Late last week, we started seeing headlines about how new research was suggesting we might have two brains instead of the one that seems to show up on MRI scans. As is so often the case, these rumors can be traced back to a single press release put out by one of the universities where the work was done.
You do not have two brains. It's a silly way to look at the results of the new paper.
But there are far better ways to look at the results, ways that can help us understand how the brain gets put together and illustrate some of the general ideas behind developmental biology. So let's take a look at what the research actually shows and place it in the context of brain development.
Krakatau, a volcanic island in Indonesia, killed more than 30,000 people when it erupted in 1883. One might assume that volcanic debris posed the major threat, yet many of the victims died from a tsunami caused by the volcanic eruption instead.
Volcanoes at sea can pose hazards quite different from those on land, as their impact can vary depending on how the volcanic activity interacts with seawater. In the deep ocean, high water pressure can suppress explosive volcanic activity, making eruptions less destructive. But closer to the surface, the lower water pressure and the high temperatures of volcanic material can cause violent explosions. Yet scientists still do not fully understand the conditions under which volcanic activity can cause a tsunami.
To better understand these risks, an international team of researchers examined the 2022 Hunga eruption in Tonga, focusing on the rapid caldera collapse that may have amplified its powerful tsunami. Calderas form when the ground above a magma reservoir collapses as the magma drains away. Comparisons of seafloor topography before and after the eruption showed that a roughly 4-kilometer-wide caldera sank by about a kilometer during the eruption.
Last year, the Trump administration did what it could to shut down work on the next US National Climate Assessment, eliminating funding for the US Global Change Research Program and booting hundreds of contributing authors. The administration even took past reports offline, forcing others to host copies so the information would still be accessible. And this all comes despite the fact that these reports are legally required.
Later in the year, the American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society announced an effort to give researchers a central place to compile the kind of work that would have fed the next US report, as well as potential regional and local reports. This “US Climate Collection” works differently from the US Global Change Research Program or the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Rather than facilitating the writing of a giant, coordinated report, the groups are inviting teams of researchers to publish peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals, which will then be added to a centralized resource for future report-writers.
The first paper has now been added to that collection. It’s the work of 175 authors (many of whom had been working on the US report), and it is actually being published in two journals—one operated by the American Geophysical Union and one by the American Meteorological Society. That’s because this paper is intended to provide a roadmap to prioritize future contributions.
On Friday, The Washington Post reported on a contentious White House meeting in which the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Jay Bhattacharya, tried to fend off yet another effort to place funding decisions under political control. The move came from Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which has sought to limit and control research funds. The Post suggested that Bhattacharya ended up on the losing side of the fight.
This initial leak has been confirmed and expanded on by outlets such as The New York Times and Politico. It now appears that the administration is drafting an executive order that would give Vought veto power over every individual grant awarded by the NIH.
If at first you don't succeed
The NIH is the largest funder of biomedical research on the planet, and its $47 billion budget is larger than that of the next 10 research funders combined. Its funding, distributed largely through grants to academic researchers at universities, supports everything from basic biological research to clinical trials and has helped the biotechnology industry flourish.
For most of the last century, T. rex was pictured as a sluggish, tail-dragging reptile that had to warm up in the sun before it could go anywhere. Then, further research changed that view, replacing it with the active, bird-like animal shown in the movie Jurassic Park. But whether T. rex used warm blood to power that activity remained a question. Now we might have gotten closer to an answer.
A team of researchers led by Randon J. Flores and Robert A. Eagle, geochemists at the University of California, Los Angeles, has measured the T. rex body temperature by analyzing its teeth. This dental thermometer read about 36° Celsius—roughly the body temperature of a modern elephant.
Dental thermometry
Paleontologists have long argued about dinosaur physiology based on indirect evidence like bone microstructure, growth rates, and where fossils turn up on the map. Some studies suggested many dinosaurs were endotherms, generating their own body heat like birds and mammals. Others argued that each lineage may have had its own thermal strategy.
Learning another language is a highly complex mental activity. It requires people to remember words, distinguish unfamiliar sounds, recognize patterns, work out grammatical rules, and retrieve the right expression at the right moment. All of this happens while listening, interpreting, and preparing a response.
Concerns about memory and dementia can send aging adults looking for ways to exercise their brain and maintain cognitive function, whether it is solving crossword puzzles or playing a musical instrument. Language learning might not seem like the same kind of brain exercise, but it is a complex activity that engages several mental processes at once.
For decades, astronomers thought rings were something only giant planets had. That changed in 2013, when a small, dark body orbiting between Saturn and Uranus passed in front of a star and blinked twice on either side of the main event, revealing two narrow rings around an object barely 250 kilometers across. “It was a surprise,” says Pablo Santos-Sanz, an astronomer at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía in Granada, Spain. Ever since, the question has been what such rings are made of and how long they can last.
In a recent study, Santos-Sanz and his colleagues used the James Webb Space Telescope to watch the same body, now known as Chariklo, pass in front of a background star again. They found one of its rings had grown denser and the other had almost vanished. We don’t know exactly why.
Shadowing a star
The technique behind the observation is simple. “We predict when a Solar System object passes in front of a star,” Santos-Sanz said. The starlight dims for a moment, and the shape of that dip reveals the size, shape, and surroundings of the object that caused it. “This is particularly challenging for minor bodies, and more challenging for distant minor bodies,” he said.
For a long time, sleep research has treated the cerebral cortex as a passive follower reacting to signals from the deep brain. “Usually, sleep is associated with being controlled by subcortical regions,” said Geoffrey Terral, a neuroscientist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.
The cortex is where the slow rhythms of deep sleep can be seen, but researchers assumed the signals that triggered them originated elsewhere. In a recent Nature study, Terral and Renata Batista-Brito, who runs the lab, report a population of cortical cells that challenges that assumption.
These cortical cells make up only around one percent of the cortex's inhibitory neurons, and switching them on in a mouse puts the animal to sleep. “What our work shows is that the cortex can not only see this rhythm but also initiate it by itself, and this is sufficient to promote sleep,” Terral said.
Abnormal beating of airway cilia from a child with Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia, a genetic disorder affecting respiratory function. Credit: Ning Xu, Tsinghua University
A Chinese optical engineer is the winner of this year's Small World in Motion competition, sponsored by Nikon. Ning Xu of Tsinghua University in Beijing beat out 346 other video entries from 40 different countries with his super-resolution video (above) of the abnormal beating of cilia in the airways of a child with a rare genetic respiratory disorder.
Founded in 2011, the Nikon Small World in Motion competition is a spinoff of the company's Small World Photomicrography Competition, which has been around since 1974. Both are meant "to showcase the beauty and complexity of things seen through the light microscope"—one through still photographs, the other through photovideography, taking advantage of all the technological advances that now allow users to make movies or time-lapse images through the microscope.
Primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD) is a genetic disorder that adversely affects the tiny hairlike structures that line the lungs, among other areas. Their wavelike motion helps move around germs, mucus, dust, and other irritants so the body can dispel them via coughing or sneezing. In people born with PCD, there is something wrong with those cilia, so those irritants build up, causing respiratory infections, among other complications. The cilia might be the wrong size, the wrong shape, or missing altogether. They might move abnormally or not move at all.
Days after finalizing a rule that would eliminate climate rules for power plants, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was sued by groups who say the EPA’s repeal was shockingly short-sighted and risked leaving the country’s single largest source of industrial climate pollution unchecked.
On Thursday, the American Lung Association, the American Public Health Association (APHA), the Clean Air Council, Clean Wisconsin, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) filed a petition requesting that the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit review if the EPA’s action conflicts with the Clean Air Act.
“Clean air is a basic human right,” APHA CEO Georges C. Benjamin said.
Staff at the Lady Elliott Island Eco Resort off the southern Great Barrier Reef in Australia are well acquainted with the shenanigans of a male bottlenose dolphin they've nicknamed Bubbles. Bubbles has been around since at least 2017 and regularly harasses local bigeye trevally, chasing a fish around and stressing it so much that the fish throws up what it has consumed. Bubbles then devours the regurgitated food. The dolphin's unusual behavior is the focus of a new paper published in the journal Ecology and Evolution.
If you're thinking that Bubbles sounds like kind of a jerk and Flipper would never behave like this, think again. "This perception of dolphins as the ‘good guys of the sea’ has more to do with anthropomorphism—our tendency to assign human characteristics to them—and perhaps that’s because dolphins appear to be smiling," said co-author Asia Haines of the University of the Sunshine Coast. "Dolphins are predators and actively hunt their prey, whether it has been stolen from another species or not.”
The technical term is kleptoparasitism, and it usually involves one species taking food away from another, often via aggressive confrontation. Bees and wasps are common culprits, such as the cuckoo wasp, which lays its eggs in the nests of other wasp species. The behavior is often opportunistic across many species, including bears, coyotes, and wolves. Raptors, gulls, terns, and bald eagles have been known to attack other birds and take their food. Skuas and frigatebirds steal from other seabirds; masked shrikes steal food from wheatears; and Eurasian blackbirds have been seen stealing smashed snails from thrushes. Hyenas and jackals steal food all the time.
The International Meteor Organization, the nonprofit that coordinates and publishes amateur and professional observations of meteor phenomena, said its infrastructure has suffered a “critical blow” from a cyberattack.
“We recently suffered a cyberattack that dealt a critical blow to aging infrastructure, taking much of our site offline," a static page on its website on Wednesday said. “We expect several weeks of partial downtime as we transition to new infrastructure and services.”
“I am very sad to see the site down”
In the meantime, the IMO said it’s prioritizing the reporting of fireball observations, which can be reported here. The organization is also providing some information on its Facebook page.
In recent years, there has been a lot of excitement about the potential for studying human diseases in what are called "organoids." These small patches of tissue, formed using stem cells, appear to produce many of the same cell types and at least some of the structures normally formed in actual organs, and thus can provide a better model for diseases that rely on the sometimes complex interactions among multiple specialized cell types that are a feature of the human body.
But even the most sophisticated organoids lack a lot of the features of a real human body. This is especially true for brain organoids, which don't form any of the connections with specialized brain structures needed to behave "normally." On Wednesday, a research group at Stanford University described a possible way to study brain organoids in a somewhat more natural context: They genetically wiped out a large portion of the mouse brain and replaced it with human brain organoid cells.
The replacements
Organoids, because they adopt a three-dimensional tissue structure and consist of various specialized cells, provide a much better model for an intact tissue than simply having a bunch of disassociated cells lying flat on a culture dish. But they still have a lot of limitations—they're not hooked up to a circulatory system that allows the liver to process chemicals the organoid produces and don't have immune cells moving through them, to give just a couple of examples.
The Vesuvius Challenge is an ongoing project that combines "digital unwrapping" with crowdsourced machine learning to decipher the so-called Herculaneum scrolls, badly charred 2,000-year-old papyri too fragile to be physically unrolled. The effort just got an additional boost. A team of researchers created their own contemporary model papyrus scrolls—charring them just like the originals—to validate a screening method to determine which of the Herculaneum scrolls were written in lead-based ink and hence are the most promising candidates for further analysis. They described the process in a new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE.
As previously reported, the ancient Roman resort town of Pompeii wasn’t the only city destroyed in the catastrophic 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Several other cities in the area, including the wealthy enclave of Herculaneum, were fried by clouds of hot gas, called pyroclastic pulses and flows. But still, some remnants of Roman wealth survived. One palatial residence in Herculaneum—believed to have once belonged to a man named Piso—contained hundreds of priceless written scrolls made from papyrus, singed into carbon by volcanic gas.
The scrolls stayed buried under volcanic mud until they were excavated in the 1700s from a single room that archaeologists believe held the personal working library of an Epicurean philosopher named Philodemus. The few opened fragments helped scholars identify various Greek philosophical texts, including On Nature by Epicurus and several by Philodemus himself, as well as a handful of Latin works. But the more than 600 rolled-up scrolls were so fragile that it was long believed they would never be readable, since even touching them could cause them to crumble.
Our basic understanding of core-collapse supernovae hasn't changed in decades. Large stars burn through all the fuel at their cores and start creating heavier elements in reactions that consume energy. The lack of energy from these reactions allows gravity to pull the interior of the star in on itself, collapsing it into a neutron star or black hole. The energy released by this process then blows the remainder of the star apart.
And, generally, that's right. But there's an entire busload of devils in the details. The statistics of supernovae that we've observed indicate that the model may be seriously incomplete. And on the theoretical side, there are still plenty of uncertainties, including over some of the basics, such as whether all core collapses actually result in a supernova.
A paper being released by Physical Review D provides what might be a potential explanation for the discrepancy: flavor-changing neutrinos. Neutrinos play a key role in our current models of supernovae, and right now, those models don't take into account one of neutrinos' most striking features: their ability to change identity.
Chimpanzees are known to use rudimentary tools when foraging for food. According to a new paper in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, this learned behavior is passed down from adults to offspring through social learning. Specifically, adult chimps deliberately model the behavior, then turn their tools over to the youngsters so they can mimic the same motions.
"Receiving food and tools from experienced individuals, which we call food or tool transfer, may help chimpanzees learn to use technology to extract foods that are difficult to access,” said co-author Andreu Sánchez-Megías, a graduate student at the University of Barcelona and the Jane Goodall Institute Spain in Senegal. “Tool transfers thus appear to be a form of teaching, together with observation and supervised practice. It appears that mothers are the main models and teachers for young chimpanzees in this manner.”
As we have previously reported, tool use was once thought to be one of the defining features of humans, although Charles Darwin observed chimpanzees using stones to crack nuts in 1871. In 1960, the late primatologist Jane Goodall observed a chimp named David Greybeard bend a twig, strip off the leaves, and use it to spoon termites out of a nest and into his mouth. When he learned of the behavior, Goodall's mentor, Louis Leakey, famously observed, “Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man,’ or accept chimpanzees as humans.” Since then, chimps have been observed making sponges out of leaves to soak up liquids, shaping sticks to collect algae, and sharpening rudimentary spears for hunting.
On the heels of the hottest summer on record and a United Nations report warning that global temperatures are likely to push climate risks to “increasingly dangerous heights,” the Trump administration overturned most of a Biden-era rule limiting climate pollution from power plants, the second-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.
The Environmental Protection Agency announced a final plan Monday that guts the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards, which the agency said exceeds its authority under the Clean Air Act by requiring control technologies “that are not adequately demonstrated.” The agency also proposed revoking “all remaining GHG emissions requirements for power plants,” arguing their emissions “have no material impact on climate change.”
The plan to revoke the Carbon Pollution Standards was initially revealed last spring.
Last week, the Atlantic hurricane season blew through its traditional peak—which comes around September 10—with nary a tropical wave in sight, let alone a storm or hurricane.
This is remarkable. Usually this is the time of year when sea surface temperatures reach their warmest in the tropics, and with a favorable atmosphere it should be smooth skating for tropical systems. But this year, the main region where most tropical systems develop is choked with Saharan dust and wind shear.
No one is complaining. Landfalling hurricanes are incredibly destructive for coastal areas and have the potential for considerable inland rainfall. Even storms at sea, in the Gulf of Mexico, can send energy prices skyrocketing—the last thing needed this year.
Air Force Secretary Troy Meink made the first public declaration Monday that the United States has placed "space control weapons" in orbit, an announcement that will surely reverberate in the power centers of Beijing and Moscow.
Space Force officials have previously expressed their interest in acquiring space-based weapons, and Pentagon leaders have become more open to discussing space warfare in recent years. Therefore, Meink's announcement Monday at the Air and Space Forces Association's annual Air, Space & Cyber Conference near Washington, DC, was not entirely unexpected.
“Today, we continue to ensure we remain ready to meet the challenges of evolving threats, wherever they exist. This is why the United States now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action,” Meink said in prepared remarks.
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