The newts of the genus Taricha come armed with a powerful neurotoxin that they excrete from their skin called tetrodotoxin. The toxin is a chemical defense used against predators. In a study published November 28 in the journal Frontiers in Amphibian and Reptile Science, a team of biologists describes how female Taricha newts produce more tetrodotoxin than males. The findings suggest that tetrodotoxin is not only a line of defense, but also a kind of signal. 

[Related: Poisonous animals probably took their sweet time developing unappetizing bright colors.]

“It had long been considered that newts’ toxin concentrations do not change in their lifetime and that males and females tend to have the same toxin concentrations. Now, we have shown that female newts actually contain more toxin than male newts,” study co-author and University of California, Davis ecologist and evolutionary biologist Gary Bucciarelli said in a statement. “We observed significantly greater and more drastically fluctuating toxin concentrations in females, which may have numerous causes, like mate selection.”  

Totally toxic traits

Tetrodotoxin is also found in the deadly blue-ringed octopus, pufferfish, and some shellfish and amphibian species. In sexually reproducing animals, sexually dimorphic traits like canine tooth size and vibrant color can be a key to reproductive fitness and their survival. These differing traits are believed to increase an individual’s chances of producing the next generation of offspring.

Scientists already knew that Taricha newts had other sexually dimorphic traits, such as mass, size, and tail height, so they were curious to see if toxin production also differed between the sexes. 

In the study, the authors took tetrodotoxin samples from more than 850 newts across 38 different sites in California. They noted the sex, size, mass, and tail height for all of the animals, and if the female newts were pregnant. The newts that had been captured and released were also marked so that they could know if they had been previously sampled. 

Next, the team analyzed their skin to quantify how much of the toxin was found in males compared to females. They also looked at the relationship between sexually dimorphic variables  like size and tail height and how toxin levels changed at the study sites where they could sample more than once across the breeding season. 

Understanding how these toxins work could help biologists understand more about the newts’ reproductive strategies and aid in conservation measures. A recent study found that two out of five amphibians are threatened with extinction and they continue to be the most threatened class of vertebrates on Earth. 

Femme fatale

The authors found that the females carried more toxins than the male newts. While tetrodotoxin levels generally fluctuated in both sexes, the change in females’ levels of toxin was larger. This means that female newts are likely more dangerous than males. 

[Related: How we can help the most endangered class of animals survive climate change.]

“For would-be predators, these higher concentrations pose a serious threat,” said Bucciarelli. “Taricha newts should not be handled unless by knowledgeable personnel, because they can contain up [to] 54 milligrams of tetrodotoxin per individual. Doses up to 42 micrograms per kilo of bodyweight can lead to hospitalization or death.”

The tetrodotoxin also appeared to interact with some of the other sexually dimorphic traits. The heavier newts produced higher levels of the toxin than the lighter newts and the median concentration of toxin was always higher in females regardless of size or weight. The physical resources needed to produce the toxin are possibly invested differently by females than males. Their skin may also be able to carry more of the toxin.

The higher levels of tetrodotoxin might protect females that are vulnerable to predators while reproducing. It could also allow the females to transfer toxin-producing bacteria to their eggs to potentially protect their offspring from snakes. 

Poison patterns

Previously, tetrodotoxin was believed to just be a defense against snakes. The differing amount between the sexes suggests that there might be more to it. The aroma due to the higher concentrations of the toxin may be a cue that helps the newts decide where they look for mates and which mates they choose. 

“Taricha newts’ breeding patterns are highly dependent on precipitation patterns. Given the drought conditions of California, we did not always have a balanced design when field sampling,” said Bucciarelli. “However, we feel the pattern is still very strong. Our next plan is to explore how drought and fire affect newts and their toxin concentrations and how each sex responds to these natural disasters.”

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Gravitational lensing occurs when things with mass create ripples and dents in the fabric of spacetime, and light has to follow along those lines, which sometimes create a magnifying glass effect. This both sounds and looks like something wild from science fiction, but it’s actually a very important tool in astronomy. The James Webb Space Telescope has been in the news a lot recently for just this: watching how light bends around massive galaxy clusters in space, revealing fainter, further away old galaxies behind them. 

Now, Slava Turyshev, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, is trying to harness one of these gravitational lenses closer to home, using our sun. In a new paper posted to the pre-print server arXiv, Turyshev computes all the detailed math and physics needed to show that it is actually possible to harness our sun’s gravity in this way, with some pretty neat uses. A so-called “solar gravitational lens” (SGL) could help us beam light messages into the stars for interstellar communication or investigate the surfaces of distant exoplanets.

“By harnessing the gravitational lensing effect of our star, astronomy would experience a revolutionary leap in observing capability,” says Nick Tusay, a Penn State astronomer not involved in the new work. “Light works both ways, so it could also boost our transmitting capability as well, if we had anyone out there to communicate with.”

When it comes to telescopes here on Earth, bigger is definitely better. To collect enough light to spot really faint far away objects, you need a huge mirror or lens to focus the light—but we can really only build them so big. This is where the SGL comes in, as an alternative to building bigger telescopes, instead relying on spacetime bent by the sun’s gravity to do the focusing for us. 

“Using the SGL removes the need to build larger telescopes and instead raises the problem of how to get a telescope out to the focal distance of the Sun (and how to keep it there),” explains Macy Huston, a Berkeley astronomer not involved in the new research. “And there’s a lot of work ongoing to try to solve this,” they add.

Turyshev is actively working on a mission design to send a one-meter telescope (less than half the size of the famous Hubble) out to the focus of the sun’s gravitational well. It’s quite a trek—this focal point is located about 650 AU out from our star, almost five times out from humanity’s current distance record holder, Voyager 1. To get out to such a huge distance in less than a lifetime, the team is relying on cutting-edge solar sail technology to move faster than ever before.

Currently, the James Webb Space Telescope is investigating the atmospheres of planets around other stars, and the future Habitable Worlds Observatory in the 2040s will hopefully be able to see enough detail in exoplanetary atmospheres to find hints of life. Turyshev’s mission would be the next big step towards confirming life on other worlds, hopefully launching around 2035. Once JWST and HWO identify possibly interesting worlds, the SGL telescope will then actually map the surface of an exoplanet in detail. Turyshev claims it would be able to see a planet blown up to 700 by 700 pixels—a huge improvement on direct imaging’s current 2 or 3 pixels. “If there is a swamp on that exoplanet, emitting methane, we’ll know that’s what is positioned on this continent on this island, for example,” he explains.

Looking further into the sci-fi future, this same SGL technology could be used not only “as a telescope we could use from the solar system to view other planetary systems in great detail” but also as an “interstellar communication network (for intentional communications),” says Huston. A laser positioned at the sun’s gravitational focus could send messages to other stars without losing as much signal as our current Earth-bound beacon tech.

“If we were to ever become an interstellar civilization, this [SGL] could potentially be the most effective means of communication between star systems,” says Tusay. Our radio transmissions, leaking out of Earth’s atmosphere since the early 1900s, rapidly become fainter the further away from our planet. Turyshev’s mathematical calculations show that signals sent from the SGL could be easily noticed at the distances of nearby stars, even when accounting for the noisy background of the real world. Transmission via the SGL is “not prohibited, it’s really encouraged by physics,” says Turyshev.

This tech wouldn’t solve all our interstellar roadblocks, though. We might be able to send messages, but we still don’t have a way of sending ourselves out amongst the stars to travel. There’d also be a huge delay in our galactic calls—more like sending a cross-country letter by horseback than FaceTiming with your friends. “Light still has a maximum speed,” reminds Tusay. As a result, sending a message to a star four light-years away would take four years to get there, and another four for the response to reach us. Still, the solar gravitational lens is one big step towards making our science fiction futures a reality.

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Reducing damaging “ultra-emission” methane leaks could soon become much easier–thanks to a new, open-source tool that combines machine learning and orbital data from multiple satellites, including one attached to the International Space Station.

Methane emissions originate anywhere food and plant matter decompose without oxygen, such as marshes, landfills, fossil fuel plants—and yes, cow farms. They are also infamous for their dramatic effect on air quality. Although capable of lingering in the atmosphere for just 7 to 12 years compared to CO2’s centuries-long lifespan, the gas is still an estimated 80 times more effective at retaining heat. Immediately reducing its production is integral to stave off climate collapse’s most dire short-term consequences—cutting emissions by 45 percent by 2030, for example, could shave off around 0.3 degrees Celsius from the planet’s rising temperature average over the next twenty years.

[Related: Turkmenistan’s gas fields emit loads of methane.]

Unfortunately, it’s often difficult for aerial imaging to precisely map real time concentrations of methane emissions. For one thing, plumes from so-called “ultra-emission” events like oil rig and natural gas pipeline malfunctions (see: Turkmenistan) are invisible to human eyes, as well as most satellites’ multispectral near-infrared wavelength sensors. And what aerial data is collected is often thrown off by spectral noise, requiring manual parsing to accurately locate the methane leaks.

A University of Oxford team working alongside Trillium Technologies’ NIO.space has developed a new, open-source tool powered by machine learning that can identify methane clouds using much narrower hyperspectral bands of satellite imaging data. These bands, while more specific, produce much more vast quantities of data—which is where artificial intelligence training comes in handy.

The project is detailed in new research published in Nature Scientific Reports by a team at the University of Oxford, alongside a recent university profile. To train their model, engineers fed it a total of 167,825 hyperspectral image tiles—each roughly 0.66 square miles—generated by NASA’s Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) satellite while orbiting the Four Corners region of the US. The model was subsequently trained using additional orbital monitors, including NASA’s hyperspectral EMIT sensor currently aboard the International Space Station.

The team’s current model is roughly 21.5 percent more accurate at identifying methane plumes than the existing top tool, while simultaneously providing nearly 42 percent fewer false detection errors compared to the same industry standard. According to researchers, there’s no reason to believe those numbers won’t improve over time.

[Related: New satellites can pinpoint methane leaks to help us beat climate change.]

“What makes this research particularly exciting and relevant is the fact that many more hyperspectral satellites are due to be deployed in the coming years, including from ESA, NASA, and the private sector,” Vít Růžička, lead researcher and a University of Oxford doctoral candidate in the department of computer science, said during a recent university profile. As this satellite network expands, Růžička believes researchers and environmental watchdogs will soon gain an ability to automatically, accurately detect methane plume events anywhere in the world.

These new techniques could soon enable independent, globally-collaborated identification of greenhouse gas production and leakage issues—not just for methane, but many other major pollutants. The tool currently utilizes already collected geospatial data, and is not able to currently provide real-time analysis using orbital satellite sensors. In the University of Oxford’s recent announcement, however, research project supervisor Andrew Markham adds that the team’s long-term goal is to run their programs through satellites’ onboard computers, thus “making instant detection a reality.”

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On November 25, a healthy male Sumatran rhinoceros was born at a western Indonesian sanctuary. This birth is welcome news for the critically endangered species. There are less than 50 Sumatran rhinos left, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

[Related: Rhino horns are shrinking, and humans are to blame.]

A seven-year-old female rhino named Delilah gave birth to the 55 pound calf at the Sumatran Rhino Sanctuary in Way Kambas National Park (SRS TNWK) on the island of Sumatra. According to officials from the sanctuary, a conservation guard found her laying next to her calf early on Saturday morning. The birth was about 10 days before the baby’s expected due date. The baby’s father is a rhino named Harapan who was born at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden in Ohio before coming to Sumatra. 

“You never know if a first-time mom will know what to do, but Delilah brought that calf into the world and started nursing it with no fuss or fanfare. It’s an incredible event that gives hope to the future of this critically endangered species,” International Rhino Foundation executive director Nina Fascione said in a press release. 

Sumatran rhinos are the smallest of all rhino species at about 1,000 to 2,100 pounds and three to four feet tall. They have two horns that are dark gray to black. The horns are usually very smooth and form a slender cone that is curved backwards in the wild. Poaching, illegal trading of rhino horns, and climate change have pushed these mammals to the brink of extinction. According to the IUCN Red List, they are currently extinct in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, India, Laos, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam, according to the Red List. It is uncertain if they are still present in Myanmar. 

Successful births like this one are also rare. In 2012, a male rhino named Andatu born at Way Kambas became the first Sumatran rhino born in an Indonesian sanctuary in over 120 years.

“Two years ago there was only one captive Sumatran rhino pair in the world able to successfully produce offspring. Now there are three pairs–six rhinos–who are proven breeders. Those are much better odds for the long-term survival of this species,” said Fascione.

According to Indonesian Environment and Forestry Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar, this still-to-be-named calf is the fifth born under a semi-wild breeding program at the park. The new addition brings the rhino herd at Way Kambas up to 10 animals and follows the birth of another calf in September. 

[Related: Rhinos pay a painful price for oxpecker protection.]

The sanctuary is part of a special zone in the national park where all of the rhinos are protected and looked after by local experts.

“The main objective is to produce Sumatran rhino calves to maintain the survival of the Sumatran rhino species which is now threatened with extinction,” sanctuary Director General of Natural Resources and Ecosystem Conservation Satyawan Pudyatmoko said in a statement. “The Sumatran rhino calves are the result of a breeding program. In the future, at SRS TNWK they can be released back into their natural habitat.”

Veterinarians from the Rhino Foundation of Indonesia (Yayasan Badak Indonesia) and animal care staff will continue to closely monitor Delialah and her new calf as they bond.

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The sun is setting earlier, giving you a longer chance to get a view of the night sky. You can see stars, planets, meteors, and more with this Celestron telescope deal at Amazon for Cyber Monday.

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If you’re thinking to yourself, “How can I support one of my favorite 151-year-old brands while fulfilling my desire to own a telescope of my own?”, it’s your lucky day. Our telescope, made in collaboration with Celestron, is up to $100 off this Cyber Monday.

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The assortment of black dots that decorate African penguins’ mostly all-white fronts might help the birds tell each other apart. This is the first documented time that animal behaviorists and psychologists have pinpointed a physical feature that a bird species uses for visual recognition. The findings are described in a study published in the January 2024 issue of the journal Animal Behaviour.

[Related: How African penguins continue to survive changes in climate.]

In birds, distinguishing individual flock members is primarily based on auditory cues and not visual cues. For example, some parrots distinguish their offspring with squawking equivalent of individual names. This new research is one of the first studies to show that birds could use visual cues more than scientists previously believed. 

According to study co-author and animal psychologist Luigi Baciadonna, the dots on African penguins appear when they are about three to five months old. These birds molt annually and reemerge in the same position when the new plumage comes in. 

In the new study, a team from Italy’s University of Turin, the University of Oulu in Finland, and Zoomarine Italia marine park near Rome conducted a simple experiment with 12 penguins. The team built a small enclosure with plywood walls that was just tall enough to prevent a penguin from seeing over it. They placed cameras on either end of the pen and life-size pictures of two penguins on one of the far walls. One penguin entered the enclosure, where one of the pictures featured its specific mate. 

African penguins form lifelong bonds with their partners and the team tracked their responses to images of other penguins from their species. They found that the penguins spent more time looking at the picture of their partner than they did a picture of a different familiar penguin. This occurred even when the heads of the penguins were blurred. 

When the test penguins were shown two images of their partner, including one that had the spots removed, they preferred the images where the dots remained intact. However, this preference for their partner did not occur when the birds saw unspeckled versions of their mate and a different bird. According to the team, this suggests that the penguins use these spots to tell one another apart.

[Related: Jackass penguins talk like people.]

African penguins live along the coasts of Namibia and South Africa. They are about 24 to 27 inches tall and eat squid, anchovies, and other small fish. African penguins are known to be particularly communicative with one another, so scientists have studied their behavior to better understand some of the more advanced social behaviors seen in primates. A 2021 study found that African penguins are capable of vocal accommodation. Different group members have a different dialect and vocal accommodation allows group members to learn to speak more like the others. 

“Given how goofy penguins can seem–almost stumbling over their feet as they walk, for example–the birds may not seem like they are all that bright,” Baciadonna told New Scientist. “But we showed in these two or three experiments that actually they are quite complicated and complex. They’re also clever.”

Animal physiologist and director of the Institute of Neurobiology at the University of Tübingen Andreas Nieder told Science, “It is an original study with a remarkable finding.” Nieder was not involved in the new research.

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Geologists have discovered 10 new species of trilobite in a relatively unstudied area of Thailand. These extinct sea creatures were hidden for 490 million years and are helping scientists create a new map of the animal life during the late Cambrian period. They are described in a monograph that was published in October in the journal Papers in Palaeontology.

[Related: These ancient trilobites are forever frozen in a conga line.]

Trilobites were marine arthropods similar to today’s spiders and crustaceans and are known for a wide variety of body designs. A species called Walliserops may have jousted with ‘tridents’ on their heads to win mates and recent trilobite specimens have been found with full stomachs. More than 20,000 species lived in Earth’s seas before they went extinct about 250 million years ago.

The trilobite fossils described in the new paper were trapped between layers of petrified ash in sandstone and were the product of old volcanic eruptions. The sediment from the eruptions settled on the bottom of the sea and formed a green layer called a tuff. This important layer contains crystals of a critical mineral that formed during the eruption called zircon. Aside from being as tough as steel, zircon is chemically stable and heat and weather resistant. Zircon also persists while the minerals in other kinds of rocks erode over time. Individual atoms of uranium that transform into lead live inside these resilient zircon crystals and give paleontologists a benchmark for dating the fossils. 

“We can use radio isotope techniques to date when the zircon formed and thus find the age of the eruption, as well as the fossil,” study co-author and University of California, Riverside geologist Nigel Hughes said in a statement.

Finding tuffs from the late Cambrian period (between 497 and 485 million years ago) is also rather rare. According to the team, it is one of the “worst dated” intervals of time in Earth’s history.

“The tuffs will allow us to not only determine the age of the fossils we found in Thailand, but to better understand parts of the world like China, Australia, and even North America where similar fossils have been found in rocks that cannot be dated,” study co-author and Texas State University geologist Shelly Wernette said in a statement. Wernette previously worked in the Hughes Lab.

The trilobite fossils were found on the coast of an island called Ko Tarutao. This island is part of a UNESCO geopark site that has encouraged international teams of scientists to work in this area. 

One of the most interesting discoveries was 12 types of trilobites that scientists have seen in other parts of the world, but not in Thailand. 

“We can now connect Thailand to parts of Australia, a really exciting discovery,” said Wernette.

During trilobites’ lifetime, this area was located on the margins of an ancient supercontinent called Gondwanaland. The giant land mass included present day India, Africa, South America, Australia, and Antarctica. 

[Related: Ancient ‘weird shrimp from Canada’ used bizarre appendages to scarf up soft prey.]

“Because continents shift over time, part of our job has been to work out where this region of Thailand was in relation to the rest of Gondwanaland,” Hughes said. “It’s a moving, shape shifting, 3D jigsaw puzzle we’re trying to put together. This discovery will help us do that.”

They named one of the newly discovered species Tsinania sirindhornae in honor of Thai Royal Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, for her dedication to developing the sciences in Thailand.

“I also thought this species had a regal quality. It has a broad headdress and clean sweeping lines,” Wernette said.

If the team can get an accurate date from the tuffs that the remains of T. sirindhornae had been sitting in for millions of years, they could be able to determine if closely related species found in northern and southern China are roughly the same age. 

The team believes that the portrait of the ancient world hidden in these trilobite fossils contain invaluable information about our planet’s history.

“What we have here is a chronicle of evolutionary change accompanied by extinctions. The Earth has written this record for us, and we’re fortunate to have it,” Hughes said. “The more we learn from it the better prepared we are for the challenges we’re engineering on the planet for ourselves today.”

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ENERGY NEVER STOPS radiating through space, or on Earth. For more than a decade, hundreds of millions of samples from the never-ending deluge of protons, nuclei, and other atomic debris have collected in the International Space Station’s cosmic ray bucket—an instrument called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. Here at home, cloud chambers—like those used by CERN, the Switzerland-based European Organization for Nuclear Research—illuminate the universe’s invisible cosmic storm.

In March 1951, longtime Popular Science contributor Kenneth M. Swezey treated space enthusiasts and DIYers to a step-by-step guide to making a cloud chamber, using a peanut butter jar. “The secret of any cloud chamber is a supersaturated vapor,” Swezey wrote. “As atomic particles dart through this vapor, they condense molecules in their path, leaving visible droplets—like vapor trails of high-flying aircraft.”

The first cloud chamber was devised by physicist Charles Thomas Rees Wilson in 1895 to reproduce the airborne puffs and study their behavior. By 1910, he’d begun spying the trails of charged particles, which ionized the supersaturated air and caused water droplets to form. At about the same time, physicist Victor Hess determined that charged particles, which he dubbed cosmic rays, were entering Earth’s atmosphere from space, a discovery that earned him a Nobel Prize in 1936.

Despite their ubiquity, the origins of those celestial sparks remain a mystery, although supernovas and ordinary stars like our sun are suspected to be prime sources. Beams of energy collide with atoms in Earth’s upper atmosphere, spawning charged subatomic particles like pions, muons, electrons, and positrons, whose ionized trails show up as spindly lines in cloud chambers. Radiation here on Earth also generates cosmic rays.

When Swezey offered up his home chamber in the 1950s, its use seemed somewhat practical. Fears of nuclear war, spurred by the worsening Cold War, dominated headlines. A homemade cloud chamber can detect atomic particles from nearby explosions, not to mention alpha particles, a product of radioactive decay from sources like radon gas, and gamma rays from radium, which was still being painted onto watch dials until the 1970s.

To view the cosmic ray storm, start with a glass or plastic jar—the bigger the better. A dark background, such as black felt glued inside the base and lid, will enhance the experience. Saturate the material at the base with rubbing alcohol, close the lid, and place the jar upside down on a bed of dry ice. As the apparatus cools, vapor forms. Turn off the lights, then shine a flashlight through the jar. Thin lines should appear, some perfectly straight (high-energy muons, big enough to plow through the jar), others zigzagging (electrons and positrons, so small they pinball off surrounding particles), and still others like eraser smudges (radon-spawned alpha particles, heavy and highly charged so they gather an ionic entourage).

Our 1951 cloud chamber recipe will still work today, although CERN offers an updated instructional video that uses the same essential ingredients. Can’t find dry ice? Ready-made cloud chambers will work at regular freezer temperatures. All you need is nearly pure ethanol and hot water to generate the cloud (and a few hundred extra dollars to cover the equipment costs).

This story originally appeared in the High Issue of Popular Science. Read more PopSci+ stories.

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Archaeologists have uncovered rare evidence of ritualized animal sacrifice at the Casas del Turuñuelo archaeological site in southwestern Spain. The site dates back to the 5th century BCE and offers a glimpse into the Tartessian culture of the Iberian Peninsula. The discovery is described in a study published November 22 in the open-access journal PLoS ONE.

[Related: Early humans carved old skeletal remains from burial caves into tools.]

The Tartessos were a historical civilization settled in the southern Iberian Peninsula from the 9th to 5th centuries BCE during the Iron Age. Archaeologists believed that their culture had a mixture of traits from local Iberian populations and Phoenicians arriving from countries in the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. It had a writing system called Tartessian, that had roughly 97 inscriptions in a Tartessian language. 

In the western Mediterranean region where the Tartessos lived, archaeological evidence of animal sacrifice is difficult to come by. However, written sources including Homer’s The Odyssey chronicle animal sacrifice in the Mediterranean at this time. The gap between the written record and archaeological evidence has made it difficult for archaeologists to establish a clear understanding of what protocols and patterns were behind the practice here. 

Mª Pilar Iborra Eres, a study co-author and archaeologist Spain’s Instituto Valenciano de Conservación, Restauración e Investigación, tells PopSci that the Casas del Turuñuelo site is special due to the “excellent conservation of the building and its contents. In this case, the accumulation of bone remains that testify to ritual activities.”

In this new study, Eres and her team studied an example of animal sacrifice from an Iron Age building that dates back towards the end of the 5th Century BCE. The excavation began in 2015 and they examined and dated 6,770 bones that belonged to 52 animals. The animals were predominantly adult horses, but also included cattle, pigs, and one dog. The remains show signs of intentional burial, which is one clue that they were sacrificed. 

They found that the animals had been buried in three sequential phases. In the first two phases, the skeletons were found to be mostly complete and unaltered. In the third phase, all of the skeletons except the horses show signs of having been processed for food. This suggests that a meal likely accompanied this ritual. 

A case study like this one allowed the team to establish some key details about ritual protocols at Casas del Turuñuelo in order to determine what was behind them. The bones indicate that adult animals were selected for sacrifice rather than young. The presence of burned plant and animal remains also shows that fires played a role in these rituals. 

[Related: Pompeii’s archaeological puzzles can be solved with a little help from chemistry.]

Casas del Turuñuelo also shows some unique features compared to other Mediterranean sites, including the large number of sacrificed horses. 

“The equine remains were discovered as a result of a methodical excavation of one of the areas of this building, the courtyard,” says Eres. “This is where animal sacrifices were made during the use of the building by Iron Age societies. 

The space was also likely used repeatedly over several years for a variety of sacrificial rituals.

The team was surprised that they were able to verify that the deposit here was so perfectly preserved and portrayed what they believe to be an accurate picture of the rituals that took place there. They hope to complete this study by applying new methods to study the samples. 

“Archaeology allows us to learn about many aspects of the life of past societies,” says Eres. “By applying innovative methodologies such as computed tomography, paleoparasitology, isotope analysis for the study of diet and mobility or ancient DNA, the aim is to carry out a complete study of this group of equids.”

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

Fact: Jellyfish can learn from their mistakes even though they have no brains

By Rachel Feltman

Before we can talk about how jellyfish learn, we have to talk about the fact that they have no brains. That probably doesn’t surprise you if you’re thinking of the human brain as the archetype of the organ. 

But a brain is really just a cluster of nerve cells that control the body they’re in. Exactly what that cluster looks like can vary a lot, especially among invertebrates, where they’re often very simple structures called ganglia. But most of them have some kind of centralized nerve center. Jellyfish are some of the only animals that lack this structure entirely. Others include sea cucumbers, sea urchins, coral, and other marine creatures known for their deep intellectual pursuits. 
In a new study, researchers showed that the Caribbean box jellyfish can actually learn from experience, no brain required. Some scientists say this could mean that individual neurons are capable of learning. To learn more about the experiment—and its implications for our own cognitive abilities—check out this week’s episode.

Fact: Hollywood quicksand peaked in popularity back in the 1960s—but how does the real stuff work?

By Jess Boddy

Quicksand used to be everywhere in movies. It was every 10-year-old’s worst fear in the ’90s. One day you’re just livin life, walkin around, and then BAM!!!!!! Sucked into quicksand, sometimes up to your waist, sometimes ALL THE WAY IN. and we all know the classic instructions: DO NOT MOVE! The more you move, the faster you sink.

And although we may remember quicksand best from movies like The Princess Bride and The Neverending Story, it was actually most popular as a story device back in the 1960s. And as one Slate writer posits, it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that ’60s culture outside of film was steeped in quicksand, too—from the Vietnam war to policies nicknamed “the quicksand model.” And as decades progressed, quicksand fell out of fashion with bell bottoms and tie-dye, though it did persist to scare us all as kids in the ’80s and ’90s.

But does quicksand behave in real life like it does in the movies, making you disappear into the ground in less than a second? If you struggle, do you really sink faster? Listen to this week’s episode to hear the verdict, corroborated by both real-life experience, a Nature study, and the MythBusters.

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It’s been a wormy, sexual head-scratcher for years. The Japanese green syllid worm Megasyllis nipponica detaches its butt in order to reproduce. But how do these algae-eating invertebrates do this? The process could come down to some developmental genes, according to a study published November 22 in the journal Scientific Reports.

[Related: The jumping worm invasion may be less worrisome than it sounds.]

Bye bye, butt

Some segmented sea worms like the syllid worm go through a reproductive process called  stolonization. The stolon is the worm’s posterior organ and it is full of eggs or sperm depending on the worm’s sex. During stolonization, the stolon completely detaches from the rest of the worm’s body for reproduction. 

This detached butt swims around by itself and spawns when it meets another stolon of the opposite sex. This autonomous swimming is believed to protect the original body of the worm from dangers in the environment and help the eggs and sperm travel longer distances. 

In order to swim by themselves, the stolon have to develop their own eyes, antennae, and swimming bristles while still attached to their original body. How this happens has been a mystery. The formation of the stolon itself begins when the gonads near the worm’s butt mature. A head is then formed in the front of the developing stolon, with the eyes, antennae, and swimming bristles following close behind. It develops its nerves and the ability to sense and behave independently before the stolon detaches from the rest of the body.

Hot hox genes

In the new study, a team from the University of Tokyo looked into how the stolon’s head is formed in the first place. The researchers investigated the developmental gene expression patterns in worms as they were sexually maturing. A well-known group of genes that determine body part formation called hox genes help define the head regions of various animals. The team found that hox genes are expressed more in the head region of the stolon. The genes are not typically expressed as much in the middle of the body, except for when the gonads are developing. During this time, the hox genes are highly expressed in the worm’s middle and butt. 

“This shows how normal developmental processes are modified to fit the life history of animals with unique reproductive styles,” study co-author and University of Tokyo marine biologist Toru Miura said in a statement.

[Related: These newly discovered bioluminescent sea worms are named after Japanese folklore.]

Hox genes also determine the segmentation along the worm’s body. The team thought that the hox genes would be expressed differently along the invisible line that runs from the head of the worm to the back end.

“Interestingly, the expressions of Hox genes that determine body-part identity were constant during the process,” said Miura. 

Because of this consistency, the stolon does not have a separatedigestive tract. It also has repeated uniform body segments, except for in its head and tail. 

“This indicates that only the head part is induced at the posterior body part to control spawning behavior for reproduction,” said Miura.

The study showed the developmental mechanism of stolons for the first time and sparked more investigation into this reproductive method. Miura and the team hope to clarify the sex determination mechanism and the endocrine regulations during the worm’s reproductive cycles in future studies.

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If nematodes have nightmares, they might be dreaming about the terror of being eaten alive by a carnivorous fungus called Arthrobotrys oligospora. The very real fungus can sometimes set gooey traps for these worms. It is one of over 700 known species of carnivorous fungi. New findings on the basic processes behind its unique eating habits are described in a study published November 21st in the open access journal PLoS Biology.

[Related: Parasitic Fungi Can Fuse A Nematode’s Gut Into One Cell.]

Nematodes are not usually the first thing on A. oligospora’s menu. The fungus typically gets nutrients from decaying organic matter. Starvation and the presence of nearby worms can prompt this and other fungi to create traps to capture and eat the worms. Another meat eating fungi named Pleurotus ostreatus or the oyster mushroom even uses a nerve gas as its method of trapping down nematodes. 

A. oligospora has a different approach. It generally uses sticky secretions to keep the worms pinned down before they become a meal. Earlier studies have shown some of the biological processes and genetics behind A. oligospora’s predator-prey relationship, but the molecular details of the process have remained generally unclear.

“I think it’s fascinating to consider that right under our feet in the soil, there are micro-predators like A. oligospora are continually evolving new ways to hunt, capture and consume the nematode prey and there is [a] constant evolutionary arms races between these carnivorous fungi and nematodes,” study co-author and molecular biologist Yen-Ping Hsueh tells PopSci. 

To investigate, Hsueh and a team from Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan designed a series of lab experiments to pinpoint the genes and processes involved when A. oligospora preys on a nematode worm species called Caenorhabditis elegans. They used a technique called RNAseq to see the level of activity occurring in various fungus genes at different points in time. When A. oligospora first senses a worm, two separate functions increase–DNA replication and the production of ribosomes. These are the structures that build proteins in a cell. Next, activity increases on many of the genes that encode the proteins that likely help the fungus build and use its traps. These traps include secreted worm-adhesive proteins and a family of proteins the team has identified for the first time.

“The most surprising finding was the dramatic expansion and diversification of the DUF3129 gene family in A. oligospora compared to other fungi,” says Hsueh. “We named members of this family ‘Trap Enriched Proteins’ or TEPs, since they localize to the fungal traps and contribute to trap adhesion and nematode capture.”

After A. oligospora has extended filamentous structures called hyphae into the worm to digest it, the activity in the genes that code for a variety of enzymes called proteases also increases. A group called metalloproteases that break down other proteins is increased even more. The team believes this suggests that A. oligospora uses these proteases to aid in digestion of worms like nematodes.

[Related: Nightmare-fuel fungi exist in real life.]

This research could serve as the foundation for more research into other fungal predator-prey relationships and how A. oligospora feeds on these worms. 

“Our next steps are to further investigate the molecular function of how traps adhere to nematodes,” says Hsueh. “It’s surprising how the traps catch nematodes in such a short time, and the binding of the traps are strong enough that the nematodes almost never get a chance to escape after being trapped.”

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A new image from NASA’s almost two-year-old James Webb Space Telescope features new details of a portion of our galaxy’s dense center for the first time. The image includes some parts of the star-forming hotspot that astronomers are still trying to fully understand. The region is named Sagittarius C and is about 300 light-years away from Sagittarius A*, or the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

[Related: Gaze upon the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.]

“There’s never been any infrared data on this region with the level of resolution and sensitivity we get with Webb, so we are seeing lots of features here for the first time,” observation team principal investigator Samuel Crowe said in a statement. “Webb reveals an incredible amount of detail, allowing us to study star formation in this sort of environment in a way that wasn’t possible previously.” Crowe is an undergraduate student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

The image features roughly 500,000 stars and a cluster of young stars called protostars. These are stars that are still forming and gaining mass, while generating outflows that glow in the midst of an infrared-dark cloud. A massive previously-discovered protostar that is over 30 times the mass of our sun is located at the heart of this young cluster. 

The protostars are emerging from a cloud that is so dense that the light from stars behind it cannot reach the JWST. This light trick makes the region look deceptively less crowded. According to the team, this is actually one of the most tightly packed areas of the image. Smaller infrared-dark clouds dot the image where future stars are forming. 

“The galactic center is the most extreme environment in our Milky Way galaxy, where current theories of star formation can be put to their most rigorous test,” University of Virginia astronomer Jonathan Tan said in a statement. 

JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) also captured large-scale emission from ionized hydrogen that is surrounding the lower side of the dark cloud. According to Crowe, this is the result of energetic photons that are being emitted by young massive stars. The expanse of the region spotted by JWST came as a surprise to the team and needs more investigation. They also plan to further examine the needle-like structures in the ionized hydrogen, which are scattered in multiple directions.

“The galactic center is a crowded, tumultuous place. There are turbulent, magnetized gas clouds that are forming stars, which then impact the surrounding gas with their outflowing winds, jets, and radiation,” Rubén Fedriani, a co-investigator of the project at the Instituto Astrofísica de Andalucía in Spain, said in a statement. “Webb has provided us with a ton of data on this extreme environment, and we are just starting to dig into it.”

[Related: ‘Christmas tree’ galaxy shines in new image from Hubble and JWST.]

At roughly 25,000 light-years from Earth, the galactic center is close enough for the JWST to study individual stars. This allows astronomers to collect data on both how stars form, but also how this process may depend on the cosmic environment when compared to other regions of the galaxy. One question this could help answer is if there are more massive stars in the center of the Milky Way, as opposed to on the edges of the galaxy’s spiral arms.

“The image from Webb is stunning, and the science we will get from it is even better,” Crowe said. “Massive stars are factories that produce heavy elements in their nuclear cores, so understanding them better is like learning the origin story of much of the universe.”

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With their winding and buff arms made up of billions of stars, spiral galaxies offer some of the beautiful images of the universe. Our own Milky Way galaxy is a spiral galaxy, yet these types of swirling clusters are relatively scarce in a part of the universe called the Supergalactic Plane. A team of astrophysicists believes that the bright elliptical galaxies without a defined center are more common than swirling galaxies because of the difference in density of the environments found inside and outside of the Plane. The findings are described in a study published November 20 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

[Related: Behold six galactic collisions, masterfully captured by Hubble.]

Smoothing out the arms

The Supergalactic Plane is a flattened structure in the universe that extends nearly a billion light years across. Our own Milky Way galaxy is embedded within the Plane and is about 100,000 light years wide. There are dozens of enormous armless galaxy clusters called elliptical galaxies in the Plane, but not nearly as many disk-shaped galaxies with spiral arms. 

According to the new study, the different distributions of elliptical and disk galaxies are a natural occurrence. Galaxies experience frequent interactions and mergers with other galaxies in the Plane because the region is so densely packed. This galactic demolition derby then turns the spiral galaxies into elliptical galaxies. The arms are smoothed out and the lack of internal structure in the elliptical galaxy and presence of dark matter leads to the growth of supermassive black holes. Since the dark matter outweighs everything else, it has the power to shape the newly formed elliptical galaxy and tends to guide the growth of the central black hole.

The stars in an elliptical galaxy also orbit around the core in random directions and are generally older than those in spiral galaxies, according to NASA. 

In parts of the universe away from Plane, galaxies can evolve in relative isolation. This solitude helps them preserve their spiral structure.

“The distribution of galaxies in the Supergalactic Plane is indeed remarkable,” Carlos Frenk, a study co-author and astrophysicist at Durham University in the United Kingdom, said in a statement. “It is rare but not a complete anomaly: our simulation reveals the intimate details of the formation of galaxies such as the transformation of spirals into ellipticals through galaxy mergers.”

A galactic time machine

In the study, the team used a supercomputer simulation called Simulations Beyond the Local Universe. It follows the evolution of the universe over a period of 13.8 billion years from around the time of the Big Bang up to the present. 

[Related: Hubble image captures stars forming in a far-off phantom galaxy.]

Most cosmological simulations consider random patches of the universe, which cannot be directly compared to other observations. Instead, SIBELIUS works to precisely reproduce the observed structures in space, including the Supergalactic Plane. According to the team, the final simulation is remarkably consistent with observations of our universe through telescopes.

“The simulation shows that our standard model of the universe, based on the idea that most of its mass is cold dark matter, can reproduce the most remarkable structures in the universe, including the spectacular structure of which the Milky Way is part,” said Frenk.

Scientists have been studying the separation of elliptical and spiral galaxies since the 1960s. This partitioning features prominently in a recent list of cosmic anomalies that was compiled by cosmologist and 2019 Nobel laureate Professor Jim Peebles.

“By chance, I was invited to a symposium in honor of Jim Peebles last December at Durham, where he presented the problem in his lecture,” study co-author and astrophysicist at the University of Helsinki in Finland Till Sawala said in a statement. “And I realized that we had already completed a simulation that might contain the answer. Our research shows that the known mechanisms of galaxy evolution also work in this unique cosmic environment.”

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The male sex organs of the animal kingdom come in all shapes and sizes from some that look like a bottle opener to genital stingers. For mammals, penetrative sex with a penis is needed to successfully mate. However, scientists have documented the first non-penetrative sex ever seen in a mammal. The mating technique was observed in the serotine bat (Eptesicus serotinus) and it is described in a study published November 20 in the journal Current Biology.

The mysteries of bat sex

Serotine bats are quite common in Europe and Asia, but the intricacies of bat sex remain elusive. Most previous observations of bats mating have only offered a glimpse of the backs of mating pairs. But in the new study, a team from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and a bat rehabilitation center in Ukraine got lucky. 

[Related: How echolocation lets bats, dolphins, and even people navigate by sound.]

“By chance, we had observed that these bats have disproportionately long penises, and we were always wondering ‘how does that work?’,” study co-author and University of Lausanne evolutionary biologist Nicolas Fasel said in a statement. “We thought maybe it’s like in the dog where the penis engorges after penetration so that they are locked together, or alternatively maybe they just couldn’t put it inside, but that type of copulation hasn’t been reported in mammals until now.” 

The team placed cameras behind a grid that the bats could climb hoping to get footage of their genitals and mating from one side of the grid. They found that bats’ penises are roughly seven times longer than their partners’ vaginas. Each has a “heart-shaped” head that is also seven times wider than the common bat vaginal opening. This size and shape would make penetration after an erection impossible. The study shows that instead of functioning as a penetrative organ, the penis is more like an extra arm. It pushes the female’s tail sheath out of the way to engage in contact mating, similar to cloacal kissing in birds. Instead of penetration, the birds touch their two rear orifices called the cloaca together for only a few seconds, but long enough for sperm to be released.

The bat sex detectives

Fasel collaborated with bat enthusiast and citizen scientist Jan Jeucker, who filmed hours of footage of the serotine bat in a church attic in the Netherlands. The team analyzed 97 mating events—93 from the Dutch church and four from the Ukrainian bat rehabilitation center. During the recordings, the team did not see a single incidence of penetration. The erectile tissues of the bat penis were completely enlarged before they made any contact with the vulva. The male bats grasped their partner’s nape and moved their pelvis like a probe until it made contact with the vulva. Once contact was made, the pair remained still. These interactions lasted less than 53 minutes on average, but the longest event extended to 12.7 hours. 

After copulation, the researchers saw that the female bats had wet abdomens. They believe this dampness indicates the presence of semen, but more research is needed to confirm if sperm was actually transferred during these assumed mating events.

[Related: What bats and metal vocalists have in common.]

The team also characterized the form of serotine bat genitalia by measuring the erect penises of live bats that were captured as part of other research studies. The necropsies on bats that had died at bat rehabilitation centers revealed how much longer and wider the serotine bat penises were compared to the bat vaginas. The penises are also about a fifth as long as the bats’ head to body length. Female serotine bats also have unusually long cervixes, which potentially helps them select and store sperm.

The team believes that the bats may have evolved their oversized penises as a way to push aside the female tail membranes.  

“Bats use their tail membranes for flying and to capture the insects, and female bats also use them to cover their lower parts and protect themselves from males,” said Fasel. “But the males can then use these big penises to overcome the tail membrane and reach the vulva.”

The team plans to study bat mating behavior in more natural contexts and further investigate penis morphology and mating behavior in other bat species. 

“We are trying to develop a bat porn box, which will be like an aquarium with cameras everywhere,” says Fasel.

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SpaceX’s second, unpiloted Starship test flight of the year ended in yet another fiery inferno on November 18. This time, the sudden end arrived roughly 8 minutes into its 90-minute scheduled mission. But although its Super Heavy first stage booster suffered a fatal “rapid unscheduled disassembly” in the Caribbean, the world’s most powerful rocket almost doubled its previous lifespan and passed multiple other crucial milestones.

Starship launched once again from its test site near Boca Chica, Texas, at 8:03am ET on Saturday, with all 39 of the Super Heavy booster’s Raptor engines remaining lit during the mission—a first for the spacecraft intended to eventually deliver humans to Mars. At two minutes and 41 seconds following liftoff, Starship’s hot-staging sequence—in which upper stage engines ignite and separate from the booster—also proceeded successfully, clearing yet another hurdle for SpaceX engineers. The reusable booster then performed its flip maneuver en route towards an intended safe return back to Earth, but exploded only a few seconds later. The booster’s fate wasn’t a huge surprise, however, as SpaceX mission control operators already suspected such a dramatic event could occur due to the immense “load on top of the booster.”

Meanwhile, the Starship upper stage continued to soar for another few minutes to roughly 92 miles above the Earth’s surface—well above the Kármán Line, an internationally recognized demarcation between the planet’s atmosphere and outer space. Moments before its scheduled Second Engine Cut Off, or SECO, the upper stage met its own explosive demise. Space X representatives cited a delay in Starship’s automated flight termination system, but do not yet know the exact cause for its malfunction. If successful, Starship would have circumnavigated Earth before performing a hard landing near Hawaii.

The results of April’s Starship test received considerable criticism from both Boca Chica locals and the Federal Aviation Administration for surrounding environmental damage sustained during launch. Starship’s Raptor engines burn approximately 40,000 pounds of fuel per second to reach 17 million pounds of thrust. Nearby Texan residents described the blowback as resembling a “mini earthquake” at the time, with at least one business owner’s store window shattering. The April 20 test flight blasted a 25-feet deep crater, ejecting clouds of dirt, dust, and debris into the air while smashing a bowling ball-sized fragment into a nearby NASA Spaceflight van. Much of the area near Starship’s launch site includes protected ecosystems, as well as land considered sacred by local Indigenous communities. The FAA soon issued 63 corrective actions needed before SpaceX could legally attempt another Starship test.

[Related: SpaceX’s Starship launch caused a ‘mini earthquake’ and left a giant mess.]

Unlike SpaceX’s outing, Starship’s upgraded launch mount reportedly better mitigated the resulting blowback—at least according to Elon Musk’s company assessment. The FAA, meanwhile, wasted no time in issuing its own statement on Saturday’s event.

“A mishap occurred during the [SpaceX] Starship OFT-2 launch from Boca Chica, Texas, on Saturday, Nov. 18,” the administration posted to X over the weekend. Although no injuries or public property damage was reported this time, the FAA promised to oversee the “SpaceX-led mishap investigation” to ensure the company will comply with “regulatory requirements.”

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While we may never be able to read a dog’s mind, new research indicates that some “smarter” dogs may be able to better interpret where an object is in space. By studying how this phenomenon called spatial bias may reflect what dogs see, researchers could potentially show that dogs process information similarly to the way humans do. The findings are described in a study published November 18 in the journal Ethology.

[Related: Dogs and wolves remember where you hide their food.]

What is spatial bias?

Spatial bias is how the brain processes information related to space, location, or distance when that same information could easily apply to an object.

When a person points to an object, a human toddler will generally focus directly on the object. However, a dog will usually take the gesture as cue to look in that specific direction. This difference is not necessarily due to the dog’s eyesight, but how they think and interpret gestures. Spatial bias is often demonstrated in the difference in how dogs and children react when a person shows them where a toy or treat may be.

“Very early on, children interpret the gesture as pointing to the object, while dogs take the pointing as a directional cue. In other words, regardless of the intention of the person giving the cue, the meaning for children and dogs is different,” study co-author Ivaylo Iotchev said in a statement. Iotchev is a neuroscientist and ethnologist at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary.

Spatial bias has been observed in behavioral tests that show how dogs learn and imitate, but hadn’t been studied until now, according to Iotchev. Earlier studies have not clarified if dogs behave this way due to inferior vision compared to primates, or if it is because the parameters of the space around them are more important to dogs than specific, nearby objects.

In this new study, a team of animal behavior experts was able to gain insight into how some dogs can overcome spatial biases on difficult challenges.

Learning location versus shape and color 

The team first tested two behavioral tasks on 82 domestic dogs of varying breeds and sizes. In one task, the dogs had a maximum of 50 trials to learn whether a treat was placed on the right or left side of a plate. This task was designed to teach the dogs about a location when they were directed to find where the treat was.

In the second task, the team used a white round plate and a black square one. Both plates were always placed in the middle and a dog was always given only one type of plate to eat from. However, the dog was exposed to each plate in a semi-random sequence, to teach them about the shape and color of the plate. This helped indicate if location or physical properties were easier for the dogs to remember. 

The team measured learning by how quickly a canine ran to the correct plate. They found that the dogs learned faster when the treat was placed to the right or left of a plate instead of on it. 

The dogs appeared to have more difficulty remembering whether the food was on the white round plate or black square one. The ‘spatial bias’ measure indicated that the dogs were learning about a specific place faster than an object’s features like color or shape. 

Measuring cognition and vision

A more complicated task looked to see if the dogs had retained the knowledge of where the treat had been placed. If the dog had previously received the treat on the right side of the plate, it was then placed on the left side. If the dog had previously been given the treat on a white plate, it was now on the black plate.

[Related: Do domesticated dogs howl back at wolves?]

To investigate if spatial bias is more sensory, cognitive, or a mixture of both, the team needed to note any differences between the visual and cognitive abilities of different dogs. They measured how short each dog’s head was, since this is correlated with visual acuity. They also observed how efficiently the dogs solved the problems. 

“The visual abilities of dog breeds differ from each other, which indirectly results from their head shape. Dogs with shorter heads–scientifically known as brachycephalic–develop human-like vision,” study co-author and PhD student Zsófia Bognár said in a statement. “The structure of their retina implies sharper and more focused vision than their longer-headed counterparts. “

To gauge their cognitive ability, the dogs took part in a series of tests of their memory, attention skills, and perseverance. They found that spatial bias is smaller in dogs with who could see finer details better. According to the team, as human children develop, spatial bias decreases with increasing intelligence and this could be possible for some canines with the right mindset as well.

Earlier studies have shown that for dogs, being “smart” has more to do with its memory than ability to learn new words. The dogs that exhibit characteristics that humans would label as intelligence demonstrated the ability to stick to a more complex task. Understanding how this works can help biologists better understand dogs’ evolution.

“Spatial bias in dogs is not simply a sensory problem but also a mindset. We also found that ‘smarter’ dogs are resilient in difficult learning situations and can overcome their biases,” said Iotchev.

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Although NASA’s Psyche spacecraft is currently en route to its rendezvous with a unique, metal-heavy asteroid floating between Mars and Jupiter, it still has quite a while before it reaches its destination. But researchers aren’t waiting until the end of its 3.5 year, 280-million-mile journey to make the most of the project. Even after barely a month of spaceflight, Psyche is already achieving some impressive technological feats.

On November 16, NASA announced its Deep Space Optical Communications experiment aboard Psyche successfully achieved “first light” earlier this week, beaming a data-laden, near-infrared laser nearly 10 million miles back to Caltech’s Palomar Observatory. Additionally, DSOC operators were able to “close the link”—the vital process in which test data is simultaneously beamed through both uplink and downlink lasers. Although only the first of numerous test runs to come, it completes a necessary step within NASA’s ongoing plans to develop far more powerful communications tools for future space travel.

[Related: In its visit to Psyche, NASA hopes to glimpse the center of the Earth.]

Astronauts, ground crews, and private companies have all utilized radio wave frequencies for data transfers and communications since the late-1950’s, thanks to a global antenna array known as the Deep Space Network. As organizations like NASA aim to expand humanity’s presence beyond Earth in the coming decades, they’ll need to move away from radio systems to alternatives like infrared lasers. Not only are such lasers more cost efficient, but they are also capable of storing and transmitting far more information within their shorter wavelengths. Further along in DSOC’s development, for example, will hopefully accomplish data transmission rates between 10-to-100 times greater than today’s spacecraft radio systems.

“Achieving first light is one of many critical DSOC milestones in the coming months, paving the way toward higher-data-rate communications capable of sending scientific information, high-definition imagery, and streaming video in support of humanity’s next giant leap: sending humans to Mars,”  Trudy Kortes, NASA’s director of Technology Demonstrations, said in Thursday’s announcement.

NASA also noted that, while similar infrared communications has been successfully achieved in low Earth orbit as well as to-and-from the moon, this week’s DSOC milestone marks the first test through deep space. This is more difficult thanks to the comparatively vast, growing distance between Earth and Psyche. During the November 14 test, data took roughly 50 seconds to travel from the spacecraft to researchers in California. At its farthest distance from home, Psyche’s data-encoded photons will take around 20 minutes to relay. That’s more than enough time for both Earth and Psyche to drift further along their own respective cosmic paths, so laser arrays on the craft and at NASA will need to adjust for the changes. Future testing will ensure the terrestrial and deep space tech is up to the task.

[Related: NASA’s mission to a weird metal asteroid has blasted off.]

Once it becomes the new norm, Jason Mitchell, director of the Advanced Communications and Navigation Technologies Division within NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program, believes optical lasers will offer a “boon” for researchers’ space missions data collection, and will help enable future deep space exploration.
“More data means more discoveries,” Mitchell said in NASA’s announcement.

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Hindsight is not quite 20/20 for NASA’s historic Apollo missions. For instance, the Apollo 12 lander successfully touched down on the moon at exactly 6:35:25 UTC on November 19, 1969. What happened to the lunar environment as astronauts touched down, however, wasn’t recorded—and exact details on the reactions between nearby rocks, debris, and lunar regolith to lander engines’ supersonic bursts of gas aren’t documented. And physically replicating Apollo 12’s historic moment on Earth isn’t possible, given stark differences in lunar gravity and geology, not to mention the moon’s complete lack of atmosphere.

This is particularly a problem for NASA as it continues to plan for astronauts’ potential 2025 return to Earth’s satellite during the Artemis program. The landing craft delivering humans onto the lunar surface will be much more powerful than its Apollo predecessors, so planning for the literal and figurative impact is an absolute necessity. To do so, NASA researchers at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, are relying on the agency’s Pleiades supercomputer to help simulate previous lunar landings—specifically, the unaccounted information from Apollo 12.

As detailed by NASA earlier this week, a team of computer engineers and fluid dynamics experts recently designed a program capable of accurately recreating Apollo 12’s plume-surface interactions (PSI), the interplay between landing jets and lunar topography. According to the agency, the Pleiades supercomputer generated terabytes of data over the course of several weeks’ worth of simulations that will help predict PSI scenarios for NASA’s Human Landing System, Commercial Lunar Payload Services, and even future potential Mars landers.

[Related: Meet the first 4 astronauts of the ‘Artemis Generation’]

NASA recently showed off one of these simulations—the Apollo 12 landing—during its appearance at SC23, an annual international supercomputing conference in Denver, Colorado. For the roughly half-minute simulation clip, the team relied on a simulation tool called the Gas Granular Flow Solver (GGFS). The program is both capable of modeling interactions to predict regolith cratering, as well as dust clouds kicked up around the lander’s immediate surroundings.

According to the project’s conference description, GGFS utilizing its highest fidelities can “model microscopic regolith particle interactions with a particle size/shape distribution that statistically replicates actual regolith.” To run most effectively on “today’s computing resources,” however, the simulation considers just one-to-three potential particle sizes and shapes.

[Related: Moon-bound Artemis III spacesuits have some functional luxury sewn in.]

The approximation of the final half-minute of descent before engine cut-off notably includes depictions of shear stress, or the lateral forces affecting a surface area’s erosion levels. In the clip, low shear stress is represented by a dark purple hue, while the higher shear stress areas are shown in yellow.

Going forward, the team intends to optimize the tool’s source code, alongside integrating increased computational resources. Such upgrades will allow for better, higher fidelity simulations to fine-tune Artemis landing procedures, as well as potentially plan for landing missions far beyond the lunar surface.

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Cooperation between different groups of humans lies at the root of our social norms, traditions, and culture. Groups of a great ape species called bonobos may also work collaboratively with other cliques, according to a study published November 16 in the journal Science.

[Related: Bonobo ladies get to choose their mates and boy oh boy are they picky.]

Along with chimpanzees, bonobos are some of our closest living relatives. Studying their relationships can help scientists reconstruct what human traits appear to be more innate and how they evolve. However, both species of primate exhibit different levels of cooperation despite living in similar social groups that have multiple adult members of both sexes. 

Chimpanzees appear to have more hostile relationships between different groups. Even lethal aggression is not uncommon. This hostility has led researchers to assume that group conflict is an innate part of human nature. 

Bonobos might be telling a different story about how social structures and communities have evolved over time. 

“The ability to study how cooperation emerges in a species so closely related to humans challenges existing theory, or at least provides insights into the conditions that promote between-group cooperation over conflict,’ study co-author and German Primate Center evolutionary biologist Liran Samuni said in a statement.

The study looked at two groups of 31 wild adult bonobos in the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve in the Democratic Republic of Congo over a period of two years. When the different groups of bonobos met up, they often fed, rested, and traveled together. 

“Tracking and observing multiple groups of bonobos in Kokolopori, we’re struck by the remarkable levels of tolerance between members of different groups,” Samuni said. “This tolerance paves the way for pro-social cooperative behaviors such as forming alliances and sharing food across groups, a stark contrast to what we see in chimpanzees.” 

The authors also did not observe disputes that led to the lethal aggression that has been observed in chimpanzees. The bonobos did not not interact randomly between groups. Cooperation only happened among a select few group members. 

“They preferentially interact with specific members of other groups who are more likely to return the favor, resulting in strong ties between pro-social individuals,” study co-author and Harvard University evolutionary biologist Martin Surbeck said in a statement. “Such connections are also key aspects of the cooperation seen in human societies. Bonobos show us that the ability to maintain peaceful between-group relationships while extending acts of pro-sociality and cooperation to out-group members is not uniquely human.”

[Related: Humans owe our evolutionary success to friendship.]

Cooperation between human groups leads to exchanges of ideas, knowledge, innovation, and resources. The Bonobos in the study also shared food resources across groups without any strong cultural influence. The authors believe that this challenges another existing idea that a shared culture and traits are necessary components for groups to cooperate with one another. 

The study also highlights the importance of collaboration when studying bonobos that live in remote and largely inaccessible parts of the preserve. 

“It is through strong collaborations with and the support of the local Mongandu population in Kokolopori, in whose ancestral forest the bonobos roam, that studies of this fascinating species become possible,” said Subeck, who directs research in the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve. “Research sites like Kokolopori substantially contribute not only to our understanding of the species’ biology and our evolutionary history, but also play a vital role in the conservation of this endangered species.”

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Like jellyfish, fungi, sea worms, and fireflies, some species of sea cucumbers glow in the dark. A team of researchers from Nagoya University in Japan have found that 10 known deep-sea species are bioluminescent in their natural habitats. The findings are part of a new textbook called The World of Sea Cucumber published on November 10.

[Related: The deepest known ocean virus lives under 29,000 feet of water.]

There are roughly 1,200 species of sea cucumbers. These marine invertebrates are found in every ocean on Earth, but they are best represented in the western Pacific and Indian Ocean. They generally live in shallow waters, but some species live at depths of thousands of feet deep. Most closely related to sea urchins, sea stars (aka starfish), sea lilies, and sand dollars, these bottom-dwellers range from as small as one inch long up to six feet. Some sea cucumbers are also known to shoot out a tangle of sticky, noodle-like goo from their butts when provoked. 

The new textbook takes readers deep underwater and discusses the bioluminescent properties of some of these sea cucumbers. According to NOAA, the light emitted by bioluminescent animals is produced by energy released from interior chemical reactions that are sometimes ejected from the organism. Its function is still a mystery, but it is generally used to ward off or evade predators, find food, or as a form of communication. 

The authors drew on previous sea cucumber research to highlight the differences between the shallow-dwelling and a bit more drab species and their brilliantly glowing deep-sea relatives. The book also shows the evolution of sea cucumbers from the Jurassic era roughly 180 million years ago up to the present day. 

To uncover the 10 bioluminescent sea cucumber species, the team deployed a remotely operated vehicle about 3,280 feet below the surface of Monterey Bay, California. The vehicle was equipped with a very sensitive and an arm that was robotically controlled from the ship. Unlike the more uniform bioluminescence seen in specimens taken onto ships, the light was shining from the sea cucumber’s head to tail and then back up similar to a wave.  

According to the authors, the previously unknown luminosity in these 10 deep-sea species suggests that sea cucumbers are more diverse than scientists once believed. A member of the order Molpadia is included in this discovery, which was previously believed to be a non-luminescent order of animals. 

While these sea cucumbers dwell in some of Earth’s deepest parts, they are still not immune to the effects of overfishing and particularly the drilling and mining activities that threaten their ecosystem. 

[Related: This headless chicken is the deep-sea ‘monster’ of our dreams.]

“As deep-sea exploration and development continue, information on their biodiversity and ecology, such as this book, becomes important as it allows us to assess the impact of human activities on deep-sea ecosystems,” textbook co-author and Nagoya University biochemist Manabu Bessho-Uehara said in a statement. “Heavy metal pollution from the mud discarded during drilling operations and motor-derived noise disrupting sound communication are important problems, but the effects on organisms when bioluminescence signals are disturbed, such as when light is obscured by drilling mud, have not been examined. It is necessary to clarify the importance of bioluminescence on the deep-sea floor and find measures that will lead to sustainable development.”

Studying the flora and fauna living in these extreme locations can also provide valuable knowledge of all life on Earth. It can help us discover new viruses that thrive in hydrothermal vents and the factors at play in Earth’s climate and carbon cycle. 

“I believe that understanding deep-sea ecosystems and interactions among organisms will lead to a better understanding of life on Earth itself,” said Bessho-Uehara.

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A team using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has observed two of the most distant galaxies astronomers have ever seen. At close to 33 billion light years away from Earth, these distant regions can offer insight into how the universe’s earliest galaxies may have formed. The findings are detailed in a study published November 13 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

[Related: ‘Christmas tree’ galaxy shines in new image from Hubble and JWST.]

The galaxies UNCOVER z-13 and UNCOVER z-12 are the second and fourth most distant galaxies ever observed and are located in a region called Pandora’s Cluster (Abell 2744). The two galaxies are among the 60,000 sources of light in Pandora’s Cluster that were captured in some of the first deep field images the JWST took in 2022. This region of space was selected for this kind of imaging due to its location behind several galaxy clusters. The light creates a natural magnification effect called gravitational lensing. This happens when the gravitational pull of the clusters’ combined mass warps the space-time around it. It then magnifies any light that passes nearby and offers a larger view behind the clusters.

Other galaxies confirmed at this distance generally appear in images as red dots. However, these new galaxies are larger and look more like a peanut and a fluffy ball, according to the team.

“Very little is known about the early universe, and the only way to learn about that time and to test our theories of early galaxy formation and growth is with these very distant galaxies,” study co-author and astronomer Bingjie Wang from Penn State University said in a statement. “Prior to our analysis, we knew of only three galaxies confirmed at around this extreme distance. Studying these new galaxies and their properties has revealed the diversity of galaxies in the early universe and how much there is to be learned from them.” 

Wang is also a member of the JWST UNCOVER (Ultradeep NIRSpec and NIRCam ObserVations before the Epoch of Reionization) team that conducted this research. UNCOVER’s early goal is to obtain highly detailed images of the region around Pandora’s Cluster using JWST.

Since the light that is emitted from these galaxies had to travel for so long to reach Earth, it offers a window into the universe’s past. The team estimates that the light JWST detected was emitted by the two galaxies when the universe was about 330 million years old and that it traveled for about 13.4 billion light years to reach the space telescopes. 

However, the galaxies are currently closer to 33 billion light years away from Earth because of the expansion of the universe over this period of time. 

“The light from these galaxies is ancient, about three times older than the Earth,” study co-author, Penn State astronomer, and UNCOVER member Joel Leja said in a statement.  “These early galaxies are like beacons, with light bursting through the very thin hydrogen gas that made up the early universe. It is only by their light that we can begin to understand the exotic physics that governed the galaxy near the cosmic dawn.”

[Related: JWST takes a jab at the mystery of the universe’s expansion rate.]

The two galaxies are also considerably bigger than the three galaxies previously located at these extreme distances. While our Milky Way galaxy is roughly 100,000 light years across, galaxies in the early universe are believed to have been very compressed. A galaxy of 2,000 light years across like one of ones the team imaged came as a surprise.

“Previously discovered galaxies at these distances are point sources—they appear as a dot in our images,” Wang said. “But one of ours appears elongated, almost like a peanut, and the other looks like a fluffy ball. It is unclear if the difference in size is due to how the stars formed or what happened to them after they formed, but the diversity in the galaxy properties is really interesting. These early galaxies are expected to have formed out of similar materials, but already they are showing signs of being very different than one another.”

To make inferences about these early galaxies, the team used detailed models. They believed that in addition to being young (by space standards), the two galaxies also had few metals in their composition, and were growing rapidly and actively forming stars. 

“The first elements were forged in the cores of early stars through the process of fusion,” Leja said. “It makes sense that these early galaxies don’t have heavy elements like metals because they were some of the first factories to build those heavy elements. And, of course, they would have to be young and star-forming to be the first galaxies, but confirming these properties is an important basic test of our models and helps confirm the whole paradigm of the Big Bang theory.”

Astronomers will continue to use lensing clusters and the instruments aboard the JWST to continue to peel back the timeline of some of the universe’s first galaxies.  

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There are millions of pieces of space junk orbiting Earth these days, so what’s one more bit of detritus amidst the trash cloud?

According to NASA’s recent spacewalk debriefing, International Space Station denizens Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara spent nearly seven hours conducting various repairs on a sun-tracking solar panel array. During their shift, however, one of their “crew lock bags” (astronaut-speak for a toolkit) accidentally got loose, and drifted away before either astronaut could catch it. While not a major issue in and of itself, this certainly highlights (yet again) the growing problem floating above humanity’s heads.

[Related: The FCC just dished out their first space junk fine.]

Thankfully, the lock bag didn’t contain anything of major importance. In a separate press conference last week, ISS deputy program manager Dana Weigel stated the bag’s contents included “some tethers and things like tool sockets” similar to the everyday household varieties, calling them “fairly common items” that aren’t a “huge impact” for the crew. Most importantly, Mission Control observed the bag’s current orbital trajectory and determined it presents a low risk of “recontacting” with the ISS, with “no action required.”

Meganne Christian, a European Space Agency 2022 astronaut class member, shared a clip on social media taken from Moghbeli’s helmet camera showing the toolbag’s escape into the cosmic abyss.

Since the toolbag isn’t in a stable orbit, experts estimate it will decay into Earth’s atmosphere sometime during March 2024. Given its size, the lost equipment will burn up completely during the descent, so there’s no need to stress or keep an eye to the sky—unless that’s your thing, of course.

The US Space Force already cataloged the new orbital debris as 58229/1998-067WC, and will track its movements over the course of its lifespan. Per The Register, the toolbag’s brightness is measured at a stellar magnitude +6, meaning you could hypothetically witness its atmospheric reentry with the naked eye during perfect weather conditions. That said, binoculars will probably increase the odds of seeing its fiery end.

[Related: Some space junk just got smacked by more space junk, complicating cleanup.]

But one toolbag’s atmospheric cremation does very little to solve the ongoing issue of space junk. After years of orbital industry expansion, the planet is surrounded by discarded rocket debris, satellites, and all manner of space travel detritus. It’s getting so bad that a recent project space junk cleanup project was suddenly complicated by its target colliding with another bit of trash.

Thankfully, governmental regulators are taking notice—earlier this year, the FCC issued its first ever space pollution fine to the satellite television provider, Dish Network, for failing to properly decommission one of its satellites last year. No penalties are expected for ISS astronauts Moghbeli and O’Hara; after all, they aren’t the first astronauts to drop the bag, so to speak. In 2008, two ISS astronauts accidentally lost a kit containing “two grease guns, scrapers, several wipes and tethers and some tool caddies.”

Update 11/17/2023 12:20PM : The Virtual Telescope Project has released this image, taken on November 15, 2023. The tool bag is still zooming around the Earth at roughly 17,500 mph until its projected March 2024 deorbit.

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For the first time in over 60 years, a rare egg-laying mammal has been spotted by scientists. Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna (Zaglossus attenboroughi) was caught on camera during a major expedition in the Cyclops Mountains in Indonesia’s Papua Province.

[Related: Dams are hurting this enigmatic Australian species.]

A sacred animal

The long-beaked echidna is named for wildlife documentarian and conservationist Sir David Attenborough and has only been recorded by scientists once in 1961. It is considered a monotreme, or an evolutionary distinct group of mammals who can lay eggs. The platypus is also a monotreme and there are only five remaining species of these strange types of mammal on Earth. 

They live in burrows and mainly eat insects, earthworms, and termites. They are listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species and are only known to live in the Cyclops Mountains.

“Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna has the spines of a hedgehog, the snout of an anteater, and the feet of a mole. Because of its hybrid appearance, it shares its name with a creature of Greek mythology that is half human, half serpent,” University of Oxford biologist James Kempton said in a statement. “The reason it appears so unlike other mammals is because it is a member of the monotremes–an egg-laying group that separated from the rest of the mammal tree-of-life about 200 million years ago.”

The echidna also has cultural significance for the people in the village of Yongsu Sapari. They have lived on the northern slopes of the Cyclops Mountains for eighteen generations. Rather than fighting during conflicts, the tradition is for one party to go up into the Cyclops to find echidna while the other party goes to the ocean to search for a marlin. Both of these creatures were difficult to find and it would take decades to even whole generations to locate them. However, once they were found, the marlin and echidna would symbolize the end of the conflict.

Finding echidnas, whip scorpions, and forest shrimp

During an expedition that began in 2019, a group of scientists from institutions in multiple countries set up over 80 trail cameras. They did not see any signs of the echidna for four weeks of trekking through a “beautiful but dangerous land.” A sudden earthquake forced the team to evacuate, one team member broke his arm in two places, another contracted malaria, and another had a leech attached to his eye for a day and a half.

[Related: Meet the first electric blue tarantula known to science.]

On the last day of the expedition, they finally spotted Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna. The identification of the species was later confirmed by mammalogist Kristofer Helgen from the Australian Museum Research Institute.

In addition to this elusive egg-laying mammal, this expedition marked the first comprehensive assessment of mammal, reptile, amphibian, and invertebrate life in the Cyclops Mountains. They combined Western scientific techniques with the extensive local knowledge of Papuan team members. Among the new discoveries are several insect species that are completely new to science and an entirely new genus of ground and tree-dwelling shrimp.

“We were quite shocked to discover this shrimp in the heart of the forest, because it is a remarkable departure from the typical seaside habitat for these animals,” entomologist  Leonidas-Romanos Davranoglou from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History said in a statement. “We believe that the high level of rainfall in the Cyclops Mountains means the humidity is great enough for these creatures to live entirely on land.”

Some other funky underground species including blind spiders, blind harvestman, and a whip scorpion were also found living in a previously unexplored cave system. The team hope that its rediscovery of Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna and all of these new species will help bring attention to the conservation needs of the Cyclops Mountains and Indonesian New Guinea.

CORRECTION November 19, 2023 3:55 PM EST: An earlier version of the article summary said the animal was named after Richard Attenborough. Zaglossus attenboroughi is named for Sir David Attenborough. We regret the error.

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Two of the most powerful space telescopes in the universe have joined forces to showcase a panorama of colorful galaxy clusters about 4.3 billion light-years away from Earth. The image of  galaxy cluster MACS0416 is from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Hubble Space Telescope and combines both visible and infrared light. 

[Related: Euclid telescope spies shimmering stars and galaxies in its first look at the ‘dark’ universe.]

According to NASA, MACS0416 is a pair of colliding galaxy clusters that will eventually combine to form an even bigger cluster. It includes numerous galaxies outside of the cluster and some other light sources that vary over time. The variation is likely due to a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, where light is distorted and amplified from distant background sources.

Color coding

In the image, different colors represent the varying wavelengths of light. The shortest are blue, the intermediate are green, and the longest are red. The wavelengths range from 0.4 to 5 microns and the variation creates a particularly vivid landscape of galaxies.

The colors also give clues to how far away the galaxies are. The bluest galaxies are relatively close, tend to show intense star formation, and are best detected by Hubble. The more red galaxies tend to be further away and are best spotted by JWST. Some of the galaxies also appear very red because they have a large amount of cosmic dust that tends to absorb bluer colors of starlight.

“The whole picture doesn’t become clear until you combine Webb data with Hubble data,” Rogier Windhorst said in a statement. Windhorst is an astronomer at Arizona State University and principal investigator of the PEARLS program (Prime Extragalactic Areas for Reionization and Lensing Science), which took the JWST observations.

Oh Christmas tree

While the images are pleasant to look like, they were also taken for a specific scientific purpose. The team was using their data to search for objects varying in observed brightness over time, known as transients. All of these colors twinkling together in the galaxy look like shining colorful lights on a Christmas tree. 

“We’re calling MACS0416 the Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster, both because it’s so colorful and because of these flickering lights we find within it. We can see transients everywhere,” said astronomer Haojing Yan of the University of Missouri in Columbia said in a statement. Yan is a co-author of one paper describing the scientific results published in The Astrophysical Journal.

The team identified 14 transients across the field of view. Twelve of the transients were located in three galaxies that are highly magnified by gravitational lensing. This means that they are likely to be individual stars or multiple-star systems that are very highly magnified for a short period of time. The other two transients are located within more moderately magnified background galaxies, so they are likely to be supernovae.

More observations with JWST could lead to finding numerous additional transients and in other similar galaxy clusters. 

Godzilla and Mothra 

One of the transients stood out in particular. The star system is located in a galaxy that existed roughly three billion years after the big bang and is magnified by a factor of at least 4,000. They nicknamed the star system Mothra in a nod to its “monster nature” of being both very bright and magnified. Mothra joins another lensed star the researchers previously identified that they nicknamed “Godzilla.” In Japanese cinema, Godzilla and Mothra are giant monsters known as kaiju.

In addition to the new JWST images, Mothra is also visible in the Hubble observations that were taken nine years ago. According to the team, this is unusual, because a very specific alignment between the foreground galaxy cluster and the background star is needed to magnify a star this much. The alignment should have been eliminated by the mutual motions of the star and the cluster.

An additional object within the foreground cluster could be adding more magnification. 

“The most likely explanation is a globular star cluster that’s too faint for Webb to see directly,” astronomer Jose Diego of the Instituto de Física de Cantabria in Spain said in a statement. “But we don’t know the true nature of this additional lens yet.” Diego is also a co-author of a paper published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics that details this finding. 

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Researchers in Denmark have discovered six new species of beetle, including one with some eye-opening genitalia. Loncovilius carlsbergi has a penis shaped like a bottle opener. The top looks like the protruding longer part of a bottle opener that latches onto the bottle cap, and the bottom resembles the pincer that holds the bottle in place. The specimen is described in a study published October 28 in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

[Related: Acrobatic beetle bots could inspire the latest ‘leap’ in agriculture.]

While the team from the Natural History Museum of Denmark still not sure why Loncovilius carlsbergi evolved this uniquely shaped penis, studying them can reveal the role that the genitals play in the bugs’ daily lives. 

“Genitalia are the organs in insects that evolve to be different in every species. As such, they are often the best way to identify a species,” study co-author and biologist Aslak Kappel Hansen said in a statement. “That’s why entomologists like us are always quick to examine insect genitalia when describing a species. The unique shape of each species’ genitals ensures that it can only reproduce with the same species.”

Aslak and his colleagues found and named six new species in the rove beetle genus Loncovilius that had been hidden within the insect collections at the museum. Loncovilius carlsbergi was named for the Carlsberg Foundation, which has funded research at the museum for years. Carlsberg is a popular 176-year-old Danish beer company.

Loncovilius beetles are only found in Chile and Argentina and entomologists don’t know too much about them. They are less than an inch long and all of their legs have sticky bristles on them, while other predatory rove beetles only have sticky front legs. 

Where Loncovilius beetles live make them special among this family of beetles. Most predatory rove beetles live on the ground, among dead leaves, fungi, and bark. Loncovilius beetles live on flowers. The authors believe that their sticky legs helped them adapt the ability to climb flowers and vegetation.

“We suspect that they play an important role in the ecosystem. So, it’s worrying that nearly nothing is known about this type of beetles, especially when they’re so easy to spot–and some of them are even quite beautiful,” study co-author and systematic entomologist Josh Jenkins Shaw said in a statement. “Unfortunately, we can easily lose species like these before they’re ever discovered.”

The forces of climate change, pollution, and habitat loss is exacerbating the Earth’s biodiversity crisis. These combined forces have threatened over one million plant and animal species with extinction, a rate of loss that is 1,000 times greater than previously expected. The team believes that this crisis will likely affect these newly discovered beetles as well.

[Related: A pocketful of bacteria helps these beetles through their most dramatic life changes.]

“Loncovilius populations are likely to change in coming decades. Our simulations demonstrate that at least three of the Loncovilius species are at risk because the rapidly changing climate strongly alters more than half of their habitat area by 2060,” study co-author and PhD student José L. Reyes-Hernández said in a statement. “It is important to stress that many more species will be affected by this change, but we don’t know how because only for four species we had enough data for our analysis.” 

The planet’s species are also going extinct faster than scientists can fully name and describe them. Some estimates place the number of species lost from the Earth every day at upwards of 150. According to Jenkins Shaw, as many as 85 percent of all species on the planet are still not formally named or described. 

“A taxonomic name is important because nature conservation relies on knowledge about species in particular areas. Without such a description, species are often left out of conservation efforts,” said Jenkins Shaw.

The authors hope that Loncovilius carlsbergi’s attention-grabbing genitals could spark broader interest in insects. They are also working on producing an actual bottle opener shaped like this beetle’s penis into production. 

“It’s important that we recognize the vast wealth of yet to be researched species around us before it’s too late. We would like for people around the world to talk about the crisis facing our planet’s species. A move towards serious learning and awareness may be sparkled by a light chat that takes place over a beer,” said Kappel Hansen.

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This article was originally featured on Knowable Magazine.

More than 1.5 billion years ago, a momentous thing happened: Two small, primitive cells became one. Perhaps more than any event—barring the origin of life itself—this merger radically changed the course of evolution on our planet.

One cell ended up inside the other and evolved into a structure that schoolkids learn to refer to as the “powerhouse of the cell”: the mitochondrion. This new structure provided a tremendous energetic advantage to its host—a precondition for the later evolution of complex, multicellular life.

But that’s only part of the story. The mitochondrion is not the only important structure within complex, eukaryotic cells. There’s the membrane-bound nucleus, safekeeper of the genome. There’s a whole system of internal membranes: the endoplasmic reticulum, the Golgi apparatus, lysosomes, peroxisomes and vacuoles—essential for making, transporting and recycling proteins and other cargo in and around the cell.

Where did all these structures come from? With events lost in the deep past and few traces to serve as evolutionary clues, it’s a very tough question to tackle. Researchers have proposed various hypotheses, but it is only recently, with some new tools and techniques, that cell biologists have been able to investigate the beginnings of this intricate architecture and shed some light on its possible origins.

A microbial merger

The idea that eukaryotes originated from two cells merging dates back more than 100 years but did not become accepted or well known until the 1960s, when the late evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis articulated her theory of endosymbiosis. The mitochondrion, Margulis said, likely originated from a class of microbes known as alphaproteobacteria, a diverse group that today includes the bacterium responsible for typhus and another one important for the genetic engineering of plants, among many others.

Nothing was known about the nature of the original host cell. Scientists proposed that it already was fairly complicated, with a variety of membrane structures inside it. Such a cell would have been capable of engulfing and ingesting things—a complicated and energetically expensive eukaryotic feature called phagocytosis. That might be how the mitochondrion first got into the host.

But this idea, called the “mitochondria late” hypothesis, doesn’t explain how or why the host cell had become complex to begin with.

In 2016, evolutionary biologist Bill Martin, cell biologist Sven Gould and bioinformatician Sriram Garg, at the University of Dusseldorf in Germany, proposed a very different model known as the “mitochondria early” hypothesis. They argued that since no primitive cells today have any internal membrane structures, it seems very unlikely that a cell would have had these over 1.5 billion years ago.

Instead, the scientists reasoned, the endomembrane system—the whole hodgepodge of parts found inside complex cells today—could have evolved soon after the alphaproteobacterium took up residence inside a relatively simple host cell, of a kind from a class called archaea. The membrane structures would have arisen from bubbles, or vesicles, released by the mitochondrial ancestor.

Free-living bacteria shed vesicles all the time, for all sorts of reasons, Gould, Garg and Martin note, so it seems reasonable to think they’d continue to do that when enclosed inside a host.

Eventually, these vesicles would have become specialized for the functions that membrane structures perform today inside eukaryotic cells. They would even fuse with the host cell’s membrane, helping to explain why the eukaryote plasma membrane contains lipids with bacterial features.

Vesicles could have served an important initial function, says biochemist Dave Speijer of the University of Amsterdam. The new endosymbiont would have generated plenty of poisonous chemicals called reactive oxygen species, by oxidizing fatty acids and burning them for energy. “These destroy everything, they are toxic, especially on the inside of a cell,” Speijer says. Sequestering them inside vesicles would have helped keep the cell safe from harm, he says.

Another problem created by the new guest could also have been helped by making membranes barriers, Gould, Garg and Martin add. After the alphaproteobacterium arrived, bits of its DNA would have mixed with the genome of the archaeal host, interrupting important genes. Fixing this would mean evolving machinery to splice out these foreign pieces—today they’re known as introns—from the messenger RNA copies of genes, so those protein-making instructions wouldn’t be garbled.

But that created yet another problem. The protein-making machinery—the ribosome—works extremely fast, joining several amino acids together per second. In contrast, the intron-removing system of the cell is slow, snipping out about one intron per minute. So unless the cell could keep the mRNA away from ribosomes until the mRNA was properly processed, the cell would produce many nonsensical, useless proteins.

The membrane surrounding the nucleus provided an answer. Serving as a spatial barrier, it allows mRNA splicing to finish up in the nucleus before the intron-free mRNA is translated in the cell’s internal fluid, the cytosol. “This is the selective pressure behind the origin of the nucleus,” Martin says. To form it, vesicles secreted by the endosymbiont would have flattened and wrapped around the genome, creating a barrier to keep ribosomes out but still allowing small molecules to pass freely.

An inside-out explanation

In short, Gould, Garg and Martin’s hypothesis explains why endomembrane compartments evolved: to solve problems created by the new guest. But it doesn’t fully explain how the alphaproteobacterium got inside the host to begin with, says cell biologist Gautam Dey at EMBL in Heidelberg, Germany; it assumes the endosymbiont is already inside. “This is a massive problem,” Dey says.

An alternative idea, proposed in 2014 by cell biologist Buzz Baum of University College London (with whom Dey once worked) and his cousin, University of Wisconsin evolutionary biologist David Baum, is the “inside-out” model. In this scenario, the alphaproteobacterium and the archaeal cell destined to be its eventual host would have lived side by side for millions of years in an intimate symbiosis, each depending on the other’s metabolic products.

The archaeal cell would have had long protrusions, as seen on some modern-day archaea that live in close association with other microbes. The alphaproteobacterium would have nestled up against these slender extensions.

Eventually, the protrusions would have wrapped around the alphaproteobacterium and enclosed it completely. But during the long stretch of time before that happened, the archaeal cell would have begun some spatial division of labor: It would keep information-processing jobs in its center, where the genome was, while functions like protein building would take place in the cytosol within the protrusions.

The power of the inside-out model, Buzz Baum says, is that it gives the cell eons of time, before the alphaproteobacterium becomes fully enclosed, to evolve ways to regulate the number and size of the mitochondrion and other membrane compartments that would eventually become fully internal. “Until you can regulate them, you’re dead,” Buzz Baum says.

The model also explains why the nucleus has the shape that it does; in particular, it provides an explanation for its unusually large pores. Viewed from inside the center of an archaeal cell, the long protrusions would be openings that could naturally become big pores like those, Baum says.

Most important, the inside-out model explains how the alphaproteobacterium would have gotten inside the archaeal host in the first place.

Still, the inside-out model has features it needs to explain. For example, the mitochondrion would end up in the wrong place—inside the endoplasmic reticulum, the network of tubes on which sit the cell’s protein-making ribosomes, as the archaeal protrusions wrapped around it. And so an additional step would be required to get the alphaproteobacterium into the cytoplasm.

But Martin’s main objection is that the inside-out model does not provide an evolutionary pressure that would have caused the nucleus or other membrane-bound compartments to arise in the first place. The inside-out model “is upside-down and backwards,” Martin says.

The nucleus: A riddle in the middle

Though the models agree that the mitochondrion evolved from an alphaproteobacterium, they have very different ideas about the origin of the nucleus and other organelles.

In the Gould, Garg and Martin model, the source for all of the structures would have been vesicles released by the evolving mitochondrion. Vesicles to contain reactive chemicals or cellular cargo, and the ability to move this cargo around, would have evolved very early. The nucleus would have come later.

In the inside-out model, the nucleus was, essentially, the remains of the archaeal cell after it wrapped its membranes around the alphaproteobacterium. So it would have appeared immediately. The endoplasmic reticulum also would have formed early, created from those squished-together protrusions. Other organelles would have come later—arising, Buzz Baum says, from buds of archaeal membrane.

Thus the models also make different predictions about the chemical nature of the membranes of cell organelles—at least originally—and how today’s complex cells came to have membrane lipids that are all chemically like the ones in bacteria, not archaea.

In the Gould, Garg and Martin model, in the beginning all the membranes except for the host cell’s outermost one would have been bacterial, like the membranes of the new resident. Then, as bacterial vesicles fused with this archaeal outer membrane, the bacterial lipids would slowly replace the archaeal ones.

In the inside-out model, the membranes of the nucleus and endoplasmic reticulum — and probably others — would have been archaeal, like the host, to start. Only later on, after genes from the bacterial genome moved over to the archaeal genome, would the lipids become bacterial in nature, Baum suggests.

How to test these ideas? Through experiments, cell biologists are starting to glimpse ways in which simple vesicles could have diversified into different organelles with distinct jobs—by taking on different shapes, like the layered membrane stacks of the modern endoplasmic reticulum or the Golgi body, or by ending up with different proteins inside them or on their membranes.

They are also highlighting the dynamism of the modern-day mitochondrion—and its potential to spawn new membrane structures.

Take, for example, the compartment that Speijer thinks evolved early in order to deal with reactive oxygen species: the peroxisome.

In 2017, cell biologist Heidi McBride of McGill University in Montreal reported that cells lacking peroxisomes could generate them from scratch. Working with mutant human fibroblast cells without peroxisomes, her team found that these cells put proteins that are essential for peroxisome function into mitochondria instead. Then the mitochondrial membrane released them as little bubbles, or vesicles.

These vesicles, or proto-peroxisomes, matured into true peroxisomes when they fused with another type of vesicle derived from endoplasmic reticulum, which carry a third necessary peroxisome protein. “It’s a hybrid organelle,” McBride says.

For McBride, this is an indication that peroxisomes—and probably other organelles—originally came from mitochondria (not exclusively from the endoplasmic reticulum, as previously believed). “The presence of mitochondria launched the biogenesis of new organelles,” she says. “In the case of peroxisomes, it’s quite direct.”

Other mitochondrion antics have also been noted.

First, a 2021 report from the lab of biochemist Adam Hughes at the University of Utah found that when yeast cells are fed toxic amounts of amino acids, their mitochondria will shed vesicles that are loaded with transporter molecules. The transporters move amino acids into the vesicles, where they won’t poison the mitochondria.

Hughes also discovered that the vesicles shed by the mitochondria can form long, tubule-like extensions with multiple layers, reminiscent of the layered stacks of the endoplasmic reticulum and the Golgi body. The structures persist in the cell for a long time. “They’re definitely their own unique structure,” Hughes says.

And in 2022, immunologist Lena Pernas, now at UCLA, showed that multilayered, mitochondria-derived structures can form in other contexts, too. When a cell is infected by the parasite Toxoplasma, her team found, the mitochondria surround the parasite and change shape. The parasite responds, and the upshot is that the mitochondrion ends up shedding large bits of outer membrane.

Pernas, who wrote about mitochondrial remodeling in the Annual Review of Physiology in 2016, recently discovered that these structures, which initially look like simple vesicles, also can grow and take on more complex shapes, such as stacks of sheet-like layers. What’s more, the stress of infection changes what sorts of proteins are placed on these shed bits of mitochondrial membrane. Such changes open the door for the stacked sheets to behave in different ways than they normally would, presenting the opportunity to take on new jobs, Pernas says.

The more Pernas and Hughes study these structures—found in quite different cells and conditions—the more similar they look. It’s tantalizing, says Hughes, to imagine how a structure like this, forming in the early days of eukaryote evolution, could have evolved over eons of natural selection into some of the endomembrane compartments existing in cells today.

It may never be possible to know for sure what happened such a very long time ago. But by exploring what can happen in today’s living bacterial, archaeal and eukaryotic cells, scientists can get more clarity on what was possible—and even probable. A cell moves into another cell, bringing benefits but also problems, setting off a complex cascade. And then, McBride says, “all this stuff blooms and blossoms.”

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.

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If you remember chatting with SmarterChild back on AOL Instant Messenger back in the day, you know how far ChatGPT and Google Bard have come. But how do these so-called chatbots work—and what’s the best way to use them to our advantage?

Chatbots are AI programs that respond to questions in a way that makes them seem like real people. That sounds pretty sophisticated, right? And these bots are. But when it comes down to it, they’re doing one thing really well: predicting one word after another.

So for ChatGPT or Google Bard, these chatbots are based on what are called large language models. That’s a kind of algorithm, and it gets trained on what are basically fill-in-the-blank, Mad-Libs style questions. The result is a program that can take your prompt and spit out an answer in phrases or sentences.

But it’s important to remember that while they might appear pretty human-like, they are most definitely not—they’re only imitating us. They don’t have common sense, and they aren’t taught the rules of grammar like you or I were in school. They are also only as good as what they were schooled on—and they can also produce a lot of nonsense.

To hear all about the nuts and bolts of how chatbots work, and the potential danger (legal or otherwise) in using them, you can subscribe to PopSci+ and read the full story by Charlotte Hu, in addition to listening to our new episode of Ask Us Anything. 

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If you live in and around Gulkana, Alaska and recently saw some eerie lights in the sky—don’t worry; they were all part of a science experiment. Earlier this week, researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and several other US institutions created artificial auroras by sending radio pulses into the Earth’s ionosphere using HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) transmitters on the ground. The frequencies of these transmissions were between 2.8 and 10 megahertz. 

These transmitters act as heaters that excite the gasses in the upper atmosphere. When the gasses “de-excite,” they produce an airglow between 120 and 150 miles above ground, according to a notice about the project issued by the HAARP team. This is similar to how charged particles from the sun interact with gasses in the upper atmosphere to create natural auroras; the charged particles are steered by the Earth’s magnetic field to the north and south poles to form aurora borealis and aurora australis. Compared to those light displays, the artificial auroras are much weaker. 

So why did the researchers do all this? Studying this artificial airglow may provide insights on what happens when real aurora lights appear.

If you noticed a faint red or green splotch in the sky above Alaska between November 4 and November 8, chances are good that you saw the experiment in progress. HAARP also notes in its FAQ that these ionosphere-heating experiments have no detectable effects on the environment after 10 minutes or so. 

[Related: Why NASA will launch rockets to study the eclipse]

Additionally, the team also wants to understand how these superheated gasses in the ionosphere interact with each other. Insights into these dynamics could inform collision detection and avoidance features for satellite systems. Gathering more intel on auroras and other upper atmosphere phenomena like it can help scientists see how weather and particles from space are interacting with the environment around Earth, and how energy is transferred during these events. 

Disturbing the ionosphere is not the only way to study auroras. Launching rockets into the ionosphere, which sits just at the edge of space, is another popular approach. 

The goal of HAARP is to research the physical and electrical properties of the Earth’s ionosphere as it pertains to surveillance, military and civilian communications, as well as radar and navigation systems. Outside of studying auroras, HAARP has used its antenna array to peer inside a passing asteroid, observe solar storms, and conduct other tests related to space physics. Beyond the Earth, the team’s ambitions extend to the moon and to Jupiter. 

HAARP has had an interesting history. Despite conducting serious science, around 2014, controversy and conspiracy brewed around the program’s mysterious antenna field, then run by the US military, prompting scientists to host open houses with the public explaining what they can and can’t do with their technology. Its image problem remains despite the changes in ownership over the years. 

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Hummingbirds are some of the world’s fastest birds and must frequently squeeze through tiny spaces in plants to get to the nectar that they need to keep up their energy. However, over time, they have lost their ability to fold their wings close to their bodies at the wrist and elbow like other birds. How hummingbirds squeeze into such tight spaces has remained a mystery to ornithologists until now. A study published November 9 in the Journal of Experimental Biology found that they deploy two very specific strategies: the sideways and the bullet.

[Related: This hybrid hummingbird’s colorful feathers are a genetic puzzle.]

Into the flight arena

The study focused on Anna’s hummingbirds (Calypte anna). These are among the most common hummingbirds living along the West Coast of the United States. They are about the size of a ping-pong ball and have iridescent emerald feathers and sparkling pink throat plumage. 

A team from the University of California, Berkeley designed a two-sided flight arena for the experiment. They used alternating rewards to train the hummingbird to fly through a 2.48 square inch gap in the partition that separated the two sides of the arena. To do so, they only refilled a feeder shaped like a flower with a sip of sugar water if the bird returned to the feeder that was on the other side through one of the gaps. This encouraged the birds with an only 4.7 inch-wide wingspan to flit around the arena. 

The team then replaced the gap between the two sides of the flight arena with a series of smaller oval and circular openings that ranged from 4.7 inches to only 2.3 inches in height, width, and diameter. The birds’ movements were recorded using high-speed cameras, to get a sense of how they negotiated the various openings. 

Next, the team wrote a computer program to methodically track the position of each bird’s bill as it approached and passed through each hole. The program also pinpointed where the hummingbird’s wing tips were, to calculate their wing positions as they transited through.

[Related: These female hummingbirds don flashy male feathers to avoid unwanted harassment.]

The experiment revealed that the hummingbirds used two unique strategies to negotiate the gaps. 

The sideways

In the first strategy, the hummingbirds approached the circular opening and usually hovered in front of it to assess its size. They then traveled through it sideways, reaching forward with one wing and sweeping the second wing back, similar to the shape of a cross. Their wings were still fluttering to fly through the door and then swiveled forward to continue on their way. 

The bullet

For the second strategy, the birds swept their wings backwards, pinning them to their bodies. They then quickly shot through the opening beak first like a bullet, before sweeping their wings forward. They resumed flapping their wings once they were safely through the circle. All of the hummingbirds in the study generally deployed this technique as they grew bolder and more familiar with the arena.

Changing tactics

The team observed that the hummingbirds who used the first strategy of sideways traveling tended to fly more cautiously than those that shot through the circles beak first. As the birds became more familiar with the openings after multiple approaches, they appeared to become more confident. They started to approach them quicker and dropped the more sideways way of getting through in favor of shooting through beak first. 

For the smallest opening–only half a wingspan wide–every bird zipped through facing forward with their wings back. Even the more cautious birds did this on their first attempt to avoid collisions. 

According to the team, about eight percent of the birds in the experiment clipped their wings as they passed through the partition and only one experienced a major collision. The bird who did experience the collision was able to successfully reattempting the move and continue flying.  

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What happens to glass if you leave it out in the open for several billion years—but with no air and no running water? We can find the answers to that question by studying naturally occurring glass on the moon. The moon may lack the features that usually weather rocks or minerals on Earth, but that doesn’t make this satellite completely inert. Scientists know that prolonged exposure to radiation leaves a mark on the lunar surface. Now, new research suggests that billions of years of radiation exposure appear to stiffen lunar glass, according to a team who published their work yesterday in the journal Science Advances.

The moon may not seem like an obvious place to find glass. But tiny glass spheroids riddle the lunar regolith—the rock chips and other loose material covering the lunar surface. Meteoroids constantly bombard the material, melting it into tiny pools. As the molten regolith cools back down, it hardens into glass. 

Glass is more than just a brittle, transparent sheet that fills windows. Scientists think of the stuff as the result of a liquid cooling rapidly without its atoms slotting into a defined structure. For that reason, some scientists consider glass to be its own separate state of matter.

And, even on the moon, glass does not last for billions of years without changing. Though the moon has neither a significant atmosphere nor running water to weather rocks like on Earth, the lunar surface is subject to something that our planet’s atmosphere typically filters out: radiation. Some of it comes from the sun; some arrives as cosmic rays from far greater distances. Regardless, over billions of years of radiation exposure, the effects build up.

[Related: Why do all these countries want to go to the moon right now?]

Geologists have long been interested in how radiation affects lunar soil. “There have been 20 years’ worth of study on it,” says Rhonda Stroud, a space materials scientist at Arizona State University, who was not an author of the paper. 

Much of that work involved taking facsimiles of lunar soil, which they call simulants, and exposing them to radiation. But, Stroud says, it’s hard to know how individual material particles react by studying vast quantities of them. “Any one little dust particle or sub-millimeter glass sphere could have its own age,” she says. “Things get buried, the regolith churns.”

Fortunately, we have actual lunar glass on Earth in the form of samples returned by our moon missions. Most recently, we can thank the Chang’e-5 lunar lander, which lifted off from China in November 2020 and returned less than a month later bearing 3.81 lbs of souvenirs. Chang’e-5 did not land in a place on the moon that experienced many impacts—and, consequently did not return with much glass. 

Still, scientists managed to sift through Chang’e-5’s bounty and pick out five particular glassy particles, each one about the width of a human hair. They examined each particle under a transmission electron microscope, allowing them to view its structure. They also pressed a tiny probe on each particle, allowing them to test how the particle reacted to force.

The researchers then “rejuvenated” the samples by heating them up to liquid temperatures of more than 1100 degrees F, holding them there for a minute, then letting them cool. They repeated the same microscope and pressure tests on the de-aged samples, allowing them to estimate what the particles looked like before hundreds of millions or even billions of years sitting on the moon and basking in radiation.

[Related: We finally have a detailed map of water on the moon]

They found a drastic change in a property that engineers call the Young’s modulus, which measures how much force a material needs to distort by a certain length. If the researchers’ rejuvenated samples were any indication, then prolonged radiation exposure increased the Young’s modulus of the glass by as much as 70 percent. More subtly, radiation also seemed to harden some of the particles.

These discoveries can help scientists figure out how glass behaves in the soil of other worlds. And the research team believes that it might also help us understand the behavior of the glass we make on Earth. 

In fact, this paper’s authors believe that lunar glass itself may soon be useful. In their vision, moon-dwellers might sift through the lunar regolith for glass beads and convert them into glass that they could use for their vehicles or habitats.

But it is not obvious to everyone how research like this yet translates into actual infrastructure. “The radiation from solar wind is very, very slow,” Stroud says. “I don’t think we need materials to withstand billions of years.”

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On November 8, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a Type 2 diabetes drug called tirzepatide for use in chronic weight management. It has been sold under the brand name Mounjaro for treating diabetes, but it will be called Zepbound when prescribed for weight loss. The drug is made by pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and doses should be available after Thanksgiving.

[Related: 6 Ozempic facts that make sense of social media hype.]

How Zepbound works

The medicine is a weekly injectable medication and the main ingredient is called tirzepatide. It mimics two hormones called glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) and glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide (GIP). Both are naturally produced in the body and the drug targets receptors in the brain for these hormones.

Both GIP and GLP-1 bind to receptors in the brain that tell the body it is full. GLP-1 also slows digestion to make people feel fuller longer and with smaller portions. American Board of Obesity Medicine medical director Kimberly Gudzune told The Washington Post that GLP-1 targets the receptors in the brain that decrease appetite and it slows digestion to make people feel fuller longer and with smaller portions. Additionally, GLP-1 increases the amount of insulin that the pancreas releases after eating, which slows down the rise in blood sugar.

GIP meanwhile works in the brain to decrease appetite and may also improve how the body breaks down fats and sugars.

Who is eligible for Zepbound?

The FDA cleared Zepbound for adults 18 and older considered obese (a body mass index of at least) or overweight (a body mass index of 27 or more) with at least one weight-related health condition. The FDA also said that it should be taken with exercise and a reduced-calorie diet.

What is a ‘weight-related condition’?

Weight-related conditions are medical complications that can arise from being overweight or obese. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), they include high blood pressure (hypertension), high LDL cholesterol, high levels of triglycerides, and Type 2 diabetes. 

Roughly 70 percent of American adults are considered overweight or obese by body mass index, according to the FDA. However, body mass index (BMI) is an imperfect metric for measuring health that has been questioned by the American Medical Association. Losing five to 10 percent of body weight with diet and exercise has been associated with a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease in adults who are overweight or obese

“Obesity and overweight are serious conditions that can be associated with some of the leading causes of death such as heart disease, stroke and diabetes,” director of the FDA’s Division of Diabetes, Lipid Disorders, and Obesity John Sharretts, said in a statement. “In light of increasing rates of both obesity and overweight in the United States, today’s approval addresses an unmet medical need.”

[Related: TikTokers are taking a diabetes drug to lose weight. Now it’s in short supply.]

How effective is Zepbound?

The FDA’s approval comes on the heels of a phase 3 clinical trial. All of the participants in the study had obesity or were overweight and had at least one weight-related condition.

At the highest dosage of tirzepatide (15 milligrams) participants saw an average weight loss 22.5 percent body weight, or about 52 pounds, over a period of 72 weeks. At a 10 mg dose, the average weight loss was about 21.4 percent (48 pounds). At only five milligrams, average weight loss was about 16 percent (35 pounds).

How does it compare to Ozempic or Wegovy?

Ozempic and Wegovy contain an ingredient called semaglutide. It works by suppressing the appetite by mimicking GLP-1, a hormone that signals to the brain that the stomach is full. In similar clinical trials, semaglutide has been shown to reduce body weight by roughly 15 percent (34 pounds) after 68 weeks.

By comparison, the tirzepatide in Mounjaro and Zepbound works on both the GLP-1 and GIP pathways.

While those taking tirzepatide lost more weight than those taking semaglutide in separate trials, the data is not comparable due to potential differences in study length and population. More data is needed that compares both drugs at the higher doses needed for weight-loss, so it is too early to say if one is more effective than the other.

[Related: Fatphobia and medical biases follow people after death.]

What are the potential side-effects?

In studies, the main side effects were gastrointestinal issues like nausea, vomiting, constipation, and diarrhea. The FDA says that Zepbound’s label will contain warnings for inflammation of the pancreas, gallbladder problems, low blood sugar, acute kidney injury, diabetic retinopathy, and suicidal behavior or thinking.

How much will Zepbound cost?

A one month supply of Zepbound is estimated to cost about $1,060. While it is less than Wegovy’s $1,300 price tag, both drugs may be too expensive for many that are eligible. Ozempic costs $936 per month before insurance.

Many insurance companies do not cover weight loss medication that is intended to treat Type 2 diabetes, but that could change with the FDA’s approval. Medicare and Medicaid are currently barred by law from covering weight loss medications. 

According to Eli Lilly, patients can sign up on its website for a copay, or a discount card program. The company also said that those who can get Zepbound through commercial insurance may pay as little as $25 for a one-month or three-month supply. It is unclear what will happen after that period as far as coast and weight staying off. Those who are commercially insured, but don’t have coverage for Zepbound, might be eligible to pay as little as $550 for a one-month prescription.

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After over half a century of loyal service, the world’s last remaining Super Guppy aircraft continues to dutifully transport NASA’s gigantic rocket parts in its cavernous, hinged cargo bay. On Tuesday, the Huntsville International Airport posted a video and accompanying images to social media of the rotund plane arriving from Kennedy Space Center. Perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, it sounds like a prop plane of that size can make a huge, rich racket on the tarmac.

[Related: Artemis II lunar mission goals, explained.]

Aboard the over 50-ton (when empty), turboprop plane this time around was the heat shield that protected last year’s Artemis I Orion spacecraft. The vital rocketry component capable of withstanding 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit resided in the Super Guppy’s 25-foot tall, 25-foot wide, 111-foot long interior during a nearly 690-mile journey to the Alabama airport, after which it was transported a few miles down the road to the Marshall Space Flight Center. From there, a team of technicians will employ a specialized milling tool to remove the heat shield’s protective Avcoat outer layer for routine post-flight analysis, according to NASA.

The Super Guppy is actually the third Guppy iteration to lumber through the clouds. Based on a converted Boeing Stratotanker refueling tanker and designed by the now defunct Aero Spacelines during the 1960s, an original craft called the Pregnant Guppy was supplanted by its larger Super Guppy heir just a few years later. This updated plane included an expanded cargo bay, alongside an incredibly unique side hinge that allows its forward section to open like a pocket watch. A final Super Guppy Turbine debuted in 1970, and remained in use by NASA for over 25 years. In 1997, the agency purchased one of two newer Super Guppy Turbines built by Airbus. This Guppy is the current and only such hefty boy gracing the skies. With its bulky profile, the Super Guppy’s travel specs are pretty impressive—it’s capable of flying as high as 25,000 feet at speeds as fast as 250 nautical miles per hour.

[Related: NASA’s weird giant airplane carried the future of Mars in its belly.]

Last PopSci checked in on the Super Guppy’s journeys was back in 2016, when it transported an Orion crew capsule potentially destined for a much further trip than the Artemis missions’ upcoming lunar sojourns—Mars. According to Digital Trends, the Super Guppy’s next flight could occur sometime next year ahead of NASA’s Artemis II human-piloted lunar flyby.

“Although much of the glory of America’s space program may be behind it, the Super Guppy continues to be one of the only practical options for oversized cargo and stands ready to encompass a bigger role in the future,” reads a portion of NASA’s official description.

Until then, feel free to peruse the official, 74-page Super Guppy Transport User’s Guide.

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For the first time, scientists have observed one virus attaching itself to another virus. An electron microscope captured the interaction in stunning detail and shows how these two different viruses may have co-evolved. The findings were published in the Journal of the International Society of Microbial Ecology on October 31. 

[Related: The deepest known ocean virus lives under 29,000 feet of water.]

The viruses in the study are both categorized as bacteriophages. These are a group of viruses that are known to infect bacteria. Bacteriophages also infect single-celled prokaryotic organisms known as archaea and are commonly called “phages.” 

Some viruses called satellites (shown in purple) depend on both their host organism and another virus known as a helper to complete its life cycle. The satellite virus depends on the helper virus to build the protective shell that covers its genetic material called a capsid or to help it replicate its DNA.  For this relationship to continue, the satellite and the helper must be close to one another for at least a little while, but there were no known cases of a satellite virus attaching to the helper until this discovery. 

“When I saw it, I was like, ‘I can’t believe this,’” study co-author and University of Maryland, Baltimore County biologist Tagide deCarvalho said in a statement. “No one has ever seen a bacteriophage—or any other virus—attach to another virus.”

The students who isolated the satellite nicknamed it the MiniFlayer and dubbed its helper the MindFlayer. The team saw this viral relationship between the satellite MiniFlayer and helper MindFlayer while looking at some samples of a family of bacteriophage satellites that infect Streptomyces bacteria. They initially believed that the samples had been contaminated due to the large sequences of DNA and some smaller sequences of DNA that didn’t match anything they were familiar with. 

They took detailed electron microscopy images that show 80 percent of helper viruses in this sample had a satellite bound at its “neck,” where the helper’s outer shell connects to its tail. The ones that did not still had remnant satellite tendrils at the neck that the team said looked like “bite marks.”

Next, they analyzed the genomes of the bacteriophages and bacterial hosts. The satellite viruses had genes that coded for their outer protein shell, but did not have the genes needed to multiply within bacterial cells. This evidence supported the idea that both types of bacteriophages were actually interacting with each other. 

[Related: Ask Us Anything: Can viruses be good for us?]

They also saw that the satellite viruses did not have a gene that is necessary for them to integrate into the genome of bacterial host cells after they have entered them. Since most of the satellite viruses can hide in the host’s DNA, they can replicate once the right helper comes along. According to the team, the satellite thus attaches to the helper using a unique adaptation at its tail, so that it can survive without this key gene.

 “Attaching now made total sense, because otherwise, how are you going to guarantee that you are going to enter into the cell at the same time? This satellite has been tuning in and optimizing its genome to be associated with the helper for, I would say, at least 100 million years,” co-author and  University of Maryland, Baltimore County computational biologist Ivan Erill said in a statement. 

As of now, this kind of relationship has only been observed in a laboratory setting. Understanding these long-term viral relationships could help scientists discover numerous other examples in nature. 

“It’s possible that a lot of the bacteriophages that people thought were contaminated were actually these satellite-helper systems,” said deCarvalho. “So now, with this paper, people might be able to recognize more of these systems.”

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Dinosaur Mysteries digs into the secretive side of the “terrible lizards” and all the questions that keep paleontologists up at night.

YOU NEVER KNOW how small you are until you’re next to a big ol’ dinosaur. Find the right lighting in the museum hall and you can literally stand in the shadow of the skeletons of Apatosaurus, Patagotitan, Brachiosaurus, and other reptiles that grew far larger than any other terrestrial creature in the past 66 million years. But even after nearly two centuries of research, we have only the haziest notions of why some dinosaurs were larger than any terrestrial mammal to date.

While a number of dinosaurs fell in the supersized category—Tyrannosaurus rex weighed more than a mature male African elephant—the sauropods were the all-time titleholders. They had small heads with simple teeth, impressively long necks, hefty bodies, and tapering tails. So many sauropod species reached more than 100 feet in length, paleontologists still aren’t sure which one stretched the farthest. While the largest land mammals, like the hornless rhino Paraceratherium and the biggest fossil elephants, got to be about 18 tons, sauropods evolved to have more mass at least 36 times during their evolutionary history—an ongoing reprisal of gargantuan herbivores through the Jurassic and Cretaceous.

The stunning heft of these creatures has often led us to wonder why they got to be so much bigger than any terrestrial creature before or since. But in the realm of paleontology, “why” questions are extremely difficult to answer. Queries starting with “why” are matters of history, and in this case, the history plays out dozens of times on multiple continents over the course of more than 130 million years. Though we see the end effect, we can’t quite make out the causes.

Dinosaurs have a habit of digging their claws into our imaginations, however, so researchers have kept on, turning up a few clues in the past two decades about the surfeit of superlative sauropods. While higher oxygen levels have been linked to bigger body sizes in a few ancient insects, the atmosphere in the heyday of the dinosaurs was about the same as today’s. What’s more, the Earth’s gravitational force was just as strong in the Mesozoic era as in the modern era. So we know that the impressive size of Argentinosaurus and other top sauropods was not a matter of an abiotic factor like increased oxygen in the atmosphere or lower gravity. Our explanation lies elsewhere.

Paleontologists are getting closer to the truth by looking at the dinosaurs themselves. For example, experts have identified a suite of characteristics that set sauropods apart from the mastodons and giant rhinos of the Cenozoic. Eggs have a great deal to do with it.

The largest mammals of all time were placentals, gestating their offspring on the inside so they could come out more developed. This reproductive strategy comes with some constraints. To reach even larger adult sizes, females of each species would need to carry their babies in the womb for longer. African elephants, for example, already gestate for about two years—during which much can go wrong. But sauropods, like all nonavian dinosaurs, laid multiple eggs at a time, bypassing the reproductive constraints of live birth and flooding their ecosystems with tons of babies that had the potential to grow huge (even if most ended up as snacks for the carnivores of the time). The different reproductive strategies gave dinosaurs some advantages over mammals.

Camarasaurus and other sauropods also got some assistance from their anatomical peculiarities. Sauropods had complex air-sac systems in their respiratory tracts that created air pockets within and around their bones. These nifty features kept their skeletons light without sacrificing strength, and also made extracting oxygen from the air and shedding excess body heat more efficient. The distinctive dinosaurs could grow long necks too, because they didn’t have heavy heads full of massive, grinding teeth like large herbivorous mammals over the past 66 million years. Instead, sauropods had small, light noggins full of spoon- or pencil-shaped teeth that were mostly just capable of cropping vegetation to be broken down and fermented through their gastrointestinal tracts. In other words, their guts did the work, not their teeth. Studies of ginkgoes, horsetails, and other common Mesozoic plants indicate that the ancient vegetation was more calorie-rich than previously supposed, so the abundance of green food likely fueled the reptilian giants’ unprecedented growth.

But these facts only show us what allowed sauropods to become big. The dinosaurs didn’t have to drift in that direction. In fact, some were relatively small: The island-dwelling species Magyarosaurus was about the size of a large cow. Sauropods could have thrived at smaller sizes, but they instead kept spinning off lineages of giants. We know something about what made living large possible, but what we still don’t know is what evolutionary pressures drove sauropods to evolve enormous bodies.

Predators certainly played their part. All sauropods were born small—even the largest species hatched from eggs about the size of a soccer ball. They were vulnerable to various Jurassic and Cretaceous carnivores, but growing up quickly was one way to stave off those hungry jaws. Hunting megafauna can be dangerous and even deadly, as we see with lions, wolves, and even humans today, and so sauropods may have plumped up to be less appealing to the likes of Allosaurus and T. rex.

But if carnivorous appetites were the main driver of sauropod size, we’d see a more uniform and extended “arms race” between the dinosaurs over time, resulting in gradually larger predators and prey. The fossil record instead shows that sauropods scaled up in different times and places, likely for an array of reasons ranging from local grub to what mating sauropods found sexy in each other. The repeated evolution of gigantic dinosaurs hints that there were many pathways to the sauropods’ impressive stature, not just one. Biology was as complicated back then as it is now, and we’ll never get the full story without experiencing 100-foot-long reptiles ourselves.

Read more PopSci+ stories.

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NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been exploring Jupiter since it arrived at the planet in 2016. In recent years, the mission has turned its attention to the gas giant’s many moons, including the hellish volcanic world Io and the ice ball Europa. Now, in research published in Nature Astronomy, the Juno team revealed new photos of Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede, which show evidence of salts and organic compounds. These materials are likely the residue of salty sea water from an underground ocean that bubbled up to the frozen surface of Ganymede. And, excitingly, a salty ocean indicates conditions there might be conducive to life.

Ganymede is a particularly weird place. Not only is it Jupiter’s most massive satellite, it’s the biggest moon in the whole solar system—it’s even larger than the planet Mercury. It also is the only moon to have its own magnetic field, generated from a molten metal core deep in its interior. Like other icy worlds of the outer solar system, such as Europa or possibly Pluto, Ganymede probably has an ocean lurking under its icy crust. Some studies suggest multiple seas, stacked together in a layer cake of ice sheets and oceans, hide underground.

“Because Ganymede is so big, its interior structure is more complicated” than that of smaller worlds, explains University of Arizona geologist Adeene Denton, who is not affiliated with the new work. She notes that the moon’s massive size means there’s a lot of space for interesting molecules to mix about. But that also means they’re tricky to spot, because material must cover a large distance  to get to the surface where our spacecraft can see them.

Juno finally passed close enough to Ganymede—within 650 miles, less than the distance from New York City to Chicago—to take a close look at the chemicals on its surface using its Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper (JIRAM). This incredible instrument tracked the composition of Ganymede’s surface in great detail, noting features as small as 1 kilometer wide. If JIRAM were looking at New York City, it would be able to map Manhattan in ten-block chunks.

[Related: Astronomers find 12 more moons orbiting Jupiter]

Importantly, material on the surface of Ganymede might tell us about the water hiding below. If there are salts above, the subsurface ocean might have that same brine. Oceans, including the ones on Earth, acquire their salt from chemical interactions where liquid water touches a rocky mantle. This kind of exchange is “one of the conditions necessary for habitability,” says lead author Federico Tosi, research scientist at the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome, Italy.

However, other current research suggests that Ganymede doesn’t have a liquid water layer directly touching its mantle. Instead, icy crusts separate the ocean from the rock. But because the team did see these salts in the JIRAM data, it suggests they were touching at one point in the past, if not now. “This testifies to an era when the ocean must have been in direct contact with the rocky mantle,” explains Tosi.

As for the organic chemicals that Juno detected, the team still isn’t completely  sure what flavor of compound they are. They’re leaning towards aliphatic aldehydes, a type of molecule found elsewhere in the solar system that’s known as an intermediate step necessary to build more complex amino acids. These usually indicate liquid water and a rocky mantle are interacting. This definitely isn’t a detection of life, but it’s interesting for the possibility of life lurking in Ganymede’s hidden oceans. “The presence of organic compounds does not imply the presence of life forms,” says Tosi. “But the opposite is true: life requires the presence of some categories of organic compounds.”

[Related: Why a 3,000-mile-long jet stream on Jupiter surprised NASA scientists]

Unfortunately, Juno won’t have a chance to swing by Ganymede again to search for more salty shores—instead, it’s headed toward the explosive Io. The probe’s most recent survey of these minerals was a “a unique opportunity to take a close look at this satellite,” Tosi says. We won’t have to wait too much longer, though, for a second visit. In about ten years, he adds, we’ll get another chance to explore these salty waters with the ESA JUICE mission, “which is expected to achieve complete and unprecedented coverage of Ganymede.”

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While the majority of fish are cold-blooded and rely on the temperature outside of their bodies to regulate their internal temperatures, less than one percent of sharks are actually warm-blooded. The extinct but mighty megalodon and the living great white shark generate heat with their muscles the way many mammals do. However, they are not the only sharks with this warm quirk. A study published November 7 in the journal Biology Letters found that there are more warm blooded sharks than scientists initially believed. 

[Related: Megalodons were likely warm-blooded, despite being stone-cold killers.]

Warmer muscles might help these giant carnivores be more powerful and athletic, by using that heat to generate more energy. Regional endothermy in fish has been seen in apex predators like the great white or giant tuna, but there has been debate on when this warm bloodedness evolved in sharks and if the megalodon was warm blooded. A previous study from June 2023 found that the megalodon was warm blooded and that the amount of energy it used to stay warm may have contributed to its extinction about 3.6 million years ago.

The new study looked at the results of autopsies from some unexpected shark strandings in Ireland and southern England earlier in 2023. The sharks belonged to a rarely seen species called the smalltooth sand tiger shark. These sharks are found around the world in temperate and tropical seas and in deep waters (32 to 1,700 feet deep). They have a short and pointed snout, small eyes, protruding teeth, and small dorsal and anal fins and can reach about 15 feet long. Smalltooth sand tiger sharks are considered a “vulnerable” species by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. While they are not targeted by commercial fisheries, the sharks may be mistakenly caught in nets and may face threats from pollution. 

Smalltooth sand tiger sharks are believed to have diverged from the megalodon at least 20 million years ago. The autopsies from this year’s stranded sharks unexpectedly served as a timeline that took marine biologists from institutions in Ireland, South Africa, and the United States back millions of years. 

The team found that these rare sharks have physical features that suggest they also have regional endothermy like the megalodon, great white, and some filter-feeding basking sharks. This new addition means that there are likely more warm-blooded sharks than scientists thought and that warm bloodedness evolved quite a long time ago.

“We think this is an important finding, because if sand tiger sharks have regional endothermy then it’s likely there are several other sharks out there that are also warm-bodied,” study co-author and marine biologist Nicholas Payne said in a statement. “We used to think regional endothermy was confined to apex predators like the great white and extinct megalodon, but now we have evidence that deep water ‘bottom dwelling’ sand tigers, and plankton-eating basking sharks also are warm bodied. This raises plenty of new questions as to why regional endothermy evolved, but it might also have important conservation implications.” Payne is affiliated with Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. 

[Related: Were dinosaurs warm-blooded or cold-blooded? Maybe both.]

Scientists believe that the megalodon’s warmer body allowed it to move faster, tolerate colder water, and spread all over the world’ oceans. However, this evolutionary advantage could have contributed to its downfall. The megalodon lived during the Pliocene Epoch (5.33 million years to 2.58 million years ago) when the world cooled and sea levels changed. These ecosystem changes and competition with newcomers in the marine environment like great whites may have led to its extinction. 

Understanding how extinct sharks met their end could help scientists gauge how today’s warm-blooded sharks could fare due to warmer ocean temperatures from human-caused climate change. It has potential conservation implications and could explain some shifting patterns of where sharks are foraging. 

“We believe changing environments in the deep past was a major contributor to the megalodon’s extinction, as we think it could no longer meet the energetic demands of being a large regional endotherm,” study co-author and Trinity College marine biologist Haley Dolton said in a statement. “We know the seas are warming at alarming rates again now and the smalltooth tiger that washed up in Ireland was the first one seen in these waters. That implies its range has shifted, potentially due to warming waters, so a few alarm bells are ringing.”   

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Reviled the world over for making our scalps itch and rapidly spreading in schools, lice have hitched their destiny to our hair follicles. They are the oldest known parasites that feed on the blood of humans, so learning more about lice can tell us quite a bit about our own species and migratory patterns. 

[Related: Ancient ivory comb shows that self-care is as old as time.]

A study published November 8 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE found that lice likely came into North America in two waves of migration. First when some humans potentially crossed a land bridge that connected Asia with present day Alaska roughly 16,000 years ago during the end of the last ice age and then again during European colonization. 

“In some ways, lice are like living fossils we carry around on our own heads,” study co-author Marina Ascunce, an evolutionary biologist with the United States Department of Agriculture, tells PopSci.  

Lice are wingless parasites that live their entire lives on their host and there are three known species that infest humans. Humans and lice have coevolved for thousands of years. The oldest louse specimen known to scientists is 10,000 years old and was found in Brazil in 2000. Since lice and humans have a very intertwined relationship, studying lice can offer clues into human migratory patterns.

“They went on this ride across the world with us. Yet, they are their own organism with some ability to move around on their own (e.g., from one head to another). It provides insight into what happened during our time together,” study co-author and mammal geneticist from the University of Florida David L. Reed tells PopSci. 

In this new study, a team of scientists from the United States, Mexico, and Argentina analyzed the genetic variation in 274 human lice uncovered from 25 geographic sites around the world. The analysis showed distinct clusters of lice that rarely interbreed and were found in different locations. Cluster I was found all over the world, while Cluster II was found in Europe and the Americas. The only lice that had ancestry from both clusters are found in the Americas. This distinct group of lice appears to be the result of a mixture between lice that were descended from populations that arrived with the people who crossed the Bering Land Bridge into North America and those descended from European lice. 

Researchers found genetic evidence that head lice mirrored both the movement of people into the Americas from Asia and European colonization after Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the late 1400’s.

“Central American head lice harbored the Asian background associated with the foundation of the Americas, while South American lice had marks of the European arrival,” Ariel Toloza, a study co-author and insect toxicologist at Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnica (CONICET) in Argentina, tells PopSci. “We also detected a recent human migration from Europe to the Americas after WWII.” 

[Related: Rare parasites found in 200 million-year-old reptile poop.]

The evidence in this study supports the theory that the first people living in the Americas came from Asia between 14,000 and 16,000 years ago and moved south into Central and South America. However, other archaeological evidence like the 23,000 to 21,000 year-old White Sands footprints and Native American tradition suggests that humans were already living in the Americas before and during the last ice age. Some potentially 30,000-year-old stone tools were discovered in a cave in Central Mexico in 2020, which also questions the land bridge theory. 

The study also fills in some of lice’s evolutionary gaps and the team sequenced the louse full genome for future research. 

“The same louse DNA used for this first study was used to analyze their whole genomes and also more lice were collected, so in the next year or so, there will be new studies trying to answer our ongoing questions,” says Ascunce. 

Technological improvements can also now help scientists study include ancient DNA from lice that has been found in mummies or even from louse DNA recovered from ancient combs. The study also offers some lessons in studying animals that we may generally experience as a nuisance.

“The world is full of a lot of plants and animals that are reviled or despised,” says Reed. “You never fully [know] what role they play in the environment or what their true value might be. So, be curious and see what stories the lowliest of animals might have to tell.”

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Excerpted from A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. Copyright © 2023. Available from Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House.

On Earth, air pushes on your skin from every direction with a consistent pressure of about 14 pounds per square inch, or using ridiculous non-American units, 1 atmosphere. That’s about the weight of 1 liter of water on every square centimeter of your skin. You don’t notice this for the same reason a seabottom shrimp doesn’t notice that the surrounding liquid could implode a submarine—your body is adapted to the pressure near Earth’s surface. It counterbalances the typical push of your surroundings, and you only rarely experience sudden pressure changes. 

But consider a soda. When you buy a sealed bottle of Diet Pepsi, you know it’s full of gas, but you don’t see a lot of bubbles. That’s because the bottle is held at about four times the surface air pressure of Earth, keeping carbon dioxide suspended sedately inside. When you open the top, you expose its contents to Earth’s relatively gentle atmosphere. All that dissolved gas rushes out in the familiar bubbling foam. If you want to avoid the sudden burst of gas, you can always open your bottle forty meters under the sea, where the pressure will keep the gas in place, and the seawater will make the Diet Pepsi taste no worse. 

Your body is like the soda, except that the gas suspended in your fluids is nitrogen, absorbed from the atmosphere. If you were teleported to outer space, where the air pressure level is “none,” your bodily fluids would react like the Diet Pepsi when opened, only instead of a burst of foam, you’d get nitrogen bubbles blocking your veins and arteries, preventing the normal flow of blood, oxygen, and nutrients. This danger is familiar to divers going from low depths back to the surface. If you switch from high to low pressure too quickly, you get “decompression sickness,” colloquially known as “the bends” because it often affects joints, causing the sufferer to bend in agony. If it’s in your lungs, that’s “the chokes.” If it’s in your brain, you’ve got “the staggers.” 

If you’re exposed to space, most likely you’ll just have the death. In fact, the only people who’ve ever died in space were killed by sudden loss of pressure. It was June 30, 1971, and cosmonauts Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vik tor Patsayev, and Vladislav Volkov were returning from Salyut-1. The three cosmonauts spent weeks performing zero gravity acrobatics, televised for the adoring Soviet public. They entered the capsule, and after some brief issues getting the hatch to seal, undocked and began their descent. When the ground crew arrived and the capsule was opened, the men were found, still seated, serene in death. Attempts to revive them proved useless—each had suffered massive brain hemorrhaging. Subsequent investigation determined that when they undocked from their space station, a valve on the return craft had unexpectedly popped open, exposing them to a near-perfect vacuum. 

Decompression sickness isn’t just a danger during accidents; it’s an issue any time you use a pressure suit. You may imagine a space suit as something like bulky clothing, but normal clothing doesn’t have to provide a sealed habitat inside itself. It’d be more accurate to imagine a leather balloon that happens to be shaped like a human. And like a balloon, the higher the internal pressure, the harder it is to bend. In a human-shaped balloon, high pressure means difficulty bending at the joints. Like, a lot of difficulty. A phenomenon called “fingernail delamination” is well documented, and we encourage you not to learn what it is. Thus, although the International Space Station is kept at Earth pressure, both American and Russian space suits only have around one third of that. 

So, why don’t astronauts get bendy, choky, staggery, and deathy when they don space suits? Because they prebreathe pure oxygen before spacewalks, removing most of the nitrogen from their blood. No nitrogen, no nitrogen bubbles. Movies may have led you to believe heroic astronauts can slip on a space suit and leap to the rescue, but under current designs this would result in Brad Pitt clutching his joints and shambling to a very painful (if handsome) death. 

The astute nerd will ask why not just keep the ISS at the same low pressure as the suit. The short answer is that although humans can survive in low pressure as long as there’s enough oxygen floating around, engineers would have to design all equipment to operate in a low-pressure, pure-oxygen environment. 

But pure oxygen is dangerous. In 1967, during prep for the Apollo 1 flight, a spark went off in the crew’s capsule, causing an intense fire in the pure oxygen environment. The three astronauts—Edward White II, Roger Chaffee, and Gus Grissom—could not be rescued, because the sudden increase in temperature and pressure made it impossible to use the inward-opening hatch, while the intense heat prevented rescuers from saving them. 

Less well known is a similar and earlier incident from the Soviet Union. In early 1961, Valentin Bondarenko was training to be a cosmonaut, and one of the training exercises was to spend ten days in a high-oxygen pressurized chamber. Near the end of confinement, he removed a medical sensor from his body and wiped the sticky glue from the sensor off with an alcohol swab. He absent-mindedly threw it aside, where it landed on an electric hot plate. The resulting fire quickly got out of control, consuming his suit. Oxygen had to be bled out of the chamber before rescuers could reach him, and he died of shock soon after. This happened just a month before Gagarin became the first human to reach outer space. The Soviets preferred to keep their failures a secret, and so when the Apollo 15 astronauts left a plaque on the Moon with the names of astronauts and cosmonauts who lost their lives in the race for the Moon, Bondarenko was not included. His story was only finally shared a quarter century after his passing. 

Buy A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith here.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Scientists made a claw machine out of a dead spider

By Rachel Feltman

This story comes from the 2023 Ig Nobel Awards. We’ve talked about a few Ig Nobel winners on the show before. In 2007, the government plans for a so-called gay bomb won the Ig Nobel Peace Prize. Anyway, the Ig Nobels are an annual award ceremony for research that makes you laugh, then makes you think. They were held in September, and one of the stories in particular really stuck out to me.

Last year, researchers from Rice University coined the ominous phrase “necrobotics” to describe a bold new field they’d ventured into. That’s “necro” for dead and “botics” for robotics. 

In a move that makes me think of those Big Mouth Billy Bass The Singing Sensation things that got really popular in the late 90s, the researchers used dead spiders to create robotic claw hands. 

This started in 2019, when mechanical engineers were setting up their lab at Rice and noticed a dead spider at the edge of a hallway. They got to wondering why spiders always curl their legs up so tight when they die. As any arachnid-expert could have told them, spiders have a hydraulic pressure system that controls their limbs. Basically, a spider’s muscles naturally keep its legs contracted into a closed position. It opens them by applying hydraulic pressure. When they die, they can no longer pump fluid into their little hydraulic legs to keep them open. So they default to their curled up state. The researchers decided to see if they could harness that claw-machine-like mechanism. All they had to do was find a way to pump up the hydraulic pressure. 

They landed on inserting a needle into the internal valves that wolf spiders use to fill up their own hydraulics, then super gluing it into place and attaching a syringe full of air. Puffing the air into the spider legs made them open up. You might be surprised to learn this study stirred a bit of controversy from other academics. 

In searching for other examples of necrobotics, I came across Custom Robotic Wildlife. They’re a 25-year-old small family business in Wisconsin that specializes in adding high-tech capabilities to taxidermy. Why, you may ask? Usually, it’s to create convincing decoys of wildlife to catch would-be poachers. To learn more about their unique roadkill robots—including some that poop candy—check out this week’s episode. 

FACT: Learning to talk to dolphins might help us talk to theoretical aliens

By Laura Krantz

Humans have been broadcasting our presence for about 85 years now, with radio, television, and radar, essentially spamming space with all kinds of messages. Very few of those have actually been deliberate—like the one from the Arecibo Telescope (RIP), or the Doritos commercial we sent out in 2008. But these are essentially messages in a bottle, tossed into the great black ocean of space, and it doesn’t seem likely that anyone or anything is going to come across them. But what if they do? What would we do if something answers back? How on Earth would we even figure out what they’re saying? Enter Dr. Laurance Doyle, an astrophysicist and member of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute. He thinks if we really want to get some practice trying to communicate with species other than ourselves, we don’t have to look to space—we’ve got plenty of opportunities right here. 

In 1932, a linguist by the name of George Zipf had his students count the letters in the book Ulysses to see how many there were of each letter. What he found is that the second most common letter occurred approximately half as often as the first most common. The third most common occurred one third as often as the first, and so on down the line. Graphed out using a logarithmic scale, this information showed up as a downward 45 degree slope, or a minus one slope. In the end, Zipf plotted dozens and dozens of languages and got that same minus one slope for all of them. This statistical distribution became known as Zipf’s Law and scientists think that if a message obeys Zipf’s Law, it indicates that it’s a real language, that meaningful knowledge is being transmitted.

Now, this was supposed to just apply to human communications. But Laurance and two colleagues, Dr. Brenda Mccowan and Dr. Sean Hanser, had an idea. Dr. Mccowan had recorded and classified the whistles of bottlenose dolphins and so Dr. Doyle graphed her data based on Zipf’s Law—and got a minus one slope for dolphin whistles. The dolphins are talking (which, of course, Matt Groening already knew…). It turns out that several bird species do this as well, including African penguins.

The problem, of course, is that we have no idea what they’re saying. Per Dr. Doyle’s line of thinking, that seems to provide us with an excellent opportunity to practice our translation abilities. Should we ever receive that extraterrestrial message, we might have better luck dissecting it. And, of course, our understanding of how different species communicate here on Earth might give us a sense of how advanced an alien civilization is based on the complexity of the signal.

Check out more stories like this on today’s episode, in addition to my new book, Is Anybody Out There? A Wild Thing Book.

FACT: The oldest living aquarium fish has been around for at least 15 US presidents and maybe as many as 18

By Chelsey B. Coombs

It’s surprisingly difficult to tell how old a fish is. In the past, if you wanted to know a fish’s age, you had to use a ring-counting method like you use with trees, but with these strange calcium carbonate structures located directly behind the brain called otoliths. And unfortunately, that means having to kill the fish, which is obviously bad if you’re working with endangered species like the Australian lungfish.

One Australian lungfish in particular has been around for a looooooong time, and her name is, appropriately, Methuselah. She arrived at the Steinhart Aquarium at the California Academy of Sciences all the way back in November 1938.

Methuselah is a legend and a sweetie who apparently loves figs and getting belly rubs. But no one knew exactly how old she was – they were going off of her arrival date to the museum, which would put her around 84 years old.

Luckily, two scientists, Dr. Ben Mayne of CSIRO, which is like Australia’s NSF, and Dr. David T. Roberts of Seqwater, the Queensland Government Bulk Water Supply Authority, created a non-invasive way to estimate the age of fish using their DNA. That’s important because it helps us predict how populations will grow and we can use that data to aid in the conservation of these important species.

They found that our girl Methuselah is probably around 92 years old, although taking into account the method’s margin of error, she could be as old as 101. And that makes her, as far as we know, the oldest living aquarium fish.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Arah Narida leans over a microscope to gaze into a plastic petri dish containing a hood coral. The animal—a pebbled blue-white disk roughly half the size of a pencil eraser—is a marvel. Just three weeks ago, the coral was smaller than a grain of rice. It was also frozen solid. That is, until Narida, a graduate student at National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan, thawed it with the zap of a laser. Now, just beneath the coral’s tentacles, she spies a slight divot in the skeleton where a second coral is beginning to bud. That small cavity is evidence that her hood coral is reaching adulthood, a feat no other scientist has ever managed with a previously frozen larva. Narida smiles and snaps a picture.

“It’s like if you see Captain America buried in snow and, after so many years, he’s alive,” she says. “It’s so cool!”

For nearly 20 years, scientists have been cryopreserving corals—freezing them at temperatures as low as -196 °C for long-term storage. The goal has been to one day plant corals grown from cryopreserved samples on reefs plagued by bleaching and acidification. Yet, progress has been agonizingly slow. When Narida and her colleagues published a study earlier this year detailing how they successfully grew adult corals from cryopreserved larvae, it was a milestone for the field.

Coral cryopreservation is difficult in part because freezing and thawing wreak havoc on cells. As scientists lower the temperature, the water in the coral’s cells turns to ice, leaving them dehydrated and deflated. Reheating is just as delicate: if the coral is warmed too slowly, melting ice can refreeze and tear through the cells’ outer membranes. The result is a soggy mess, as the cells’ innards ooze out through jagged holes—picture a frozen strawberry becoming limp and shriveled as it thaws.

Through trial and error, though, cryobiologists have developed the techniques that helped Narida grow her hood coral to adulthood. To prevent ice damage, Narida says, she washes the animals in antifreeze first. Antifreeze can be toxic, but it also seeps into the larvae’s cells and pushes out the water, helping the coral survive the next step: being dunked in liquid nitrogen.

In 2018, researchers reported that they had managed to get a coral larva to survive freezing and thawing for the first time. The scientists had added gold nanoparticles to their antifreeze to help the corals warm evenly during reheating. However, the thawed larvae were unable to settle and develop into adults. Instead, they kept swimming until they died.

When Narida began her experiments with hood corals in 2021, she included gold in her antifreeze recipe and combined several different antifreeze chemicals to reduce the solution’s toxicity. To thaw the animals quickly and minimize damage, Narida used a high-powered laser designed for welding jewelry. Then, she carefully washed the antifreeze away with seawater, rehydrating the corals. In the end, a whopping 11 percent of larvae in the experiment survived thawing, then settled, and developed into adults.

Leandro Godoy, a coral cryobiologist at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, is impressed by how many larvae survived after settling. “It’s a huge step,” he says, considering that, in the wild, only about five percent of corals make it that far.

Narida’s oldest thawed coral has survived for nearly nine months and is still growing. But she has more work to do. The larvae that survive cryopreservation are exceptionally fragile and can experience side effects that slow their development. They need careful tending in the lab, like ICU patients after surgery, says Chiahsin Lin, a coral cryobiologist at Taiwan’s National Dong Hwa University and Narida’s coauthor on the study.

The challenge now is to boost the coral’s survival even more to make large-scale reef restoration from cryopreserved larvae practical, Godoy explains.

“We still need to improve,” says Narida. “But this is already a success story.”

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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A very dry start

When the solar system first came together, some of the young planets were too hot for water. “Earth and Mars should have formed extremely dry,” says Humberto Campins, an asteroid expert at the University of Central Florida—due to their locations in the solar system’s frost line.

When the sun was coalescing out of a collapsing cloud of gas and dust 4.6 billion years ago, its tremendous heat made a boundary. Outside of it, space was cool enough for ice grains to solidify. (This helps explain why far-out Jupiter and Saturn have ocean moons.) Inside of it, heat vaporized water. Earth and the other inner planets clumped together from the dry rock and dense metal that remained. Something must have happened, some millions of years later, to nourish those planets with water. Astronomers have explored several possible scenarios. 

Craters on the surface of our moon indicate that our side of the frost line was constantly hit with space rocks, including a particularly violent shower known as the Late Heavy Bombardment. Some experts think those projectiles—specifically meteorites, the bits of asteroids that fall to Earth—might have been more like cosmic water balloons. The hypothesis is supported by the 2010 discovery of a thin crust of frost on asteroid 24 Themis. More recently, NASA found water-bearing clay minerals in the near-Earth asteroid Bennu during a ground-breaking sample-retrieval mission.

Still, it’s possible that other processes were involved in delivering water to Earth, such as gas from the cloudy solar nebula that dissolved hydrogen into the planet’s magma layer. It’s also possible that there were multiple sources and steps.

“The pieces of the puzzle are not clear,” says Campins, who is a member of the team that probed Bennu’s contents. But he points to one major clue that “gives us an idea of where the water may be coming from”: the type of hydrogen that flows through our aquatic systems.

Matching elements

The most common form of hydrogen in the universe has a lone proton orbited by an electron. But there’s a slightly different version called deuterium with a proton and a neutron squished into the center. Astronomers have measured the proportion of deuterium to regular hydrogen in Earth’s water and looked for that “D-H ratio” in other objects around the solar system.

This lends to the idea that a bunch of space bodies hit Earth with noble gasses, H₂O, and who knows what else. “If most of the water gets contributed by asteroid impacts and most of the noble gasses are contributed by comets,” the elemental math seems to add up, Campins says. “But I think that nature is a little bit more complicated than that…it could be that the timing of those two was not the same.” 

In fact, newer evidence emphasizes a different kind of space rock from closer to home.

Local rocks

If space rocks brought water to the Red Planet, could they have done so elsewhere? “What we’re learning here may not only be applicable to our understanding of what we should expect on Mars,” Campins says, “but about the possibility of water and organic molecules being delivered to planets around other stars, which would give you an environment that could be conducive to the formation of life.”

Putting these lines of evidence together gives us a recipe that would have involved lots of damp local rocks and a few of the more distant ice balls. Hydrogen, nitrogen, and zinc isotopes “all tell the same story” of a wet Earth, Raymond says: Previously overlooked non-carbonaceous meteorites probably supplied about 70 percent of the planet’s water, and just a dash of carbonaceous meteorites touched up its vast blue surface. 

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On November 7, the European Space Agency (ESA) released the first five images taken with its premier Euclid space telescope. The images show spiral galaxies, star nurseries, and incredible celestial objects in incredibly sharp detail. 

[Related: Euclid space telescope begins its search through billions of galaxies for dark matter and energy.]

Perseus cluster of galaxies

IC 342 aka the ‘Hidden Galaxy’

Irregular galaxy NGC 6822

[Related: Your guide to the types of stars, from their dusty births to violent deaths.]

Globular cluster NGC 6397

The Horsehead Nebula

Dark matter and dark energy

In July, Euclid launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. It’s on a mission of studying the mysterious influence of dark matter and dark energy on the universe and mapping one third of the extragalactic sky. According to the ESA, 95 percent of our cosmos appears to be made of these mysterious ‘dark’ entities. But we don’t understand what they are because their presence causes only very subtle changes in the appearance and motions of the things we can see.

“Dark matter pulls galaxies together and causes them to spin more rapidly than visible matter alone can account for; dark energy is driving the accelerated expansion of the Universe. Euclid will for the first-time allow cosmologists to study these competing dark mysteries together,” Carole Mundell, ESA Director of Science, said in a statement. “Euclid will make a leap in our understanding of the cosmos as a whole, and these exquisite Euclid images show that the mission is ready to help answer one of the greatest mysteries of modern physics.”

Euclid will observe the shapes, distances, and motions of billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years over the course of the next six years.

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Astronomers have discovered the most distant supermassive black hole ever observed. They had the help of a “cosmic magnifying glass,” or gravitational lensing. This happens when a massive celestial body creates a large curvature of spacetime so that the path of light around it can be bent as if by a lens.

The black hole is located in the galaxy UHZ1 in the direction of the galaxy cluster Abell 2744. The galaxy cluster is about 13.2 billion-years-old. The team used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to find the telltale signature of a growing black hole. It started to form only 470 million years after the big bang when the universe was only 3 percent of its current age of about 13.7 billion years-old. The galaxy is much more distant than the cluster itself, at 13.2 billion light-years from Earth. 

[Related: Gravitational wave detector now squeezes light to find more black holes.]

Astronomers can tell that this black hole is so young because it is so giant. Black holes evaporate over time. Most black holes in galactic centers have a mass that is equal to roughly a tenth of the stars in their host galaxy, according to NASA. This early black hole is growing and as a mass that is on par with our entire galaxy. Astronomers have never witnessed a black hole at this stage before and studying it could help explain how some of the first supermassive black holes in the universe formed. The findings are detailed in a study published November 6 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

“We needed Webb to find this remarkably distant galaxy and Chandra to find its supermassive black hole,” study co-author and astronomer Akos Bogdan said in a statement. Bogdan is affiliated with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“We also took advantage of a cosmic magnifying glass that boosted the amount of light we detected,” Bogman added. This magnifying effect is known as gravitational lensing. The team took X-ray observations with Chandra for two weeks. They saw intense, superheated X-ray emitting gas—a supermassive black hole’s trademark—from the galaxy. The light coming from the galaxy and the X-ray from the gas around the supermassive black hole were magnified by the hot gas and dark matter coming from the galaxy cluster. This effect was like a “cosmic magnifying glass” and it enhanced the infrared light signals that the JWST could detect and allowed Chandra to see the faint X-ray source.

“There are physical limits on how quickly black holes can grow once they’ve formed, but ones that are born more massive have a head start. It’s like planting a sapling, which takes less time to grow into a full-size tree than if you started with only a seed,” study co-author and Princeton University astronomer Andy Goulding said in a statement. 

[Related: ‘Rogue black holes’ might be neither ‘rogue’ nor ‘black holes.’]

Observing this phenomenon could help astronomers answer how some supermassive black holes can hit enormous masses so soon after the explosion of energy from the big bang. There are two opposed theories for the origin of these supermassive black holes–light seed versus heavy seed. The light seed theory says that a star will collapse into a stellar mass black hole and then grow into a supermassive black hole over time. In the heavy seed theory, a large cloud of gas–not an individual star–collapses and condenses to form the supermassive black hole. This newly discovered black hole could confirm the heavy seed theory. 

“We think that this is the first detection of an ‘Outsize Black Hole’ and the best evidence yet obtained that some black holes form from massive clouds of gas,” study co-author and Yale University theoretical astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan said in a statement. “For the first time we are seeing a brief stage where a supermassive black hole weighs about as much as the stars in its galaxy, before it falls behind.”

The team plans to use this and more data coming in from the JWST and other space telescopes to create a better picture of the early universe. 

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A tiny glimmer spotted amid seagrass by a diver off the Italian coast has yielded one of the largest historical treasure troves in over a decade. According to a November 4 announcement by Italy’s culture ministry, an archeological recovery team has recovered somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 near-pristine ancient coins from the Mediterranean Sea dating back to the fourth century Roman empire. 

[Related: These ‘fake’ ancient Roman coins might actually be real.]

Authorities described the large, bronze coins (known as follis) found near the town of Arzachena “in an exceptional and rare state of conservation,” with only four appearing slightly damaged. Upon further inspection, experts determined the currency originated across the Roman empire between 324 and 340 CE—roughly during Constantine the Great’s reign—with nearly every active mint known from the time, apart from Antioch, Alexandria, and Carthage.

Roman follis coinage entered circulation circa 294 CE during monetary reforms instituted by the emperor Diocletian. Even without a final official coin count, the Arzachena find is already confirmed to be larger than the last major follis discovery made a decade ago in the UK. In 2013, a local metal detector enthusiast uncovered 22,888 follis near Seaton Down a few hundred feet away from the site of a Roman military fort and villa circa the second-to-third centuries.

“The treasure found in the waters of Arzachena represents one of the most important discoveries of numismatic finds in recent years and highlights once again the richness and importance of the archaeological heritage that the depths of our seas… still guards and conserves,” Luigi La Rocca, regional director general of archaeology, fine arts and landscape, said via the Italian government’s recent announcement. La Rocca went on to describe such artifacts as “an extraordinary but also very fragile heritage” that is now constantly threatened by climate change and other human ecological impacts.

[Related: AI revealed the colorful first word of an ancient scroll torched by Mount Vesuvius.]

The tens of thousands of coins may not be the end of discoveries off the Sardianian coast, either. While recovering the follis, divers also found fragments of tall, two-handled, narrow neck jugs known as amphorae. Combined with the coins’ location across “two macro-areas of dispersion” in a large, sandy area between the beach and seabed, experts believe the region could hide the remains of a yet-to-be-uncovered shipwreck. Conservationists are now moving forward with follis restoration efforts.

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On November 3, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History debuted a piece of the asteroid Bennu to the public for the first time. The sample was deposited on Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on September 24. The spacecraft did not land, but instead dropped a capsule containing about nine ounces of asteroid samples down to Earth. The spacecraft continued on to a new mission called OSIRIS-APEX. It is set to explore the asteroid Apophis when it comes within 20,000 miles of Earth in 2029. 

On display is a 0.3-inch in diameter stone that weighs only 0.005-ounces. The stone was retrieved amidst rocks and dust collected by the spacecraft in 2020 after two years of exploring Bennu. 

[Related: NASA’s first asteroid-return sample is a goldmine of life-sustaining materials.]

OSIRIS-REx stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer and is the first US mission to collect samples from an asteroid. The spacecraft traveled 1.4-billion-miles from Earth, to the asteroid Bennu, and then back again. Bennu is roughly 4.5 billion years old and dates back to the crucial first 10 million years of the solar system’s development. Its age offers scientists a window into what this time period looked like. The space rock is shaped like a spinning top and is about one-third of a mile across at its widest part–slightly wider than the Empire State Building is tall. It revolves around the sun between the orbits of Earth and Mars.

“The OSIRIS-REx mission is an incredible scientific achievement that promises to shed light on what makes our planet unique,” Kirk Johnson, the Sant Director of the National Museum of Natural History, said in a statement. “With the help of our partners at NASA, we are proud to put one of these momentous samples on display to the public for the first time.”

The sample was labeled OREX-800027-0 by NASA scientists at Houston’s Johnson Space Center and is being stored in a nitrogen environment to keep it safe from contamination. CT scans of the displayed stone revealed that it is composed of dozens of smaller rocks. The fragments were fused back together at some point and the entire stone was changed by the presence of water. The alterations to the stone produced clays, iron oxides, iron sulfides, and carbonates as its major minerals and even carbon. 

The samples from this mission hold chemical clues to our solar system’s formation. Evidence of essential elements like carbon in the rocks outside of the main sample container have already been uncovered by NASA scientists. These early samples also contain some water-rich minerals. Scientists believe that similar water-containing asteroids bombarded Earth billions of years ago, which provided the water that eventually formed our planet’s first oceans.

[Related: NASA’s OSIRIS mission delivered asteroid samples to Earth.]

“Having now returned to Earth without being exposed to our water-rich atmosphere or the life that fills every corner of our planet, the samples of Bennu hold the promise to tell us about the water and organics before life came to form our unique planet,” museum meteorite curator Tim McCoy said in a statement. McCoy has worked on the OSIRIS-REx mission for nearly two decades as part of an international team of scientists.

According to Space.com, a sizable crowd turned out to see the space rock and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and other space agency and Smithsonian officials were present at the unveiling ceremony. Additional Bennu samples will be on display at a later date and at the Alfie Norville Gem & Mineral Museum at the University of Arizona in Tucson and Space Center Houston, next to to NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

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North Carolina’s Outer Banks saw a busy sea turtle nesting season this year. The barrier islands stretching from Ocracoke Island north to the Virginia state saw 459 total nests between May and October, according to reporting from The Virginian-Pilot and three conservation groups in the state dedicated to sea turtle nesting.

[Related: This waddling robot could guide baby turtles to the sea.]

There are six species of sea turtles native to the United States—green, hawksbill, Kemp’s ridley, leatherback, loggerhead, and olive ridley. All six species are protected by the Endangered Species Act and four of them are known to nest in North Carolina. Human activities are the biggest threats to sea turtle species around the world. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says that their biggest threats are being caught in fishing gear, nesting and habitat loss, pollution and marine debris, boat strikes, climate change, and the direct harvest of sea turtles and eggs.

During the early to middle of the summer in the Outer Banks, female turtles return to the same beaches where they hatched to dig nests into the sand. They use their back flippers to dig a hole in the ground to deposit the eggs, and then cover it back up with sand. According to the National Park Service, the nesting process takes about one to three hours to complete. 

The tiny turtles hatch a few months later and follow the light of the moon to the ocean. However, their journey from their nests is quite hazardous, as they can be misdirected by artificial lights from homes and streets, crushed by human activity, or eaten by predators on their way to the ocean. 

[Related: Endangered green turtles are bouncing back in the Seychelles.]

At Cape Hatteras National Seashore, this year tied with 2022 as the second-busiest nesting season on record with 379 reported nests. The area covers more than 70 miles and stretches from Ocracoke Island north to Nags Head. The National Park Service says that the first nest was found on May 12 and the most recent was seen on October 29. The nests comprised 324 loggerhead turtles, 51 green turtles, three Kemp’s ridleys, and one leatherback. The leatherback nest was the first one seen on Hatteras National Seashore in 11 years.

Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge on the northern end of Hatteras island reported its third-busiest nesting season since 2009. The refuge covers about 13 miles and saw 43 sea turtle nests this year. By species, 37 nests belonged to loggerhead turtles and six were green turtle nests, according to data from the Sea Turtle Nest Monitoring System.

The nonprofit Network for Endangered Sea Turtles (NEST) also reported its third-busiest nesting season since 2015. Vice President Susan Silbernagel said 30 nests belong to loggerhead turtles and seven were green turtle nests. The all-volunteer organization covers about 50 miles from Nags Head up to Virginia. 

[Related: Safely share the beach with endangered sea turtles this summer.]

To better protect the endangered turtles, volunteers and scientists have been regularly monitoring the region’s beaches since 1997. Staff members and volunteers at Cape Hatteras will establish a buffer zone around the nests for added protection. 

“We could not manage and monitor sea turtle nesting without the help of over 50 dedicated volunteers that assist with monitoring of our nests and reporting and responding to sea turtle strandings,” Michelle Tongue told The Virginian-Pilot. Tongue is the deputy chief of resource management and science for the National Park Service’s Outer Banks Group. 

Sea turtles spend the vast majority of their lives in the ocean and are among the largest reptiles in the world. Kemp’s ridley and green sea turtles weigh about 75 to 100 pounds, while leatherbacks can weigh about 2,000 pounds. Sea turtles are set apart from their pond or land-dwelling relatives by their flippers. Instead of these appendages, land and pond turtles have feet with claws. 

Continued monitoring and vigilance during the 2024 nesting season will hopefully increase survival rates for these endangered reptiles.

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Tired of paying increasingly hefty monthly subscription fees for your streaming services, only to scroll nearly as long as a movie’s runtime just to find something to watch? Well, your choices are only going to expand thanks to NASA’s new streaming channel. But at least when NASA+ launches on November 8, it won’t come with any fees or commercials.

The commercial free on-demand platform will be available via the NASA App on iOS and Android devices, web browsers, as well as through Roku, Apple TV, and Fire TV. The ever-expanding catalog will include live coverage of launch events and missions, original videos, and multiple new series.

[Related: NASA’s first asteroid-return sample is a goldmine of life-sustaining materials.]

“We’re putting space on demand and at your fingertips with NASA’s new streaming platform,” Marc Etkind, NASA Headquarters’ Office of Communications associate administrator, said earlier this year. “Transforming our digital presence will help us better tell the stories of how NASA explores the unknown in air and space, inspires through discovery, and innovates for the benefit of humanity.”

Check out trailers for some of the first series to hit NASA+ this month:

NASA Explorers will offer viewers a multi-episode look at the agency’s recently concluded, seven-year OSIRIS-REx mission. Completed in September, OSIRIS-REx successfully returned samples collected in space from Bennu, a 4.5 billion-year-old asteroid traveling across the cosmos since the dawn of the solar system.

Other Worlds will focus on the latest updates and news from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) program. Launched in 2021 following a 17-year-long development on Earth followed by a six-month orbital tune up, the JWST provides researchers with some of the most spectacular glimpses of space ever achieved. Over the course of its decade-long lifespan, the JWST aims to capture information and imagery from over 13.5 billion years ago—when some of the universe’s earliest galaxies and stars began to form.

And for those looking to just bask in cosmic majesty, Space Out will allow viewers to do just that alongside “relaxing music and ultra-high-definition visuals of the cosmos, from the surface of Mars to a Uranian sunset.”

[Related: Moon-bound Artemis III spacesuits have some functional luxury sewn in.]

“From exoplanet research to better understanding Earth’s climate and the influence of the Sun on our planet along with exploration of the solar system, our new science and flagship websites, as well as forthcoming NASA+ videos, showcases our discovery programs in an interdisciplinary and crosscutting way, ultimately building stronger connections with our visitors and viewers,” Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA Headquarters’ Science Mission Directorate, said over the summer.

NASA+ comes as the space agency nears a scheduled 2025 return to the lunar surface as part of its ongoing Artemis program. When humans touch down on the moon for the first time in over 50 years, they apparently will do so in style, with both Prada-designed spacesuits and high-tech lunar cameras.

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Humans are the only primates currently living in the wild in North America, but that was not always the case. The continent was once home to non-human primates, including big-eyed tarsier-like animals called omomyiforms and long-tailed critters called adapiforms. About 30 million years ago, a lemur-like creature named Ekgmowechashala was the last primate to inhabit the continent before Homo sapiens arrived. In a study published November 6 in the Journal of Human Evolution, fossil teeth and jaws shed some new light on this mysterious creature. 

[Related: 12-million-year-old ape skull bares its fangs in virtual reconstruction.]

From China to Nebraska

Understanding the origins of North America’s primates has been a paleontological puzzle. It’s been unclear whether they evolved on the continent or arrived from somewhere else via land bridges. The first first primates in North America date back about 56 million years at the beginning of the Eocene Epoch. Scientists believe that the primates like Ekgmowechashala generally flourished on the continent for over 20 million years. 

Ekgmowechashala was about five pounds and only one foot tall. They lived in what is now the American Plains just after the Eocene-Oligocene transition. At this time, a huge cooling and dying event made the continent much less hospitable for primates. Ekgmowechashala went extinct about 34 million years ago. 

For the study, paleontologists first had to reconstruct Ekgmowechashala’s family tree with the help of  an older “sister taxon,” or a closely related group of animals. Both groups generally share a branch on their family trees, but diverged at some point and have different lineages. This sister animal originates in and the team named it Palaeohodites, which means “ancient wanderer.” The fossils were collected by paleontologists from the United States in the 1990s from the Nadu Formation in Guangxi, an autonomous region in China. The fossils closely resembled the Ekgmowechashala material that had been found in North America in the 1960s, when the primate was still quite mysterious to North American paleontologists.

The Palaeohodites fossil potentially helps resolve the mystery of Ekgmowechashala’s strange presence in North America. It was likely a migrant to the continent instead of being the product of local evolution.

“Due to its unique morphology and its representation only by dental remains, its place on the mammalian evolutionary tree has been a subject of contention and debate. There’s been a prevailing consensus leaning towards its classification as a primate,” study co-author and University of Kansas PhD candidate Kathleen Rust said in a statement. “But the timing and appearance of this primate in the North American fossil record are quite unusual. It appears suddenly in the fossil record of the Great Plains more than 4 million years after the extinction of all other North American primates, which occurred around 34 million years ago.”

[Related: These primate ancestors were totally chill with a colder climate.]

The Ekgmowechashala fossils found in the US during the 1960s include an upper molar that looks very similar to the Palaeohodites molars found in China, according to study co-author and University of Kansas paleontologist Chris Beard. The team from Kansas closely analyzed the fossils to establish evolutionary relationships between the American Ekgmowechashala and its cousin Palaeohodites. 

The paleontologists believe that Ekgmowechashala did not descend from an older North American primate that survived the climate shift roughly 33 million years ago that caused other North American primates to go extinct. Instead, Ekgmowechashala’s ancestors likely crossed over the icy Beringian region that once connected Asia and North America millions of years later.

Rising from the dead

Ekgmowechashala is an example of the “Lazarus effect” in paleontology. This is where a species suddenly appears in the fossil record long after their relatives have died off. It is a reference to Lazarus who, according to New Testament mythology, was raised from the dead. It is also a pattern of evolution seen in the fossil record of North American primates, who went extinct about 34 million years ago. 

“Several million years later Ekgmowechashala shows up like a drifting gunslinger in a Western movie, only to be a flash in the pan as far as the long trajectory of evolution is concerned,” Beard said in a statement. “After Ekgmowechashala is gone for more than 25 million years, Clovis people come to North America, marking the third chapter of primates on this continent. Like Ekgmowechashala, humans in North America are a prime example of the Lazarus effect.”

The past is prologue?

Studying the way primates were affected by previous changes in climate can provide important insight to today’s human-driven climate change. Organisms generally retreat to more hospitable regions with the available resources or end up going extinct. 

“Around 34 million years ago, all of the primates in North America couldn’t adapt and survive. North America lacked the necessary conditions for survival,” said Rust. “This underscores the significance of accessible resources for our non-human primate relatives during times of drastic climatic change.

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We may be a spacefaring species, but only a tiny vanguard have actually explored beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Fewer than 700 people have flown in space, and the vast majority of those have been white men with a military background, screened for health and skills. But astronauts’ demographics are rapidly changing. Commercial space companies have sent space tourists on suborbital and orbital space flights, such as the all-civilian men and women of the SpaceX Inspiration 4 mission. Multiple companies plan to launch private space stations after the International Space Station is retired. NASA, meanwhile, has promised that a woman will be the first astronaut to set foot on the moon again when the Artemis III mission lands on the lunar south pole. And, in subsequent missions, the space agency plans to build long-term habitats on the moon. 

With more humans headed to space than ever, there’s an opportunity for all kinds of medical scenarios to crop up—especially those that haven’t occurred among the previous cadre of professional astronauts. Space travelers could have heart attacks, suffer traumatic injuries, or, as a result of one of the most human of activities, become pregnant.  

“It’s not a question of if, but when,” says physician Emmanuel Urquieta, the chief medical officer at the Translational Research Institute for Space Health, or TRISH, at Baylor College of Medicine. The problem, he says, is that the small sample of humans who have flown in space provides very little knowledge of how average body will respond to long-term flights. That goes double for conception, pregnancy, and the delivery of a baby, where there is no human spaceflight data at all. Numerous factors such as low gravity and high radiation are thought to pose risks to the healthy development of a fetus or the birth of a child. 

[Related: Space changes your brain in bigger ways than we thought]

These aren’t simply academic gaps to fill. “If we’re planning to develop habitation capabilities, and off-Earth colonies on the moon and Mars, this is something that will absolutely need to be solved,” Urquieta says. 

Scientists have just completed a very basic start. One new study published in the journal iScience by researchers at the Japan Aerospace Space Agency, JAXA, and the Japan Aerospace Space Agency may provide optimistic, if provisional, evidence that pregnancy in space is possible. At least, for mice. 

In August 2021, the research team sent frozen mouse embryos to the ISS, where, once thawed, they developed in the space station’s microgravity environment. After the embryos were returned to Earth about a month later, the study authors found that the small clusters of cells grew as normal. Each embryo formed two cellular structures known as a blastocyst and an inner cell mass; if allowed to develop further, those would go on to become the placenta and fetus, respectively. The researchers had worried that without gravity, the inner cell mass would not be able to coalesce in one space within the blastocyst. 

The research is another piece of evidence that mammalian fertility works in the conditions of spaceflight. Past experiments have shown that mouse sperm flown in space produced viable offspring when returned to Earth. Although there is a large gap between this early stage of embryonic development and birth of a healthy animal, the study team plans to conduct such a test in the future. 

And, of course, this finding was in mice. Urquieta cautions that it’s hard to tell how mouse results translate to human health even when experiments take place within Earth’s normal gravity. “A general challenge in human spaceflight is that a lot of the research that we have is from animal models,” he says. ”How much of those results could be extrapolated to humans still remains a question.”

[Related: What happens to your body when you die in space?]

Even if a fetus can develop in space, several key challenges must be addressed for a human mother off Earth. The first is nutrition, because pregnant people need sufficient protein and levels of folic acid to support a healthy fetal development. “Providing macro and micronutrients in spaceflight is going to be challenging,” Urquieta says, in a space station environment where fresh foods are in short supply. Lunar or Mars colonies probably won’t even have the luxury of regular deliveries from Earth. 

Then there’s radiation. Not all the mouse embryos developed successfully in the new study, and the researchers suspect that radiation could be the cause. “We know that radiation is very damaging in general to cells, and especially during the first three or four weeks of pregnancy,” Urquieta says. The ISS orbits low enough that it’s shielded by Earth’s magnetosphere, he says, but on the moon or a trip to Mars, the full brunt of galactic cosmic radiation could become a problem. 

Being pregnant on Earth isn’t a garden stroll, either, and it would probably be even less comfortable in space. Certain well-documented physiological changes in microgravity include shifting bodily fluids in for instance, with blood collecting in the head and overall blood volume decreasing. “There’s also space motion sickness, nausea, and vomiting. We know that that is also something common in pregnancy,” Urquieta says. “It would definitely exacerbate the non-pleasant symptoms.” 

Ultimately, he says, he researchers who study reproduction in space need to think about crawling before they walk—finding general solutions for astronaut radiation exposure and nutritional needs at lunar bases before tackling the specific requirements of pregnant astronauts. But given the likely inevitability of human space pregnancies, he says, “I think it’s important we start the conversations, and also increase awareness that this is going to be a very, very complex and challenging issue to solve.” 

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There’s an aviation term called the “death spiral”—when pilots’ skewed sensory perceptions contradict the accurate readings on their instruments, causing confusion and leading to bad course corrections. As the name implies, this often leads to tragic consequences—many experts believe such an issue contributed to John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s fatal crash in 1999, as well as the 1959 tragedy that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper. Disorientation was also one of the causes in the 2021 helicopter crash that claimed Kobe Bryant’s life.

[Related: How pilots end up in a ‘death spiral’ ]

Such a scenario is terrifying enough on its own—but imagine a similar situation while floating in the vacuum of space. With no gravitational pull and few, if any, points of reference, working in such an environment could quickly become disorienting and potentially dangerous as astronauts lose their sense of direction.

Although NASA astronauts receive copious training to guard against spatial disorientation, the issue is still a huge concern, especially as private companies increasingly expand their own projects with both space tourism and governmental contracts. Thanks to a team of researchers, however, wearable sensors enhanced by vibrotactile feedback might one day help keep astronauts feeling grounded.

[Related: This US astronaut will have spent an entire year in orbit.]

“Long duration spaceflight will cause many physiological and psychological stressors which will make astronauts very susceptible to spatial disorientation,” Vivekanand P. Vimal, a research scientist at Brandeis University’s Ashton Graybiel Spatial Orientation Lab, explained in a recent profile. “When disoriented, an astronaut will no longer be able to rely on their own internal sensors which they have depended on for their whole lives.”

To explore these issues, Vimal and their colleagues conducted a series of trials involving 30 participants. The team taught 10 of them to treat their vestibular senses (which pick up onwhere they are in space and where they are going) with skepticism. Another 10 volunteers received the same training alongside the addition of vibrotactors—devices attached to their skin that buzz depending on their geospatial positioning. The final 10 participants only received the vibrotactors with no training whatsoever. Subjects then wore blindfolds and earplugs while white noise played in the background, and took their place inside an intentionally disorienting “multi-axis rotation device” (dubbed MARS).

Similar to an inverted pendulum, MARS first rotated upright subjects from side-to-side around a central axis to act as an analog to everyday gravitational cues on Earth. Subjects then used two joysticks to attempt to remain stabilized without swinging into either side’s crash boundary. A second phase involved the same parameters, but with the cockpit shifted on a horizontal angle (with the participants facing the ceiling) to better approximate a space environment without Earth’s gravitational reference points. Throughout each subject’s 40 trials, vibrotactors on 20 of the 30 participants buzzed if they shifted too far from a central balancing point, thus potentially queuing them to correct their position with their joysticks.

Vimal, alongside co-authors Alexander Sacha Panic, James R. Lackner, and Paul DiZio, published the results in a new study published on November 3 with Frontiers in Physiology. According to the team’s findings, all participants first felt disoriented during the analog tests due to conflicting input from their vestibular systems and vibrotactors. Those with prior training with their sensors performed best during the space phase, while training-only participants without the wearables “crashed” more often. This third group also accidentally destabilized themselves more frequently than the other two. However, the subjects performed far better while situated in the Earth analog position, with or without the vibrotactors’ aid—Vimal’s team suspects the devices may have been too weak, or participants needed more time to adjust to the devices. 

[Related: ISS astronauts are building objects not possible on Earth.]

With further testing and refinement, Vimal’s team believes engineers could integrate similar wearables into astronauts’ suits to provide orientation aid, both inside spacecraft and outside space stations. They may be small additions, but they are some that could save explorers from some very serious, scary, and possibly even fatal circumstances.

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The freshly released images from NASA’s Lucy spacecraft’s first asteroid flyby reveal that Dinkinesh is actually a binary pair. A binary asteroid pair has a larger main asteroid and a smaller satellite orbiting around it. In the weeks leading up to the flyby, the Lucy team had wondered if Dinkinesh was actually a binary system because Lucy’s instruments detected the brightness of the asteroid changing over time. This is a sign that something is getting in the way of the light, likely a body orbiting the main space rock. 

[Related: NASA spacecraft Lucy says hello to ‘Dinky’ asteroid on far-flying mission.]

From a preliminary analysis of the first available images, the team estimates that the larger asteroid body is roughly 0.5 miles at its widest and that the smaller body is about 0.15 miles in size.

Dinkinesh is another name for the Lucy fossil that this mission is named after. The 3.2 million-year-old skeletal remains of a human ancestor were found in Ethiopia in 1974. The name Dinkinesh means “marvelous” in the Amharic language. 

“Dinkinesh really did live up to its name; this is marvelous,” Hal Levison, Lucy principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute, said in a statement. “When Lucy was originally selected for flight, we planned to fly by seven asteroids. With the addition of Dinkinesh, two Trojan moons, and now this satellite, we’ve turned it up to 11.”

The November 1 encounter primarily served as an in-flight test of the asteroid-studying spacecraft. It specifically focused on testing the system that allows it to autonomously track an asteroid as it whizzes by at 10,000 miles per hour. The team calls this its terminal tracking system.

“This is an awesome series of images. They indicate that the terminal tracking system worked as intended, even when the universe presented us with a more difficult target than we expected,” Lockheed Martin guidance and navigation engineer Tom Kennedy said in a statement. “It’s one thing to simulate, test, and practice. It’s another thing entirely to see it actually happen.”

It will take up to a week for the remainder of the data from the flyby to be downloaded to Earth. This week’s encounter was carried out as an engineering check, but the team’s scientists are hoping this data will help them glean insights into the nature of small asteroids.

“We knew this was going to be the smallest main belt asteroid ever seen up close,” NASA Lucy project scientist Keith Noll said in a statement. “The fact that it is two makes it even more exciting. In some ways these asteroids look similar to the near-Earth asteroid binary Didymos and Dimorphos that DART saw, but there are some really interesting differences that we will be investigating.”

[Related: Why scientists are studying the clouds of debris left in DART’s wake.]

The Lucy team plans to use this first flyby data to evaluate the spacecraft’s behavior and  prepare for its next close-up look at an asteroid. This next encounter is scheduled for April 2025, when Lucy is expected to fly by the main belt asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson. This asteroid is named after American paleoanthropologist Donald Johnson, one the scientists who discovered the Lucy fossils.

Launched in October 2021, NASA’s Lucy mission is the first spacecraft set to explore the Trojan asteroids. This group of primitive space rocks is orbiting our solar system’s largest planet Jupiter. They orbit in two swarms, with one moving  ahead of Jupiter and the other lagging behind it. 

There are about 7,000 asteroids in this belt, with the largest asteroid estimated to be about 160 miles across. The asteroids are similar to fossils and represent the leftover material that is still hanging around after the giant planets including Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune formed.

Lucy will then travel into the leading Trojan asteroid swarm. After that, the spacecraft will fly past six Trojan asteroids, including binary asteroids like Dinkinesh: Eurybates and its satellite Queta, Polymele and its yet unnamed satellite, Leucus, and Orus. 

In 2030, Lucy will return to Earth for yet another bump that will gear it up for a rendezvous with the Patroclus-Menoetius binary asteroid pair in the trailing Trojan asteroid swarm. This mission is scheduled to conclude some time in 2033.

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If you think of a particle accelerator, what may come to mind is something like CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC): a multibillion-dollar colossus that’s dozens of miles wide and crosses international borders in the name of unlocking how the universe works.

But particle accelerators take many forms. There are more than 30,000 accelerators in the world today. While some of them—including LHC—are designed to unveil the universe’s secrets, the vast majority have far more Earthly purposes. They’re used for everything from generating beams of brilliant light to manufacturing electronics to imaging the body and treating cancer. In fact, a hospital can buy a room-sized medical accelerator for just a few hundred thousand dollars. And, as of last month, scientists have made another curious addition to the list: the smallest particle accelerator yet.

Physicists have fabricated an accelerator the size of a coin, publishing their work in Nature on October 18. This device is just a tech demo, but its creators hope it opens the gateway to even smaller accelerators that could fit on a silicon chip.

“I consider this paper to be really interesting and cool physics, for sure, and it’s been an effort that’s been going on for a long time,” says Howard Milchberg, a physicist at the University of Maryland, who was not involved with the research.

[Related: The green revolution is coming for power-hungry particle accelerators]

This mini-accelerator is not merely a Lilliputian LHC. Depending on its operational calendar, LHC fires protons or the nuclei of lead atoms around a large circle. This miniaturized accelerator instead fires electrons down a straight line. 

Plenty of other linear electron accelerators have existed, including most famously the now-dismantled two-mile-long Stanford Linear Collider. Traditionally, electron accelerators boost their projectiles by shooting them through metallic cavities, typically made from copper, that contain twitching electromagnetic fields. The chambers thus push particles along like surfers on electric waves. 

But some physicists believe that these old-fashioned accelerators are not ideal. The metallic cavities are prone to errors. They’re also unwieldy and require large equipment. The researchers’ new accelerator instead uses precise laser shots to push the electrons.

Physicists have been trying to make laser accelerators since the 1960s. Called photonic accelerators, referring to the study of light, they can be smaller and more cost-efficient than their cavity-based counterparts. But only in the past decade have lasers become precise and affordable enough for even experimental photonic accelerators to be practical.

Making them smaller, then, brought its own series of daunting obstacles. A major stumbling block had been the fact that engineers didn’t have the sophisticated technology needed to craft a mini accelerator’s tiny parts.

Take the coin-sized accelerator the researchers tried to build. First, it generates electrons using a part repurposed from an electron microscope. Then, the device pushes the electrons down a colonnade: two rows of several hundred silicon pillars, each just 2 micrometers tall, with an even smaller gap between the rows. A laser strikes the top of the pillars, creating electric fields that boost the electrons squeezed inside—at least on paper.

“Making such small features with enough precision is extremely demanding,” says Tomáš Chlouba, a physicist at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany, and one of the paper’s authors. “You need really top-of-the-line devices…these are not cheap devices, and these are not devices that were available in the 90s.”

[Related: Scientists found a fleeting particle from the universe’s first moments]

But chip fabrication is always advancing. Now, Chlouba and his colleagues could rely on techniques that are already common in the world of semiconductor manufacturing. They fashioned a successful prototype. The device can deliver only about 1 electron per second, a tiny trickle by particle accelerator standards. (The average wire inside the average device in your home carries quadrillions of times more electrons.) Moreover, the electrons have about the same energy as those inside an old-style cathode ray tube television: again, a pittance by particle accelerator standards. 

As a result, “I don’t know how practical it could be,” says Milchberg. Fitting more electrons down the colonnade would be like hitting a bullseye with a shotgun blast, he says.

Indeed, Chlouba makes it patently clear that he and his colleagues are very far away from using this accelerator for anything resembling a real-world application. If they want to do that, they’ll need to make many more electrons, with much higher energies. Milchberg says it is also not clear if batches of electrons can fit together down the colonnade without their negative electric charges pushing them apart.

But if researchers succeed at overcoming these hurdles, Chlouba could imagine a host of applications for particle accelerators that could be arranged on a standard silicon chip. Medical professionals already use electron accelerators to treat skin cancer. With that in mind, some doctors might imagine an accelerator that is small enough to insert inside the body via an endoscope. “This is smaller, cheaper, and fits everywhere,” Chlouba says.

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A team of scientists at Northwestern University have developed synthetic melanin that can accelerate healing in human skin. It is applied in a cream and can protect the skin from the sun and heal chemical burns, according to the team. The findings are described in a study published November 2 in the journal Nature npj Regenerative Medicine.

What is melanin?

Melanin is a pigment that is naturally produced in humans and animals. It provides pigmentation to the hair, eyes, and skin. It protects skin cells from sun damage by increasing pigmentation in response to the sun–a process commonly called tanning. 

“People don’t think of their everyday life as an injury to their skin,” study co-author and dermatologist Kurt Lu said in a statement. “If you walk barefaced every day in the sun, you suffer a low-grade, constant bombardment of ultraviolet light. This is worsened during peak mid-day hours and the summer season. We know sun-exposed skin ages versus skin protected by clothing, which doesn’t show age nearly as much.”

[Related: A new artificial skin could be more sensitive than the real thing.]

Aging in the skin is also due to simply getting older and external factors like environmental pollution. Sun damage, chronological aging, and environmental pollutants can create unstable oxygen molecules called free radicals. These molecules can then cause inflammation and break down the collagen in the skin. It is one of the reasons that older skin looks very different than younger skin. 

‘An efficient sponge’

In the study, the team used a synthetic melanin that was engineered with nanoparticles. They modified the melanin structure so that it has a higher free radical-scavenging capacity.

Researchers used a chemical to create a blistering reaction to a sample of human skin tissue in a dish. The blistering looked like a separation of the upper layers of the skin from each other and was similar to an inflamed reaction to poison ivy. 

They waited a few hours, then applied their topical melanin cream to the injured skin. The cream facilitated an immune response within the first few days, by initially helping the skin’s own free radical-scavenging enzymes recover. A cascade of responses followed where healing sped up, including the preservation of the healthy layers of skin underneath the top layers. The synthetic melanin cream soaked up the free radicals and quieted the immune system. By comparison, blistering persisted in the control samples that did not have the melanin cream treatment. 

“The synthetic melanin is capable of scavenging more radicals per gram compared to human melanin,” study co-author and chemist/biomedical engineer Nathan Gianneschi said in a statement.  “It’s like super melanin. It’s biocompatible, degradable,nontoxic and clear when rubbed onto the skin. In our studies, it acts as an efficient sponge, removing damaging factors and protecting the skin.”

According to the team, the super melanin sits on the surface of the skin once it is applied and isn’t absorbed into the layers below. It sets the skin on a cycle of healing and repair that is directed by the body’s immune system. 

[Related: The lowest-effort skincare routine that will still make your skin glow.]

Protection from nerve gas

Gianneschi and Lu are studying using melanin as a protective dye in clothing. The thought is the pigment could act as an absorbent for toxins, particularly nerve gas. 

“Although it [melanin] can act this way naturally, we have engineered it to optimize absorption of these toxic molecules with our synthetic version,” Gianneschi said in a statement

They are also pursuing more clinical trials for testing their synthetic melanin cream. In a first step, they recently completed a trial showing that the synthetic melanins do not irritate human skin. Since it protects tissue from high energy radiation, it could also be an effective treatment for burns cancer patients undergoing radiation therapy often experience. 

This research was funded by the United States Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health.

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The ability to get lost in thoughts and use our imaginations to daydream might not be completely unique to humans. A study published November 2 in the journal Science found that rats can think about objects and places that are not right in front of them. 

[Related: How science came to rely on the humble lab rat.]

Imagining locations that are away from our current position is a component of both memory and conjuring up possible future scenarios. If animals have this ability, they could have a form of imagination that is similar to our species.

“The rat can indeed activate the representation of places in the environment without going there,” Chongxi Lai, a co-author of the study and engineer and neuroscientist at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, said in a statement. “Even if his physical body is fixed, his spatial thoughts can go to a very remote location.”

To learn more, Lai and a team at Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Maryland designed a series of experiments to see if rats can use their thoughts to imagine going towards a specific location or moving a remote object.

Reading a rat’s mind

When humans and rodents experience events or visit places, specific neural activity patterns are activated in their hippocampus. This area of the brain is responsible for spatial memory and stores mental maps of the rat’s world. It is also involved in recalling past events and imagining future situations. To recall memories, specific patterns related to places and events are generated in the hippocampus. Chimpanzees have been shown to have the ability to pretend, but scientists are still figuring out how chimps and other non-human animals think. 

To peer inside of a rat’s brain and look at these brain patterns, the team developed a real-time “thought detector.” This system measures neural activity and translates what it means using a brain-machine interface (BMI). 

The BMI produced a connection between the electrical activity occurring in the rat’s hippocampus and the animal’s position in a 360-degree virtual reality arena. It allowed the researchers to see if a rat can activate hippocampal activity to think about a location in the virtual arena without physically traveling there. 

A rat ‘thought dictionary’

With the BMI in place, the team worked to decode the brain signals in the rats. They built a “thought dictionary” of what the brain activity patterns looked like when the rat was traveling through the virtual arena in the experiment.

To do this, the rat was harnessed into a virtual reality system. As the rat walked on a spherical treadmill, its movements were translated onto a 360-degree screen. The rat was rewarded when it navigated towards its goal.

While the rat walked on the treadmill, the BMI system recorded the activity occurring in the hippocampus. The team saw which neurons were activated when the rat navigated the virtual arena to reach each goal. These signals provided them with the basis for a real-time translation of what was going on in the hippocampus.

With the thought dictionary set up, the team disconnected the treadmill. The rat was rewarded for the first step of reproducing the hippocampal activity pattern that was associated with walking towards a goal location.

The Jumper task and the Jedi task

Next, they designed two different tasks for the rats to perform–the Jumper task and the Jedi task.

In the Jumper task, the BMI translated the rat’s brain activity into motion on a screen. The animal was essentially using its thoughts to find a reward by thinking about where it needs to go to obtain it. This is a thought process similar to traveling to work or school and imagining the buildings and places we will pass along the way. 

[Related: We probably have big brains because we got lucky.]

The Jedi task had a rat hypothetically move an object to a location in its mind. The rat was fixed in a virtual place, but controlled its hippocampal activity to envision moving the object towards a goal. This is similar to how a person sitting on a couch imagining  getting up and refilling a water glass in a kitchen. The team then changed the location of the rat’s goal, which required it to produce activity patterns associated with the new location.

They found that the rats can precisely and flexibly control their hippocampal activity. Surprisingly, they could sustain this activity and hold their thoughts on a given location for many seconds. This time frame is similar to the amount of time humans can take to relive past events or imagine new scenarios.

“The stunning thing is how rats learn to think about that place, and no other place, for a very long period of time, based on our, perhaps naïve, notion of the attention span of a rat,” Tim Harris, a study co-author and biophysicist from Howard Hughes Medical Institute, said in a statement.

According to the team, this study shows how BMI can be used to probe hippocampal activity and could be a new way to study this critical region of the brain. BMI is increasingly used in prosthetics, and this new work could be used to develop devices based on these same principles.

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On November 1, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft successfully completed its first asteroid flyby. The 56 feet-long spacecraft came within 230 miles of the asteroid Dinkinesh aka “Dinky.” This fairly small space rock is in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. 

[Related: Meet Lucy: NASA’s new asteroid-hopping spacecraft.]

Dinkinesh is the first of 10 asteroids the probe will visit over the next 10 years. The asteroid is about 10 to 100 times smaller than the Jupiter Trojan asteroids that are the main target of the Lucy mission. Dinkinesh is another name for the Lucy fossil that this mission is named after. The 3.2 million-year-old skeletal remains of a human ancestor were found in Ethiopia in 1974.

Lucy zoomed by Dinkinesh at about 10,000 miles per hour.  This encounter was the first in-flight test of the spacecraft’s terminal tracking system. 

“The Lucy operations team has confirmed that NASA’s Lucy spacecraft has phoned home after its encounter with the small main belt asteroid, Dinkinesh,” NASA wrote in a blog post. “Based on the information received, the team has determined that the spacecraft is in good health and the team has commanded the spacecraft to start downlinking the data collected during the encounter.”

It will take NASA up to a week to download the data on how Lucy performed during this first in-flight test during the encounter. NASA planned for the high-resolution grayscale camera onboard Lucy to take a series of images every 15 minutes. Dinkinesh has been visible to Lucy’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI) as a single point of light since early September. The team began to use L’LORRI to assist with the navigation of the spacecraft. 

Lucy’s thermal infrared instrument (L’TES) should also begin to collect data. Since L’TES was not designed to observe an asteroid quite as small as Dinkinesh, the team is interested to see if it can detect the half-mile wide asteroid and measure its temperature during the encounter.

Astronomers plan to use the data from this approach to gain a better understanding of small near-Earth asteroids and if they originate from larger main belt asteroids. 

Launched in October 2021, NASA’s Lucy mission is the first spacecraft set to explore the Trojan asteroids. These are a group of primitive space rocks orbiting our solar system’s largest planet Jupiter. They orbit in two swarms, with one ahead of Jupiter and the other lagging behind it. Lucy is expected to provide the first high-resolution images of what these space rocks look like. 

There are about 7,000 asteroids in this belt with the largest about 160 miles across. The asteroids are similar to fossils and represent the leftover material that is still hanging around after the giant planets including Uranus, Neptune, Jupiter, and Saturn formed.

[Related: New image reveals a Jupiter-like world that may share its orbit with a ‘twin.’]

In 2024, Lucy will return towards Earth for a second gravity push that will give it the energy needed to cross the solar system’s main asteroid belt. It is expected to observe asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson in 2025. This asteroid is named after American paleoanthropologist Donald Johnson, one the scientists who discovered the Lucy fossils.

It will then travel into the leading Trojan asteroid swarm. After that, the spacecraft will fly past six Trojan asteroids: Eurybates and its satellite Queta, Polymele and its yet unnamed satellite, Leucus, and Orus. 

In 2030, Lucy will return to Earth for yet another bump that will gear it up for a rendezvous with the Patroclus-Menoetius binary asteroid pair in the trailing Trojan asteroid swarm. This mission is scheduled to end some time in 2033.

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In Washington, D.C., a honey bee landed on a restaurant bar, creating quite a stir. But a man a few feet away, who was allergic to the insect’s sting, was not alarmed. This bee’s head and wings were metal, and its abdomen glass.

The bistro, Bresca, which means “honeycomb” in Catalan, likes to serve its riff on a Bee’s Knees cocktail in this bee-like vessel. And, to fit the theme, Bresca’s version swaps out simple syrup made of processed sugar and water for a syrup made entirely of honey and water. Unlike the sucrose-heavy simple syrups that many bartenders use in cocktails, honey is mostly fructose and glucose. Because fructose is sweeter than sucrose, honey goes a long way in a cocktail, and knowing how to use it is key to impressing your guests. 

Use different varieties of honey to your benefit

“Honey comes from thousands and thousands of varietals of plants,” says Juliana Rangel, associate professor of apiculture at Texas A&M’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. “Each plant has its own unique [taste] profile that’s not found in [table] sugars.”

[Related: How to build a garden that’ll have pollinators buzzin’]

When you are familiar with the varieties of honey available to you, you can choose the perfect honey to complement the other ingredients in a cocktail. “Horsemint honey,” Rangel notes, which comes from a plant that grows wildly across central Texas and other areas, “would be a great complement to a minty beverage like mojitos because the honey itself has those components.” Rangel also explains that because honey naturally contains acids, it combines well with citrus fruits often used in cocktails. 

But because of honey’s thickness, it needs to be thinned out before it goes into a cocktail. At the urban apiary on the rooftop of the Hilton hotel in McLean, Virginia, the harvest goes to the kitchen and bar, where it’s mixed with equal parts warm water. This keeps it viscous and flavorful, but loose enough to be blended easily into a cocktail of whiskey, Cointreau, and muddled lemon slices so the oils from the skin can help round out the drink.

Actually, mind your beeswax

Bees work busily, visiting flowers and converting pollen and nectar in their stomachs to remove water and produce a simple sugar. A harvesting bee then passes this nectar to another bee that stores this sugar in the honeycomb, drying it out with their wings and capping it with beeswax. As it turns out, beeswax is another useful agricultural product and has its place around alcohol.

Bresca’s bartender works much like a bee. Not only is cocktail construction a busy process, but to infuse the right flavors into the drink, the bartender must move it from vessel to vessel, aging it in beeswax for nine days before it goes into the metal and glass bee.

Storing a cocktail in a jar with a beeswax-coated interior is a lot like putting wine into an oak barrel, Gerling explains. “Alcohol is a solvent. It’s extracting properties from the beeswax.”

Hawksmoor in New York City goes as far as infusing whiskey with melted beeswax harvested from Manhattan rooftops to make their Night Nurse cocktail. After time in the refrigerator, the bartender skims off all that rises to the surface—about a quarter of the initial wax. It’s the same process as fat-washing a cocktail, and the melted beeswax imparts floral flavors and a creamy mouth-feel. Hawksmoor also acid-adjusts their honey with malic acid from apples and citric acid for a cleaner taste.

[Related: 5 ways to keep bees buzzing that don’t require a hive]

While Rangel says beeswax can add an earthy and floral taste to a cocktail, she is less keen on aging alcohol in beeswax. Alcohol will degrade the wax particles, she says, resulting in leaching. And because bees visit agricultural crops and can carry pesticides on their bodies, those chemicals get imparted into the beeswax, giving it a chemical residue.

But it’s no different than eating a salad without the organic label stamped on the bag. And it’s probably no worse than the alcohol itself.

“In urban environments,” Rangel notes, “the pesticides are actually less.”

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Scavenging has been maligned as a food gathering strategy and is generally associated with animals like vultures and hyenas. Millions of years ago, carnivorous dinosaurs may have evolved this technique of taking meat from dead carcasses too. The findings are described in a study published November 1 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

[Related: Dinosaur cannibalism was real, and Colorado paleontologists have the bones to prove it.]

Carnivorous dinosaurs like the cannibalistic Allosaurus were surrounded by both living and dead prey. The bodies of large sauropod dinosaurs, some of whom could weigh more than 500,000 pounds, could have provided an important food source for carnivores.

In this study, a team of researchers from Portland State University created a simplified computer simulation of a dinosaur ecosystem from the Jurassic age. They used the animals that have been found in the 163.5 to 145 million year-old Morrison Formation in the western United States as the basis. This enormous fossil formation was once home to a wide variety of plants and dinosaurs.

The model included large carnivores common to the area like Allosaurus, large sauropods and their carcasses, and a large group of living and huntable Stegosaurus’. The carnivores were assigned traits that would improve their hunting abilities with the energy from living meat sources or their scavenging abilities with the sustenance from the carcasses. The model then measured the evolutionary fitness of the simulated predators. 

The model found that when there were a large amount of sauropod carcasses around, scavenging was more profitable than hunting for the Allosaurus. Meat eaters in these kinds of ecosystems may have evolved specialized traits to help them detect and exploit these large carcasses.

“Our evolutionary model demonstrates that large theropods such as Allosaurus could have evolved to subsist on sauropod carrion as their primary resource,” the authors wrote in a statement. “Even when huntable prey was available to them, selection pressure favored the scavengers, while the predators suffered from lower fitness.”

[Related: This 30-pound eagle would take down 400-pound prey and dig through their organs.]

This model represents only a simplified depiction of a complex ecosystem, so more variables like additional dinosaur species may alter the results. While theoretical, using models like this one can help scientists better understand how the availability of meat from carcasses can influence how predators evolve. A September 2023 modeling study found that even early humans living in southern Europe roughly 1.2 to 0.8 million years ago were scavengers. They may have competed in groups of five or more to fight off extinct giant hyenas for the carcasses of animals that had been abandoned by larger predators like saber-toothed cats.

“We think allosaurs probably waited until a bunch of sauropods died in the dry season, feasted on their carcasses, stored the fat in their tails, then waited until the next season to repeat the process,” the authors wrote. “This makes sense logically too, because a single sauropod carcass had enough calories to sustain 25 or so allosaurs for weeks or even months, and sauropods were often the most abundant dinosaurs in the environment.”

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When looking at a sea star–or starfish–it’s not really clear which part of its identical five pointed body is considered its head. This question has puzzled biologists for decades, but some new research says that a starfish’s whole body could function like a head. The findings are described in a study published November 1 in the journal Nature and might have solved the mystery of how sea stars and other echinoderms evolved their distinctively shaped bodies.

[Related: This strange 500-million-year-old sea urchin relative lost its skeleton.]

Searching for heads and trunks 

Sea stars are invertebrates that belong to a group of animals called echinoderms.This group also includes sea urchins and sand dollars and they all have bodies that are arranged in five equal and symmetric sections. Early in their evolution, echinoderms had a bilaterally designed ancestor with two mirrored sides more like a human’s. 

“How the different body parts of the echinoderms relate to those we see in other animal groups has been a mystery to scientists for as long as we’ve been studying them,” Jeff Thompson, a co-author of the study and evolutionary biologist at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, said in a statement. “In their bilateral relatives, the body is divided into a head, trunk, and tail. But just looking at a starfish, it’s impossible to see how these sections relate to the bodies of bilateral animals.”

In the new study, an international team of scientists compared the molecular markers in sea stars with a wider group of animals called deuterostomes. This group includes echinoderms like sea star and bilateral animals including vertebrates. Deuterostomes all share a common ancestor, so comparing their development can offer clues into how echinoderms evolved their more unique five-pointed body plan.

They used multiple high-tech molecular and genomic techniques to see where different genes were expressed during a sea star’s development and growth. Micro-CT scanning also allowed the team to understand the shape and structure of the animals in closer detail.

Sea star mapping

Team members from Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and Pacific BioSciences, used techniques called RNA tomography and in situ hybridization to build a three-dimensional map of a sea star’s gene expression to see where specific genes are being expressed during development. They specifically mapped the expression of the genes that control the growth of a sea star’s ectoderm, which includes its nervous system and skin. 

They found gene signatures associated with head development almost everywhere in juvenile sea stars. The expression of genes that code for an animal’s torso and tail sections were also largely missing.

[Related: What’s killing sea stars?]

“When we compared the expression of genes in a starfish to other groups of animals, like vertebrates, it appeared that a crucial part of the body plan was missing,” said Thompson. “The genes that are typically involved in the patterning of the trunk of the animal weren’t expressed in the ectoderm. It seems the whole echinoderm body plan is roughly equivalent to the head in other groups of animals.”

The molecular signatures that are typically associated with the front-most portion of an animal’s head were also localized towards the middle of each of the sea star’s five arms. 

“It’s as if the sea star is completely missing a trunk, and is best described as just a head crawling along the seafloor,” study co-author and Stanford University evolutionary biologist Laurent Formery said in a statement. “It’s not at all what scientists have assumed about these animals.” 

Sea stars and other echinoderms may have evolved their five-section body plan by losing the trunk region that their bilateral ancestors once had. This chance would have allowed them to move around and feed differently than animals with two symmetrical arms.

“Our research tells us the echinoderm body plan evolved in a more complex way than previously thought and there is still much to learn about these intriguing creatures,” said Thompson. “As someone who has studied them for the last ten years, these findings have radically changed how I think about this group of animals.”

This research was supported by the Leverhulme Trust, NASA, the NSF, and the Chan Zuckerberg BioHub.

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In the summer, astronomers spotted an airplane-sized asteroid—large enough to potentially destroy a city—on an almost-collision course with Earth. But no one saw the space rock until two days after it had zoomed past our planet. 

This asteroid, named 2023 NT1, passed by us at only one-fourth of the distance from Earth to the moon. That’s far too close for comfort. Astronomers weren’t going to let this incident go without a post-mortem. They’ve recently dissected what went wrong and how we can better prepare to defend our planet from future impacts, in a new paper recently posted to the preprint server arXiv.

We know from history that asteroids can cause world-shattering events and extinctions—just look at what happened to the dinosaurs. The study team estimated that, if NT1 hit Earth, it could have the energy of anywhere from 4 to 80 intercontinental ballistic missiles. “2023 NT1 would have been much worse than the Chelyabinsk airburst,” says University of California, Santa Barbara astronomer Philip Lubin, a co-author on the new work, referring to the meteor that exploded over a Russian city in 2013. As devastating as that would be, it’s “not an existential threat like the 10-kilometer hit that killed our previous tenants,” he adds.

The asteroid-monitoring system ATLAS, the “Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System”—four telescopes in Hawaii, Chile, and South Africa—discovered NT1 after the rock flew by. ATLAS’s entire purpose is to scour the skies for space rocks that might threaten Earth. So with this set of eyes on the sky, how did we miss it? 

It turns out that Earth has what Brin Bailey, UC Santa Barbara astronomer and lead author on the paper, calls a “blindspot.” Any asteroid coming from the direction of the sun gets lost in the glare of our nearest star.” There’s another way for asteroids to sneak up on us, too: the smaller the asteroid, the harder it is for our telescopes to spot them, even when the rocks come from parts in the sky away from the sun.

[Related: NASA’s first asteroid-return sample is a goldmine of life-sustaining materials]

“Currently, there is no planetary defense system which can mitigate short-warning threats,” Bailey says. “While NT1 has no chance of intercepting Earth in the future, it serves as a reminder that we do not have complete situational awareness of all potential threats in the solar system,” they add. That leads to Lesson #1: We simply need better detection methods for planetary defense. 

If we can manage to detect an asteroid with a few years’ warning, we might be able to redirect it with the technology recently tested by NASA’s Double-Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission.For a case with very little warning, such as NT1, though, we’d need a different approach—that’s Lesson #2. Bailey and colleagues propose a method they call “Pulverize It” (PI). 

PI’s plan is exactly what it sounds like: break the asteroid into tiny pieces, small enough to burn up in the atmosphere or fall to the ground as much less dangerous little rocks. They’d do this by launching one or multiple rockets to send arrays of small impactors to space. The impactors—six-foot-long, six-inch-thick rods—would smash into the asteroid like buckshot, efficiently dismantling it. “Had we intercepted it [NT1] even one day prior to impact, we could have prevented any significant damage,” claims Lubin.

It sounds simple enough, but some astronomers aren’t quite convinced. “I think the PI method is impractical even though it does not violate the laws of physics,” says University of California, Los Angeles astronomer Ned Wright, who was not involved in the new work. “When a building is demolished by implosion using explosive charges, a weeks-long testing and planning phase is needed in order to place the charges in the right locations and set up the proper timing. The PI method seeks to do this measuring, planning, and placing the explosives all within a period of 1 minute or so just before the spacecraft hits the asteroid.”

[Related: NASA’s first attempt to smack an asteroid was picture perfect]

Lubin points out that unlike a careful demolition on Earth, the goal is a sudden, bomb-like explosion—an event that needs less prep to pull off. But whether we use PI or another line of defense, it’s clear that we need to plan ahead. Not only is there the hazy threat of an asteroid coming out of nowhere, there are two specific, extremely risky events headed our way: asteroid Apophis’ near flyby in 2029, and close approaches from the even larger Bennu (recently sampled by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission) in 2054, 2060, and 2135.

“Humanity now possesses the technology to robustly detect and defend the planet if we choose to do so,” says Lubin. “And a variety of people are working hard to ensure we can.”

This story has been updated: An earlier version indicated that the asteroid-destroying impactors would be filled with explosives. While that may be an option, most forms of the “Pulverize It” method use non-explosive metal rods.

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Sometimes, amazing science happens in the background with little to no public attention. All those years of hard efforts and incremental progress are left unseen except by those living and working through it. Now, a new book detailing the making of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) aims to change that by sharing photographs, diagrams, and behind-the-scenes information of the science and pioneers behind the project. 

Inside the Star Factory: The Creation of the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s Largest and Most Powerful Space Observatory gives us a full-body summary of an astronomical feat that required more than 100 million hours of labor over the course of 30 years. It covers everything from the initial conception of the idea to the Christmas Day launch in 2021, providing a robust picture of what went into designing, engineering, and testing such a masterpiece. Science writer Christopher Wanjek provides an in-depth overview of the history of JWST, but even more, the book serves as an “illustrated guide [that] shows readers the heady world of scientific discovery at the very limits of human knowledge.”

All of the 100-plus images of the telescope’s construction were taken by Chris Gunn, who joined the project 15 years ago and was the only photographer given such extensive access to the development and launch of JWST. Over his long career, he’s focused on creating intricate images and videos related to science and technology, with previous experience capturing the last servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. His work puts faces to NASA’s biggest telescope endeavor, humanizing the entire assignment and showcasing those who dedicated so much of their time to a single goal. 

We had a chance to speak with Gunn about his new book to find out more about his process and experience. Here’s what he revealed. 

PopSci: How did you get involved with NASA and JWST? 

Gunn: I worked as a photographer on the last servicing mission to Hubble from 2006 to 2009. When that mission ended, I was asked to join the JWST team. I had never imagined being on such a long-term project. 

PopSci: What was the most challenging part about photographing the project? 

Gunn: The most challenging part about photographing this project was also the most exciting: the constantly evolving subject. Seeing parts of the observatory come together was amazing, but the trick was to keep a consistent look and feel in my photographs throughout the project. I started to pay more attention to the environments that I was shooting and bring elements of these environments into my compositions. When I could light my subjects, I took great care to do it subtly. Eventually, I realized that JWST’s geometry photographed beautifully but any distortion ate away at that beauty. Over time I became a more selective shooter with more restraint. 

PopSci: What’s your favorite moment (or moments) from your time with the team? 

Gunn: My favorite moments include the arrival of the first mirrors, the first time I saw the optical system deployed inside of NASA Johnson’s test chamber, and the mating of the optical system to the sunshield and main spacecraft bus. During each of these project milestones the cleanrooms were filled with a sense of awe and wonder. They aren’t particularly noisy in general, but they were super quiet for these moments. I had a sense that I was witnessing something great that humankind was achieving. 

PopSci: What were your go-to cameras and lenses? 

Gunn: One of the most interesting things about being on such a long-term project is seeing the progression in photographic technology as the years passed. I initially shot with Nikon’s D3s and D3X cameras, and finally settled on D4s for several years. Nikon’s 14-24mm 2.8 lens was my favorite lens early on. 

After the observatory was built, I switched to a medium-format Hasselblad-H camera boasting 50 megapixels. The Hassy gave me more resolution, and more importantly, allowed me to shoot with less distortion. Later in the project I acquired a mirrorless Hasselblad, which I used with adapted H lenses. The Hasselblad 50mm was probably my favorite lens as it offered a sharp, undistorted, and wide perspective. The medium format cameras also forced me to slow down and concentrate on composition. 

PopSci: Do you have a no. 1 photograph from the series? 

Gunn: I have quite a few favorites—they’re all in the book. If I had to choose one, it’s the image used for the cover. It was made at the tail end of a long day and depicts the one and only time that the secondary mirror was deployed using the flight motors. That’s the smaller mirror in the center. The center section of the primary mirror reflects the secondary mirror, and you can see the primary mirror in this reflection. Look closely and you also can see me in this reflection. The selfie was unintentional.

Buy Inside the Star Factory: The Creation of the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s Largest and Most Powerful Space Observatory here.

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As Earth rotates and the sun moves across the sky from east to west, sunflowers turn their brilliant yellow faces to follow it. The mechanics behind this process, called heliotropism, is still a mystery to plant biologists. A study published October 31 in the journal PLOS Biology likely rules out that a sunflower’s ability to follow the sun is related to a more well-known response to light that all plants follow. Sunflowers probably rely on several more complicated processes to track the sun instead. 

[Related: The mathematical theory that connects swimming sperm, zebra stripes, and sunflower seeds.]

Since plants are rooted in one place, they can’t move if light they need to make food is blocked by a neighbor or if they are in a shady spot. They rely on growth or elongation to move towards the light and there are several molecular systems behind this. The best-known response is the phototropic response. Proteins called phototropins sense blue light falling unevenly on a seedling and the plant’s growth hormones are redistributed. This ultimately causes it to bend towards the light.

Plant biologists have long assumed that the sunflower’s ability to follow the sun would be based on the same mechanism as phototropism. To track the sun, the sunflower’s head leans slightly more on the eastern side of its stem. This positions their head towards the direction where the sun rises. It then shifts west as the sun moves across the sky. An earlier study showed that sunflowers have an internal circadian clock that anticipates the sunrise and coordinates the opening of its florets with the time when pollinating insects arrive in the morning. 

To investigate whether this sun-tracking ability is a shru, the team behind the new study used sunflowers grown in a laboratory and others grown outdoors in sunlight. They looked to see which genes were switched on when both sets of plants were exposed to their light sources. The indoor sunflowers grew straight towards their blue light source in the lab and activated the genes associated with phototropin. The flowers that were grown outdoors and swung their heads with the sun had a different pattern of gene expression. These sunflowers also didn’t have any apparent differences in phototropin molecules between one side of the stem and another. 

“We’ve been continually surprised by what we’ve found as we study how sunflowers follow the sun each day,” study co-author and University of California, Davis plant biologist Stacey Harmer said in a statement. “In this paper, we report that they use different molecular pathways to initiate and maintain tracking movements, and that the photoreceptors best known for causing plant bending seem to play a minor role in this remarkable process.”

The team also blocked blue, ultraviolet, red, or far-red light with shade boxes. The blinders didn’t have any effect on the heliotropism response. According to the team, this indicates that there are probably multiple pathways responding to different wavelengths of light to achieve the same goal of following the sun. 

[Related: Dying plants are ‘screaming’ at you.]

The genes involved in heliotropism have not yet been identified. “We seem to have ruled out the phototropin pathway, but we did not find a clear smoking gun,” Harmer said.

When the sunflowers grown in the lab were moved outside, they began to track the sun on their first day. They initially showed a huge burst of gene expression on the shaded side of the plant that did not happen on the following days. Harmer said this suggests some kind of “rewiring” is going on in the plant.

In addition to weeding out some of the process behind how sunflowers track the sun, this work also has relevance for designing future experiments with plants to understand their mechanisms.

“Things that you define in a controlled environment like a growth chamber may not work out in the real world,” Harmer said. 

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Lampreys are the vampires of the ocean and the lakes they can invade. While these eel-like parasitic vertebrates don’t use two sharp fangs to suck blood, lampreys have a toothed oral sucker that latches onto their prey and feasts on their host’s blood. Modern day lampreys are found in temperate zones of most of the world’s oceans except in Africa. However, specimens of their extinct ancient ancestors are fairly rare in the fossil record, despite dating back roughly 360 million years. Now, paleontologists in northern China have found two unusually large fossilized lamprey species that fill a large evolutionary gap. The specimens are described in a study published October 31 in the journal Nature Communications.

[Related: Why sea lampreys are going to be a bigger problem for the Great Lakes.]

“We found the largest fossil lampreys ever found in the world,” study co-author and Chinese Academy of Sciences paleontologist Feixiang Wu tells PopSci. “Based on these fossils, our study assumed that the most recent common ancestor of modern lampreys was likely eating flesh rather than sucking blood as conventionally believed.”

The earliest known lampreys date back about 360 million years ago during the Paleozoic Era. These early species are believed to have been only a few inches long and had weak feeding structures. The 160 million-year-old fossils in this new study were discovered in the Lagerstätte Yanliao Biota in northeastern China and date back to the Jurassic. The longer of the two specimens is named Yanliaomyzon occisor. It is more than 23 inches long and is estimated to have had 16 teeth. The shorter 11 inch-long species is named Yanliaomyzon ingensdentes and had about 23 teeth. By comparison, modern lampreys range from six to 40 inches long.

Their well-preserved oral discs and “biting” structures indicate that these lamprey species had already evolved enhanced feeding structures, bigger body size, and were predators by the Jurassic period. It also appears that they had already evolved a three-phased life cycle by this point

Lampreys begin their lives as burrowing freshwater larvae called ammocetes. During this stage, they have rudimentary eyes and feed on microorganisms with their toothless mouths. They spend several years in this stage, before transforming into adults. Some move into saltwater, while others will remain in freshwater. As adults, they become parasites that attach to a fish with their mouths and feed on their blood and tissue. Lampreys eventually return to freshwater to reproduce, where they build a nest, then spawn, and then die.

It is still unclear when lampreys evolved this lifecycle and their more complex teeth for feeding. These new well-preserved fossils fill an important gap in the fossil record and give some insights into how its lifecycle and feeding originated. 

[Related: Evolution made mosquitos into stealthy, sensitive vampires.]

The study also pinpoints where and when today’s lamprey’s first appeared. “We put modern lampreys’ origin in the Southern Hemisphere of the Late Cretaceous,” says Wu. 

The Late Cretacous lasted from 100.5 million years ago to 66 million years ago and ended with the mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs. In future research, the team would like to search for specimens from the Cretaceous. According to Wu, this time period could be very important to their evolutionary history.

More fossilized specimens could also provide more accurate ideas of what kinds of flesh ancient lampreys feasted on with all those teeth and how that has evolved over time. 

“Living lampreys are always hailed as ‘water vampires,’ but their ancestor might be a flesh eater, their teeth tell,” says Wu. 

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BENEATH A CLEAR SKY and a high sun, a regular human eye can see nearly the entire visible color spectrum. Remove direct sunlight, and a reflection offers only a sliver of the rainbow. But despite darkness distorting our points of reference, we can still determine color in shadow. Many factors influence the hues we detect: our eyes, our brains, the air, objects the light bounces from, Earth’s geometry, and even our visual memories.

Trying to replicate that breadth and sensitivity to color on a computer monitor or printer is both a nightmare and a dream for technologists. And that’s exactly the problem that Roxana Bujack, a staff scientist on the Data Science at Scale Team at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, is trying to solve with computations. Math is behind “everything that happens in Photoshop,” Bujack says. “It’s all just matrices and operations, but you see immediately with your eyes what this math does.”

Any answer to this problem would be a far cry from art-class color wheels, or even how most computer screens and printers operate today. Digital work relies on the RGB (red, green, blue) model, which uses a monitor’s light source to adjust the brightness of those three colors to create pigment in pixels. The CMY (cyan, magenta, yellow) model behind printers, meanwhile, is subtractive, removing colors from a white base; if you want to print yellow on card stock, the printer combines the CMY inks to change the lighter background by varying degrees to reach the desired color.

These color models were last updated a century ago. Erwin Schrödinger, of quantum cat fame, along with mathematician Bernhard Riemann and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, improved RGB. Realizing that the distance between, say, a rosy red and a drab green could not be measured on a straight line, they looked for a more flexible model. They shifted from representations of color in a familiar physical space, what’s known as Euclidean geometry, to the warped world of Riemannian geometry.

Bujack likens their interpretation to an airline service map. Routes aren’t indicated with straight lines, but rather half-moons that reflect Earth’s curvature. “Suppose you take two colors and then pick one that lies on the shortest path between them—say, magenta in the middle, purple to the right, and pink to the left. Then you measure the paths from magenta to purple and from magenta to pink,” she says. “The sum of those two path segments should equal the length of the whole path drawn from magenta to pink, representing the perceived difference between those two colors. It should add up, just like the flight distances from Seattle through Reykjavik to Amsterdam.”

Schrödinger’s 3D model has been the foundation of color theory for more than 100 years. Scientists and developers apply it when seeking to perfect the digital representation of colors on the screens of machines. It helps translate into pixels the ways by which a human eye distinguishes different shades, like the way you’re able to recognize this text as black and the background as white without a blur.

For Bujack, the contours of this space are familiar. She studied mathematics at Leipzig University in Germany, where a course on image processing propelled her into a subset of that field. That’s where she became fascinated by the math that powers programs as diverse as Photoshop and processor-consuming video games. She graduated with a doctorate in computer science in 2014 before landing at the Los Alamos Laboratory, former home to the Manhattan Project.

There, in 2021, her team launched a project with a modest aim: to build algorithms that would design color maps, streamlining the conversion of pigments into digits and date, Bujack says. Illustrators who use Photoshop, Final Cut, and similar programs would benefit; so would the climate scientists, physicists, and weather researchers who represent numerical data with colors.

But they discovered an inconsistency that upended the century-old understanding of the field. “Schrödinger’s work was super-advanced, realizing we need a curved space to describe color space and that this stupid Euclidean space is not working out,” says Bujack. But Schrödinger and his collaborators “did not notice that we need a more robust model.”

Schrödinger’s math doesn’t work, Bujack and her team found, because it fails to predict the correct hues between two colors. On a flight path—halfway between Seattle and Reykjavik, for example—you can calculate how long you have left in your journey. But a midpoint between purple and red does not produce the expected color. The old 3D approach overestimated how different we perceive one shade to be from the next. The Los Alamos team published its findings in April 2022 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “As a scientist, I have always dreamed of proving someone famous wrong,” says Bujack. “However, this level of fame exceeds even my wildest dreams.”

But that revelation did not come with an obvious solution. “The current model is not accurate,” says Bujack. “[But] that doesn’t mean we have an off-the-shelf model to replace it.” Because mapping out the new space is “way more laborious” than Schrödinger’s calculations, a mathematical update is “years and years and years in the future.”

The consequences of this discovery, however, could make their way to our computers sooner. Nick Spiker, a color engineer working on IDT Maker, a proprietary digital relighting system, consulted with Bujack after her study was published. He’s since submitted a patent for a product that could help video producers and photographers change the apparent time of day in their videos and pictures.

While it hasn’t led to a replacement model yet, Bujack’s insight will help build something better—for instance, “If you’re watching Netflix or any visual content and you want accurate color,” Spiker says. He adds, “Now this is going to make images appear more realistic than ever before.”

Read more PopSci+ stories.

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As the darkest nights of the year approach in the Northern Hemisphere, the night skies will light up, giving us a chance to see three meteor showers. Our closest planetary neighbor Venus will also be particularly radiant this month. It is also the time of year to keep an eye out for the Aurora Borealis. Here are some of the events to look out for this month. If you happen to get any stellar sky photos, please tag us and include #PopSkyGazers.

[Related: Astronomers find 12 more moons orbiting Jupiter.]

November 2 to 3 – Jupiter at Opposition

The month kicks off with our solar system’s largest planet appearing at its biggest and brightest state of the year, which is called opposition. Jupiter hits opposition at 12 a.m. EDT on November 3 and will be visible in the eastern horizon for skygazers in the Northern Hemisphere. 

According to Larry Wassterman from the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, opposition occurs when a planet, Earth, and the sun lie along a straight line with Earth in the middle. The planet and the sun are on the opposite sides of Earth so they are considered in opposition. 

“The planet is as close to the Earth as possible and will appear as big and as bright as it can ever get. This is a great time to take a look and discover Jupiter in opposition for yourself. During Jupiter’s opposition, Earth will pass between Jupiter and the Sun, and the proximity will make Jupiter appear larger in the sky. On the day of opposition, Jupiter rises when the Sun sets,” Wassterman writes. 

November 5 and 6 – Southern Taurids Meteor Shower Predicted Peak 

November’s first meteor shower is predicted to peak November 5th and 6th. Both of the Taurids meteor showers don’t have very definite peaks. The meteors ramble along in space and are especially noticeable from late October into early November, when both the Southern and Northern Taurids overlap. 

According to EarthSky, under dark skies with no moon, both South Taurids produce about five meteors per hour and 10 total when the North and South Taurids overlap. Fireballs are also possible, like the ones that appeared in 2022. Taurid meteors are slower than those from other meteor showers, but can be very bright.  

The Taurids are visible almost everywhere on Earth, except for the South Pole. 

[Related: Meteorites older than the solar system contain key ingredients for life.]

November 9 – Moon and Venus Conjunction

Already the brightest planet in our solar system, Venus will shine particularly brilliantly early this month. Venus will put on a show in the eastern horizon at 2:55 AM EST. As the morning continues Venus will shift upwards, and be one teach one degree to the upper right by the time morning twilight begins at about  5:44 a.m. EST. For some viewers, the moon will pass in front of Venus, blocking it from view at this time. 

Visibility will be best in northern Canada, most of Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard, west Russia, most of Europe, parts of north Africa, and most of the Middle East.

November 11 through 13 – Northern Taurids Meteor Shower Predicted Peak

Due to the moon’s phases, the best chance for seeing the Northern Taurids this month is from November 11 through the 13. Ideal viewing times will be around midnight because the moon will only be about 2 percent full that night. The sky will be darker and more primed for you to spot any meteors under clear skies.

November 18 – Leonids Meteor Shower Predicted Peak

For the Leonids, the night sky will be free of moonlight when the shower is predicted to peak on November 18th. For best viewing, watch late on the night of November 17 until dawn on November 18. The morning of November 17 may also be worthwhile for viewing. It is possible to see 10 to 15 Leonid meteors per hour under a moonless sky. 

The Leonid meteor shower is famous for producing one of the greatest meteor storms in living history. On November 17, 1966, there were thousands of meteors per minute during a 15-minute span. Leonid meteor storms sometimes happen in cycles of 33 to 34 years, but this cycle did not occur during the 1990s as anticipated. 

The Leonids will be visible in both hemispheres.

[Related: The moon is 40 million years older than we thought, according to crystals collected by Apollo astronauts.]

November 27 – Full Beaver Moon

November’s full moon will reach peak illumination on November 27 at 4:16 a.m. EST. The moon will also appear very full and close on the night of November 26. According to the Farmer’s Almanac, it is called the Beaver Moon in reference to the time of year when beavers begin to shelter in their lodges, after storing up food for the winter. This was also when beavers pelts are at their thickest.

Some other names for November’s full moon include the Whitefish Moon or Adikomemi-giizis in Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe), the Little Winter Moon or Gahsá’kneh in Seneca, and the Leaf Fall Moon or Yapa Huktugere Nuti in the Catawba language.

The same skygazing rules that apply to pretty much all space-watching activities are key this month: Go to a dark spot away from the lights of a city or town and let the eyes adjust to the darkness for about a half an hour. 

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For the first time, astronomers using data from the Keck II telescope have detected the presence of an infrared aurora on the planet Uranus. The discovery could shed light on some of the unknown properties of the magnetic fields of our solar system’s planets. It could also help explain why a planet so far from the sun is hotter than it should be. The findings are described in a study published on October 23 in the journal Nature Astronomy. 

[Related: Uranus got its name from a very serious authority.]

The NIRSPEC instrument (Near InfraRed SPECtrograph) at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii  was used to collect 6 hours of observations of Uranus in 2006. The study’s authors carefully studied 224 images to find signs of a specific particle–ionized triatomic hydrogen or H3+. They found evidence of H3+ in the data after collisions with charged particles. The emission created an infrared auroral glow over Uranus’ northern magnetic pole. The image itself is an artist’s rendition of the infrared aurora, superimposed on a Hubble Space Telescope image of Uranus.

Uranian auroras vs. Earth auroras

Auroras on the planet Uranus are caused when charged particles from the sun interact with the planet’s magnetic field the same way they do on Earth. The particles are funneled along magnetic field lines toward the magnetic poles. When they enter the Uranian atmosphere, the charged particles bump into atmospheric molecules. This causes the molecules to glow. 

The dominant gasses in Uranus’ atmosphere are hydrogen and helium and they are at much lower temperatures than on Earth. The presence of these gasses at these temperatures cause Uranus’ auroras to predominantly glow at ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths. By comparison, auroras on Earth come from oxygen and nitrogen atoms colliding with the charged particles and the colors are mostly blue, green, and red and can generally be seen with the human eye at the right latitudes. 

Uranus and Neptune are unusual planets in our solar system because their magnetic fields are misaligned with the axes in which they spin. Astronomers haven’t found an explanation for this, but clues could lie in Uranus’s aurora. 

Measuring the infrared

In the study, a team of astronomers used the first measurements of the infrared aurora at Uranus since investigations into the planet began in 1992. The ultraviolet aurorae of Uranus was first observed 1986, but the infrared aurora has not been observed until now, according to the team. 

By analyzing specific wavelengths of light emitted from the planet. With this data, they can analyze the light called emission lines from these planets, which is similar to a barcode. In the infrared spectrum, the lines emitted by the H3+ particles will have different levels of brightness depending on how hot or cold the particle is and how dense this layer of the atmosphere is. The lines then act like a thermometer taking the planet’s temperature.

The astronomers found that there were distinct increases in H3+ density in Uranus’s atmosphere with little change in temperature. This is consistent with ionization that is caused by the presence of an infrared aurora. These measurements can help astronomers understand the magnetic fields on the other outer planets in the solar system. They could also scientists identify other planets that are suitable for supporting life.

[Related: Ice giant Uranus shows off its many rings in new JWST image.]

“The temperature of all the gas giant planets, including Uranus, are hundreds of degrees Kelvin/Celsius above what models predict if only warmed by the sun, leaving us with the big question of how these planets are so much hotter than expected? One theory suggests the energetic aurora is the cause of this, which generates and pushes heat from the aurora down towards the magnetic equator,” study co-author and University of Leicester PhD student Emma Thomas said in a statement. 

Clues to life on exoplanets

According to Thomas, most of the exoplanets astronomers have discovered are in the sub-Neptune category, so they are a similar size as Neptune and Uranus. Similar magnetic and atmospheric characteristics could also exist on these exoplanets. Uranus’s aurora directly connects to the planet’s magnetic field and atmosphere, so studying it can help astronomers make predictions about the atmospheres and magnetic fields and their suitability for supporting life.

These results may also provide insight into a rare phenomenon on Earth called geomagnetic reversal. This occurs when the north and south poles switch hemisphere locations. According to NASA, pole reversals are pretty common in Earth’s geologic history and the last one occurred roughly 780,000 years ago. Paleomagnetic records show that over the last 83 million years, Earth’s magnetic poles have reversed 183 times. They’ve also reversed at least several hundred times in the past 160 million years. The time intervals between these reversals have fluctuated, but average about 300,000 years.

“We don’t have many studies on this phenomena and hence do not know what effects this will have on systems that rely on Earth’s magnetic field such as satellites, communications and navigation,” said Thomas. “However, this process occurs every day at Uranus due to the unique misalignment of the rotational and magnetic axes. Continued study of Uranus’s aurora will provide data on what we can expect when Earth exhibits a future pole reversal and what that will mean for its magnetic field.”

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Paleontologists in North Dakota have discovered new species of mosasaur. These giant meat-eating aquatic lizards swam the Earth’s seas about 80 million years ago during the late Cretaceous period. This new species is named Jormungandr walhallaensis after a sea serpent in Norse mythology named Jörmungandr and Walhalla, North Dakota where its fossils were found. The findings are described in a study published October 30 in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History.  

[Related: Dinosaurs who stuck together, survived together.]

“If you put flippers on a Komodo dragon and made it really big, that’s what it would have looked like,” study co-author and Richard Gilder Graduate School PhD student Amelia Zietlow, said in a statement.

The first mosasaur specimens were discovered over 200 years ago and the word “mosasaur” even predates the word “dinosaur” by roughly 20 years. There are still several unanswered questions about these ancient sea lizards, including how many times they evolved to have flippers and when they became fully aquatic. Scientists believe that they evolved to have their signature flippers at least three times and possibly four or more. It is also still a mystery if mosasaurs are more closely related to present day monitor lizards or snakes or another living creature entirely. This new specimen fills in some knowledge gaps of how the different groups of mosasaurs are related to each other.

“As these animals evolved into these giant sea monsters, they were constantly making changes,” Zietlow said. “This work gets us one step closer to understanding how all these different forms are related to one another.”

Researchers in northeastern North Dakota first discovered the Jormungandr fossil in 2015. It included a nearly complete skull, jaws, and cervical spine, and a number of vertebrae. An extensive analysis revealed that the fossil is of a new species that has multiple features that are also seen in two other mosasaurs: Clidastes and Mosasaurus. Clidastes is a smaller animal of about six to 13 feet long that lived roughly 145 million years ago. Mosasaurus was much larger at almost 50 feet long and lived about 99.6 to 66 million years ago alongside the Tyrannosaurus rex. 

[Related: This four-legged snake fossil was probably a skinny lizard.]

The new specimen is about 24 feet long and has flippers. It also has a shark-like tail similar to other early mosasaur species. It also likely would have had “angry eyebrows,” caused by a bony ridge on its skull. Its slightly stumpy tail would have also been shorter than the rest of its body.

Jormungandr was likely a precursor to the bigger Mosasaurus. 

“This fossil is coming from a geologic time in the United States that we don’t really understand,” study co-author and paleontologist from the North Dakota Geological Survey Clint Boyd said in a statement. “The more we can fill in the geographic and temporal timeline, the better we can understand these creatures.”

In Norse mythology, Jörmungandr is an enormous sea serpent or worm who encircles the Earth. Jörmungandr is believed to be the middle child of the trickster god Loki and the giantess Angrboða. Thor the god of thunder also has an ongoing battle with Jörmungandr and it is believed that the two will fight to the death during Ragnarok, or the end of the world. 

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The Indian Space Research Organization, or ISRO, is on a roll. India’s national space agency accomplished the first ever landing of a spacecraft, the Vikram lander, near the lunar south pole on August 23. On September 2, ISRO launched Aditya-L1, the agency’s first solar probe. 

And on October 21, ISRO completed a successful launch abort system test for the Gaganyaan, a spacecraft India hopes will carry three national astronauts around Earth on an orbital mission by 2026. That’s an ambitious leap from uncrewed space missions, but if India succeeds, it will join a club of just three other nations that have sent their own astronauts and craft to space—Russia, the US, and China. 

“India is the most impressive, exciting space story of the year,” says Rich Cooper, vice president of communications and outreach for the Space Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes space industry and exploration. “In a year full of a lot of accomplishments, India has more than put itself on the map.”

India’s space program goes back decades. ISRO launched its first satellite, Rohini-1, into orbit on a rocket of Indian manufacture in 1980. The agency became known for launching satellites, and later more distant space missions—such as the Mangalyaan Mars orbiter launched in 2013—under disciplined budgets. ISRO also plans to send an orbiter to Venus in 2025, and a second Mars orbiter to the Red Planet in 2024.

[Related: Meet the first 4 astronauts of the ‘Artemis Generation’]

“The Indian space program has been under the radar, I think, because it has always operated well, but with lower stakes and lower budget,” says Laura Forczyk, a space industry analyst and founder of the consultancy company Astralytical. But IRSO’s ambitions are clearly and justifiably ramping up in the wake of the Vikram landing, she says, as “successfully landing a lander and a rover on the moon is something that very few countries in the world have ever done.”

And even those countries that have done it before sometimes stumble: in 1957 Russia placed the first satellite, Sputnik, in orbit, and four years later sent the first human, Yuri Gagarin, to space. But in 2023, around the same time India was celebrating the Vikram success, Russia failed to make a soft landing on the moon with its Luna 25 mission. 

India’s progress hasn’t been in a vacuum—it’s been studying the successes and failures of Russia, US, and China’s space programs since the beginning, according to Cooper. “There are 60-plus years of human spaceflight lessons to learn, and India has been a marvelous student at looking at those lessons,” he says. “They more than did their homework.”

The Gaganyaan program plans to proceed similarly to NASA’s Artemis program, with multiple system and spacecraft tests before the first human climbs aboard a rocket. The first uncrewed test flight, Gaganyaan 1, is scheduled for sometime in 2024, and a second Gaganyaan 2, is scheduled for 2025. 

[Related: Why do all these countries want to go to the moon right now?]

Gaganyaan 3, in 2026, aims to put a trio of Indian astronauts in orbit around Earth for three days. From there, ISRO hopes to build a space station by 2035, and send Indian astronauts to the moon by 2040. That’s a familiar expansion method, according to University of North Dakota space studies professor Michael Dodge, as it was proposed by Werner von Braun, the Nazi rocket scientist who became the architect of NASA’s Apollo program. “This is a strategy that has been around for a very long time, historically speaking, and it looks like India is pursuing that in a very sort of systematic way,” Dodge says. 

Whether India’s timeline for growing its space program will hold is another question. Forczyk notes that Gaganyaan 1 was supposed to launch in 2020, but faced delays both from COVID-19 and those typical of a complicated human spaceflight program. It may take ISRO more time and money than they expect, and she thinks the launch of Gaganyaan 1 will likely slip into 2025. 

But a crewed mission by 2026? “I think that’s completely feasible,” Forczyk says. As Russia’s influence wanes, and that of India’s close rival China’s rises, the crewed Gaganyaan program is “a means of growing their own standing in the world.”

Dodge notes that national prestige has always been a part of space exploration, going back to the original space race between the US and the Soviet Union. But that prestige is about two things, “One of them is technological prowess, and being able to demonstrate to the world that you were among the elite, and your capability to use and explore space,” he says. ”But the other is a geopolitical overlay.”

What excites Forczyk about ISRO’s plans, in contrast to India’s anti-satellite missile test in 2019, is that they are a peaceful way for India to cultivate national and geopolitical prestige. The success of the Indian civilian space program can serve as a model for other nations as they make their own bids to become space powers in the 21st century. 

“What we’re going to see is more countries that have historically not played a large role in space rise, because they see it as a means of demonstrating their technology, technological advancement,” Forczyk says. “A peaceful demonstration of advancement.” 

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Halloween is coming, which means the race for the most awesome costume is on. Fortunately, a little science can add some serious fright to your get-up. These tricks only require a little advance preparation, but your friends will remember the result for years to come.

Apply makeup that only appears under ultraviolet LEDs

Want to play Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? You can paint your skin with glowing scars, creepy eye makeup, and veiny hands… that only appear under ultraviolet light. Add some UV LEDs to your costume, and you’ll be able to turn this makeup on and off with a switch. Alternatively, amp up your vampire look with similar UV-reactive makeup that’s visible under normal light but produces fluorescence in the presence of a blacklight.

To put this look together, you’ll need specially-formulated face paint that reacts to ultraviolet light. Brands like Moon Glow and Midnight Glo specialize in this type of UV-reactive makeup. For hair products that glow, look for gel or dye from Manic Panic.

Once you have your face paint, you’ll need some wearable LEDs. Look for UV-emitting strip lights, sometimes called “blacklight” strips, which are widely available at hardware stores and online. Choose lights that you can cut and that come wired to a connector, preferably a DC receptacle. If you can’t find a strip with a DC power source, get one with a solderless connector, buy a separate DC receptacle at an electric supply store, and connect the two in seconds—no tools required. In the long haul, this setup is not the sturdiest, but you only need it for a night.

For power, you have a couple options. A battery holder with a DC plug can attach directly to your light strip. Or grab a power bank like the one you use to charge your phone, attach it to a USB-to-DC converter, and connect that to your LEDs. However, before you plug in the power bank, check its maximum instantaneous amperage limit, usually found in the user’s manual. Compare that to the overall amperage the LED strip will pull, which you’ll find in the specifications sheet. If the light strip draws more amps than the battery can provide, the power will drain too quickly, potentially destroying the power bank.

Now that you have your materials in hand, use fabric glue or pins to attach the light strip to your clothing. Put on your UV-enabled costume, apply your UV-reactive makeup, and test the range of the lights in total darkness. This should show you how the effect is working and whether you need to tweak the setup.

Use makeup glue to mimic puncture effects

If you’re planning to dress as a zombie, a heavily memed Skyrim guard, or pretty much anything with punctured skin, add a little interactive element to your costume by inserting a few blood-spattered rods, sticks, or arrow shafts into your body, then letting people pull on them. Of course, you’re not really going to stab yourself with pointy objects—but some stage blood and makeup glue will give people the illusion that you did.

A quick warning: If you’re allergic to latex, check the makeup glue ingredients carefully. Many of them use latex, and anaphylactic shock is not a fun costume trick!

First, find a spot on your body where your skin is relatively loose. To test it, lay the stick or rod flat on the surface and pinch two ridges of flesh together around the object.

[Related: A stork impaled by a 30-inch spear flew thousands of miles to make it home]

Once you’ve picked a good spot, apply the makeup glue to that area, put your prop in the middle, and pinch your skin together lightly, just enough to cover the middle of the pin and keep it in place. To ensure that nobody notices you’ve glued your skin together, you might want to fill in the pinched area with a little foundation. Complete the effect with a bit of fake gore.

Pretend to pull a scarf through your neck

Want to really sell your ghost costume? Have somebody grab your tie or scarf, give it a tug, and watch them gape in shock as it seems to slide through your incorporeal neck. What you’re really doing is creating a loose knot that easily pops off (and isn’t visible from the front). For this trick, you’ll need a scarf or tie about 4 or 5 feet long, and some time to practice and really get the hang of the knot.

Here’s how it works: Put the scarf around your neck, take the ends in your hands, and pull gently until the left-hand side hangs longer than the right. Cross your arms, right over left, with your right hand holding the scarf a little higher than your left. Pull your right hand across, forming a u-bend. Wrap the part of your scarf held by your left hand around your neck, over the bend, and follow with your right, gently resting the loop on the back of your neck. This is a little tough to visualize, so check out the video below for more details.

Finally, ask someone to tug on the left-hand end, and the scarf will seem to fall “through” your body. Once you’ve got the knot down, you can re-tie your neck gear and endlessly repeat the performance.

Play undead with no pulse and endless guts

If you’re going to be one of the legion of Halloween zombies, you should give your costume a couple touches that make it stand out.

The first trick just requires a rubber ball. Hide it in your armpit, ask someone to take your pulse from your wrist, and then squeeze the ball. This will temporarily block your radial artery, which delivers pulsing blood to your wrist. Search as they might, your friend won’t detect the tell-tale sign of life.

[Related: How William Harvey discovered blood circulation]

If that’s too subtle, try a new take on the old endless hanky gag. Get some red “silks,” available at magic shops (you can also make your own with bolts of fabric), and knot them together end to end with a simple square knot. Then fold your ties to form a stack and twist them until they fit in something small and portable, like a cardboard tube.

Stick the tube in your shirt, leaving the end sticking out, and ask somebody to play pull-the-intestine. For bonus points, tie something gross, like a rubber heart, to the last tie. This is particularly great if you really ham it up; shriek, make gagging sounds, or hide a handy fake blood capsule so it creates a grotesque mess.

This story has been updated. It was originally published in 2018.

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When humans finally return to the moon as part of NASA’s Artemis program, they’ll arrive with a bevy of high-tech equipment to capture new, awe-inspiring glimpses of Earth’s satellite. But cameras have come a long way since the Apollo missions. In 2023, some incredibly advanced options are already almost moon-ready right off the shelf.

According to a recent update from the European Space Agency, engineers collaborating with NASA are finalizing a Handheld Universal Lunar Camera (HULC) with real-world testing in the rocky, lunar-esque vistas of Lanzarote, Spain. While resilient enough to travel to the moon, HULC’s underpinning tech derives from commercially available professional cameras featuring high light sensitivities and cutting-edge lenses. To strengthen the lunar documentation device, researchers needed to add a blanket casing that is durable enough to protect against ultra-fine moon dust, as well as the moon’s extreme temperature swings ranging between -208 and 250 degrees Fahrenheit. At the same time, the covering can’t impede usage, so designers also created a suite of ergonomic buttons compatible with astronaut spacesuits’ thick gloves.

[Related: Check out this Prada-designed Artemis III spacesuits.]

So far, HULC has snapped shots in near pitch-black volcanic caves, as well as in broad daylight to approximate the lunar surface’s vast spectrum of lighting possibilities. According to the ESA, HULC will also be the first mirrorless handheld camera used in space—such a design reportedly offers quality images in low light scenarios.

Even with the numerous alterations and adjustments, the HULC is still not quite ready for the Artemis III mission, currently scheduled for 2025. The ESA reports that at least one version of the camera will soon travel to the International Space Station for additional testing.

“We will continue modifying the camera as we move towards the Artemis III lunar landing,” Jeremy Myers, NASA lead on the HULC camera project, told the ESA on October 24. “I am positive that we will end up with the best product–a camera that will capture Moon pictures for humankind, used by crews from many countries and for many years to come.”

Images of Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong striding across the lunar surface during the Apollo 11 moonwalk instantly became iconic photographs in 1969, but they were only a preview of many more to come. Over the next three years, 10 more astronauts documented their visits to the moon using an array of video and photographic cameras. When humans finally return as part of the Artemis program, HULC will be in tow to capture new, awe-inspiring glimpses of Earth’s satellite.

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Despite being our closest planetary neighbor, Venus is a pretty inhospitable place. It is about 100 times hotter than Earth and spacecraft exploring its thick atmosphere have been crushed in only two hours. However, Venus may have once had tectonic plate movements that are similar to what occurred during Earth’s early days. The new finding gives astronomers some novel scenarios to evaluate regarding the possibility of early life on Venus, its evolutionary past, and the history of the solar system. The findings are described in a study published October 26 in the journal Nature Astronomy. 

[Related: We finally know why Venus is absolutely radiant.]

In the study, researchers used atmospheric data from Venus and computer modeling to show that the composition of the planet’s current atmosphere and surface pressure could have only resulted from an early form of plate tectonics. This process is critical to life and involves multiple continental plates pushing, pulling, and sliding beneath one another. 

On Earth, these plate tectonics have intensified over billions of years. This process has formed new continents, mountains, and led to the chemical reactions that stabilized Earth’s surface temperature. It also created an environment that is more conducive for life to develop.

Venus went in the opposite direction and has surface temperatures of 867 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt lead. Astronomers have always believed that Venus has a “stagnant lid.” This means that the planet’s surface only has a single plate with minimal amounts of give, so most of the gasses remain trapped beneath the outer crust lid.

The team used current data on Venus’ atmosphere as the endpoint for these models and started by assuming Venus has had a stagnant lid through its entire existence. They were quickly able to see that computer simulations recreating the planet’s current atmosphere didn’t match up with where Venus is now. 

Next, the team simulated what would have had to happen on Venus for the planet to get to its current state. They eventually matched the numbers almost exactly when they accounted for limited tectonic movement early in Venus’ history followed by the stagnant lid model that exists today.

Due to the abundance of nitrogen and carbon dioxide present in Venus’ atmosphere, the team believes that Venus must have had plate tectonics about 4.5 billion to 3.5 billion years ago after the planet formed. They suggest that like on Earth, this early tectonic movement would have been limited in terms of the number of plates moving around and in how much they shifted. The process also would have been occurring on Venus and Earth at the same time. 

“One of the big picture takeaways is that we very likely had two planets at the same time in the same solar system operating in a plate tectonic regime—the same mode of tectonics that allowed for the life that we see on Earth today,” study co-author and Brown University planetary geophysicist Matt Weller said in a statement. 

[Related: A private company wants to look for life just above Venus.]

According to the team, this further bolsters the possibility that microbial life existed on ancient Venus. It also shows that at one point, both Earth and Venus were even more alike than scientists previously thought before diverging. Both planets are about the same size, have the same mass, density, and volume and live in the same solar neighborhood.

The work also shows the possibility that plate tectonics on all planets might simply come down to timing, so life itself may also be a product of the perfect timing. 

“We’ve so far thought about tectonic state in terms of a binary: it’s either true or it’s false, and it’s either true or false for the duration of the planet,” study co-author and Brown University geobiologist and geophysicist Alexander Evans said in a statement. “This shows that planets may transition in and out of different tectonic states and that this may actually be fairly common. Earth may be the outlier. This also means we might have planets that transition in and out of habitability rather than just being continuously habitable.”

Understanding the transition of tectonic states will be important for future studies of nearby moons and distant exoplanets. Jupiter’s fourth largest moon Europa has already shown evidence of Earth-like plate tectonics.

“We’re still in this paradigm where we use the surfaces of planets to understand their history,” Evans said. “We really show for the first time that the atmosphere may actually be the best way to understand some of the very ancient history of planets that is often not preserved on the surface.”

Future NASA DAVINCI missions will measure gasses in Venus’ atmosphere and could help solidify this study’s findings and the details of how this happened may hold important implications for Earth.

“That’s going to be the next critical step in understanding Venus, its evolution and ultimately the fate of the Earth,” Weller said. “What conditions will force us to move in a Venus-like trajectory, and what conditions could allow the Earth to remain habitable?”

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Bats and spiders get most of the attention for Halloween and spooky season, but October is also ladybug time in many parts of the United States. Alongside their appropriately nicknamed cousins the “Halloween beetle,” residents from Wisconsin to North Carolina to New Hampshire historically report seeing more of these insects indoors this time of year. Here’s why.

[Related: These fold-up robots fly just like ladybugs.]

Looking for warmth

Ladybugs typically spend the warmer summer months outside in gardens and grasses. As fall settles in, the insects likely begin to seek a place to hibernate indoors when the temperatures begin to drop. 

They could also be looking for a safe and warm place to lay their eggs. According to This Old House, ladybugs will often leave a trail of pheromones that tells other ladybugs in the colony, “Hey, this place is safe, warm, and perfect for egg-laying,” when they find a good spot to lay eggs. 

They are most commonly spotted by doors and windows, where it is easy for them to squeeze inside under cracks. They can also hitch a ride on potted plants and flowers brought into the home.

How to tell a ladybug from a Halloween beetle

The more well-known and common seven spotted ladybugs (Hippodamia convergens) are often confused with their cousins the Asian lady beetle aka harlequin ladybird or the Halloween beetle (Harmonia axyridis). These bugs are also red, but can also appear more orange and have more spots on their backs. It is also more typical for them to swarm houses in the fall and before the winter. Both species are members of the Coccinellidae family of beetles, but belong to a different genus. 

The easiest way to tell the two cousins apart is to look at their spots. If there are more spots, it’s a Halloween beetle. If there are only seven, it’s a ladybug. You can also look around their “neck.” Halloween beetles have different markings that look a bit like a butterfly or a black “M.” They are also generally larger than ladybugs. 

Ladybugs also typically have a rounded or oval shape. Halloween beetles also have an oval appearance, but they are slightly longer with a pointed head and snout. 

According to University of Kentucky entomologists, Asian lady beetles seem to be attracted to lit up surfaces that have a light-dark surface contrast. Homes that are partially illuminated by the sun are then attractive to the beatles. 

[Related: How many ants are there on Earth? Thousands of billions.]

“Once the beetles alight on buildings, they seek out crevices and protected places to spend the winter. They often congregate in attics, wall cavities, and other protected locations,” the entomologists told WBIR-TV in Knoxville, Tennessee. “Since lady beetles are attracted to light, they are often seen around windows and light fixtures.”

Can they hurt me or my house?

Ladybugs do more good than harm. They do not carry any diseases and they are a garden’s best friend, by eating aphids and worms that can ruin spring flowers and veggies. Halloween beetles are generally more likely to infest a home. 

They are not typically aggressive to humans, but Halloween beetles can bite if they feel trapped or threatened. Like other insects, their bites can create small, red, and itchy marks. 

Halloween beetles can also harm furniture or carpets with their secretions. Some safe ways to keep them away include planting mums, lavender, bay leaves, cloves, citronella, and plants in the citrus and mint families to naturally repel ladybugs, sealing entry points to your home, and using door sweeps at the bottom of doors. 

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Gravitational wave observatories, such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), are exercises in extreme sensitivity. LIGO’s two experimental ears—one in Louisiana, another in Washington state—listen to ripples in space-time left behind by objects that include black holes and neutron stars. To do this, LIGO carefully watches for minute fluctuations in miles-long laser beams. The challenge is that everything from rumbling tractors to the weather to quantum noise can cause disturbances of their own. A huge part of gravitational wave observation is the science of weeding out unwanted noise.

Now, following a round of upgrades, both of LIGO’s ears can hear 60 percent more events than ever before. Much of the credit goes to a system that corrects for barely perceptible quantum noise by very literally squeezing the light.

Physicists and engineers have been tinkering with light-squeezing in the lab for decades, and their work is showing real results. “It’s not a demonstration anymore,” says Lee McCuller, a physicist at Caltech. “We’re actually using it.” McCuller and his colleagues will publish their work in the journal Physical Review X on October 30.

Gravitational waves are an odd curiosity of how gravity works, as predicted by general relativity. As a falling rock casts ripples in water, sufficiently spectacular events—say, two black holes or two neutron stars merging together—cast waves in the fabric of space-time. Listening into those gravitational waves allows astronomers to peek at massive objects like black holes and neutron stars that are otherwise difficult to see clearly. Scientists can only pull this off thanks to devices like LIGO.

LIGO’s ears are shaped like very large Ls, their arms precisely 4 kilometers (2.49 miles) long. A laser beam, split in two, travels each down one of the arms. Those beams bounce off a mirror at the far end, and return back to the vertex, where they can be recombined into a single beam. Tiny shifts in space-time—gravitational waves—can subtly stretch and squeeze either arm, etching patterns in the recombined beam’s light.

The length shifts are extremely subtle, far too slight to even dream of seeing with the naked eye. The task of detecting such a slight shift becomes even trickier when LIGO detectors are prone to earthquakes, weather, and human activity, all of which create noise that rattles the mirrors or shakes up the laser beams.

Physicists have developed ways of cutting out all that noise. They can keep the arms in a vacuum, devoid of all other matter, to prevent sound waves. They can suspend mirrors to isolate them from vibrations. They can measure the noise of the outside world and adjust the instruments accordingly, like a very large noise-cancelling headset. 

But something that these methods cannot filter out is quantum physics. Even in a perfect vacuum, the inherent randomness of the universe at its tiniest scales—particles popping in and out of existence—makes its mark. “You’ve got a natural fluctuation on the level of your measurement that can mask a weak gravitational wave signal,” says Patrick Sutton, an astrophysicist at Cardiff University, a member of the LIGO-Virgo collaboration who wasn’t an author of the new study.

[Related: We’ve recorded a whopping 35 gravitational wave events in just 5 months]

LIGO detected the first-ever confirmed gravitational waves in 2016. Around the same time, its operators were thinking about ways to weed out the quantum disturbances. Physicists can manipulate light by trapping it within a crystal and “squeezing” it. They installed such a crystal on both LIGO detectors in time for the observatory’s third round of detections, which began in 2019.

The upgrade enabled LIGO to work with laser light with higher frequencies. But squeezing light like this came at a cost: making it more difficult to read lower-frequency light. This is problematic, because the gravitational waves from events we can detect—such as black hole mergers—tend to produce a good deal of lower-frequency light in LIGO.

So, after COVID-19 forced LIGO to shut down in mid-2020, its operators added a new chamber to their squeezing setup. This chamber allows a more adaptive approach, manipulating different properties of light at different frequencies. To do this, the chamber must trap light for 3 milliseconds—enough time for light to travel hundreds of miles. The chamber began operation when LIGO’s fourth, current observing run switched on earlier this year.

“It took a lot of engineering and design work and careful thinking to make this an upgrade that does its job and improves squeezing, but doesn’t introduce new noise,” McCuller says.

Both of LIGO’s detectors can now pick up gravitational waves from further into the cosmos and from a wider swath of space. LIGO now hears about 60 to 70 percent more events, according to Sutton. Better sensitivity also allows astronomers to measure gravitational waves with greatly increased precision, which lets them test the theory of general relativity. “It’s a significant jump,” Sutton says.

[Related: Astronomers now know how supermassive black holes blast us with energy]

LIGO’s fellow detector in Europe, Virgo, is implementing the same frequency-dependent squeezing based on its scientists’ own research. “We don’t currently know of any other technique that can improve upon this one,” McCuller says. “In terms of new techniques, this is the best one we actually know how to use at the moment.”

All the gravitational wave events we’ve seen so far came from two black holes or two neutron stars emerging: loud, violent events that leave equally violent splashes. But gravitational wave listeners would like to use gravitational waves to listen to other events, too, such as supernovas, gamma ray bursts, and pulsars. We aren’t quite there yet, but squeezing may get us closer by letting us take full advantage of the hardware we have.

“The key there is just to make the detectors ever more sensitive—bring that noise down and down and down—until, eventually we start seeing some,” Sutton says. “I think those will be very exciting days.”

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Before your most recent meal, you might have felt some hunger pangs, signaling it was time to eat. Maybe you developed a sudden craving for Italian or another cuisine. These cues did not come out of thin air—they are the work of an almond-sized region in the brain called the hypothalamus. This area of the brain, despite its tiny size, has an enormous job in keeping us alive.

Nicknamed the master switchboard, the hypothalamus works in the background making sure our bodies are in the best condition possible. And, like the way many background actors are kept on the edges of a frame, its role has been taken for granted in the science community. “The hypothalamus is a very underappreciated region,” says Dayu Lin, a professor in the department of neuroscience and physiology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. She’s seen research interest in the brain region wane, with some even considering it to be less interesting compared to areas involved in higher and complex cognition.

But there’s still much more we have yet to uncover about the hypothalamus, as four review papers show in a series published by the journal Science today. Advanced technology has opened up new ways of examining the small brain region, redefining its old roles and identifying previously unknown ones. 

The body’s regulator

The hypothalamus controls a variety of vital processes. Working with the pituitary gland, it’s in charge of all hormone production. It is also involved in controlling temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, appetite, and other parts of our physiology. 

“The hypothalamus is regarded as an integral element in central nervous system control of both bodily hormonal activity, as well as a number of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral states,” says James Giordano, a Pellegrino Center professor of neurology at Georgetown University Medical Center, who was not involved in the current studies. 

Complex structures and circuits give the hypothalamus a wide range of influence over multiple bodily processes, the first new paper shows. The hypothalamus is divided into a cluster of cell bodies, called nuclei, with intersecting pathways that help it communicate and coordinate activity within itself and with other outside brain regions. “Hypothalamic function is critical to the integrative activity of the brain, and in this way can be seen as important to defining the integrity of body to brain, and brain to body activity,” Giordano adds.

[Related: New human brain atlas is the most detailed one we’ve seen yet]

Until now, a lack of scientific resources prevented researchers from understanding the function of these cells. Lin, who co-authored another paper on the brain region’s role in social behavior, said it was difficult to study what was going on in this area without disrupting the communication between cells. Past research relied on animals with lesions in specific areas of the hypothalamus, but this does not give a full picture of how the removed cells interact with the rest of the region. 

The 2009 invention of single-cell RNA sequencing, a laboratory technique that allows scientists to analyze the genetic information of individual cells, has helped in better dissecting the circuitry that give hypothalamic clusters their diverse functions. In the recent work, researchers have mapped the cell subtypes in the hypothalamus based on. The next challenges will be to figure out why certain cell types group together and how the clumps govern different behaviors.

This isn’t the only new tool that these scientists employed. Another new research technique, optogenetics, allows neuroscientists to use light to monitor brain cell activity. A third, retrograde tracing, uses a virus to track neural connections starting from synapses all the way to their cell bodies, which helped identify never-before-seen circuits. In the future, these could reveal the hypothalamus’s other roles in regulating behaviors that include pain responses and anxiety. At the same time, the study authors speculate that the hypothalamus directly connects to the gut microbiome, with the implication that this brain area would be in charge of gut bacterial effects as well as serotonin and other hormones involved in the regulation of food. 

Sleep, socialization, and goals

The other three papers focus on some of this brain controller’s major functions. Sleep, for example, is governed by specific neurons that act as a “switch” for transition from rest to wakefulness. But that’s not their only purpose. Sleep-wake cells are equally involved with other hypothalamic activities such as the control of energy metabolism and core body temperature.

“Our manuscript highlights the fact that most neuronal circuits in the hypothalamus serve more than one function, and that they are all interconnected,” says Luis de Lecea, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University who served as author of the new review article. “Sleep is [also] intertwined with pretty much all brain function and loss of sleep affects many aspects of our health including aging and neurodegeneration.”

Another review article focused on how the hypothalamus can promote motivation towards necessities for us to survive such as food and water. To aim us toward such goals, the hypothalamus organizes its neural circuits to work with the ventral tegmental area, a part of the brain involved with reward processes. Optogenetic stimulation has revealed the hypothalamus sends messages to the ventral tegmental area that reinforce or inhibit motivation, and could explain food-seeking behavior. 

[Related: Psychedelics and anesthetics cause unexpected chemical reactions in the brain]

It also influences how we interact with others in a range of social behaviors. These can involve friendly and parental interactions, or aggressive or sexual actions. “These behaviors are critical for the animals to survive in the community and reproduce. The hypothalamus is essential for mediating these daily interactions,” says Lin, a co-author of this paper.

In that research, Lin proposes a dual-control system between the hypothalamus and brainstem-spinal cord. When someone spots a person they want to interact with, the hypothalamus engages with the dopamine system—dopamine is important for movements and reward—to maintain social interest and reinforce other socially acceptable actions. The brainstem-spinal cord circuit then takes this information and uses it to guide socially favorable responses and actions.

From lab animals to human health

Much of the work in investigating the ins and outs of the hypothalamus are in animals. Transgenic mice—genetically manipulated animals used to study biological processes and human diseases—make it easier for scientists to examine a specific section of the hypothalamus, Lin says, without putting any creatures under anesthesia. This is especially helpful to study communal behaviors, because animals need to be freely moving for their social brain circuits to activate. 

Although these studies originated in animals, the new information about the hypothalamus is already being used to form treatments for humans. Efforts are underway to use deep-brain stimulation to target the posterior end of the hypothalamus to prevent or reduce aggression, for example. There is also potential in targeting specific circuits in the hypothalamus to stop other problems such as insomnia and addiction. In the next 10 years, Lin predicts, we’ll be hearing more news of clinical trials that target the hypothalamus to treat troubling behaviors.

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Living long lives past reproductive age is a real rarity for female members of the animal kingdom. Humans and some species of toothed whales are the only known animals to go through menopause and the reasons behind it are an evolutionary puzzle. A team of primatologists recently found that a group of wild chimpanzees in Uganda also show signs of menopause. The findings are described in a study published October 26 in the journal Science and could provide more insight into this rare biological phenomenon.

[Related: Adolescent chimpanzees might be less impulsive than human teens.]

In humans, menopause typically occurs between the ages of 45 and 55 and is characterized by a natural decline in reproductive hormones and the end of ovarian functions. Some symptoms in humans include chills, hot flashes, weight gain, and thinning hair. The evolutionary benefits of this process are still a mystery for biologists. It is also still unclear why menopause evolved in humans but not in other known long-lived primates. 

“During our ongoing twenty five year study of chimpanzees at Ngogo in Kibale National Park, Uganda, we noticed that many old females did not reproduce for decades,” study co-author and Arizona State University primatologist Kevin Langergraber tells PopSci. “It’s a surprising trait from the perspective of evolution: how and why can natural selection favor the extension of lifespan past the point at which individuals can no longer reproduce? We need to know in what species it occurs and which it doesn’t as a first step [to that question].”

To look closer, the authors calculated a metric called the post-reproductive representation (PrR). This measurement is the average proportion of adult lifespan that an animal spends in its post-reproductive state. Most mammals have a PrR close to zero, but the team found that Ngogo chimpanzees have a PrR of 0.2. This means that the female chimpanzees in this group live 20 percent of their adult years in a post-reproductive state. 

Urine samples from 66 female chimpanzees from different stages in their reproductive lives also showed that the transition to this post-reproductive state was marked by changes in hormones like gonadotropins, estrogens, and progestins. 

While similar hormonal variations are also a way to tell that this transition is happening in humans, the post-reproductive chimpanzees were not involved in raising their offspring’s children. In these chimpanzees, the common grandmother hypothesis, where females live longer after menopause to help take care of future generations, does not appear to apply. This contrasts with some populations of orca whales, where grandmothers are a critical part of raising their offspring’s young to ensure their survival. 

[Related: Nice chimps finish last—so why aren’t all of them mean?]

According to the team, there are two possible explanations for these longer post-reproductive lifespans. Chimpanzees and other mammals in captivity can have artificially long post-reproductive lifespans because they are protected from natural predators and some pathogens. Even though they’re a wild population, the Ngogo chimpanzees could also be similarly protected and live artificially long lives. They live in a relatively remote area that is undisturbed by logging and hunting by humans and are exposed to fewer human pathogens. Their current habitat could also be closer to what existed in their evolutionary past compared with other populations of primates that are more affected by humans.

“The study both illuminates and raises questions about the evolution of menopause,” University of Exeter evolutionary biologist Michael Cant wrote in a related review on the study. “It also highlights the power of difficult long-term field studies–often run on small budgets and at constant risk of closure–to transform fundamental understanding of human biology and behavior.” Cant is not an author of the study.

Langergraber says future studies like this one could answer the question of how common substantial post-reproductive lifespans have been throughout chimpanzee evolutionary history and if impacts from humans have kept their survivorship rates artificially low.

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In Head Trip, PopSci explores the relationship between our brains, our senses, and the strange things that happen in between.

MANY ILLUSIONS are products of mismatched sensory inputs, evoked when one sense contradicts another. (It looks like just a noisy fan, but it sounds as if it’s speaking.) One of the most startling—and easiest to try by yourself—of these illusions is the McGurk effect, an audiovisual illusion first described by Scottish psychologist Harry McGurk and his assistant John MacDonald in 1976. 

If you search YouTube, you’ll find many videos of the McGurk effect. You watch a person’s face as they speak a single syllable—usually ba—over and over again. After a while, the person will start mouthing a different syllable, usually fa. Many listeners will “hear” the accompanying audio changing to match this. In reality, though, it does nothing of the sort; the sound being played remains the same throughout. “Ba! Ba! Ba!”

So what’s going on? Michael Beauchamp, a professor of neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent much of his career investigating the McGurk effect. “It’s what I think about all day, every day,” he laughs. In a 2012 paper in the journal NeuroImage, Beauchamp and colleague Audrey Nath examined the link between the effect and neural activity in a region of the brain called the left superior temporal sulcus (STS).

This STS forms a physical bridge between the visual cortex and the auditory processing region (a fact Beauchamp demonstrates with a 3D printout of his own brain). One of this brain region’s many important functions is processing multisensory audiovisual input. “[The STS] puts auditory information and visual information together,” Beauchamp explains. “That’s why we think it’s important for the McGurk.”

The 2012 research examined functional MRI data to study left STS activity in people who experienced the McGurk effect and to compare it to left STS activity in those who didn’t. There were, indeed, increased levels of activity in the first group. However, Beauchamp makes sure to caution that the results don’t constitute anything as definitive as “the STS causes the McGurk effect,” given the inherent complexity of the brain. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable [being that definitive] without a much larger sample size,” he says.

Still, the study did hint at one important fact that has been the focus of much subsequent research. “Some people always get the McGurk effect, and some people never do,” Beauchamp says. “[But] there’s also a whole spectrum in the middle. We are super certain of this; we’ve seen [it] in hundreds of people.”

The existence of this spectrum suggests that the effect—and thus the interaction between vision and hearing in multisensory processing—is more complex and nuanced than many scientists once believed. (This includes McGurk himself, who claimed that 98% of people always experience the full effect, while the remaining 2% never experience it at all.) 

It also suggests the whole concept of “illusion” is worth re-examining. We tend to assume that experiencing an illusion constitutes a failure of our senses—that we’ve been fooled, and that in the process, we’re coming up against the limits of our brains’ ability to make sense of the outside world. But Beauchamp’s study proposed that the real picture might be more subtle: “We speculate that McGurk perceivers have more liberal criteria for integrating auditory and visual speech information. Even if the auditory and visual information is mismatched, McGurk perceivers integrate it. This might provide an advantage under conditions of high levels of auditory or visual noise, at the cost of being misled by McGurk stimuli.”

That means, in some cases at least, the susceptibility to illusions may be adaptive, rather than maladaptive, because illusions are ultimately induced by the brain doing its best to make sense of mismatched or contradictory sensory information. This also raises the question of how our neurological centers might adapt to a change in the quality of that information. (As someone who has acquired hearing loss—I have damage to the cochlea in one ear, the legacy of a stray elbow in a childhood basketball game—I find this idea has personal resonance.) So do we know how, or if, the STS and the rest of the brain adapt to a long-term change in the reliability of one of the senses? 

“It’s a fascinating question—and an open one. We know the brain is plastic,” he says, adding that finding ways to use this plasticity is one of the goals of his team’s research. “For example, a lot of people’s hearing declines a lot faster than their vision does, so if we could help them to become more attuned to visual information, that might help [compensate for] hearing loss.”

The extent of the brain’s plasticity in this respect is underlined by one more remarkable detail that Beauchamp’s research has uncovered: The McGurk effect can be permanent. “If you watch the same McGurk effect clip for a long time, you’ll get the illusion even if you’re not looking at the screen. Basically, your brain is getting rewired; you don’t even need to see the face anymore, because your brain has been convinced, ‘OK, the auditory part is wrong, so I’ll go with what the visual part is saying,’” the professor explains.

Again, you can try it yourself: “Go on YouTube,” Beauchamp says. “Watch [one of those] videos for a minute a day for a few days, and then listen to it again without looking. My prediction is that you’ll still get the McGurk effect.”

Read more PopSci+ stories.

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In parts of Brazil, water levels are so low due to severe drought that previously submerged ancient rock carvings are visible for the first time since 2010. The petroglyphs including depictions of animals and other natural objects are located on the shores of Rio Negro, at an archeological site known as the Ponto das Lajes–Place of Slabs– near where the Rio Negro and the Solimões river flow into the Amazon River.

These carvings were previously seen during a drought 13 years ago, when the Rio Negro’s water levels dropped to what was then an all-time known low of 44.7 feet. As of October 23, the water levels in the Rio Negro are at 42.2 feet. Some experts predict that the drought could last until early 2024. 

[Related: The Amazon is on the brink of a climate change tipping point.]

According to the BBC, archaeologist Jaime Oliveira told local media that the markings were carved by people who lived in the area in pre-Columbian times. “This region is a pre-colonial site which has evidence of occupation dating back some 1,000 to 2,000 years. What we’re seeing here are representations of anthropomorphic figures.”

In addition to the faces and animals, grooves in one of the rocks were potentially used by Indigenous people in the area as a whetstone to sharpen their arrows. Carlos Augusto da Silva of the Federal University of Amazonas identified 25 groups of these carvings on a single rock.

Pieces of ceramics that archaeologists believe are thousands of years old have also been found at the site. The area was home to large Indigenous villages before European colonists arrived in the Seventeenth Century. 

[Related: Historic drought brings eerie objects and seawater to the surface of the Mississippi River.]

The carvings re-emerged earlier in October amid this unusually dry season. A similar situation arose in Europe in the summer of 2022, when one of the worst droughts in 500 years revealed “hunger stones,” in rivers across the continent. These stones covered in engraved markings show the water levels from previous dry times and some come with grim warnings. Near the town of Děčín in the northern Czech Republic, one haunting stone read “If you see me, then weep,” or “Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine.”

Scientists attribute this drought in South America to an El Niño weather pattern and warming in the North Atlantic linked to human-made climate change. 

Due to the low water levels, endangered pink river dolphins in Lake Tefé, Brazil are at risk of suffocation and a major hydropower plant near Porto Velho has also been shut down. Tens of thousands living in remote communities who can only travel by boat are also being isolated from the rest of the world.

These dry conditions are also accelerating the destruction of the most biodiverse rainforest on Earth. Parts of the Amazon rainforest have already begun to change from humid ecosystems that store large amounts of heat-trapping gasses into more dry forests that release these gasses into the atmosphere. Climate change, deforestation and fires have made it harder for the Amazon region as a whole to recover from severe droughts.

“This is a catastrophe of lasting consequences,” Luciana Vanni Gatti, a scientist at Brazil’s National Institute of Space Research, told The New York Times. “The more forest loss we have, the less resilience it has.”

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Research has long suggested that music can help lower pain perception without medication and could even help babies tolerate heel-prick blood tests. Emerging research has also found that music might change our experience of certain types of discomfort.  Importantly,  the type of music you’re listening to may play a role. According to a small Canadian study published October 25 in the journal Frontiers in Pain Research, listening to our favorite music can reduce pain intensity and bittersweet music specifically can help reduce the general unpleasantness of pain. 

[Related: Spotify wants to understand your body on music.]

In the body, hypoalgesia is a decreased sensitivity to pain. It happens when pain stimuli are disrupted between their origin point like a knee or foot and where they are recognized as pain by the conscious mind, primarily in the brain’s thalamus and cortex. 

To look into this response, researchers placed heat on the left arms of 63 healthy participants. The sensation was similar to the feeling of a hot cup of coffee being held against the skin. The participants either listened to two of their favorite music tracks, relaxing music selected for them by the researchers, scrambled music, or silence. 

The participants were asked to rate the intensity and unpleasantness of the pain. When scrambled sound or silence was played, the participants rated the pain as less intense by about four points on a 100-point scale. They also said the pain was less unpleasant by about nine points when listening to their preferred tracks, compared with silence or scrambled sound. The relaxing music that was selected for them did not produce this effect, as in zero points.

“In our study, we show that favorite music chosen by study participants has a much larger effect on acute thermal pain reduction than unfamiliar relaxing music,” study co-author and PhD candidate at the Université de Montréal Darius Valevicius said in a statement. “In addition, we used scrambled music, which mimics music in every way except its meaningful structure, and can therefore conclude that it is probably not just distraction or the presence of a sound stimulus that is causing the hypoalgesia.”

They also examined if musical themes could modulate the pain-decreasing effects of favorite music. Participants were asked about their emotional response to their favorite music and the researchers assigned four themes: energizing/activating, happy/cheerful, calming/relaxing, and moving/bittersweet. The different emotional themes varied in their ability to reduce pain.

“We found that reports of moving or bittersweet emotional experiences seem to result in lower ratings of pain unpleasantness, which was driven by more intense enjoyment of the music and more musical chills,” Valevicius said. 

[Related from PopSci+: The science is clear: Metal music is good for you.]

While neurologists don’t fully understand what stimulates the chills and physical responses we get with some music, these reactions appear to indicate a neurophysiological process that can block some pain signals. Chills can manifest as a tingling sensation, shivers, or goosebumps.

According to the authors, some of the limitations include how long the participants listened to the music samples. For example, listening to relaxing music for longer than seven minutes may have stronger effects than the shorter tracks that the participants listened to. They also need to address if listening to favorite music can be effective with other, non-thermal stimuli like chronic pain.

“Especially when it comes to the emotion themes in favorite music like moving/bittersweet, we are exploring new dimensions of the psychology of music listening that have not been well-studied, especially in the context of pain relief. As a result, the data we have available is limited, although the preliminary results are fairly strong,” Valevicius said.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Einstein’s brain got stolen, then got lost, then got used for some terrible “science” 

By Rachel Feltman

I’ve wanted to talk about Einstein’s noggin for a while, but I decided to finally take the leap because my hometown haunt the Mütter Museum has been in the news. The Mütter Museum is where medical students, history nerds and hot goth girls alike go to learn about the history of medicine through the lens of creepy and beautiful displays that include soapified corpses, phrenology skull collections, watermelon-sized ovarian cysts and fetuses with deadly congenital disorders.

I won’t go too deep into the current controversy, but the Mütter, which has been collecting and displaying medical paraphernalia and human remains since 1863, is under new management and overdue for an ethics review—and a lot of people are freaking out. You can hear my own rambling thoughts on the issue by listening to this week’s episode, but this piece by artist Riva Lehrer gets at the heart of the issue better than I ever could. 

One of the Mütter’s most commonly praised specimens is more ethically dubious than most visitors realize. It’s the brain of none other than Albert Einstein. 

First things first: Albert Einstein’s brain was straight up stolen. Einstein wanted to be cremated, but when he died of an aortic aneurysm in Princeton, New Jersey in 1955, the pathologist who presided over his autopsy, one Thomas Harvey, was like “surely he didn’t mean his brain” and just… kept it! When Einstein’s son Hans Albert found out, Harvey apparently convinced him that the scientific value of his father’s brain was such that cremating it would be a tragedy, and Hans demurred. But this happened after Einstein’s ashes had been scattered in a private moment by his family somewhere along the Delaware River, so you have to imagine Hans might have had a different answer if there had still been time to put the brain back with the rest of him. 

But despite Harvey’s big talk about using Einstein’s brain to unlock the secrets of genius, it would mostly get carried around the country for the next 30-odd years. 

Harvey lost his job at Princeton Hospital, then spent some time in Philadelphia, where he had the brain dissected into hundreds of blocks and mounted on thousands of slides. He then traveled throughout the midwest, occasionally giving universities some slivers of brain to study, apparently often carrying them in a beer cooler. But no one would actually publish research on Einstein’s brain until 1985. Several studies have cropped up since then, but they’ve all reached pretty dubious conclusions. To find out more about how Einstein’s actually-pretty-unremarkable brain has revealed our misguided obsession with innate intelligence, check out this week’s episode. 

FACT: A Miami county is fighting peacock overpopulation by giving the birds vasectomies

By Sandra Gutierrez

Parts of Miami-Dade county have been positively overrun by peacocks. This invasive species was brought from India and commercialized as “exotic yard ornaments” in the 1920s and 30s. They have since become sort of a symbol of Miami—they’re part of the scenery and people love them. 

But peacocks are not the brightest and can be kind of jerks. They’re known to peck and scratch dark-colored vehicles because they see their reflection and think it’s another male. There have also been reports of these colorful birds harassing kids holding food, and getting extremely territorial around mating season. To add insult to injury, peacocks poop everywhere, their feathers clog AC units, and they are very vocal—Miami residents have been complaining about the birds waking them up in the middle of the night and interrupting their Zoom calls with all their squawking.  

Controlling the peafowl overpopulation has been a challenge. Catching them can be somewhat  of a dangerous sport since they can grow to be up to 4-feet tall, and there’s regulation protecting the birds from being killed or captured. This is the context in which Pinecrest, a Miami-Dade county municipality, pitched a vasectomy initiative to wane the presence of peafowl within its borders. For every procedure, they’ll prevent up to 7 females from laying fertilized eggs, which is efficient but also expensive and labor-intensive. 

Avian vasectomies are pretty similar to human ones, as the anatomy is very similar. Unlike ducks, geese, and swans, peacocks don’t have a penis. Instead, they have a small bump of erectile tissue on the back wall of their cloaca called papilla. Just like in humans, vasectomies don’t prevent the release of seminal fluid, only of sperm, so the bird can continue to act as a dominant male.

We don’t know if this is going to solve the peacock problem at Miami-Dade, but research shows that just like what happens in humans and other mammals, avian vasectomies are safe and overall, don’t have reported negative effects: they don’t change breeding behavior, hormonal levels stay the same, and courtship and copulation post-surgery remain unaltered, so the peacocks should be just fine.

FACT: Hippos were nearly farmed in the US for meat

By Sarah Gailey

If you like Beyond Meat patties, wait’ll you try this beef alternative. In 1910, America had two big problems to solve: a shortage of meat, and an abundance of invasive water hyacinth choking off the Mississippi river delta. Congressman Robert Broussard proposed a bold solution—he suggested the importation of exotic livestock, including hippopotami, into the US. Broussard’s proposal would have resulted in one of the biggest land grabs in United States history, along with one of the most disastrous ecological and economic collapses in the world. Listen to find out just how big a bullet we dodged, and how close we came to being a nation overrun by feral, furious tanks made of ham. We also discuss the legacy of cocaine in Central America, the growth behaviors of one of the most invasive plants in the world, and (of course) the question of how hard it would be to castrate an unwilling hippo. Supplemental reading material includes Jon Mooallem’s deep dive and my book, American Hippo, an alternate history asking what kind of cowboys we might need to tame a hippopotamus-infested frontier.

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Humans have been changing the atmosphere from Earth’s surface for nearly two centuries—but now in the Space Age, we’re altering it from outer space, too. Atmospheric scientists recently found traces of unexpected metals in the stratosphere, the second-lowest layer of the atmosphere where ozone resides and meteors burn up into shooting stars. The researchers determined that this pollution came from spacecraft as they reenter Earth’s atmosphere, in research published last week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

This study is “the first observational evidence that space activities are a very significant source of particulate pollution to the stratosphere” says Slimane Bekki, an atmospheric scientist at LATMOS not involved in the new work. “More importantly, nobody knows the impacts of these particles on the ozone layer,” he adds, pointing out the importance of this molecule in shielding humans from dangerous UV radiation.

Usually, mission planners’ main concern is to ensure that space debris doesn’t hit the ground, where it could hurt people or structures—but, as this research points out, what evaporates in the stratosphere could still be making an impact, even if it’s not a literal one. That material has to exist somewhere, and it looks like it’s lingering in the stratosphere. “We are finding this human-made material in what we consider a pristine area of the atmosphere. And if something is changing in the stratosphere—this stable region of the atmosphere—that deserves a closer look,” said co-author and Purdue atmospheric scientist Dan Cziczo in a press release. 

[Related on PopSci+: Rocket fuel might be polluting the Earth’s upper atmosphere]

The research team flew through the stratosphere across the continental US in aircraft specially designed to fly at high altitudes, equipped with air-analyzing instruments in their nose cones. These unique planes— NASA’s ER-2 and WB-57—cruise at around 65,000 feet, almost double the altitude of typical passenger jets. Flying as high as 70,000 feet, the research craft can go above 99 percent of the mass of Earth’s atmosphere.

Within the stratosphere, the collecting equipment on these planes recorded traces of the heavy metals niobium and hafnium. These elements aren’t found naturally in the atmosphere, but they are typically used in rockets and spacecraft shells. The team also measured higher-than-expected concentrations of over 20 metals, including copper, lithium, aluminum, and lead. All told, about 10 percent of aerosol particles in the stratosphere contain metals. 

Atmospheric scientists aren’t sure exactly how these changes will affect Earth. The stratosphere contains tiny blobs of sulfuric acid, which are now infused with the metals from old spacecraft. The presence of those metals could change the chemistry of the stratosphere, including how big the sulfuric acid drops grow. Even small tweaks high up could affect the way light bends, the transfer of heat, or how crystals of ice grow. 

The big question is how these changes will affect human life on the surface. Unfortunately, there’s no clear answer to that, but in the past small stratospheric changes have led to big impacts—like adding CFCs that ate away at the ozone layer. Eventually, there may need to be additional environmental precautions for spaceflight to prevent harm to the stratosphere.

[Related: This beautiful map of Earth’s atmosphere shows a world on fire]

“The only way for these particles not to appear in the upper atmosphere is for the satellites not to be launched in the first place,” explains University of Exeter atmospheric scientist Jamie Shutler, who was not part of the research team. “The possible ways forward are to launch less, make the satellites last for longer (so we need to launch less), or encourage industry to make the constituents of satellites public knowledge (so we can guide manufacturers as to the potential harmful effects).” He adds that this new finding “confirms our concern” about stratospheric contamination.

But before we can solve this problem, “the concept that reentry can affect the stratosphere has to be thought about,” says lead author Daniel Murphy, atmospheric scientist at NOAA. He emphasized that this idea is still incredibly new and will require much more research to understand the scale and potential consequences of this pollution.

Potential impacts are expected only to grow as the rate of spacecraft launches and reentries accelerate. In the last five years, space agencies and private companies have launched more than 5,000 satellites, noted Martin Ross, co-author on the work and climate scientist at The Aerospace Corporation, in a press release. “Most of them will come back in the next five, and we need to know how that might further affect stratospheric aerosols,” he said. The team expects that the proportion of particles containing metal could grow from 10 to more than 50 percent in the next few decades, especially thanks to upcoming plans to reduce space debris by hurling it back into the atmosphere.

Those efforts and upcoming launches, though, need to be aware of the possible effects on Earth—and researchers need to do more work to determine the extent of those effects. “Understanding our planet is one of the most urgent research priorities there is,” said Cziczo.

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When foraging, bumblebees often have a choice to make. Do they go for the nectar that is the easiest to get, or should they work harder to get nectar with a higher sugar content? A new study found that the priority for the bumblebees is getting the most calories in the shortest amount of time, even at the expense of using up more energy. This trade-off ensures an immediate energy boost for the bumblebee colony, according to a study published October 24 in the journal iScience.

[Related: Female honeybees may pass down ‘altruistic’ genes.]

The study looked at a common species in the United Kingdom called Bombus terrestris or the buff-tailed bumblebee. Bumblebees will drink nectar from flowers and regurgitate it into their nest for other bees to use. They only store a small amount of nectar in their nests, so they must make the most of every opportunity to forage. 

To make these choices, bumblebees appear to trade off the time that they spend collecting nectar with the energy content of that nectar. If the sugar content is worth it, the bees will work to collect it despite being more difficult to access. By comparison, honeybees make their foraging decisions by optimizing the amount of energy they are expelling for any nectar, likely to prolong a honeybee’s working life.  

“Bumblebees can make decisions ‘on the fly’ about which nectar sources are the most energetically economical,” study co-author and University of Oxford bee biologist Jonathan Pattrick said in a statement. “By training bumblebees to visit artificial slippery flowers and using different ‘nectars’ with high, medium or low amounts of sugar, we found that they could make a trade-off between the energy content of the nectar and how difficult it was to access.”

For the study, Patrick and a team of biologists made 60,000 observations of the bumblebee’s behavior over six months. This allowed them to precisely estimate bumblebee foraging energetics and each bumblebee in the study was observed for up to eight hours a day without a break. The team used artificial flowers that were positioned vertically and horizontally and had slippery surfaces that made it difficult for the bees to grip. 

A computer program measured the split-second timing as the bees flew between the fake flowers and foraged for nectar to see how much energy the bumblebees spent flying and how much they collected while drinking. They then identified how the bees decided whether to spend extra time and energy collecting high-sugar nectar from the slippery flowers, or take the easier option of collecting lower-sugar nectar from flowers they could land on.

Each bumblebee was then given one of three tests.

In test one, the nectar on both the vertical and horizontal artificial flowers contained the same amount of sugar. The bumblebees chose to forage from the horizontal flowers instead of spending the extra time and energy hovering around the vertical flowers.

In test two, the vertical flowers had much more sugary nectar than the horizontal flowers and the bumblebees chose to drink almost exclusively from the vertical flowers.

[Related: Bee brains could teach robots to make split-second decisions.]

In test three, the vertical flowers had slightly more sugary nectar than the horizontal flowers. This created a situation where the bumblebees had to make a tradeoff between the time and energy they spent foraging and the energy content in the nectar they were drinking. They ended up feeding from the horizontal flowers.

Based on these test results, the authors conclude that the bumblebees can choose to spend additional time and energy foraging from the more hard-to-access nectar sources, but only if the eventual reward is really worth it. Understanding how this works can help make predictions about what types of flowers the bumblebees are likely to visit and inform choices of the kinds of flowers planted to make fields more bumblebee friendly.

“It’s amazing that even with a brain smaller than a sesame seed, bumblebees can make such complex decisions,” study co-author and University of Cambridge biochemist Hamish Symington said in a statement. “It’s clear that bumblebee foraging isn’t based on a simple idea that ‘the more sugar there is in nectar, the better’ – it’s much more subtle than that. And it highlights that there’s still so much to learn about insect behavior.”

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ON A COMPUTER MONITOR, in a laboratory half the size of a galley kitchen, I’m taking a look at the future. But the grainy object on the screen isn’t all that remarkable. It’s just a horse egg in a petri dish, blown up to the point where I can see the outline of its outer membrane. That’s when a white-coated scientist directs my attention to the device at my right: a high-powered microscope projecting the image of the horse egg, with two metal spikes the size of syringes angled at each side of the plate. Beneath me on the floor is an orange pedal I’m instructed to press with my foot. Suddenly, on the screen, I see a laser beam carve an incision into the membrane of the horse egg, like a hot knife going through butter.

In a few more years, the same laser-guided system will be used to punch a hole into an egg taken from an Asian elephant, remove the nucleus of that cell, and insert a nucleus containing edited genes required for surviving arctic temperatures, such as fuzzy hair and extra fat—all in the pursuit of creating the closest animal to a woolly mammoth to walk the Earth in many millennia.

The lab is one stop on my tour of the bioengineering facility of Colossal Biosciences. Co-founded in 2021 by Harvard geneticist George Church and serial entrepreneur Ben Lamm, Colossal is the world’s first de-extinction company. Its purpose? To rewild lost species. In June, I traveled to Dallas to get an in-person look at the 26,000-square-foot research facility where the startup’s innovative might is brought to bear. 

Colossal’s plan is to design a hybrid of a prehistoric woolly mammoth—which Church has described as “the cuddly version of a velociraptor”—as well as the thylacine, a marsupial from Australia and Papua New Guinea that died out in 1936, and the quintessential symbol of human-made extinction, the dodo, the last of which was snuffed out on its native island of Mauritius in 1662. 

De-extinction as an idea is not new. Church has discussed engineering a new lineage of woolly mammoths from frozen genetic material since 2008. The nonprofit organization Revive & Restore harbors aspirations of returning the extinct passenger pigeon to the skies. Scientists at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance hope to make gametes from cryopreserved skin cells of northern white rhinoceroses, a subspecies down to its last two members. What makes Colossal unique is its unicorn status: It has raised $225 million in investment capital in just two years and is now valued at $1.45 billion. Peter Thiel, Chris and Liam Hemsworth, the Winklevoss twins, Paris Hilton, and even the not-for-profit partner of the Central Intelligence Agency have all chipped in. (So has Matt Sechrest, co-founder of Recurrent Ventures, which owns Popular Science.)

Which raises a thorny question: What happens when you venture-fund nature?

Lamm, an energetic 41-year-old with a shoulder-length mop of dark hair, is well versed in this space. He comes from the tech world and has founded six different companies in his native Texas. (One of them, an artificial intelligence defense platform that counts the US Space Force and NASA as customers, was just acquired by a Texas-based private equity firm in August.) But the focus on money and investors belies the larger point. De-extinction, Lamm says, is a way to return keystone species to degraded ecosystems while developing the techniques to support future conservation projects. If we can genetically engineer a dodo, for example, what’s to stop us from breeding a more disease-resistant offshoot of Hawaiian honeycreepers, who are currently being decimated by avian malaria?

“[Some of] the technology advances that are going to be necessitated to de-extinct a creature are exactly the same technologies that will be necessary to help creatures not fall over the brink,” says Kenneth Lacovara, a paleontologist and geologist at Rowan University who agrees with Colossal’s mission.

Critics, meanwhile, say it’s misguided to scrape the natural world for genetic material to fulfill scientific whims. Why de-extinct obsolete species when there are more than 1,300 endangered and threatened ones in the United States alone that need protection? Observers also argue that introducing the genetic traits of dead creatures into modern analogs is not a means to conservation when the habitats of still-living endangered animals are continually under threat.

“We should protect species and do what we can,” says Lamm. “But that current model of just putting our arms around it, protecting it, just doesn’t work at the same speed at which we are destroying environments.”

The pioneering work Lamm speaks of will take decades. The company expects to birth a mammoth-like calf in about five years and then build up to a whole herd of woolly proxies. But in Colossal’s vision, the reintroduction of lost species is not only a way to right the wrongs of humanity but also a way to generate significant scientific know-how—so we can sustain species currently at risk in an increasingly inhospitable world, lest they perish forever.

THAT AN EARTHBOUND CREATURE like a woolly mammoth could vanish was once utterly unbelievable. French naturalist Georges Cuvier eventually delivered the sobering truth. He made his bones in 1790s Paris studying elephant fossils. Concluding that the remains were too distinct to be directly related to modern-day elephants, Cuvier posited the notion of espèces perdues, “lost species.” It was clear to him that the skeletons belonged to another megafauna that had vanished. Voilà: Extinction became a dilemma for modern science to solve.

Lamm’s fascination began with an introductory call to Church in 2019. His business acumen lay in using artificial intelligence for satellite software systems, and he wondered if the machines could also help with synthetic biology—the practice of building living systems from DNA and other small molecules. At the end of the call, after he idly asked Church what else he was working on, the mammoth comeback came up. “I was like, ‘Wait, what?’ I stayed up all night reading” everything Church had written about his quest, recalls Lamm. Soon he teamed up with the geneticist to form Colossal, where he is now CEO. In September 2021, the company launched with $15 million in seed funding and announced its plan to revive a version of the woolly mammoth.

Colossal widened its focus to the thylacine after Lamm was introduced to Andrew Pask at the University of Melbourne, who had already been conducting research on the marsupial and now consults on the company’s project on the species. More money came in, at which point investors asked the obvious question: What can we do for extinction’s mascot, the dodo? Beth Shapiro, who co-directs the Paleogenomics Lab at the University of California at Santa Cruz and has studied the flightless bird’s genome for almost two decades, advises Colossal’s avian genomics work. A few years ago, she and collaborators from other institutions had assembled the first complete genome of the dodo.

To any expert in this field, the tools in Colossal’s Texas labs aren’t unfamiliar. There are desktop gene sequencers and centrifuges. Hooded substations in a tissue culture lab for manipulating bits of animals. Computers that peer into sequenced DNA and analyze nucleotide bases. The laser-guided microscope I saw in the embryology lab is a proprietary device Colossal invented. In a company of 116 people, more than 60 are cell engineers and geneticists using these tools daily.

What’s important to understand, however, is that despite its talk of de-extinction, not to mention the graphics peppering its website, Colossal will never resurrect an animal. There’s no way to truly reanimate an extinct species by synthesizing its DNA from scratch—even with cutting-edge technology and living cells from an organism, and there are no such cells of a mammoth, dodo, or thylacine. 

“It’s still not possible to bring an extinct species back to life if what you mean is an exact copy,” says Shapiro. “What we’re working to do is to create proxies for these extinct species using some of their traits.”

Colossal’s real aim is to take existing species closely related to extinct animals, modify their DNA to give them traits similar to the company’s de-extinction targets, and place them in ecological settings that are as similar as possible to where previously extinct species once lived. For the dodo, it may be the Nicobar pigeon, a living cousin that inhabits islands in southeast Asia. For the thylacine, it’s the fat-tailed dunnart, a marsupial that resembles a rat. Modern-day elephants are also in the mix: Although the woolly mammoth has been gone for anywhere from 4,000 to 10,000 years, it has a close relative in the Asian elephant—so close, in fact, that more than 99 percent of the animals’ genomes are identical.

“A mammoth to an Asian elephant is more closely related than an African elephant is to an Asian elephant,” says Eriona Hysolli, Colossal’s head of biological sciences, who works closely with Church out of his lab in Boston and supervises the mammoth work.

What Colossal scientists are trying to do is understand links between genotype and phenotype: how the sequence of letters in DNA code translates to how an animal looks and behaves. Hysolli says they are targeting about 65 sequences in the mammoth genome that confer various cold-adaptive traits, like subcutaneous fat, woolly hair, and dome-shaped craniums. In the genome engineering lab, computers compare the ancient DNA of the mammoth to that of the Asian elephant to identify areas of the elephant genome that must be modified in a future hybrid to express extinct characteristics. 

“Are all the phenotypes there? Are all the ecological functions there? That is, for us, what we’re saying is de-extinction,” says Matt James, a former director of animal care at the Dallas Zoo, now chief animal officer at Colossal. “We de-extincted critical genes for these species.”

To do that, Colossal is trying out pluripotent stem cells, which are capable of turning into any adult cell type. Those are created inside the company’s tissue culture lab from Asian elephant cells donated from various sources. (Colossal partners with 11 zoos across the US.) This is where genome engineering and cell manipulation will eventually intersect. There are two ways to insert mammoth genes into an elephant cell: use the ever-popular CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing tool to insert enzymes that make changes to nucleotide bases along the Asian elephant’s genome, or make multiple sequence changes at once, a process known as multiplexing, with the help of other molecular tools. 

Finally, to complete the mammothification of an Asian elephant, a nucleus from a regular elephant egg would be swapped with the nucleus from a cell modified with snippets of the mammoth genome—something they are planning for by early 2026 so Colossal can meet its projected date of 2028. Known as somatic cell nuclear transfer, it’s the same technique scientists used to make the famous clone Dolly the sheep in 1996. Colossal’s scientists are already practicing with gametes from animals like cows and horses. 

Once the hybrid egg develops into an embryo, it will be implanted into a female Asian elephant. The gestation period for a mammoth is the same as for an Asian elephant: around 22 months. And if that fetus survives long enough to be born, it should, hypothetically, be adapted to cold weather because it possesses mammoth traits. It probably won’t have massive tusks, but it will be 200 pounds of flesh, fat, and protective fur.  

James is confident that Colossal will be able to produce a mammoth by implanting a modified embryo into a surrogate. To increase its chances, though, he says the team will develop multiple eggs and work with a couple of female elephants. Even so, the first generation of mammoth hybrids won’t go anywhere near the wild. “They will be in what we would call a managed care facility,” says James, which means a sanctuary or some other facility where their anatomy, physiology, and behavior can be studied regularly. The mammoths will have to prove they have the skills to live and thrive independently in the wild. 

Skeptics might say the means, in this case, don’t justify the end. “It’s not necessarily accurate to say that the animals will benefit more by being brought back to life rather than just staying dead,” says Zohar Lederman, a physician and bioethicist at the University of Hong Kong. 

Others are much more strident. “It seems like a terrible idea to me,” says Karl Flessa, a geosciences professor at the University of Arizona who centers his research work on conservation biology and habitat and species restoration. “Why are you bringing back a Pleistocene animal as the world continues to warm and all of the habitats that were once available for mammoths are pretty much gone? Why would you want to do that?”

IN AN OP-ED for Rolling Stone in July, Colossal CEO Lamm argued that the company’s efforts are absolutely essential to sustaining the biodiversity of the planet. “I came to the conclusion,” he wrote, “that the question is no longer should we practice de-extinction science but how long do we have to get it right.”

Global authorities continually point out that Earth is currently in the middle of an extinction crisis. In 2019, the United Nations published a landmark report stating that one million animal and plant species are close to dying out, which is more than ever before in our history. A subsequent report issued in 2020 by the World Wildlife Fund found that wildlife populations had decreased by two-thirds in the last half-century alone, mainly due to human activities like deforestation, insecticide use, and poaching. In May, four researchers published a study in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution linking climate change to another mass extinction. They evaluated almost 36,000 species on land and in the ocean and used climate models to show that 15 percent of those organisms will experience dangerous and potentially fatal temperatures if the planet warms by 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100.

Lamm, Church, and the rest of Colossal’s corporate chain contend that those sorts of numbers animate the underlying principle of the company: that their lab-made proxies aren’t just some well-funded science project—they can legitimately be used to build resilience in species by pushing them toward the right adaptations in a changing world. The mammoth-elephant hybrid is the classic example. Asian elephants are listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Merging snippets of woolly mammoth genome with the Asian elephant might give the big mammal a chance to inhabit a place like Pleistocene Park, a large tract of tundra in Russian Siberia that’s free from our interference.

“People say we should be working on endangered species. That’s exactly what we’re working on,” Church told me via video call the day after I toured Colossal’s lab. “One of the advantages of making a hybrid starting from an endangered species is that you give that endangered species a whole new place to live, which is much larger and less encumbered by human conflict than their current location.”

At the same time, the genomic sequencing Colossal currently leads is being put toward the development of a vaccine for a herpesvirus—the primary cause of death of young Asian elephants in zoos in North America.

But geneticist Stephan Schuster remains incredulous. Schuster was part of the Pennsylvania State University team that, in 2008, was the first to sequence nearly a full genome of an extinct animal when it assembled 2.9 billion base pairs from the genome of an 18,000-year-old woolly mammoth found in Siberia. “If there is a single person on the planet that I would trust to get the project accomplished, it is George Church,” he says. But, he adds, talk of resurrecting a mammoth has gone on for a decade, without much to show for it.

Schuster has a long list of queries about Colossal’s methodology. Will changes made to Asian elephant DNA lead to unpredictable mutations elsewhere on the genome? How many elephant pregnancies must happen to create one transgenic animal? How do you implant a mammoth-hybrid embryo into the uterus of an Asian elephant, which is deep inside the animal? “Just show success,” says Schuster. “All the rest, it’s just blah, blah, blah, blah.”

Another one of the scientific community’s main criticisms of Colossal is money versus impact. A $225 million capital fund for species restoration is nothing to sneeze at. Meanwhile, based on an analysis by the Center for Biological Diversity and other conservation groups, the US Fish and Wildlife Service requires a total of $841 million to fully fund all recovery efforts under the Endangered Species Act. The agency’s 2023 budget for protection efforts is just $331 million.

Colossal retains the exclusive license to commercialize any biotechnology that emerges from its de-extinction projects. Lamm assures me that anything that might be applicable to human healthcare—for gene therapy and the like—will be strictly proprietary. The one exception is how the instruments, like its laser-guided embryo-editing tool, are employed for various species preservation projects. “We may open-source some of the technology for its application to conservation,” he says.

The proxies themselves, once born, are also likely to be wholly owned by Colossal, at least for a while. Early hybrids will live in a vast fenced-in area like a nature preserve. Once there are enough members of each de-extincted target that can live and survive in the wild, they will start being released. And that’s when, Colossal says, ownership transfers to the natural world.

“They would become more of a natural resource for the area where they’ve been rewilded,” says chief animal officer James. It would be similar to how we might view elephants already existing in the wild. A specific country doesn’t own an African elephant—although it might be argued that those countries do have a responsibility to protect wildlife. (One location that Colossal is considering for future mammoths is North Dakota; the state development fund invested $3 million in the company earlier this year.)

Skeptics of Colossal’s overall strategy also wonder what will happen should de-extinction efforts prove successful. Creatures that have been gone for tens, hundreds, and thousands of years would suddenly emerge into a vastly different world—one that, by the very metrics Colossal cites, is already far too dangerous for the organisms that are still alive.

“Having mammoths isn’t going to solve any of those problems,” says Ronald Sandler, director of the Ethics Institute at Northeastern University. “It’s not going to reduce habitat loss. It’s not going to reduce carbon emissions. It’s not going to help us prevent a currently extant species from going extinct.”

Take the infamous flightless dodo, which could be an inspiration for shoring up vanishing populations of endemic island pigeons. The scientific process for creating its replacement is different from those for the mammoth and thylacine proxies. Currently, there’s no way to genetically edit a living bird. Scientists can manipulate the egg cell of a mammal when it’s ready to be fertilized because its nucleus is easy to get to—but the yolk of a bird egg makes that impossible. Instead, Colossal plans to create primordial germ cells, which can become sperm or egg cells, and inject them into developing embryos of a living bird. One prime candidate is the Nicobar pigeon. A male and female Nicobar would each then grow up with gametes containing the edits required to birth offspring with the characteristics that so distinguished the dodo, like its flightlessness, S-shaped body, and hooked beak. Say that works multiple times over, enough to generate a population of dodo proxies. What good does that do if its historic home of Mauritius is filled with invasive predators and may be flooded in 100 years?

“I’m critical of de-extinction, but I also do think it has a role to play,” says Tom Gilbert, a paleogenomics researcher at the University of Copenhagen. He also worked with Shapiro to produce the dodo genome and is a member of Colossal’s scientific advisory board. In his eyes, releasing “a bad mutant mismatch of something else not adapted to the environment” doesn’t strike him as an effective means of ecosystem restoration. “But if you can excite a generation of young people using crazy de-extinction projects to love nature and get into science, that is going to save the world,” he adds. “If it requires a mutant mammoth-elephant hybrid to get the people excited, that is a valid reason to do it.”

THE BIGGEST OPEN QUESTION is whether Colossal can and will use the bioengineering toolkit it’s developing for the greater conservation good. The startup certainly claims it will: It recently joined forces with Thomas Hildebrandt, another member of its scientific advisory board, who currently leads BioResponse, an international consortium attempting to create a new population of northern white rhinoceroses. Colossal’s supporting role will be to gather DNA from museum specimens of the near-extinct species, analyze the data, and then use its gene-editing tools to help create more diverse northern white rhino embryos. The genetic variation should, in theory, help protect the rare mammals from disease in captive-breeding programs and, eventually, in the wild.

Still, there is no hybrid mammoth, thylacine, or dodo to point to at the moment. For Lamm, generating those ancient species is the priority. “If Colossal does nothing else in conservation or de-extinction, and we cure elephant endotheliotropic herpesvirus and are responsible for saving elephants, that was a pretty good day,” he tells me just after our walk-through of the lab. “But fundamentally…if we aren’t successful in our de-extinction efforts, I will personally not see it as success.” 

Yet there is a danger in pursuing ghosts and still-fictional creatures. Mammothlike elephants or big-beaked pigeons or fiercer dunnarts could overshadow wildlife teetering on the precipice of oblivion right now. After all, who cares, really, about the orangefoot pimpleback, an endangered freshwater mussel, or the Oahu tree snail?

When I present paleontologist Kenneth Lacovara with that conundrum, he deems it a false choice. “Yes, we have to do everything we can to conserve species that are on the brink,” he says. “And yes, we should try to bring back species that have gone extinct that were pushed into extinction by humans. I think that’s justice. Those two things are not at odds with each other.”

Maybe not. Could the return of a mammoth-like beast backed by millions of dollars in capital funds stabilize an ancient Arctic ecosystem that traditionally helped trap greenhouse gases deep inside the frozen tundra? “When a species is introduced to a landscape, you can’t always predict what every one of the consequences is going to be,” says Shapiro.

But we certainly know what happens when a species is removed from where it belongs, be that the fault of overzealous humans or larger environmental degradation. Consider the reintroduction of gray wolf packs to Yellowstone National Park, perhaps the preeminent example of the positive ecological effects born from restoring fauna in their native habitats. As one of the top predators in the region, wolves helped bring other wildlife and natural cycles back into balance. 

We don’t know what will happen if a woolly mammoth hybrid makes its debut in the 21st century. But the future that Colossal envisions is one in which the act of protecting the animal kingdom goes beyond building fences, zoos, or preserves—one in which humans invest in and invent tools that could prime species for survival, including those that haven’t been dead for thousands of years. 

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With its 19 feet-long torpedo-shaped body and long teeth the newly-described Lorrainosaurus was a fearsome mega predator. The fossilized remains of a 170-million-year-old marine reptile is the oldest-known pliosaur and dates back to the Jurassic era. The discovery is described in a study published October 16 in the journal Scientific Reports.

[Related: Millions of years ago, marine reptiles may have used Nevada as a birthing ground.]

Pliosaurs were members of a group of ocean-dwelling reptiles that are closely related to the more famous long-necked plesiosaurs. Unlike their cousins, these pliosaurs had short necks and massive skulls. From snout to tail, it was likely about 19 feet long and very little is known about the plesiosaurs from this time.

“Famous examples, such as Pliosaurus and Kronosaurus–some of the world’s largest pliosaurs–were absolutely enormous with body-lengths exceeding 10m [32 feet]. They were ecological equivalents of today’s killer whales and would have eaten a range of prey including squid-like cephalopods, large fish and other marine reptiles. These have all been found as preserved gut contents,” study co-author and Uppsala University paleontologist Benjamin Kear said in a statement.

Pliosaurs first emerged over 200 million years ago and remained relatively small players in marine ecosystems. Following a landmark restructuring of the marine predator ecosystem in the early to middle Jurassic era (about 175 to 171 million years ago) they reached apex predator status.

“This event profoundly affected many marine reptile groups and brought mega predatory pliosaurids to dominance over ‘fish-like’ ichthyosaurs, ancient marine crocodile relatives, and other large-bodied predatory plesiosaurs,” study co-author and paleobiologist at the Institute of Paleobiology of the Polish Academy of Sciences Daniel Madzia said in a statement.

The fossils in this study were originally found in 1983 in northeastern France, but were recently analyzed by an international team of paleontologists who identified this new pliosaur genus called Lorrainosaurus. The teeth and bones represent what was once a complete skeleton that decomposed and was spread along the ancient seafloor by scavengers and ocean currents. 

[Related: The planet’s first filter feeder could be this extinct marine reptile.]

“Lorrainosaurus was one of the first truly huge pliosaurs. It gave rise to a dynasty of marine reptile mega-predators that ruled the oceans for around 80 million years,” Sven Sachs, a study co-author and paleontologist from the Naturkunde-Museum Bielefeld in Germany, said in a statement.

Other than a short report published in 1994, these fossils remained obscure until the team reevaluated the specimens. Finding Lorrainosaurus’ remains indicates that the reign of gigantic mega-predatory pliosaurs likely began earlier than paleontologists previously thought. These giants were also locally responsive to the major ecological changes in the marine environments that covered present day Europe during the early Middle Jurassic.

“Lorrainosaurus is thus a critical addition to our knowledge of ancient marine reptiles from a time in the Age of Dinosaurs that has as yet been incompletely understood,” said Kear.

The post This Jurassic-era ‘sea murderer’ was among the first of its kind appeared first on Popular Science.

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Against all odds and expectations, both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are still going strong after nearly half a century of hurtling through—and far past—the solar system. To help boost the potential for the probes’ continued operations, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have beamed out two software updates across the billions of miles separating them from the historic spacecraft. If successful, the pair of interstellar travelers could gain at least another five years’ worth of life, if not more.

On October 20, NASA announced plans to transmit a software patch to protect Voyager 1 and 2 against a glitch that occurred within the former’s system last year. In May 2022, NASA started noticing inaccurate readings coming from Voyager 1’s attitude articulation and control system (AACS). A few months later, engineers determined the AACS was accidentally writing commands into memory instead of actually performing them.

Although engineers successfully resolved an original data issue within Voyager 1 in 2022, the new patch will hopefully ensure such a problem won’t arise again in either probe. Receiving the patch will take over 18 hours to reach transmitters; Voyager 2 will get the patch first to serve as a “testbed for its twin” in case of unintended consequences like accidentally overwriting essential code. Given Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are respectively 15 billion and 12 billion miles from Earth, engineers consider the farther craft’s data more valuable, as it still remains the farthest traveling human-made object. The NASA-JPL team will issue a command on October 28 to test the patch’s efficacy.

[Related: The secret to Voyagers’ spectacular space odyssey.]

The second planned tune-up for Voyager 1 and 2 involves the small thrusters responsible for controlling the probes’ communication antennas. According to NASA, spacecraft can generally rotate in three directions—left and right, up and down, as well as wheellike around a central axis. During these movements, propellant automatically flows through incredibly narrow “inlet tubes” to maintain the antennas’ contact with Earth.

But each time the propellant is used, miniscule residue can stick within the inlet tubings—while not much at first, that buildup is becoming problematic after the Voyager probes’ (many) decades’ of life. To slow the speed of buildup, engineers have edited the probes’ operational commands to allow both craft the ability to rotate nearly 1 degree farther in each available direction. This will reduce how often their thrusters need to fire. When engineers do need to enable thrusters, they now plan to fire them for longer periods of time, thus reducing the overall number of usages. 

[Related: How is Voyager’s vintage technology still flying?]

“This far into the mission, the engineering team is being faced with a lot of challenges for which we just don’t have a playbook,” Linda Spilker, Voyager mission project scientist, said via NASA’s update. “But they continue to come up with creative solutions.”

Experts estimate both the fuel lines and software adjustments could extend the Voyager program’s lifespan by another five years. According to NASA, however, “additional steps in the coming years to extend the lifetime of the thrusters even more.”

The post Voyager probes get virtual tune-up to keep decades-long missions going and going appeared first on Popular Science.

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The moon is our closest neighbor in space and the only celestial body humans have set foot on, yet we are still learning about it. In fact, Earth’s moon might actually be 40 million years older than scientists previously believed. By conducting an atom-by-atom analysis on crystals that were brought back by Apollo astronauts in 1972, a team of geochemists and plenary scientists now calculate that the igneous orb is at least 4.46 billion years old. The findings are described in a study published today in the journal Geochemical Perspectives Letters.

Intertwined fates

Heck is a curator for the meteorite collection at the Field Museum in Chicago and a professor at the University of Chicago. He says that studying the moon also helps us understand our own planet because of the topographical differences.

“Earth’s surface is much, much younger because there’s so much geologic activity [here] from volcanism and weathering,” explains Heck. “The moon’s surface is essentially an archive of solar system dynamics. This is a record that we don’t have on Earth, but our planet’s evolution is tied to these impacts that happened in the early solar system.”

A historical perspective

In the study, the team looked at moon dust brought back by the Apollo 17 crew. The 1972 lunar landing included NASA geologist Harrison Schmidt, who collected multiple rocks to study back on Earth. His samples contain very small crystals that were created billions of years ago and can help indicate when the moon was formed.

The energy created by the impact from the object that struck Earth and created the moon melted the rock that eventually became the lunar surface. That offers a clue to the elements that existed on the celestial body since its emergence versus the ones that appeared much later. For example, zirconium, a silver metal found on both the Earth and the moon, could not form and survive on the molten lunar surface: Any zircon crystals that are currently present on the moon must have formed after the magma ocean cooled. Determining the age of these structures can thus reveal the minimum possible age for the moon, assuming that they emerged right after the impact.

Looking atom by atom

Researchers have previously suggested that the moon is older than estimated, but this new study is the first to use an analytical method called atom probe tomography to pinpoint the age from the oldest known lunar crystal retrieved by humans.

“In atom probe tomography, we start by sharpening a piece of the lunar sample into a very sharp tip using a focused ion beam microscope, almost like a very fancy pencil sharpener,” study co-author and planetary scientist Jennika Greer said in a statement. “Then, we use UV lasers to evaporate atoms from the surface of that tip. The atoms travel through a mass spectrometer, and how fast they move tells us how heavy they are, which in turn tells us what they’re made of.”

This atom-by-atom analysis revealed how much of the zircon crystals had undergone radioactive decay—a process where atoms that have an unstable configuration shed some protons and neutrons. They then transform into different elements, like how uranium decays into lead. Based on the amount of conversion and the known half-lives of different chemical isotopes, experts can estimate the age of the sample.

“Radiometric dating works a little bit like an hourglass,” Heck said in a statement. “In an hourglass, sand flows from one glass bulb to another, with the passage of time indicated by the accumulation of sand in the lower bulb. Radiometric dating works similarly by counting the number of parent atoms and the number of daughter atoms they have transformed to. The passage of time can then be calculated because the transformation rate is known.”

The team working with the Apollo 17 sample found that the proportion of lead isotopes (the daughter atoms created during the decay) indicated that the crystals were about 4.46 billion years old, so the moon must at least be that old too. While this puts the moon’s age back 40 million years, that’s still a very short time compared to the universe’s roughly 13.7 billion-year history. 

“It’s amazing being able to have proof that the rock you’re holding is the oldest bit of the moon we’ve found so far. It’s an anchor point for so many questions about the Earth. When you know how old something is, you can better understand what has happened to it in its history,” Greer said.

From Apollo to Artemis

In future studies, clues pulled from these decades-old samples could be pooled with those from samples taken by upcoming Artemis lunar missions. Artemis III is scheduled for 2025 and will land on and explore the lunar South Pole. The Apollo 17 mission collected samples from the Taurus-Littrow valley on the eastern edge of Mare Serenitatis, so crystals from a different region of the moon could yield unimaginable discoveries. 

[Related: Scientists have new moon rocks for the first time in nearly 50 years]

“I am convinced that there is older stuff on the moon—we just haven’t found it yet. I even think we have older zircons in the Apollo samples. This is really the power of sample return,” says Heck. 

A mixture of new samples and future advances in technology could further anchor the timeline of how our solar system was formed and beyond.  “Maybe in 50 or 100 years or even later, new generations of scientists will have the tools we can only dream about today to address scientific questions we can’t even think about today,” says Heck. “These templates are a legacy for future generations.”

The post The moon is 40 million years older than we thought, according to crystals collected by Apollo astronauts appeared first on Popular Science.

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NASA plans to return humans to the moon in 2025 with the Artemis III mission. Before that, the space agency will conduct a vital preliminary mission in November 2024, when the Artemis II mission flies a crew of astronauts in lunar orbit for the first time since the 1970s. But the “important first step” toward those goals, as NASA put it in a recent blog post, is the planned launch of the IM-1 mission carrying the NOVA-C lunar lander in a few weeks. It will attempt to land several NASA science experiments near Malapert A, a crater in the southern lunar polar region. Those studies could help NASA prepare for astronaut operations in the area in 2025. 

Unlike the Artemis missions, though, NOVA-C isn’t a big NASA project. Instead, the truck-sized craft designed to ferry small payloads to the lunar surface was built, and will be operated by, the small Texas-based company Intuitive Machines. 

If it succeeds in landing near the lunar south pole, NOVA-C will be the first US soft landing on the moon since the 1970s, and the first ever commercial landing on the moon that hasn’t crashed or failed. So why is a small spacecraft built by a relatively small company a key part of NASA’s big moon program?

“There is a pattern that we have now seen of NASA trying to move to more commercial solutions and services, rather than do it all on their own,” says Wendy Whitman Cobb, a space policy expert and instructor at the US Air Force School of Advanced Air and Space Studies. It’s much like NASA’s Commercial Crew and Cargo programs, which contracted with SpaceX to fly astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station aboard its Dragon space capsules. 

[Related: Why do all these countries want to go to the moon right now?]

Now NASA is turning to commercial companies to prepare the way for humanity’s return to the moon. Intuitive Machines was one of the first companies to receive a contract—for $77 million— under NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS program, back in 2019. NASA designed CLPS to fund private sector companies interested in building small, relatively inexpensive spacecraft to fly experiments and rovers to the moon, allowing NASA to simply purchase room on the spacecraft rather than developing and operating it themselves. 

In the case of NOVA-C, five NASA payloads will ride along with devices from universities including Louisiana State and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. ”The NASA payloads will focus on demonstrating communication, navigation and precision landing technologies, and gathering scientific data about rocket plume and lunar surface interactions, as well as space weather and lunar surface interactions affecting radio astronomy,” the space agency wrote in a blog post about the mission. 

“We don’t still don’t know a lot about the moon,” Whitman Cobb adds. The moon has variable gravity depending on where there are more metallic materials. “Finding out where those places are, how lunar dust is going to kick up when you’re trying to land or take off—all of these things are really key.”

That’s why NASA is sending payloads to ride along with NOVA-C. But the reason NOVA-C is landing where it is, about 300 kilometers from the south pole, has more to do with how the whole world is now thinking about the moon.

NOVA-C was originally destined to land in the Oceanus Procellarum, one of the large, dark areas known as mares, or “seas,” on the lunar surface. But in May, NASA and Intuitive Machines announced the change in plans and the new target near the south pole. 

[Related: We finally have a detailed map of water on the moon]

”The decision to move from the original landing site in Oceanus Procellarum was based on a need to learn more about terrain and communications near the lunar South Pole,” NASA announced in a blog post at the time. “Landing near Malapert A also will help mission planners understand how to communicate and send data  back to Earth from a location that is low on the lunar horizon.”

The reasons NASA wants to land near the lunar south pole with Artemis, and why the recent and successful Chandrayaan 3 mission of India, and the failed Russian Luna 25 mission, both targeted the lunar south pole are twofold: research and resources, according to Richard Carlson, a lunar geologist who retired from the Carnegie Institute for Science in 2021.  

“Both north and south polar regions have permanently shadowed craters where water has been detected from orbit,” he says. ”The real question is whether that water is a one micron surface coating of water on a few grains, or whether it’s a substantial abundance of water. Water of course being useful for a lot of things, from drinking water to turning it into hydrogen and oxygen, which is rocket fuel.”

The other motivation for going to the south pole is that it’s geologically very different from where the Apollo missions landed, according to Carlson. “They all landed on a pretty small portion of the moon on the Earth facing side of the moon on the nice flat mares, and that’s a rather unusual part of the moon geologically,” he says. ”If you think of studying the Earth this way, the Apollo lunar program would have basically landed on, let’s say, just North America, and that’s it.”

The lunar south polar region is much more geologically varied, with tall mountains and ridges, as well as rocks dug out from deep within the moon and scattered over the region by impact craters billions of years ago, Carlson says. But of course, such a landscape has its downsides for spacecraft coming from Earth. 

“You look at the pictures of the places that they selected [for Artemis III] and I wouldn’t want to land there. I mean, they’re really rough,” he says. “If we land on a rock, the spacecraft is going to fall over.” Sending small, uncrewed craft like NOVA-C to the moon’s south polar ahead of Artemis astronauts will test how difficult landing there really is. 

After all, as Witman Cobb notes, touching down anywhere on the moon is really hard. Before the failed Luna 25 landing on August 21, there were two failed commercial lunar landings. The Israeli company SpaceIL saw its Beresheet lander crash land in 2019, while the Hakuto-R M1 lander from Japanese company ispace crashed in April. 

”We haven’t seen a commercial company be successful in landing on the moon yet,” Whitman Cobb says. ”That’s really fascinating when you think about our capability of landing humans on the moon in the 1960s, and 1970s. That today, with all of the technology that we now have, this is still a really, really difficult thing to do.”

The post This private lander could be the first US machine on the moon this century appeared first on Popular Science.

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A group of paleontologists, park rangers, and geologists have discovered a new species of ancient shark in the rock layers of Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky. It was uncovered in a large fossil deposit that includes at least 40 different species of shark and their relatives, and even well-preserved skeletal cartilage. 

[Related: Megalodons were likely warm-blooded, despite being stone-cold killers.]

The new species is named Strigilodus tollesonae and is a petalodont shark. These extinct  sharks had petal-shaped teeth and lived about 337 million years ago. According to the National Park Service, it is more closely related to present day ratfish than sharks or rays and it was identified from teeth found in the cave’s walls. Strigilodus tollesonae likely had teeth that included one rounded cusp used for clipping and a long, ridge inert side that crushed prey the way molars do. Paleontologists believe that it likely lived like modern day skates and fed on worms, bivalves, and small fish. 

Strigilodus tollesonae translates to “Tolleson’s Scraper Tooth” and it is named after Mammoth Cave National park guide Kelli Tolleson for her work in the paleontological study that uncovered the new species. 

The limestone caves that make up the 400-mile long Mammoth Cave System were formed about 325-million-years ago during the Late Paleozoic. Geologists call this time period the Mississippian Period, when shallow seas covered much of North America including where Mammoth Cave is today. 

In 2019, the park began a major paleontological resources inventory to identify the numerous types of fossils associated with the rock layers. Mammoth Cave park staff reported a few fossil shark teeth that were exposed in the cave walls of Ste. Genevieve Limestone in several locations. Shark fossils can be difficult to come by, since shark skeletons are made of cartilage instead of bone. Cartilage is not as tough as bone, so it is generally not well-preserved in the fossil record. 

The team then brought in shark fossil specialist John-Paul Hodnett of the Maryland-National Capital Parks and Planning Commission to help identify the shark fossils. Hodnett and park rangers discovered and identified multiple different species of primitive sharks from the shark teeth and fine spine specimens in the rocks lining the cave passages.

“I am absolutely amazed at the diversity of sharks we see while exploring the passages that make up Mammoth Cave,” Hodnett said in a statement. “We can hardly move more than a couple of feet as another tooth or spine is spotted in the cave ceiling or wall. We are seeing a range of different species of chondrichthyans [cartilaginous fish] that fill a variety of ecological niches, from large predators to tiny little sharks that lived amongst the crinoid [sea lily] forest on the seafloor that was their habitat.”

[Related: This whale fossil could reveal evidence of a 15-million-year-old megalodon attack.]

In addition to Strigilodus tollesonae, the team have identified more than 40 different species of sharks and their relatives from Mammoth Cave specimens in the past 10 months. There appear to be at least six fossil shark species that are new to science. According to the team, those species will be described and named in an upcoming scientific publication.

The majority of the shark fossils have been discovered in areas of the park that are inaccessible to the public, so photographs, illustrations, and three-dimensional models have been made to display the discovery. The park also plans to celebrate the new shark fossils with multiple presentations and exhibits on Monday October 23. 

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Best overall		Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ		SEE IT	A solid build and specs, paired with smartphone-guided sky recognition technology, makes this telescope perfect for starry-eyed explorers.
Best for viewing planets		Sky-Watcher Skymax 102mm Maksutov-Cassegrain Telescope		SEE IT	This telescope punches above its weight class in size and power, making it an ideal scope for checking out neighboring orbs.
Best for kids		Orion Observer II 60mm AZ Refractor Telescope Starter Kit		SEE IT	The entire package is designed to inspire kids during the window where they stare curiously out of the windows.

Telescopes under $500 can provide a passport to the universe without emptying your wallet. In their basic function, telescopes are our connection to the stars. For millennia, humankind has gazed skyward with wonder into the infinite reaches of outer space. And as humans are a curious bunch, our ancestors devised patterns in the movements of celestial bodies, gave them names, and built stories around them. The ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, and Greeks indulged in star worship. But you don’t have to follow those lines to geek out over the vastness of the night sky. It’s just so cool. Fortunately, whatever your motivation for getting under the stars, there is an affordable option for you on our list of the best telescopes under $500.

• Best overall: Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ
• Best for viewing planets: Sky-Watcher Skymax 102mm Maksutov-Cassegrain Telescope
• Best for astrophotography: William Optics Guide Star 61
• Best for kids: Orion Observer II 60mm AZ Refractor Telescope Starter Kit
• Best budget: Popular Science by Celestron Travel Scope 70 Portable Telescope

How we chose the best telescopes under $500

The under-$500 telescope market is crowded with worthy brands and models, so we looked at offerings in that price range from several well-known manufacturers in the space. After narrowing our focus based on personal experience, peer suggestions, critical reviews, and user impressions, we considered aperture, focal length, magnification, build quality, and value to select these five models.

The best telescopes under $500: Reviews & Recommendations

To get the best views of the stars, planets, and other phenomena of outer space, not just any old telescope will get the job done. There are levels of quality and a wide range of price points and features to sort through before you can be sure you’re making the right purchase for what you want out of your telescope, whether it’s multi-thousands, one of the best telescopes for under $1,000, or one of our top picks under $500.

Best overall: Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ

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Why it made the cut: Solid build and specs, paired with the remarkable StarSense Explorer app, make this telescope a perfect introduction to celestial observation.

Specs

• Focal length: 650mm
• Aperture: 130mm, f/5
• Magnification: 65x, 26x

Pros

• App aids in finding stars
• Easy to operate
• Steady altazimuth mount

Cons

• Eyepieces are both low power

Newbies to astronomy today can have a decidedly different experience than beginners who started stargazing before smartphones were a thing. Instead of carting out maps of the night sky to find constellations, the StarSense Explorer series from Celestron, including the DX 130AZ refractor, makes ample use of your device to bring you closer to the stars. 

With your smartphone resting in the telescope’s built-in dock, the StarSense Explorer app will find your location using the device’s GPS and serve up a detailed list of celestial objects viewable in real time. Looking for the Pleiades cluster? This app will tell you how far away it is from you and then lead you there with on-screen navigation. The app also includes descriptions of those objects, tips for observing them, and other useful info. 

The StarSense Explorer ships with an altazimuth mount equipped with slow-moving fine-tuning controls for both axes so you can find your target smoothly. And for those times you want to explore the night sky without tethering a smartphone, the scope’s red dot finder will help you zero in on your targets. The two eyepieces, measuring 25mm and 10mm, are powerful enough to snag stellar views of the planets but not quite enough to see the details a high-powered eyepiece would deliver.

Best for viewing planets: Sky-Watcher Skymax 102mm Maksutov-Cassegrain Telescope

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Why it made the cut: This telescope punches above its weight class in size and power, making it an ideal scope for viewing planets.

Specs

• Focal length: 1300mm
• Aperture: 102mm, f/12.7
• Magnification: 130x, 52x

Pros

• Great for viewing planets and galaxies
• Sharp focus and contrast
• Powerful

Cons

• Not ideal for deep-space viewing

Let’s be real—most consumers in the market for a moderately priced telescope are in it to gain spectacular views of the planets and galaxies, but probably not much else. And it’s easy to see why. Nothing makes celestial bodies come alive like viewing them in real time, in all their colorful glory.

If that sounds like you, allow us to direct you to the Sky-Watcher Skymax 102, a refracting telescope specializing in crisp views of objects like planets and galaxies with ample contrast to make them pop against the dark night sky. The Skymax 102 is based on a Maksutov-Cassegrains design that uses both mirrors and lenses, resulting in a heavy-hitting scope in a very compact and portable unit. A generous 102mm aperture pulls in plenty of light to illuminate the details in objects, and the 1300mm focal length results in intense magnification.

Two included wide-angle eyepieces measuring 25mm and 10mm deliver 130x and 52x magnification, respectively. The package also includes a red-dot finder, V-rail for mounting, 1.25-inch diagonal viewing piece, and a case for transport and storage. Look no further if you’re looking for pure colors across a perfectly flat field in a take-anywhere form factor.

Best for astrophotography: William Optics GuideStar 61 

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Why it made the cut: Top-notch specs and an enviable lens setup make this telescope ideal for astrophotography.

Specs

• Focal length: 360mm
• Aperture: f/5.9
• Magnification: 7x (with 2-inch eyepiece)

Pros

• Well-appointed specs
• Sturdy, durable construction
• Carrying case included

Cons

• Flattener is an extra purchase

Sometimes you want to share more than descriptions of what you see in the night sky, and that’s where this guidescope comes in, helping you to focus on the best full-frame image. You can go as deep into the details (not to mention debt) as your line of credit will allow in your quest to capture the most impressive images of space. Luckily, though, this is a worthy option at a reasonable price. 

The Williams Optics Guide Star 61 telescope is a refracting-type scope with a 360mm focal length, f/5.9 aperture, and 61mm diameter well-suited to capturing sharp images of planets, moon, and bright deep-sky objects. The GS61 shares many specs with the now-discontinued Zenith Star 61, including focal length, aperture, and diameter, as well as the FPL53 ED doublet lens for high-contrast images.

The scope’s optical tube is about 13 inches long and weighs just 3 lbs.—great for traveling with the included carrying case—with a draw-tube (push-pull) focuser for coarse focusing and a rotating lens assembly for fine focus. Attaching a DSLR camera to the Guide Star 61 is a fairly easy job, but note that the flattener for making that connection is a separate purchase.

Best for kids: Orion Observer II 60mm AZ Refractor Telescope Starter Kit

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Why it made the cut: The entire package is designed to get kids exploring space right out of the box.

Specs

• Focal length: 700mm
• Aperture: 60mm, f/11.7
• Magnification: 70x, 28x

Pros

• Capable of detailed views of moon and planets
• Lightweight construction
• Lots of handy accessories

Cons

• Not enough optical power to reach deep space

Parents have a limited window of time to recognize and develop their kids’ interests, so kindle a fascination with the stars through a star projector and then fan it with a telescope. That’s what makes the Orion Observer II such a great buy. Seeing the craters on the moon or the rings of Saturn for the first time can affirm your kids’ curiosity about space and expand their concept of the universe—and they can get those goosebumps while learning through this altazimuth refractor telescope.

The Orion Observer II is built to impressive specifications, with a 700mm focal length that provides 71x magnification for viewing the vivid details of planets in our solar system. True glass lenses (not plastic) are a bonus at this price point, and combined with either included Kellner eyepieces (25mm and 10mm), the telescope delivers crisp views of some of space’s most dazzling objects. 

Kids and parents can locate celestial objects with the included red-dot finder. The kit also includes MoonMap 260, a fold-out map that directs viewers to 260 lunar features, such as craters, valleys, ancient lava flows, mountain ranges, and every U.S. and Soviet lunar mission landing site. An included copy of Exploring the Cosmos: An Introduction to the Night Sky gives a solid background before they go stargazing. And with its aluminum tube and tripod, the entire rig is very portable, even for young ones, with a total weight of 4.3 pounds. Find more options for the best telescopes for kids here. (And/or go the opposite direction with a microscope for kids—a love of science begets more science.)

Best budget: Popular Science by Celestron Travel Scope 70 Portable Telescope

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Popular Science has teamed up with Celestron on a line of products. The decision to include this model in our recommendations was made by our reviewer independently of that relationship, but we do earn a commission on its sales—all of which helps power Popular Science.

Why it made the cut: With its feature set, portability, and nice price point, this scope is ready for some serious stargazing without a serious investment.

Specs

• Focal length: 400mm
• Aperture: 70mm, f/5.7
• Magnification: 168x

Pros

• Bluetooth remote shutter release
• Ships with two eyepieces
• Pack included

Cons

• Lacks optical power for deep space

Getting out of town, whether camping in the wilderness or driving in the countryside, is one of the attractions of stargazing. Out in the great wide open, far away from streetlights, the stars explode even to the naked eye. Add a handy telescope like the Popular Science Celestron Travel Scope 70 Portable Telescope—our pick for the best portable telescope under $500—and you’ll see much farther into space. The fact that it’s as affordable as it is moveable just adds to the value.

The Popular Science Celestron Travel Scope 70 Portable Telescope is a well-equipped refractor telescope built for backpacking and adventuring but without skimping on cool gadgets. Whether you’re gazing at celestial or terrestrial objects, the smartphone adapter will aid you in capturing images with your personal device, with an included Bluetooth remote shutter release.

Designed with portability and weight in mind, the entire package fits into an included pack with a total of 3.3 pounds—that includes the telescope, tripod stand, 20mm and 10mm eyepieces, 3x Barlow lens, and more. Download Celestron’s Starry Night software to help you get the most from your astronomy experience. 

Here are some other options from the Celestron and Popular Science collaboration:

• Popular Science StarSense Explorer DX 100AZ Smartphone App-Enabled Telescope
• Popular Science AstroMaster 80mm – Portable Refractor Telescope
• Popular Science StarSense Explorer DX 5” Smartphone App-Enabled Telescope 
• Popular Science by Celestron Outland X 12x50mm Monocular with Tripod, Smartphone Adapter, and Bluetooth remote

What to consider when buying the best telescopes under $500

Optics

There are three types of optics available on consumer telescopes, and they will help you achieve three different goals. Refractor telescopes use a series of glass lenses to bring celestial bodies like the moon and near planets into focus easily. Reflector telescopes—also known as Newtonian scopes for their inventor, Sir Isaac Newton—swap lenses for mirrors and allow stargazers to see deeper into space. Versatile compound telescopes combine these two methods in a smaller, more portable form factor, with results that land right in the middle of the pack. 

Aperture

Photographers will recognize this: The aperture controls the amount of light entering the telescope, like on a manual camera. Aperture is the diameter of the lens or the primary mirror, so a telescope with a large aperture draws more light than a small aperture, resulting in views into deeper space. F-ratio is the spec to watch here. Low f-ratios, such as f/4 or f/5, are usually best for wide-field observation and photography, while high f-ratios like f/15 can make deep-space nebulae and other bodies easier to see and capture. Midpoint f-ratios can get the job done for both.

Mounts

All the lens and mirror power in the world won’t mean much if you attach your telescope to a subpar mount. In general, the more lightweight and portable the tripod mount, the more movement you’ll likely get while gazing or photographing the stars. Investing in a stable mount will improve the viewing experience. The two common mount types are alt-az (altitude-azimuth) and equatorial. Altazimuth mounts operate in the same way as a camera tripod, allowing you to adjust both axes (left-right, up-down), while equatorial mounts also tilt to make it easier to follow celestial objects.

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best telescopes under $500

• Best overall: Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ
• Best for viewing planets: Sky-Watcher Skymax 102mm Maksutov-Cassegrain Telescope
• Best for astrophotography: William Optics Guide Star 61
• Best for kids: Orion Observer II 60mm AZ Refractor Telescope Starter Kit
• Best budget: Popular Science by Celestron Travel Scope 70 Portable Telescope

Although this group of sub-$500 scopes is fairly diverse, the Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ stands out in our best telescopes under $500 as the best place to start your interstellar journey due to its versatility and sky recognition app, which make for a fun evening of guided tours through the star patterns, no experience necessary. 

Why trust us

Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

Our writers and editors have combined decades of experience covering and reviewing consumer electronics. We each have our own obsessive specialties—from high-end audio to video games to cameras and beyond—but when we’re reviewing devices outside of our immediate wheelhouses, we do our best to seek out trustworthy voices and opinions to help guide people to the very best recommendations. We know we don’t know everything, but we’re excited to live through the analysis paralysis that internet shopping can spur so readers don’t have to.

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Of all the pyrotechnics that blast through the cosmos, fast radio bursts (FRBs) are among the most powerful—and mysterious. While our radio telescopes have picked up hundreds of known FRBs, radio astronomers recently detected one of the most fascinating bursts yet. Not only does it come from a greater distance than any FRB observed before, it’s the most energetic, too.

A superlative FRB like this defies our already murky understanding of the bursts’ origins. FRBs are sudden surges of radio waves that typically last less than a second, if not mere milliseconds. And they are very, very high-energy: They can deliver as much energy in milliseconds as the sun emits in three days. Despite all that, we don’t know for certain how they form.

The new event, what astronomers lovingly call FRB 20220610A, first appeared as a blip in the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder, an arrangement of antennae in the desert about 360 miles north of Perth. When astronomers measured the burst’s redshift, they calculated that it left its source about 8 billion years ago, as they described in a paper published today in Science. 

After pinpointing the burst’s origin in the sky and following up with visible light and infrared telescopes, the authors managed to develop a blurry image of merging galaxies.

[Related: Two bizarre stars might have beamed a unique radio signal to Earth]

“The further you go out in the universe, of course, the fainter the galaxies are, because they’re farther away. It’s quite difficult to identify the host galaxy, and that’s what they’ve done,” Sarah Burke Spolaor, an astronomer who studies FRBs at West Virginia University, who was not an author of the study.

FRBs aren’t exciting just because they’re loud. To reach us, a burst from outside the Milky Way must traverse millions or billions of light-years of the near-empty space between galaxies. In the process, they’ll encounter an extremely sparse smattering of ionized particles. This is the stuff that prevents the bulk of the cosmos from being completely empty—what astronomers call the intergalactic medium, which might make up as much as half of the universe’s “normal” matter.

“We don’t know much about it, because it’s so tenuous that it’s difficult to detect,” says Daniele Michilli, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who also wasn’t a study author.

As an FRB crosses the intergalactic medium on its long voyage, the particles cause its radio waves to scatter, which leaves fingerprints that astronomers can pick apart. In this way, scientists can use FRBs to investigate the intergalactic medium. More faraway bursts like FRB 20220610A could allow astronomers to study the medium across wide swathes of the universe.

[Related: How astronomers traced a puzzling detection to a lunchtime mistake]

“It’s very exciting, definitely one of the great applications of fast radio bursts,” says Ziggy Pleunis, an astronomer who studies FRBs at the University of Toronto, who was also not part of the authors’ group. “Fast radio bursts currently are really the only thing that we know that interacts with the intergalactic medium in a meaningful enough way that we can measure properties.”

In the future, astronomers might even be able to use FRBs to study how the universe expands. To unweave that mystery, however, astronomers will need to detect FRBs from even deeper into the cosmic past than FRB 20220610A. “For a lot of applications, it’s still not quite far away enough,” Pleunis says. “But it certainly bodes well.” 

There’s a balancing act involved: Over a sufficiently long distance, the particles in the intergalactic medium will peel an FRB apart until it disperses into background noise. To survive, an FRB must be brighter and more energetic; in turn, by taking stock of how much a burst has dispersed, astronomers can estimate its original energy. 

By computing the numbers for FRB 20220610A, they found that it was the most energetic burst Earth has seen so far. (Another recently observed burst, FRB 20201124A, comes within the same order of magnitude, but FRB 20220610A is the record-holder.) A burst with this much energy throws something of a wrench into astronomers’ understanding, such as it is, of what creates FRBs in the first place.

We, again, don’t have a definitive answer to that question. Complicating the question, some FRBs are one-off flashes, while others repeat, hinting that the two types of FRBs may have two different origins. (To wit, FRB 20220610A seems to have been a one-off. But that other high-energy FRB, FRB 20201124A, seems to repeat.)

Nevertheless, astronomers have simulated a few scenarios, largely involving neutron stars. Perhaps FRBs burst from near a neutron star’s surface, or perhaps FRBs erupt from shockwaves through the material that neutron stars throw up.

But when this paper’s authors ran the numbers with their new FRB, they found that neither of those two scenarios could easily create an burst with this much energy—suggesting that theoretical astronomers have even more work to do before they can satisfactorily explain these events.

“What always strikes me about fast radio bursts is, every time we observe a new one, it breaks the mold of previous ones,” Spolaor says.

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Jupiter and its dynamic atmosphere are ready for another closeup in a new image taken with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Using the telescope’s data, scientists have discovered a new and never-before-captured high-speed jet stream. The jet stream sits over Jupiter’s equator above the main cloud decks, barrels at speeds twice as high as a Category 5 hurricane, and spans more than 3,000 miles. The findings were described in a study published October 19 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

[Related: This hot Jupiter exoplanet unexpectedly hangs out with a super-Earth.]

Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system and its atmosphere has some very visible features, including the infamous Great Red Spot, which is large enough to swallow the Earth. The planet is ever-changing and there are still mysteries in this gas giant that scientists are trying to unravel. According to NASA, the new discovery of the jet stream is helping them decipher how the layers of Jupiter’s famously turbulent atmosphere interact with each other. Now, JWST is helping scientists look further into the planet and see some of the lower and deeper layers of Jupiter’s atmosphere where gigantic storms and ammonia ice clouds reside. 

“This is something that totally surprised us,” study co-author Ricardo Hueso said in a statement.  “What we have always seen as blurred hazes in Jupiter’s atmosphere now appear as crisp features that we can track along with the planet’s fast rotation.” Hueso is an astrophysicist at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain.

The research team analyzed data from JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) that was obtained in July 2022. The Early Release Science program was designed to take images of Jupiter 10 hours apart (one Jupiter day) in four different filters. Each filter detected different types of changes in the small features located at various altitudes of Jupiter’s atmosphere.

The resulting image shows Jupiter’s atmosphere in infrared light. The jet stream is located over the equator, or center, of the planet. There are multiple bright white spots and streaks that are likely very high-altitude cloud tops of condensed convective storms. Jupiter’s northern and southern poles are dotted by auroras that appear red and extend to the higher altitudes of the planet. 

“Even though various ground-based telescopes, spacecraft like NASA’s Juno and Cassini, and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have observed the Jovian system’s changing weather patterns, Webb has already provided new findings on Jupiter’s rings, satellites, and its atmosphere,” study co-author and University of California, Berkeley astronomer Imke de Pater said in a statement.  

The newly discovered jet stream travels at roughly 320 miles per hour and is located close to 25 miles above the clouds, in Jupiter’s lower stratosphere. The team compared the winds observed by JWST at higher altitudes with the winds observed at deeper layers by the Hubble Space Telescope. This enabled them to measure how fast the winds change with altitude and generate wind shears.

[Related: Jupiter formed dinky little rings, and there’s a convincing explanation why.]

The team hopes to use additional observations of Jupiter to determine if the jet’s speed and altitude change over time. 

“Jupiter has a complicated but repeatable pattern of winds and temperatures in its equatorial stratosphere, high above the winds in the clouds and hazes measured at these wavelengths,” Leigh Fletcher, a study co-author and planetary scientists at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, said in a statement. “If the strength of this new jet is connected to this oscillating stratospheric pattern, we might expect the jet to vary considerably over the next 2 to 4 years–it’ll be really exciting to test this theory in the years to come.”

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Is human society becoming more violent? It’s hard to imagine a point in time containing an event as destructive as an atomic bombing. Even the most brutal acts committed by our ancient ancestors pale in comparison to the organized assaults countries have executed in the last century alone. Ongoing wars and human right violations suggest that we are living in one of the most vicious times in history. But the evidence, according to archaeologists who study historical violence, says there is no black-and-white answer.

To conclude that humans are more violent than ever, you’d need a timeline of all the aggressive actions in human history. Archaeologists have found some artifacts that weave a story of humanity’s violent past from a skeleton that could have been the first murder victim about 430,000 years ago to the ancient Mesopotamian death pits that likely held war casualties or human sacrifices. These pieces of history, though, are still not enough to paint a complete picture. 

The further we go back in time, the harder it is to assess violence and killings, explains Linda Fibiger, an archaeologist at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, who researches conflict in early human history. 

Remains alone don’t tell complete stories. Finding enough evidence to know whether humans at a certain time period were violent, or if someone’s violent death was an isolated event, is tricky. Even if an autopsy of an ancient human implies a brutal death, it can’t reveal a killer’s motive. Some ceremonial acts, for example, were interlaced with violence as people were sacrificed as tributes to the gods.

[Related: Grisly medieval murders detailed in new interactive maps]

“I don’t think prehistory was in an eternal state of warfare and conflict. But with the skeletal evidence and the percentage of individuals with violent trauma, I’m sure most people would have been aware of violence or known somebody who encountered it,” says Fibiger. She also notes whether people in the past considered an act a crime could change the perception of whether they were living in a violent time.

If perception is a factor, it’s possible we could be living in the most peaceful era to date. In his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker theorized that small hunter-gatherer groups were the most violent, back in the day, with the highest percentage of people dying from warfare. As communities settled into more organized states, they were better able to become more “civilized” and develop skills of empathy, reasoning, and self-control.

“We would like to believe that we’re so much more smart, reasonable, and more civilized”, says Dean Falk, an evolutionary anthropologist from Florida State University. “But I don’t think everything’s peachy now.” Falk, in her previous analysis of the evidence Pinker presented, found that he failed to consider the population sizes of the different communities in his calculations. This could have inflated the rate of war deaths in hunter-gatherer communities when comparing them to state-based societies. And although a larger percentage of a small society may have died in a conflict, Falk argues that says more about the attacks they suffered than their own violent behavior.

When Falk included the absolute number of deaths (the number of deaths for a given population scaled to their size) into the calculations, she found it was the population size, not the type of civilization structure, that determined whether a society lost their residents to warfare. And while the percentage of annual war deaths was lower among state societies, Falk says the number of annual war deaths has gone up in bigger populations. “This might have to do with big brains and having technology to invent more effective weapons to kill each other.”

There’s also no rule that states we’re on a linear path toward a more or less violent society. New research published this month in the journal Nature Human Behaviour suggests human violence has waxed and waned throughout history. Giacomo Benati, an archaeologist at the University of Barcelona in Spain and coauthor of the new study says analyzing violent trends across history often falls victim to bias, focusing on historical battle records or polarized narratives of the ancient world. 

[Related: A group of humpback whales is choosing violence]

His new work, one of the largest archaeological studies on early human violence, tries to avoid that prejudice, by examining  a large set of bones. Benati and his team analyzed any sign of cranial trauma or weapon-related wounds in 3,539 skeletons belonging to people who lived in seven Middle Eastern countries between 12,000 to 400 BCE. 

This study was particularly interesting because it tries to contextualize what’s happening, says Fibiger, who was not involved in the research. The large dataset of human skeletal remains allowed them to link traumatic deaths to ongoing conflicts, economics, and the unequal distribution of resources and wealth caused by climate. “Bringing these things together gives a better concept of people’s lives,” Fibiger says, “and what might have escalated conflict and broken down relationships.”

Interpersonal violence—murder, torture, slavery, and other cruel punishments—peaked around 4,500 to 3,300 BCE during the Chalocolithic period, Benati and his co-authors concluded. The high rates of violence could have to do with the formation of political units vying for control, which may have escalated local quarrels to larger and more organized conflicts.

Benati says the most surprising finding was the steady drop in violence across the Early and Middle Bronze period, which he suspects has to do with better living standards. “After going through thousands of photos of excavated skeletons, life before modern medicine [did] not look pretty,” he says. “It was short, and they had to live with constant ailments and pains.”

Violence rates appeared to pick up again through the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age. People may have become more violent due to a drier climate. The Iron Age ushered in a 300-year drought which contributed to crop shortages and widespread famine. This lack of water would have stressed out communities, leading to competition over resources. This possessiveness for limited resources—whether land or food—are universal motivators for violence that is still seen today, Fibiger points out. Additionally, given the worsening climate situation right now, Benati says how people reacted to extreme climate events in the past could tell us how people will react to instability in the future. Climate change, for example, may once again herald a longer period of violence. 

Given our bloody record for handling conflict, archaeologists remain divided on whether humans will ever live in a violent-free society. Fibiger believes people are not inherently violent, but may be pushed into situations where they are required to defend themselves or their livelihood. By learning from violence in the past, she believes humans can do better. Falk is less optimistic. She says it’s possible we will wipe out our species, seeing that we are just as capable of violence as our ancient ancestors. The only difference now is our access to more lethal weapons and more organized warfare. “For proof of that, just turn on your TV to the evening news.”

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Honeybees are a model of teamwork in nature, with their complex society and hives that generate enough energy to create an electrical charge. They also appear to be some of the rare animals that display a unique trait of altruism, which is genetically inherited. The findings were described in a study published September 25 in the journal Molecular Ecology.

[Related: Bee brains could teach robots to make split-second decisions.]

Giving it all for the queen bee

According to the American Psychological Association, humans display altruism through behaviors that benefit another individual at a cost to oneself. Some psychologists consider it a uniquely human trait and studying it in animals requires a different framework for understanding. Animals experience a different level of cognition, so what drives humans to be altruistic might be different than what influences animals like honeybees to act in ways that appear to be altruistic.

In this new study, the researchers first looked at the genetics behind retinue behavior in worker honeybees. Retinue behavior is the actions of worker bees taking care of the queen, like feeding or grooming her. It’s believed to be triggered by specific pheromones and worker bees are always female. 

After the worker bees are exposed to the queen’s mandibular pheromone (QMP), they deactivate their own ovaries. They then help spread the QMP around to the other worker bees and they only take care of the eggs that the queen bee produces. Entomologists consider this behavior ‘altruistic’ because it benefits the queen’s ability to produce offspring, while the worker bees remain sterile. 

The queen is also typically the mother of all or mostly all of the honeybees in the hive. The genes that make worker bees more receptive to the queen’s pheromone and retinue behavior can be passed down from either female or male parent. However, the genes only result in altruistic behavior when they are passed down from the female bee parent.

“People often think about different phenotypes being the result of differences in gene sequences or the environment. But what this study shows is it’s not just differences in the gene itself—it’s which parent the gene is inherited from,” study co-author and Penn State University doctoral candidate Sean Bresnahan said in a statement. “By the very nature of the insect getting the gene from its mom, regardless of what the gene sequence is, it’s possibly going to behave differently than the copy of the gene from the dad.”

A battle of genetics 

The study supports a theory called the Kinship Theory of Intragenomic Conflict. It suggests that a mothers’ and fathers’ genes are in a conflict over what behaviors to support and not support. Previous studies have shown that genes from males can support selfish behavior in mammals, plants, and honeybees. This new study is the first known research that shows females can pass altruistic behavior onto their offspring in their genes. 

[Really: What busy bees’ brains can teach us about human evolution.]

Worker bees generally have the same mother but different fathers, since the queen mates with multiple male bees. This means that the worker bees share more of their mother’s genes with each other. 

“This is why the Kinship Theory of Intragenomic Conflict predicts that genes inherited from the mother will support altruistic behavior in honeybees,” Breshnahan said. “A worker bee benefits more from helping, rather than competing with, her mother and sisters—who carry more copies of the worker’s genes than she could ever reproduce on her own. In contrast, in species where the female mates only once, it is instead the father’s genes that are predicted to support altruistic behavior.”

Pinpointing conflict networks

To look closer, the team crossbred six different lineages of honeybees. Bresnahan says that this is relatively easy to do in mammals or plants, but more difficult in insects. They used honeybee breeding expertise from co-author Juliana Rangel from Texas A&M University and Robyn Underwood at Penn State Extension to create these populations.

Once the bee populations were successfully crossed and the offspring were old enough, the team assessed the worker bees’ responsiveness to the pheromone that triggers the retinue behavior. 

“So, we could develop personalized genomes for the parents, and then map back the workers’ gene expression to each parent and find out which parent’s copy of that gene is being expressed,” Bresnahan said.

The team identified the gene regulatory networks that have this intragenomic conflict, finding that more genes that have a parental bias were expressed. These networks consisted of genes that previous research showed were related to the retinue behavior.

“Observing intragenomic conflict is very difficult, and so there are very few studies examining the role it plays in creating variation in behavior and other traits,” study co-author and Penn State entomologist Christina Grozinger said in a statement. “The fact that this is the third behavior where we have found evidence that intragenomic conflict contributes to variation in honeybees suggests that intragenomic conflict might shape many types of traits in bees and other species.”

The team hopes that this research will help provide a blueprint for more studies into intragenomic conflict in other animals and plants.

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The recent “ring of fire” solar eclipse looked stunning across portions of North and South America and we now have a new view of the stellar event. The Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite created the image of the eclipse on Saturday October 14, depicting the mostly blue Earth against the darkness of space, with one large patch of the planet in the shadow of the moon. 

[Related: Why NASA will launch rockets to study the eclipse.]

Launched in 2015, DSCOVR is a joint NASA, NOAA, and U.S. Air Force satellite. It offers a unique perspective since it is close to 1 million miles away from Earth and sits in a gravitationally stable point between the Earth and the sun called Lagrange Point 1. DSCOVR’s primary job is to monitor the solar wind in an effort to improve space weather forecasts. 

A special device aboard the satellite called the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) imager took this view of the eclipse from space. According to NASA, the sensor gives scientists frequent views of the Earth. The moon’s shadow, or umbra, is falling across the southeastern coast of Texas, near Corpus Christi.

An annular solar eclipse occurs when the moon moves between Earth and the sun. The sun does not vanish completely in this kind of eclipse. Instead, the moon is positioned far enough from Earth to keep the bright edges of the sun visible. This is what causes the “ring of fire,” as if the moon has been outlined with bright paint.

While this year’s event could be seen to some degree across the continental United States, the 125-mile-wide path of annularity began in Oregon around 9:13 AM Pacific Daylight Time. The moon’s shadow then moved southeast across Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico, before passing over Texas and the Gulf of Mexico. It continued south towards Mexico’s Yucatan, Peninsula, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, and Brazil

Unlike the colorful Aurora Borealis, eclipses are much easier to predict. Scientists can say when annular and solar eclipses will happen down to the second centuries in advance. The precise positions of the moon and the sun and how they shift over time is already known, so scientists can see how the moon’s shadow will fall onto Earth’s globe. Advances in computer technology have also enabled scientists to even chart eclipse paths down to a range of a few feet.

[Related: We can predict solar eclipses to the second. Here’s how.]

The next annular solar eclipse will be at least partially visible from South America on October 2,2024. One of these ‘ring of fire’ eclipses will not be visible in the United States until June 21, 2039. However, a total solar eclipse will darken the sky from Maine to Texas on April 8, 2024. There is still plenty of time to get eclipse glasses or make a pinhole camera to safely watch the next big celestial event. 

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A giant seismic event on Mars—a “marsquake”—that shook the Red Planet last year had an unexpected source, surprising astrophysicists from around the world. They suspected a meteorite strike. Instead, enormous tectonic forces within Mars’s crust, which caused vibrations that lasted for six hours, caused the quake and not a meteorite strike. The findings are described in a study published October 17 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

[Related: Two NASA missions combined forces to analyze a new kind of marsquake.]

NASA’s InSight lander recorded the magnitude 4.7 marsquake on May 4, 2022, which scientists named S1222a. Its seismic signal was similar to those of previous quakes that were caused by meteorite impacts, so the team began to search for an impact crater. 

In the new study, a team from the University of Oxford worked with the European Space Agency, Chinese National Space Agency, the Indian Space Research Organisation, and the United Arab Emirates Space Agency to scour more than 55 million square miles on Mars. Each group examined the data coming from its own satellites to look for a crater, dust cloud, or other signature of a meteorite impact. Because the search came up empty, they now believe that S1222a was caused by the release of huge tectonic forces from within the Martian interior. 

That doesn’t mean Mars’s tectonic plates are moving the way they do during an earthquake. The best available evidence suggests the planet is remaining still. “We still think that Mars doesn’t have any active plate tectonics today, so this event was likely caused by the release of stress within Mars’ crust,” study co-author and University of Oxford planetary geophysicist Benjamin Fernando said in a statement. “These stresses are the result of billions of years of evolution; including the cooling and shrinking of different parts of the planet at different rates.”

While Fernando explains that scientists do not fully understand why some parts of Mars seem to have more stress than others, these results can help them investigate further. “One day, this information may help us to understand where it would be safe for humans to live on Mars and where you might want to avoid!” he said.

S1222a was one of the last events recorded by NASA’s InSight mission before its end. The InSight lander launched in May 2018 and survived “seven minutes of terror” to touch down on Mars, where it studied the planet’s interior and seismology for years. The last of the spacecraft’s data was returned in December 2022, after increasing dust accumulation on its solar panels caused InSight to lose power. 

[Related: InSight says goodbye with what may be its last wistful image of Mars.]

In its four years and 19 days of service, InSight recorded more than 1,300 marsquakes. At least eight of these events were from a meteorite impact; the largest two formed craters that were almost 500 feet in diameter. If the S1222a event was formed by an impact, the team estimates that the crater to be would have been at least 984 feet in diameter.

The team is applying knowledge from this study to other work, including future missions to our moon and the tectonics that are similar to California’s famed San Andreas fault located on one of Saturn’s moons named Titan. They also hope that it encourages additional major international collaborations to study the Red Planet and beyond. 

“This has been a great opportunity for me to collaborate with the InSight team, as well as with individuals from other major missions dedicated to the study of Mars,” study co-author and New York University Abu Dhabi astrophysicist Dimitra Atri said in a statement. “This really is the golden age of Mars exploration!”

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The Guinness World Records officially dubbed Pepper X the world’s hottest chili pepper earlier this year, going public with the announcement on October 9. Pepper X has a rating of an average of 2.69 million Scoville Heat Units (SHU). On the SHU scale, zero is considered bland, while a regular jalapeño pepper registers at about 5,000 SHU. For a non-food comparison, pepper spray used in self-defense is about 1.6 million SHUs and bear spray is about 2.2 million.

[Related: Spiciness isn’t a taste, and more burning facts about the mysterious sensation.]

Winthrop University in South Carolina calculated this off-the-charts Scobille score with specimens collected over the past four years. Pepper X has a greenish-yellow color with grooves and ridges. According to the five brave souls who have eaten it, Pepper X has an earthy flavor once the heat begins to subside.  

It dethroned the 10-year reign of the 1.64 million SHU Carolina Reaper, but both peppers were created by the same chili pepper expert to be extra spicy. Ed Currie is the founder of Puckerbutt Pepper Company and has been working on Pepper X since the bright red Carolina Reaper first took the title in 2013.

When creating a new breed of pepper, it can take several years for the desired traits to emerge through selective breeding. It takes about 10 generations for hybrid peppers to stabilize with predictable traits and consistent fruit.

Pepper X was a crossbreed with Carolina Reaper and a mystery pepper that Currie did not disclose. His goal was to create an extremely hot pepper that also had some sweetness. The spice of Pepper X even made an expert like Currie wince in pain.

“I was feeling the heat for three-and-a-half hours. Then the cramps came,” Currie told the Associated Press. “Those cramps are horrible. I was laid out flat on a marble wall for approximately an hour in the rain, groaning in pain.”

A chemical in peppers called capsaicin is what causes the burning sensation when eating a spicy pepper like the Carolina Reaper or Pepper X. Humans and other mammals will perceive capsaicin as a threat when eaten, which sends the strong burning signal throughout the body. 

According to University of Tennessee epidemiologist Paul D. Terry, the short-term effects of eating extremely spicy foods range from enjoying the sensation of heat to a more unpleasant burning sensation on the lips, tongue, and mouth. Spicy foods can also cause various forms of digestive tract discomfort, headaches, and vomiting, so it is best to avoid eating them if you experience these effects. 

[Related: Leftovers of a 2,000-year-old curry discovered on stone cooking tools.]

Capsaicin is painless except when eaten in large quantities and is likely not harmful over a long period of time. Some experts generally agree that spicy food does not cause stomach ulcers, but the association with stomach cancer isn’t as clear.

The burning sensation also releases endorphins and dopamine. Currie began growing peppers after overcoming addiction to drug and alcohol and says that kick is a natural high for him. He shares the peppers he creates with medical researchers, in hopes that they can be used to explore new cures for disease or help those with chronic pain or discomfort.

Correction (October 21, 2023): An earlier version of the story mistakenly said that capsaicin is harmful except when eaten in large quantities. It should have said that capsaicin is not harmful.

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Last Friday, NASA launched the Psyche spacecraft toward an asteroid of the same name. Psyche is blazing a trail as the first mission to a metal asteroid, and it’s also about to blaze a literal blue trail. The source of its bright wake—the probe’s remarkable propulsive system—will switch on within the first 100 days of the mission.

A mechanism known as a Hall thruster will propel the Psyche through space. This thruster glows blue as it ionizes xenon, a noble gas also used in headlights and plasma televisions, to move the spacecraft forward. This is the first time this tech, which has only been available for NASA spaceflight since 2015, has been used to travel beyond the moon—but what makes it so special, and why is Psyche using it?

When planning a space mission, engineers are focused on efficiency. Carrying chemical fuel along for the massive interplanetary journey would be like trying to drive around the entire world while having to keep all the gasoline you need in the trunk, because there are no rest stops along the way—it’s just not feasible. To get to its destination, Psyche would need thousands and thousands of pounds of chemical propellant.

[Related: How tiny spacecraft could ‘sail’ to Mars surprisingly quickly]

To get around this problem, engineers turned to electric thrusters. These come in many flavors: “There are many different types of electric thrusters, almost as many as there are different makers of cars,” explained NASA’s Psyche chief engineer Dan Goebel in a blog post. But space travel uses two kinds in particular, known as ion thrusters and Hall thrusters. “They can probably be considered the Tesla versions of space propulsion,” Goebel wrote. Rather than burning fuel, electric thrusters rip off the electrons from the propellant’s atoms in a process known as ionization. Then they chuck those ions out at some 80,000 miles per hour. This generates a higher specific impulse—which Goebel says is “equivalent to miles per gallon in your car,” but for spacecraft—than chemical fuels, enabling a thruster-powered spacecraft to go farther on less propellant.

Ion thrusters use high electric voltages to make a plasma (the fourth state of matter) and spew ions into space. NASA’s Dawn mission used these to get to dwarf planet Ceres, but they’re not the fastest—according to NASA, it would take the spacecraft four days to go from 0 to 60 miles per hour. Definitely not race car material! 

[Related: Want to learn about something in space? Crash into it.]

Hall thrusters, on the other hand, use a magnetic field to swirl electrons in a circle, producing a beam of ions. They don’t get quite as good “mileage” as ion thrusters, but they pack a bigger punch. The Psyche team picked this system because it allowed them to make a smaller, and therefore more cost-efficient, spacecraft. 

For the thrusters to work, the spacecraft needs power—which it gets from the sun, via solar panels—and something to ionize. For Psyche, that’s xenon gas. “Xenon is the propellant of choice because it’s inert (it doesn’t react with the rest of the spacecraft) and is easy to ionize,” explained Goebel. It also gives the thrusters their remarkable blue shine. Psyche carries about 150 gallons of the stuff, and gets about 10 million miles per gallon. 

Now that the mission has launched, the team will spend the next 100 days checking out all the spacecraft’s systems to ensure they’re ready for the journey. At some point in this period, those glimmering blue thrusters will turn on.

If Psyche proves to be a success, Hall thrusters will be likely to make an appearance on future space missions. They offer “the right mix of cost savings, efficiency, and power, and could play an important role in supporting future science missions to Mars and beyond,” said Steven Scott, program manager for the Psyche mission at the company Maxar, which built the thrusters, in a press release. Thanks to these propulsive devices, Psyche should reach its destination in the asteroid belt in just 3.5 years—and we can’t wait to see what lies at the end of its electric blue trail.

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The ocean’s diverse seaweeds are full of nutrients and can be very tasty. While seaweed is common in many Asian dishes, it is not as popular in many traditionally European cuisines. However, this was not always the case. New archaeological evidence also shows that early Europeans ate seaweeds and freshwater plants 8,000 years ago. The findings are described in a study published October 17 in the journal Nature Communications and anchor the plants in the past.

[Related: Why seaweed is a natural fit for replacing certain plastics.]

In the study, researchers examined biomarkers that were taken from the calcified dental plaque of 74 individuals found at 28 archaeological sites from northern Scotland to southern Spain. The plaques revealed “direct evidence for widespread consumption of seaweed and submerged aquatic and freshwater plants.”

The samples where biomolecular evidence survived showed signs that red, green, or brown seaweed and freshwater aquatic plants were eaten. One sample from Scotland’s Orkney archipelago also had evidence of a type of sea kale. The researchers also found that seaweeds and freshwater plants were continually eaten in Europe into the Early Middle Ages. 

“Not only does this new evidence show that seaweed was being consumed in Europe during the Mesolithic Period around 8,000 years ago when marine resources were known to have been exploited, but that it continued into the Neolithic when it is usually assumed that the introduction of farming led to the abandonment of marine dietary resources,” study co-author and University of York bioarchaeologist Stephen Buckley said in a statement.

The nutritional benefits from eating seaweed were likely very well understood by ancient European populations. Some historical accounts report laws related to collection of seaweed in Iceland, France, and Ireland dating back to the 10th Century. Sea kale is also mentioned by Roman naturalist and writer Pliny as an anti-scurvy remedy for sailors on long sea voyages. Through the 18th century, seaweed was considered a famine food and is featured in a popular Irish-language folk song. 

[Related: Why seaweed farming could be the next big thing in sustainability.]

Currently, there are roughly 10,000 different species of seaweeds around the world, but only 145 species are regularly consumed. Depending on the type of seaweed, the plants are a great source of fiber, iron, and potassium among other vitamins and minerals. Cultivating seaweed can also be very environmentally friendly, as the seaweed produces oxygen while absorbing excess nitrogen in the water.

“Our study also highlights the potential for rediscovery of alternative, local, sustainable food resources that may contribute to addressing the negative health and environmental effects of over-dependence on a small number of mass-produced agricultural products that is a dominant feature of much of today’s western diet, and indeed the global long-distance food supply more generally,”  study co-author and University of Glasgow archaeologist Karen Hardy said in a statement. “It is very exciting to be able to show definitively that seaweeds and other local freshwater plants were eaten across a long period in our European past.”

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For nearly half a century, Nikon’s Small World Photomicrography Competition has celebrated the beauty captured by extreme magnification. This year, the photomicrography contest was stacked: a panel of journalists and scientists selected winners from 1,900 entries submitted by researchers and photographers in 72 countries. Subjects as diverse as mutant fish, chemical reactions, and a speck of space rock became works of art when seen really, really up close.

Above, in first place, is a rodent’s optic nerve head. Blood vessels, each only 110 microns in diameter, radiate outward like the fizzing arms of a firework. The yellow star-like shapes surrounding the vessels are astrocytes, cellular helpers that maintain neuronal systems. Vision researchers at the Lions Eye Institute in Perth, Australia—Hassanain Qambari, assisted by Jayden Dickson—imaged the optic disc at 20x magnification as part of a study of diabetic retinopathy; this condition can cause blindness in people with diabetes.

“The visual system is a complex and highly specialized organ, with even relatively minor perturbations to the retinal circulation able to cause devastating vision loss,” Qambari said in a news release. “I entered the competition as a way to showcase the complexity of retinal microcirculation.” Below are other top photos, and you can see even more at Nikon’s Small World site.

[Related: 15 remarkable JWST images that reveal the wonders of our vast universe]

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Best overall		AmScope Beginner Microscope STEM Kit		SEE IT	An excellent kit filled with tools to help kids explore the world close-up.
Best for older kids		OMAX-MD82ES10		SEE IT	A high-quality microscope that will let kids feel like full-fledged researchers.
Best for young kids		Educational Insights GeoSafari Jr. Kids Microscope		SEE IT	A great option for curious toddlers that want to get up close and personal with household objects.

When most people think of microscopes, they think of labs, schools, and serious research facilities—they don’t think about kids. But there are plenty of great options when it comes to fostering an interest in science at home. If you have a curious kid looking for a fun activity that revolves around exploration and learning, a microscope is a great option for an exciting gift. However, before you inspire your little scientist to get up close and personal, it’s important to understand which make and model will be right for their interests and maturity level. We’ll walk you through some of the features to look out for and recommend some of the best microscopes for kids on the market.

• Best overall: AmScope Beginner Microscope STEM Kit
• Best for older kids: OMAX-MD8 2ES10
• Best for young kids: Educational Insights GeoSafari Jr. Kids Microscope
• Best portable: Carson MicroBrite Plus Pocket Microscope
• Best kit: Omano JuniorScope Science Kit 
• Best budget: National Geographic STEM Kit

How we chose the best microscopes for kids

We paid particular attention to each model’s durability and magnification power to select the best microscopes for kids of all ages. Children under seven won’t be able to use the features a more advanced microscope will offer, and older children might be disappointed by more rudimentary features made for younger kids, so we looked at light sources, stereo/compound power, and other technical specs to ensure a range of options to suit the spectrum of budding biologists. Finally, we searched for products with special features or science kits so your kids could start a scientific adventure the minute they open the box. We compiled our personal research and experience with online user impressions and critical consensus to select the best microscopes for kids.

The best microscopes for kids: Reviews & Recommendations

There are a lot of ’scopes to scope, so here are the ones whose profiles we choose to magnify.

Best overall: AmScope Beginner Microscope STEM Kit

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Why it made the cut: With a 52-piece set that kids can use right out of the box, this microscope is a great introduction to full-scale STEM research.

Specs

• Magnification: 120x-1200x
• Age Range: 8+
• Dimensions: 15.75 x 14.57 x 5.12 inches 
• Light Source: LED

Pros 

• Accessory kit 
• Adjustable magnification
• Carrying case included

Cons 

• Not suitable for younger kids

This beginner kit from AmScope includes a power monocular compound microscope with a color filter wheel, magnification ranging from 120x-1200x, LED light illumination, and a stain-resistant metal frame. Inside the ABS carrying case, you’ll also find a pair of tweezers, collecting vials, a Petri dish, prepared slides, Eosin dye, and more. You’ll even find a shrimp hatchery with Brine Shrimp eggs, so your kid can start their first science project immediately. If you’re looking for even more fun, grab AmScope’s World of the Microscope book, which includes additional projects and activities. This kit is recommended to be used under adult supervision and is unsuitable for preschool-aged kids. 

Best for 10-year-olds: OMAX-MD82ES10

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Why it made the cut: A professional digital microscope that will give older kids the confidence and training to go further in their STEM journey. 

Specs

• Magnification: 40x-2000x
• Age Range: 10+
• Dimensions: 9.06 x 7.09 x 12.99 inches 
• Light Source: LED

Pros 

• Professional quality 
• Built-in 1.3MP Camera 
• Swiveling binocular head 
• Impressive Magnification

Cons 

• Pricey
• Not suitable for younger kids

If you’re looking for one of the best digital microscopes for kids or the classroom, this option from OMAX is more advanced lab equipment than a lot of starter kits. It features eight levels of magnification: 40x, 80x, 100x, 200x, 400x, 800x, 1000x, and 2000x, making it the most powerful microscope on our list. It’s strong enough to show your budding biologist protozoa, cell walls, bacteria, and more. This digital compound microscope can connect via USB to Mac and Windows computers, and the built-in camera can take pictures and record videos of your findings so your kid can share their discoveries at the next family gathering. 

If you’re not ready to spend that multifunctional model money but want a digital microscope, consider this wireless model from Skybasic with 50x-1000x magnification and WiFi connectivity. 

Best for young kids: Educational Insights GeoSafari Jr. Kids Microscope 

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Why it made the cut: The GeoSafari Jr. Kids Microscope is a great way to introduce science and discovery to young children; it’s constructed with small hands in mind, encouraging independent learning without sacrificing functionality. 

Specs

• Magnification: 2.5x-8x
• Age Range: 3-6
• Dimensions: 1.12 x 8.1 x 10 inches 
• Light Source: LED

Pros 

• Inexpensive 
• Binocular eyepieces suitable for kids 
• Comes with 12 prepared slides 
• Large viewing area

Cons 

• Won’t be as fun for older siblings 

This microscope from GeoSafari Jr. is an incredible way to introduce your kids to a wonderful new world full of zoomed-in discoveries. It’s designed explicitly with preschool-aged children in mind and features a large focus knob to help kids get used to magnification, starting with 2.5x and expanding to 8x. Two large eyepieces are comfortable and easy to use, eliminating the need to coordinate closing one eye. A push-button LED light and large viewing plate make this microscope easy to use; kids can independently place household objects and outdoor finds within view, plus, you can help them use the 12 included slide plates for a more advanced experience. One of the best for 5-year-olds, My First Microscope comes in two bright colorways, is made from lightweight yet durable plastic, and is battery operated so you can take it outdoors on a nice day. 

Best portable: Carson MicroBrite Plus Pocket Microscope

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Why it made the cut: Weighing only 0.15 pounds, this pocket microscope is a great way for kids to get closer to nature during hikes, camping trips, and other outdoor adventures. 

Specs

• Magnification: 60x-120x
• Age Range: 6+
• Dimensions: 3.5 x 0.79 x 1.97 inches 
• Light Source: LED

Pros 

• Affordable
• Lightweight
• Magnification power 

Cons 

• Works best on flat object 
• Can be hard to use for little kids

This compact pocket microscope is an excellent way to explore the outdoors with your kids. While a little trickier to operate than some models made specifically for kids, it’s a great option for looking at leaves, insects, flowers, and more. An aspheric lens forces light rays to converge at a single focal point, allowing for more precise imaging aided by a bright LED light. With a magnification power range between 60x-120x, you’ll see some incredible detail, though it’s recommended that your kids start at the lowest magnification and work their way up. Using the MicroBrite to look at relatively flat objects resting on a flat surface is best, especially for kids still working on keeping a steady hand.  

Best kit: Omano JuniorScope Science Kit

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Why it made the cut: A microscope is a great gift, but the JuniorScope Science Kit comes with five fun experiment cards that will keep your kids entertained after they inspect what they find around the house.

Specs

• Magnification: 40x-400x
• Age Range: 6+
• Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 14 inches 
• Light Source: LED

Pros 

• Comes with experiments 
• Good value 
• Suitable for a wide age range

Cons 

• Larger objects can be challenging to view 

This microscope kit from JuniorScope comes with three magnification levels, a glass lens, dimmable LED lighting, and a large EZ focus knob allows kids to operate the magnification levels independently. The full kit includes five fun experiment cards that will walk your kids through different ways to inspect various specimens, including insects, human bodies, plants, and crime scenes. Alongside the cards, this kit includes forceps, a Petri dish, dropper, test tube, blank slides, prepared slides, lens paper, and more. Look no further if you want a complete kit to guide a scientifically-minded kid. 

Best budget: National Geographic STEM Kit

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Why it made the cut: A full microscope kit for under $40 that includes mineral chips, prepared plates, a lab guide, and more.

Specs

• Magnification: 40x-400x
• Age Range: 6+
• Dimensions: 12.05 x 11.05 x 6.81 
• Light Source: LED

Pros 

• Inexpensive
• Comes with tools and activities 
• Soft eyepiece 

Cons 

• Build feels a little cheap

This kit from National Geographic is an affordable way to gift a microscope, equipment, and built-in experiments. The microscope itself features a soft eyepiece, large focus knob, and fixed lens, while the full kit comes with six plant slides, six blank slides, slide case, lab guide, pipette, tweezers, specimen dish, and more. It also comes with six mineral chips, including Pyrite, Amethyst, Rose Quartz, Blue Clacite, Geode, and Green Fluorite. We can confirm that adults and children alike will enjoy getting close to these sparkly rocks. The National Geographic STEM kit delivers a full gift set without breaking the bank. 

What to consider when buying the best microscopes for kids

Just because kids can use these microscopes, that doesn’t mean their construction is completely different from lab-level models. They are still tools that come with technical specifications, and it’s important to understand how they work so you can confidently choose the right one for your young scientist. 

Magnification and eyepiece

Microscopes are designed to zoom in on organisms and other matter, but the magnification power will differ across various models. Generally speaking, the younger the child, the lower the magnification power should be because powerful optics can be more difficult to operate. Microscopes with a 5X to 400X magnification power will be great for younger kids. Higher magnification, above 400x, should typically be reserved for kids over eight. These optics are also directly related to eyepiece type. A monocular eyepiece is used by one eye and can magnify up to 1000X. A binocular microscope supports more powerful magnification and uses both eyes, reducing eye strain. 

Traditional or digital 

You’ll likely see the words “traditional” and “digital” used to describe two different microscope types. A traditional model is probably best if you’re looking for an at-home microscope. A digital unit looks at the plate using a camera, projecting the image onto a screen—helpful for classroom settings or larger families with lots of young kids reluctant to take turns, but not the typical kitchen table use case. 

Stereo or compound

Stereo and compound, also known as high or low power, describe the materials the microscope is designed to inspect. Stereo microscopes are considered low power and are great for exploring small surfaces in more three-dimensional detail: think coins, seashells, and rocks. Compound, high-power microscopes will give you a better look at living organisms, like plant matter, and rely on super small sections of the material to be put on a plate for closer inspection. 

Longevity and durability  

Traditionally, microscopes use small halogen or fluorescent bulbs to illuminate their subjects. If finding replacement bulbs fills you with dread, consider LED options, which are powerful, bright, and last for years. 

Of course, the light source won’t matter if your microscope is made from fragile material and placed in the hands of a well-intentioned yet clumsy kid. Look for strong metals or thick, durable plastics. For kids under 5, grab a model with special safety features—like rubberized grips, padding around the eyepiece, rounded edges, and other features designed to be operated by small, inexperienced fingers. Of course, you can worry less about child-friendly design and more about magnification for older kids. 

Accessories and kits 

Ensure your microscope has all the tools necessary for full functionality; appropriate accessories might include plates, Petri dishes, pipettes, tweezers, etc. If you are gifting a microscope but are unsure how to use it in a fun, engaging way, go for a microscope kit with additional accessories. These kits typically include a variety of experiments or guides to get your scientific explorer started. As they grow, you can get them a telescope under $500 to look at the larger aspects of our universe.

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best microscopes for kids

• Best overall: AmScope Beginner Microscope STEM Kit
• Best for older kids: OMAX-MD8 2ES10
• Best for young kids: Educational Insights GeoSafari Jr. Kids Microscope
• Best portable: Carson MicroBrite Plus Pocket Microscope
• Best kit: Omano JuniorScope Science Kit 
• Best budget: National Geographic STEM Kit

Shopping for the best microscope for kids shouldn’t be a process of trial and error, especially if you know what will suit the age of your little STEM explorer. As long as you don’t buy anything too advanced for smaller kids or too rudimentary for late-elementary to middle school students, you’re on track to deliver an amazing gift that will provide entertainment and learning. Consider the technical specs, pay particular attention to magnification, and think about any extra accessories that could go a long way. You’ll be conducting scientific research experiments with your future doctor/environmental scientist/zoologist/biologist/botanist in no time. 

Why trust us

Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

Our writers and editors have combined decades of experience covering and reviewing consumer electronics. We each have our own obsessive specialties—from high-end audio to video games to cameras and beyond—but when we’re reviewing devices outside of our immediate wheelhouses, we do our best to seek out trustworthy voices and opinions to help guide people to the very best recommendations. We know we don’t know everything, but we’re excited to live through the analysis paralysis that internet shopping can spur so readers don’t have to.

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A team of scientists from Spain and the United States reconstructed the skull of an extinct great ape species from a set of well-preserved, but damaged skeletal remains. The bones belonged to Pierolapithecus catalaunicus who lived roughly 12 million years ago. Studying its facial features could help us better understand human and ape evolution and the findings are described in a study published October 16 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

[Related: This 7th-century teen was buried with serious bling—and we now know what she may have looked like.]

First described in 2004, Pierolapithecus was a member of a diverse group of extinct ape species that lived during the Miocene Epoch (about 15 to 7 million years ago) in Europe. During this time, horses were beginning to evolve in North America and the first dogs and bears also began to appear. The Miocene was also a critical time period for primate evolution.

In the study, the team used CT scans to virtually reconstruct Pierolapithecus’ cranium. They then used a process called principal components analysis and compared their digital reconstruction of the face with other primate species. They then modeled the changes occurring to some key features of ape facial structure. They found that Pierolapithecus shares similarities in its overall face shape and size with fossilized and living great apes. 

However, it also has distinct facial features that have not been found in other apes from the Middle Miocene. According to the authors, these results are consistent with the idea that Pierolapithecus represents one of the earliest members of the great ape and human family. 

“An interesting output of the evolutionary modeling in the study is that the cranium of Pierolapithecus is closer in shape and size to the ancestor from which living great apes and humans evolved,” study co-author and AMNH paleoanthropologist Sergio Almécija said in a statement. “On the other hand, gibbons and siamangs (the ‘lesser apes’) seem to be secondarily derived in relation to size reduction.”

Studying the physiology of extinct animals like Pierolapithecus can help us understand how other species evolved. This particular primate species is important because the team used a cranium and partial skeleton that belonged to the same individual ape, which is a rarity in the fossil record. 

[Related: Our tree-climbing ancestors evolved our abilities to throw far and reach high.]

“Features of the skull and teeth are extremely important in resolving the evolutionary relationships of fossil species, and when we find this material in association with bones of the rest of the skeleton, it gives us the opportunity to not only accurately place the species on the hominid family tree, but also to learn more about the biology of the animal in terms of, for example, how it was moving around its environment,” study co-author Kelsey Pugh said in a statement. Pugh is a primate palaeontologist with the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York and Brooklyn College.

Earlier studies on Pierolapithecus suggest that it could have stood upright and had multiple adaptations that allowed these hominids to hang from tree branches and move throughout them. However, Pierolapithecus’ evolutionary position is still debated, partially due to the damage to the specimen’s cranium.  

“One of the persistent issues in studies of ape and human evolution is that the fossil record is fragmentary, and many specimens are incompletely preserved and distorted,” study-coauthor and AMNH biological anthropologist Ashley Hammond said in a statement. “This makes it difficult to reach a consensus on the evolutionary relationships of key fossil apes that are essential to understanding ape and human evolution.”

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