EurekAlert! Staff Picks

I sometimes feel like there's a sense of vagueness associated with stories around plastic pollution: we know there's a lot of it, we know it's very likely to have negative impacts in multiple ways, but it's not always clear exactly what the dangers might be (to us or to the environment). That's part of why I appreciate this story from Florida Atlantic University that zoomed in on the impact of the plastic chemical oleamide on the predator/prey relationship of a species of South Florida-native octopus. Like many animals, octopuses (I know it's technically more correct but man it sounds so much worse than "octopi") hunt based on chemical signals, and it was clear from the experiments that the presence of oleamide had a notable impact on the hunting behavior of the octopuses and their prey.

Findings like these can be a little less sexy compared to finding the plastic chemicals are leading to mass sickness or die-offs, but like any marine population the relationship between an octopus and it's prey is carefully calibrated over hundreds of thousands of years and even a seemingly tiny impact can have enormous ramifications. It's also interesting to me how even a material as exotic and "unnatural" as plastic is still composed of materials that have their own places in the natural order, and our use of it should always come with an acknowledgement of that. Octopuses/pi are some of the smartest creatures in the sea and that's part of what makes them personal favorite, but alas they are not smart enough (yet) to fix alterations to their environment that are entirely on us.

A few years ago, I remember reading a story about dogs left behind in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and how scientists were fascinated not just by how the radiation might impact their genes but how those genes would propagate in a domesticated population suddenly introduced to a "wild" area. I like those sorts of stories where the advancement of science sometimes comes on the back of scientific failures over successes, which drew me to this release detailing similar research done on pigs in the Fukushima area by a university directly impacted by the 2011 nuclear accident in their own backyard.

Specifically, Fukushima University researchers were studying the genetic hybridization between escaped domestic pigs and wild boars, a significant problem even outside Japan. With an environment similar to Chernobyl of a human occupied area suddenly being devoid of humans, they were able to study in higher detail how this hybridization process plays out with no interference. From that data, they made some surprising findings on how the rapid-reproduction genes present in domestic pigs but not wild boars are specifically passed from the maternal side. They hope these findings can provide insight useful to pig and boar conservation efforts around the world, hopefully bringing a little good out of the tragedy that impacted Fukushima those years ago.

I have an uncle who is an avid ice fisher, and he's mentioned to me that the solitary nature of it is part of the appeal. Just him and at most one other person, in a tent for hours on end not speaking to another soul. This research though by Max Planck Institute for Human Development social scientists highlights how even such a solo-focused endeavor has it's own web of social influences and interactions.

Together with collaborators from TU Berlin and the University of Eastern Finland, the researchers not only studied but actively organized a series of ice fishing competitions held over a period of two years. Using GPS cameras, they studied an array of the fisher's choices such as how they chose spots, how long they stuck around at each and how often they collaborated with each other. This provided a unique framework to study how groups of humans make foraging decisions "in the wild", and how much those decisions are influenced by environmental conditions, individual experience and indirect influence from their peers. It's interesting research that highlights how anything humans do in a group exists in the social context of that group (even if the thing is sitting by yourself in an ice tent all day).

"Space junk" has always seemed like an interesting and underrated problem to me. A lot of the things we think about in space are so distant, black holes and galaxies unfathomable distances away. Turns out though that one of the most pressing space-related problems is close enough to us to be essentially ecological: in space, no one can hear you litter.

...or at least they can't until your litter reenters the atmosphere. When space debris falls back down to Earth, it does so fast enough to create the same sort of sonic booms produced by jets breaking the sound barrier. Johns Hopkins scientist Benjamin Fernando and collaborators at Imperial College London used this fact to tackle an aspect of the space junk problem from an unexpected direction: seismology. They set up a network of 127 seismometers in California to track the path of debris left by a Chinese satellite entering the atmosphere. Results were encouraging, noticeably more accurate and faster than traditional radar estimates. With luck, their research will give us a much better general handle on when and where our space junk returns to us.

I love when a press release can open with a claim as absurd-sounding as "we have no idea what most of the universe is made of". That might feel like marketing hyperbole in a lot of other contexts, but when the subject is dark matter/energy, it's not far off the scientific mark. Astronomy is always a subject where the objects of study are usually theoretical in the sense we can't reach out and observe them in person, but even in most of those cases we know where things theoretically are. Not so with dark matter: it's all theory, a huge proportion of the total matter in the universe that we can't see or touch or feel at all even if we could get to it.

That quality also makes writing about it extremely difficult, and this release from Texas A&M University does an excellent job bridging the gap. It covers some of recent research Dr. Rupak Mahapatra has contributed to a team of scientists using a super-sensitive detector called TESSARACT, but also takes care to frame his work with a generous and not too technical overview of the dark matter "problem" and how they're aiming to move the needle on solving it. I understand the details on the topic probably even less than I understand most in astronomy, but the sheer novelty of it means I love reading about it every time it comes up and good interlocutors are always appreciated.

I grew up loving stories about artificial intelligence, especially ones that tackle questions of the "humanity" of that intelligence (shout out Legion from Mass Effect, you will always have a soul in my book). While ChatGPT is a far cry from Hal 9000 (for now), it's still so incredibly surreal to be living as an adult in a world in which we can reasonably ask some of those same questions of actually existing technologies.

Researchers at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Google Research and Princeton University asked the question by studying language processing in humans: they took electrocorticography recordings of a group of people after 30 minutes of listening to a podcast and tracked how different parts of the brain were activated as they processed the information. Their findings observed a layered "step-by-step" pattern where early responses sort out basic visual info in one area of the brain and later processing of context happens later in "deeper" layers. According to the researchers, this process is not all that dissimilar from the multi-tiered approach AI uses to "understand" the world.

What stands out at me so starkly from this story is not just that the human brain readings apparently matched AI methods closer than expected, but that this understanding of our own brain needed to be filled in in the first place. You hear people talk about how modern AI is a "black box" where we can set the output parameters but don't really understand exactly what's going on under the hood. And yet...is our understanding of our own brains that much more advanced*? Even with all our modern technology and centuries of research to build off of, there are still aspects of the brain that we just don't have a full understanding of how they work, and I like the idea that only once we have an even vaguely similar parallel to compare to will we be able to truly complete that understanding.

(*it is, I just think it's still an interesting question)

Echolocation is my pick for one of the absolute coolest biological adaptations running, but I'd never really considered how the ones being echo-located might respond to it. This Chiba University release studied that topic, specifically a species of moth (Autographa nigrisigna) that changes it's behavior when it senses the echolocation calls of nearby bats. They exposed various moth specimens to a wide range of pulse frequencies intended to mimic bat calls and found that egg-bearing moths in particular greatly changed their flight behavior or even stopped altogether in response to the lab-generated sound pulses. The implications for moth reproductive behavior being tied so directly to bat predation makes it an interesting study for bat and moth enthusiasts, but there are also some fascinating "real world" implications at play: getting a better handle on how moths respond to bat calls may allow for the use of ultrasonic emitters instead of pesticide to keep moth pests off of crops!

I love a release that tells a broader story. This one from the Florida Museum of Natural History details recent findings on the coiled optics nerve of chameleons that allow for their distinctive 360-degree eye movement and ability to look in two directions at once. The team laid these structures out in more detail than ever before through the use of modern imaging techniques. It's interesting research on it's own: on a hunch after seeing coil-like optic nerves in an unrelated CT scan of a particular chameleon species, they took 30 more cans of over various lizards and snakes, created full 3D brain models of 18 of those and finally found all 3 chameleon species represented had the same longer and coiled optic nerves compared to the scans of their fellow reptiles.

Where this release especially succeeds though is how it answers a question posed by one of the researchers themselves: how had no one else noticed this distinct structure before? Chameleons hold cultural significance in regions across the world so it's not like no one has been paying them any attention, but in all their efforts the researchers weren't able to find any historical description of what they'd found. The release does an excellent job framing this context by providing an informative history of our understanding on chameleon biology all the way from Aristotle's writings to a 2015 University of Haifa thesis that described the optic nerve as "c-shaped". The historical focus of both the research itself and the concise but not too exhaustive way the release lays out the relevant history does a really great job of situating the research in it's broader context, a difficult task in an environment where press officers are often pushed to focus only on what's most immediately relevant right this very second.

My general interest in volcanoes drew me to the image of a lava field featured in this Natural Science Institute of Iceland release, but as it turns out the ecological research on display in it's associated release was just as interesting. NSII researchers studied plant life on the volcanic island of Surtsey, famous for it's relatively recent arrival from an eruption in 1963 and associated status as an untouched piece of land where biologists and ecologists could study how life spreads in real time. What the NSII ecologists found though challenges some long-held beliefs in the field with the finding that many of the plants found on the island lack the traits commonly associated with long-distance dispersal. Instead, the researchers cited birds as the primary mechanism by which plants reached the island. Study author Dr. Pawel Wasowicz quoted in the release put it best: "Life does not move in isolation - it follows life", which is certainly something to consider in an age where human activity has a very real impact on where other life goes.

I'm always interested in the intersection of science and culture, which drew me to this University of Hawai'i at Manoa release about a team of researchers that linked references in traditional Okinawan songs of the Ryukyu Islands to modern knowledge of the region's geological and climate history. And their efforts were fruitful: a collection of 18th century Ryukyuan music describes wind and wave patterns that closely match 21st century scientific records. They even found mention of a particular 18th-century volcanic eruption on an isolated island!

The researcher's interest in the topic was not just idle fascination however: all of the paper authors are actually long-time practitioners of classical Ryukyuan music themselves! I really like that concept: if there's something you're interested in and passionate about and you have the scientific know-how, there's nothing stopping you from putting it into a scientific context!

When I read this ESO release about observations of a "rogue planet" forming 620 million light years from us, I'm remind that among the many reasons I'm not cut out to be an astronomer is the sheer existential intimidation of it. Figures like "six billions tons per second" and "5-10 times the mass of Jupiter" are so unfathomably beyond our terrestrial scale of reference but when you put your eye to space they're just another data point. I don't know how I'd be able to deal with those constant reminders of just how incredibly small a place in the universe we occupy.

This story itself is also fascinating. The word "planet" probably brings to mind for most an image of our solar system planets making their collective run around the sun, but there's nothing in the definition that requires that sort of order. Some in fact are so chaotic and enormous that they could actually be mistaken for stars from the right angle!

It's been pretty common through most of my life for news about the rainforests to trend negative: threats from climate change, deforestation, that sort of thing. This release caught my eye then with the surprising finding that despite the ongoing threats to their overall livelihood...the average tree size in the Amazon forest has actually increased. And according to the researchers, the cause is actually the rising CO2 levels associated with the changing climate! Interesting and unexpectedly positive knock-on effect, though the researchers also note how impossible it would be to re-plant those massive and ancient trees in the event that are ever removed so we're not off the hook yet.

There's a lot of interesting stuff going on in this release about a possible new hybrid species produced from the pairing of a blue and green jay. First, it's an example of an evolutionary process happening on a time scale we can actually see, with the two component species only coming into contact after 1950s. Even if we can only see the full process of evolution through collected evidence stretching back millions of years, it's cool to see a little sliver of the sort of occurrence that when repeated enough and for long enough constitutes the process of evolution. The researchers also explicitly indicate climate change as what moved the two populations closer together, so that adds some illustrative context into how our actions fit in to that process.

Beyond all that, the actual story of how the species was found demonstrates how much in science still comes down to luck and the right timing. The researcher saw a post online in a birdwatching group and worked with the poster to find and catalogue the bird. In his words from the release: "If it had gone two houses down, probably it would have never been reported anywhere.”

I mentioned in a previous edition of this newsletter that orangutans were my favorite of the great apes. My favorite sea animal meanwhile is the octopus. Guess I have a weakness for surprisingly intelligent but often-overlooked species.

That intelligence is very much on display in this release from Florida Atlantic University which covers the efforts of FAU marine biologists and their colleagues at Marine Biological Laboratory to detail the complex arm movements of octopuses (I prefer "octopi" but apparently that's not the technically correct term). And they were certainly thorough: 4000 arms movements and 7000 individual arm deformations across 25 different video recordings in different environments gives an exhaustive categorization of just how these fascinating creatures interact with their world.

I always love seeing research where scientists are attempting to replicate a particular natural feature or behavior through the lens of our technology. It impresses on me not just the ingenuity of the researchers and how far our tech has come but also the incredible designs of nature that are often so difficult to replicate in the first place. In this case it was an international team including New York University robotics researchers that worked to capture the "swarming" behavior of fish, birds and other tight-knit biological communities, taking inspiration from physics with the positive/negative charges of electrons matching the "positive" and "negative" charges of a robot swarm. We're still a long way from a 1 to 1 reproduction swarming in our robots, but in a time when "humanoid" robots are getting more attention it's interesting to see how researchers are approaching an entirely different type of robotic intelligence.

I absolutely love orangutans, easily my favorite of the great ape family. Very cool then to see a window into how their brains work in this University of Warwick release on a Nature Communications Biology paper. It can be easy to think of even relatively intelligent animals like apes as creatures of pure instinct, just doing whatever their biological programming commands, but as you can see in this release: orangutans learn and teach! They're not born with the skills that make them such fascinating creatures, they have families and different peer networks that they "graduate" to as their skills develop. Not all that different from how we learn things in the end.

I come from a family with a strong history of diabetes, so news about research on it tends to catch my eye more than most other medical news. When we think of the brain's relationship to diabetes, it tends to be in a more "abstract" sense, things like the willpower to avoid unhealthy foods or sugar addictions. Studies like these though highlight that the brain's role in diabetes isn't just in how it manifests in our behavior but in a real physical process with a role in managing our glucose levels. In a time when diabetes seems so much easier to manage compared to when I was a kid, I hope that studies like these continue to sharpen our understanding of how diabetes operates.

I'm fascinated with this Nagoya University release on a Science study where the mating behaviors of one species of fruit fly were transferred to another through editing just a single gene. Granted fruit flies are significantly less complex than humans, but it's still so interesting to me that we can "undo" 30-35 million years of evolutionary behavior through one experiment. Also an interesting companion to my pick from a couple weeks ago: a few million years after those diet changes and we're successful enough to make changes of our own to evolutionary behavior.

Interstellar is one of my favorite movies, and I include the ending sequence with the black hole in that despite it pushing the bounds of scientific accuracy a bit. That love draws me to a release like this on a iScience paper where a physicist looks at the prospect of sending a spacecraft into a black hole and says "yeah that could be possible with the right technology". That's the sort of mindset that makes astrophysics and space exploration so fascinating to me, the sheer scale of it all making that future focus almost a necessity even if it looks like science fiction.

One of the things I find interesting about evolutionary science is that evolution is not a perfect process, for example leaving behind obsolete traits like our tailbone for tails we no longer have. This study published in Science and reported by Dartmouth College shows a cool example of evolution moving in a different direction: some of our early ancestors "adapted" to their environment before the relevant traits had actually evolved, and evolution only caught up hundreds of thousands of years later! I find that a really fascinating example of how behavior, environment and physical changes all intersect in ways you might not necessarily expect.

I was happy to read this University of Florida release about a paper studying the impact of the citizen-science app iNaturalist on species research from all around the world. We've been collectively reckoning in recent years with the negative effects of social media and other "connective" technologies, so it's nice to see a clear example of a decentralized app having a positive impact.

Even during the height of the COVID pandemic when I'd always wear a mask outside the house, I can't deny that they were uncomfortable in some circumstances. I appreciate research, like this study from Institute of Industrial Science, University of Tokyo, that recognizes this possible impediment to mask usage and focuses not just on increasing their virus-blocking efficiency but also their comfort for the wearer. Hopefully research like this will make the future pandemics (*knocks wood*) just a little more bearable.

I love it when developments in different technologies (in this case robotics and 3D printing) intersect to allow scientists to create something they may not have considered before. "Electronics-free robots" might be a phrase that wouldn't make any sense to researchers from a few decades ago, but as described in this release, UC San Diego roboticists made it real with $20 worth of off-the-shelf 3D printing materials.

Mantis shrimp are just so cool! I love the idea that something so small can have such an incredibly complex biology. I also appreciate the potential applicability to human technology like blast shields and sound filtering in this study. This study really hammers (punches?) home the idea that while we humans have done pretty well for ourselves, it's hard for us to outdo nature.