechanism; as icy asteroids warmed in the early solar system, they sloughed off clouds of sublimated gas that soaked Earth and other worlds, with no need for direct impacts.

“We propose that primordial asteroids were icy and that when the ice sublimated, it formed a gaseous disk that could then reach planets and deliver water,” said researchers led by Quentin Kral of the Paris Observatory. “Our model shows most of the water being delivered between 20 and 30 million years after the birth of the Sun, when the Sun’s luminosity increased sharply.”  

“This offers a new mechanism capable of transporting water to the inner planets in the Solar System,” the team added. “It may even be universal across all exo-planetary systems with respect to habitable-zone planets.”

If this hypothesis is confirmed by future observations, it would certainly boost the odds that watery worlds are common in the universe. The study also gets extra points for the phrase “ten terrestrial oceans of water” which sounds like an ingredient you’d find in a major deity’s recipe book.  

A Test of Real-Life Spidey Senses  

Han, Sarah et al. “Directional web strikes are performed by ray spiders in response to airborne prey vibrations.” Journal of Experimental Biology.

Spiders are well-known for their web-spinning talents, which allow them to catch prey in their deadly silk threads. Most web-spinners lie in wait for a catch, but ray spiders (Theridiosomatidae) play a more active role by pulling their webs into tense conical shapes that they then release to capture prey like a slingshot. 

Scientists took a closer look at this ingenious hunting strategy by filming ray spiders reacting to simulated insect noises as well as live mosquitos that were “tethered to very thin strips of black construction paper attached to the abdomen or hind legs using a small dab of gel SuperGlue” (this is the only time I have ever felt a little sorry for a mosquito). 

The results show that ray spiders pick up on airborne signals from their incoming victims, triggering them to release the nets at high speeds to actively ensnare prey that might otherwise evade capture.

“Given that static webs can pick up airborne sounds, it is plausible that spiders hunting in these webs might also discern useful information about the approach, size and/or behaviors of flying insects before they impact webs,” said authors Sarah Han and Todd Blackledge of the University of Akron. “If this hypothesis is correct, such information could significantly improve the odds of spiders successfully capturing prey.”

It’s definitely worth taking a look through the study, which includes videos and pictures of the spiders in action. 

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Welcome back to the Abstract! 

This week, let’s get our hands dirty by digging deep into a bunch of dinosaur poop, puke, and guts that dates back about 200 million years to the Triassic-Jurassic transition. An amazing story, written in filthy fossilized ink, reveals how dinosaurs ate, crapped, and barfed their way to world domination.

Then, ancient needles at a camp in Wyoming hold clues about the tailored garments that prehistoric peoples depended on for comfort and survival. Next, a squirting cucumber goes ballistic—literally. And if you’ve ever felt stressed out about your social standing, there are fish who understand. I hope it was a happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate, and a restful end of November to everyone else.

The Rise of the Dinosaurs, According to Poop, Puke, and Guts 

Qvarnström, Martin et al. “Digestive contents and food webs record the advent of dinosaur supremacy,” Nature

The fossil record preserves the bones and tracks of extinct creatures, but it is also packed with heaps of poo, puke, and other delightfully yucky stuff from digestion systems of the deep past. These trace fossils are collectively known as bromalites, a category that includes coprolites (fossilized poop), regurgitalites (fossilized upchuck), and cololites (fossilized guts). 

Bromalites are incredibly useful datapoints because they expose the contents of bygone stomachs, allowing researchers to reconstruct diets and food webs with direct evidence that is absent from other parts of the fossil record.

Scientists have now dropped a bomb of a bromalite study that analyzes a whopping 500 poopy, barfy specimens that span the transition from the late Triassic to the early Jurassic periods, which played out from about 210 to 180 million years ago. This was the era when dinosaurs first took over Earth, displacing other animals in similar niches to become the most dominant group for the next 170 million years. 

“Here we analyse the rise and early evolutionary radiation of dinosaurs using a completely new approach,” said researchers led by Martin Qvarnström of Uppsala University. “We used an array of methods, including synchrotron microtomography, to perform analyses of more than 500 bromalites (coprolites, cololites and regurgitalites) and other fossils with direct evidence of feeding (for example, bones with signs of predation/scavenging).”  

Bromalites “increase in size and diversity across the interval, indicating the emergence of larger dinosaur faunas with new feeding patterns,” the team added. “Our results support the idea that stochastic processes coupled with a competitive advantage paved the way for the enormous evolutionary success of dinosaurs.”

The story unveiled through this lens unfolds in five parts. It begins with early dinosaur ancestors who leaned into omnivory, enabling them to edge out non-dinosaur animals that had more specialized diets. That was followed by the emergence of small theropods—the clade that eventually produced raptors, tyrannosaurus, and birds—which were the first carnivorous dinosaurs. In part three, dinosaurs caught a lucky break from a major bout of climate change that created landscapes with more diverse plant life, a diet favored by herbivorous dinosaurs, including the ornithischian precursors of Triceratops. The dinosaurs get bigger and more diverse in part four, a shift marked by the entrance of sauropods, the long-necked herbivores that ultimately became the largest animals ever known to walk on land. Part five: World domination. 

It’s an amazing tapestry to weave together with scatalogical threads, but the best part of the study might be all the finer details about the specimens. Bromalites from Lisowicia, a wild-looking competitor to early dinosaurs, showed it ate almost exclusively conifers, foreshadowing the disadvantage these specialized eaters would later confront in environments with more diverse flora. Bromalites from herbivorous dinosaurs in the early Jurassic contain charcoal, revealing that these animals were eating wood that was burned and charred from widespread wildfires at the time. But perhaps the gnarliest bromalites come from carnivorous dinosaurs, which would regularly poop out bones and skulls.

“Theropods, known from up to 55-cm-long tracks, probably produced the large bone-bearing bromalites” including one containing the “skull and limb elements of an early crocodylomorph,” the team said. “However, the menu of these large theropods probably extended far beyond crocodilians, as evidenced by the presence of fish scales and bone fragments of much larger prey items, which probably represent large sauropodomorph rib or limb fragments.” 

First of all, I’m always a fan of using the word “menu” in this context, because it makes me imagine a theropod at a fancy dinner table ordering a crocodilian a la carte. But more importantly, these bromalites open a window into the bellies of these beasts, yielding insights into how dinosaurs ascended to a reign so awesome that an extraterrestrial deathbringer was ultimately required to end it. We can glimpse everything from scorched landscapes to grand migrations through these digestive remains.  

The study is also a wonderful reminder that bodies have been dumping goopy waste out of one end or the other for time immemorial on this planet. May this add some purpose and grandeur to your next visit to the restroom. 

Stitching Together the Story of Prehistoric Garments 

Peloton, Spencer et al. “Early Paleoindian use of canids, felids, and hares for bone needle production at the La Prele site, Wyoming, USA.” PLOS ONE.

The phrase “clothes make the man” hints at the social judgment that we all receive for our sartorial choices, but there is also an unintended and literal side to this aphorism—the evolution of humanity has been profoundly shaped by tailored garments. Needles made of bones have provided indirect evidence of these garments at archaeological sites dating back as far as 40,000 years. Now, archaeologists working at the LaPrele Mammoth site in Wyoming have identified some of the animals used to make these tools for the first time.

“Of the various technologies and behaviors enacted to cope with cold temperatures, complex, tailored garments are among the most important,” said researchers led by Spencer Pelton of the University of Wyoming. “Despite the importance of bone needles to explaining global modern human dispersal, archaeologists have never identified the materials used to produce them, thus limiting understanding of this important cultural innovation.”

Pelton and his colleagues analyzed dozens of needles from this ancient hunting camp where Paleoindians once butchered a mammoth. They discovered that needles were commonly crafted from fur-bearing animals like foxes, hares, rabbits, bobcats, lynx and possibly the American cheetah, which has since gone extinct.

“Our results are strong evidence for tailored garment production using bone needles and fur-bearing animal pelts,” the team concluded. “Such garments might have looked comparable to those of the Inuit, who sewed fur-bearer pelts into the fringes of parkas whose base material was typically comprised of ungulate hide and used them for hats and mittens.”

Damn, that sounds cozy. As temperatures plunge across the Northern Hemisphere, remember that your warm winter-wear was pioneered by people who had to stitch to survive.

The Stressful Lives of Subordinate Cichlid Fish

Dijkstra. Peter et al. “Oxidative stress in the brain is regulated by social status in a highly social cichlid fish.” Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. 

Animals that live in hierarchical social structures receive all kinds of positive and negative information about their status, access to resources, and reproductive prospects. Now, scientists have zoomed in on how all these pressures affect the brains of the highly social cichlid fish Astatotilapia burtoni. 

Dominant males of this species are more brightly colored, territorial, and reproductively successful than subordinate males—though interestingly, subordinates can become dominant, and vice versa, depending on their environment. Scientists studied the dissected brains of fish from both male phenotypes, and discovered that subordinates were generally more stressed, though dominant fish also experienced some stress in different parts of the brain.

“Social stress can increase reactive oxygen species and derail antioxidant function in the brain, which may contribute to the onset and progression of mental health disorders,” said researchers led by Peter Dijkstra of Central Michigan University. “In hierarchical species, repeated social defeat can raise oxidative stress in the brain.” 

“Our findings show that both antioxidant capacity and oxidative DNA damage are impacted by social status but these effects varied by brain division and were marker specific,” the team said. “These general findings are consistent with the idea that distinct social challenges experienced by dominant and subordinate males could impact patterns of oxidative balance in the brain.” 

There’s something so perfectly devastating about the phrase “repeated social defeat.” If you've ever been stressed about your social life, these fish are a remdiner to cut yourself some slack for the sake of your brain.

The Secrets of a Ballistic Squirter

Box, Finn et al. “Uncovering the mechanical secrets of the squirting cucumber.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Nature is filled with innovative means of dispersing seeds, but the squirting cucumber is one of the only species that decided to go ballistic with it. This flowering plant, also known as the exploding cucumber, squirts its seeds out in a spray of goopy liquid at speeds around 44 miles per hour, allowing them to cross distances of about 32 feet from the source plant. How do they do it?? That’s the topic of a study this week that sought to expose the finer details of this impressive squirter.

“We study the remarkable seed dispersal mechanism of Ecballium elaterium, commonly known as the squirting cucumber, one of the most rapid motions in the plant kingdom,” said researchers led by Finn Box of the University of Manchester. “Despite its apparent simplicity, the specifics of the seed ejection process—combining mechanical, hydraulic, and ballistic phenomena—remain largely unexplored.” 

“By integrating experiments, high-speed videography, and advanced mathematical modeling, we uncover unique facets of this strategy, including an unusual decrease in fruit volume prior to ejection which stiffens the stem and orients the fruit to an improved angle for dispersal.”

When Charles Darwin wrote that “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved,” he was definitely talking about exploding cucumbers.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.