Tiny remnants of long-lost continents that vanished many millions of years ago are sprinkled around the world, including on remote island chains and seamounts, a mystery that has puzzled scientists for years. 

Now, a team has discovered a mechanism that can explain how this continental detritus ends up resurfacing in unexpected places, according to a study published on Tuesday in Nature Geoscience.  

When continents are subducted into Earth’s mantle, the layer beneath the planet’s crust, waves can form that scrape off rocky material and sweep it across hundreds of miles to new locations.  This “mantle wave” mechanism fills in a gap in our understanding of how lost continents are metabolized through our ever-shifting planet.  

“There are these seamount chains where volcanic activity has erupted in the middle of the ocean,” said Sascha Brune, a professor at the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences and University of Potsdam, in a call with 404 Media. “Geochemists go there, they drill, they take samples, and they do their isotope analysis, which is a very fancy geochemical analysis that gives you small elements and isotopes which come up with something like a ‘taste.’”

“Many of these ocean islands have a taste that is surprisingly similar to the continents, where the isotope ratio is similar to what you would expect from continents and sediments,” he continued. “And there has always been the question: why is this the case? Where does it come from?”

These continental sprinkles are sometimes linked to mantle plumes, which are hot columns of gooey rock that erupt from the deep mantle. Plumes bring material from ancient landmasses, which have been stuck in the mantle for eons, back to the light of day again. Mantle plumes are the source of key hot spots like Hawai’i and Iceland, but there are plenty of locations with enriched continental material that are not associated with plumes—or any other known continental recycling mechanisms. 

The idea of a mantle wave has emerged from a series of revelations made by lead author Tom Gernon, a professor at the University of Southampton, along with his colleagues at GFZ, including Brune. Gernon previously led a 2023 study that identified evidence of similar dynamics occurring within continents. By studying patterns in the distribution of diamonds across South Africa, the researchers showed that slow cyclical motions in the mantle dislodge chunks off the keel of landmasses as they plunge into the mantle. Their new study confirms that these waves can also explain how the elemental residue of the supercontinent Gondwana, which broke up over 100 million years ago, resurfaced in seamounts across the Indian Ocean and other locations. 

In other words, the ashes of dead continents are scattered across extant landmasses following long journeys through the mantle. Though it’s not possible to link these small traces back to specific past continents or time periods, Brune hopes that researchers will be able to extract new insights about Earth’s roiling past from the clues embedded in the ground under our feet.

“What we are saying now is that there is another element, with this kind of pollution of continental material in the upper mantle,” Brune said. “It is not replacing what was said before; it is just complementing it in a way where we don't need plumes everywhere. There are some regions that we know are not plume-related, because the temperatures are not high enough and the isotopes don't look like plume-affected. And for those regions, this new mechanism can explain things that we haven't explained before.”

“We have seen that there's quite a lot of evidence that supports our hypothesis, so it would be interesting to go to other places and investigate this a bit more in detail,” he concluded.

Update: This story has been update to note Tom Gernon was a lead author on the paper.

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that took a bite out of life, appealed to the death drive, gave a yellow light to the universe, and produced hitherto unknown levels of cute.

First, it’s the most epic ocean battle: orcas versus sharks (pro tip: you don’t want to be sharks). Then, a scientific approach to apocalyptic ideation; curbing cosmic enthusiasm; and last, the wonderful world of tadpole-less toads.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files. 

Now, to the feast! 

I guess that’s why they call them killer whales

Higuera-Rivas, Jesús Erick et al. “Novel evidence of interaction between killer whales (Orcinus orca) and juvenile white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) in the Gulf of California, Mexico.” Frontiers in Marine Science.

Orcas kill young great white sharks by flipping them upside down and tearing their livers out of their bellies, which they then eat family-style, according to a new study that includes new footage of these Promethean interactions in Mexican waters.

“Here we document novel repeated predations by killer whales on juvenile white sharks in the Gulf of California,” said researchers led by Jesús Erick Higuera Rivas of the non-profit Pelagic Protection and Conservation AC. 

“Aerial videos indicate consistency in killer whales’ repeated assaults and strikes on the sharks,” the team added. “Once extirpated from the prey body, the target organ is shared between the members of the pods including calves.”

I’ll give you a beat to let that sink in, like orca teeth on the belly of a shark. While it's well-established that orcas are the only known predator of great white sharks aside from humans, the new study is only the second glimpse of killer whales targeting juvenile sharks. 

This group of orcas, known as Moctezuma’s pod, has developed an effective strategy of working together to flip the sharks over, which interrupts the sharks’ sensory system and puts them into a state called tonic immobility. The authors describe the pod’s work as methodical and well coordinated.

“Our evidence undoubtedly shows consistency in the repeated assaults and strikes, indicating efficient maneuvering ability by the killer whales in attempting to turn the shark upside down, likely to induce tonic immobility and allow uninterrupted access to the organs for consumption, " the team said. Previous reports suggest that “the lack of bite marks or injuries anywhere other than the pectoral fins shows a novel and specialized technique of accessing the liver of the shark with minimal handling of each individual.”  

An orca attacking a juvenile great white shark. Image: Marco Villegas 

Sharks, by the way, do not attack orcas. Just the opposite. As you can imagine based on the horrors you have just read, sharks are so petrified of killer whales that they book it whenever they sense a nearby pod.

“Adult white sharks exhibit a memory and previous knowledge about killer whales, which enables them to activate an avoidance mechanism through behavioral risk effects; a ‘fear’- induced mass exodus from aggregations sites,” the team said. “This response may preclude repeated successful predation on adult white sharks by killer whales.”

In other words, if you’re a shark, one encounter with orcas is enough to make you watch your dorsal side for life—assuming you were lucky enough to escape with it. 

In other news…

Apocalypse now plz

Albrecht, Rudolf et al. “Geopolitical, Socio-Economic and Legal Aspects of the 2024PDC25 Event.” Acta Astronautica.

You may have seen the doomer humor meme to “send the asteroid already,” a plea for sweet cosmic relief that fits our beleaguered times. As it turns out, some scientists engage in this type of apocalyptic wish fulfillment professionally. 

Planetary defense experts often participate in drills involving fictional hazardous asteroids, such as the 2024PDC25, a virtual object “discovered” at the 2025 Planetary Defense Conference. In that simulation, 2024PDC25 had a possible impact date in 2041.

Now a team has used that exercise as a jumping off point to explore what might happen if it hit even earlier, channeling that “send the asteroid already” energy.. The researchers used this time-crunched scenario to speculate about the effect on geopolitics and pivotal events, such as the 2028 US Presidential elections.

“As it is very difficult to extrapolate from 2025 across 16 years in this ‘what-if’ exercise, we decided to bring the scenario forward to 2031 and examine it with today’s global background,” Rudolf Albrecht of the Austrian Space Forum. “Today would be T-6 years and the threat is becoming immediate.”

As the astro-doomers would say: Finally some good news.

Big dark energy

Son, Junhyuk et al. “Strong progenitor age bias in supernova cosmology – II. Alignment with DESI BAO and signs of a non-accelerating universe.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

First, we discovered the universe was expanding. Then, we discovered it was expanding at an accelerating rate. Now, a new study suggests that this acceleration might be slowing down. Universe, make up your mind!

But seriously, the possibility that the rate of cosmic expansion is slowing is a big deal, because dark energy—the term for whatever is making the universe expand—was assumed to be a constant for decades. But this consensus has been challenged by observations from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) in Arizona, which became operational in 2021. In its first surveys, DESI’s observations have pointed to an expansion rate that is not fixed, but in flux.

Together with past results, the study “suggests that dark energy may no longer be a cosmological constant” and “our analysis raises the possibility that the present universe is no longer in a state of accelerated expansion,” said researchers led by Junhyuk Son of Yonsei University. “This provides a fundamentally new perspective that challenges the two central pillars of the [cold dark matter] standard cosmological model proposed 27 years ago.”

It will take more research to constrain this mystery, but for now it’s a reminder that the universe loves to surprise.

And the award for most squee goes to…

Thrane, Christian et al. “Museomics and integrative taxonomy reveal three new species of glandular viviparous tree toads (Nectophrynoides) in Tanzania’s Eastern Arc Mountains (Anura: Bufonidae).” Vertebrate Zoology

We’ll end, as all things should, with toadlets. Most frogs and toads reproduce by laying eggs that hatch into tadpoles, but scientists have discovered three new species of toad in Tanzania that give birth to live young—a very rare adaptation for any amphibian, known as ovoviviparity. The scientific term for these youngsters is in fact “toadlet.” Gods be good.

“We describe three new species from the Nectophrynoides viviparus species complex, covering the southern Eastern Arc Mountains populations,” said researchers led by Christian Thrane of the University of Copenhagen. One of the new species included “the observation of toadlets, suggesting that this species is ovoviviparous.”

Note to Nintendo: please make a very tiny Toadlet into a Mario Kart racer.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

After a decade-long excavation at a remote site in Kenya, scientists have unearthed evidence that our early human relatives continuously fashioned the same tools across thousands of generations, hinting that sophisticated tool use may have originated much earlier than previously known, according to a new study in Nature Communications.

The discovery of nearly 1,300 artifacts—with ages that span 2.44 to 2.75 million years old—reveals that the influential Oldowan tool-making tradition existed across at least 300,000 years of turbulent environmental shifts. The wealth of new tools from Kenya’s Namorotukunan site suggest that their makers adapted to major environmental changes in part by passing technological knowledge down through the ages.

“The question was: did they generally just reinvent the [Oldowan tradition] over and over again? That made a lot of sense when you had a record that was kind of sporadic,” said David R. Braun, a professor of anthropology at the George Washington University who led the study, in a call with 404 Media. 

“But the fact that we see so much similarity between 2.4 and 2.75 [million years ago] suggests that this is generally something that they do,” he continued. “Some of it may be passed down through social learning, like observation of others doing it. There’s some kind of tradition that continues on for this timeframe that would argue against this idea of just constantly reinventing the wheel.”

Oldowan tools, which date back at least 2.75 million years, are distinct from earlier traditions in part because hominins, the broader family to which humans belong, specifically sought out high-quality materials such as chert and quartz to craft sharp-edged cutting and digging tools. This advancement allowed them to butcher large animals, like hippos, and possibly dig for underground food sources.

When Braun and his colleagues began excavating at Namorotukunan in 2013, they found many artifacts made of chalcedony, a fine-grained rock that is typically associated with much later tool-making traditions. To the team’s surprise, the rocks were dated to periods as early as 2.75 million years ago, making them among the oldest artifacts in the Oldowan record. 

“Even though Oldowan technology is really just hitting one rock against the other, there's good and bad ways of doing it,” Braun explained. “So even though it's pretty simple, what they seem to be figuring out is where to hit the rock, and which angles to select. They seem to be getting a grip on that—not as well as later in time—but they're definitely getting an understanding at this timeframe.”

The excavation was difficult as it takes several days just to reach the remote offroad site, while much of the work involved tiptoing along steep outcrops. Braun joked that their auto mechanic lined up all the vehicle shocks that had been broken during the drive each season, as a testament to the challenge. 

But by the time the project finally concluded in 2022, the researchers had established that Oldowan tools were made at this site over the course of 300,000 years. During this span, the landscape of Namorotukunan shifted from lush humid forests to arid desert shrubland and back again. Despite these destabilizing shifts in their climate and biome, the hominins that made these tools endured in part because this technology opened up new food sources to them, such as the carcasses of large animals. 

“The whole landscape really shifts,” Braun said. “But hominins are able to basically ameliorate those rapid changes in the amount of rainfall and the vegetation around by using tools to adapt to what’s happening.”

“That's a human superpower—it’s that ability we have to keep this information stored in our collective heads, so that when new challenges show up, there's somebody in our group that remembers how to deal with this particular adaptation,” he added.

It’s not clear exactly which species of hominin made the tools at Namorotukunan; it may have been early members of our own genus Homo, or other relatives, like Australopithecus afarensis, that later went extinct. Regardless, the discovery of such a long-lived and continuous assemblage may hint that the origins of these tools are much older than we currently know.

“I think that we're going to start to find tool use much earlier” perhaps “going back five, six, or seven million years,” Braun said. “That’s total speculation. I've got no evidence that that's the case. But judging from what primates do, I don't really understand why we wouldn't see it.” 

To that end, the researchers plan to continue excavating these bygone landscapes to search for more artifacts and hominin remains that could shed light on the identity of these tool makers, probing the origins of these early technologies that eventually led to humanity’s dominance on the planet.

“It's possible that this tool use is so diverse and so different from our expectations that we have blinders on,” Braun concluded. “We have to open our search for what tool use looks like, and then we might start to see that they're actually doing a lot more of it than we thought they were.”

Welcome back to a special scary installment of the Abstract! Is Halloween over? Technically yes. But as lovers of spooky season will know, the fallout from Halloween—when dawn reveals the remains of the festivities—is an extension of the day itself. That is why I have assembled a parade of horrors for you this morning.

First, ancient mummies from a watery grave. Then: : let’s get tangled up in one of the great mysteries of spider webs; watch out for the venomous snakes; and lastly, scientists literally ask where the bodies are buried. 

For more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files. 

And now, Halloween is over but the darkness lingers on…

Prepare to enter the “mummy zone”

Sereno, Paul et al. “Duck-billed dinosaur fleshy midline and hooves reveal terrestrial clay-template ‘mummification.’ Science.

If you think human mummies are scary, wait until you meet dinosaur mummies. 

Paleontologists have discovered the mummified remains of two duck-billed dinosaurs that belong to the species Edmontosaurus (go Oilers!) annectens, which lived 66 million years ago in what is now Wyoming. 

The immaculate preservation of the animals—a 2-year-old juvenile and young adult that was roughly 5 to 8 years old—exposed unprecedented corporeal details, such as intricate polygonal scales, spinal spikes, fleshy contours, skin wrinkles, and the first hooves ever identified in a dinosaur (or any reptile), making them the oldest hooves in the fossil record.

“The late juvenile is the first subadult dinosaur mummy on record and the first large-bodied dinosaur preserving the fleshy midline over the trunk,” said researchers led by Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago. “The early adult is the first hadrosaurid to preserve the entire spike row from hips to tail tip and the first reptile preserving wedge-shaped pedal hooves.”

These “end-Cretaceous E. annectens preserve the oldest hoof renderings for any tetrapod, the first record of hooves in a reptile” and “the first instance of a hooved tetrapod capable of bipedal locomotion,” the team added.

For more than a century, paleontologists have discovered dinosaur mummies in what the team delightfully calls the “mummy zone” of the Lance Formation of east-central Wyoming. In addition to adding new specimens to this collection, Sereno and his colleagues have also shed light on the rare process of “clay templating” that produces this preservation of mummified flesh, skin, and other soft tissues. 

As the carcasses of these Edmontosaurs dried in the Cretaceous sun, they were suddenly immersed under a flash flood that left a thin biofilm over their skin, preserving the three-dimensional soft tissues in time. The team concluded that “the extraordinary preservation of the ‘mummy zone’ is due to rapid subsidence in a coastal setting subject to seasonal drought-flood cycles.”

While it’s sad that these dinos died young, it’s a miracle that we can observe their flesh, skin, and hooves 66 million years later. Anyway, it’s not as if they had much to look forward to, since the die was already cast for the non-avian dinosaurs. In this case, the die is an apocalyptic space rock to which we humans owe our existence—and the reality of these cosmic gambles of fate is frankly scarier than any mummy, even a dinosaur mummy, ever could be.

In other news…

Deck the halls with stabilimenta

Greco, Gabriele et al. “The effect of different structural decoration geometries on vibration propagation in spider orb webs.” PLOS One.

Halloween revelers will be taking down their decorative spider-web today, but real spiders keep their web decor up all year long. Researchers have long struggled to make sense of the silky zigzag ornaments that some spiders weave, known as “stabilimenta,” which could serve as insect attractors, predator defense, thermal protection, or water collection. Nobody is really sure!

Now, a team has suggested that stabilimenta might be vibrational amplifiers that help alert spiders to prey impacting the web. “No studies have yet investigated how web decorations affect vibration propagation in orb webs,” said researchers led by Gabriele Greco of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. By studying wasp spiders in Sardinia, the team found that in certain cases, ”the presence of the stabilimentum enhances the spider’s ability to detect prey location…compared to webs without a stabilimentum.”

“However, from a biological standpoint, the high variability in stabilimentum geometry suggests that the observed differences in elastic wave propagation are unlikely to have a consistent or significant functional role,” the team added. 

In other words, these web decorations still defy a one-size-fits-all explanation. My own hypothesis is that they are just the dorm room posters of the spider world.

A new antivenom bites back

Ahmadi, Shirin et al. “Nanobody-based recombinant antivenom for cobra, mamba and rinkhals bites.” Nature.

Though I am a militant ophiophilist, even I can see how a clade of dangerous limbless weirdos ended up becoming so widely feared and maligned. Snakes kill tens of thousands of people per year, an ongoing tragedy that has galvanized researchers to develop antivenom “cocktails” that could treat snakebit emergencies across many species while also mitigating adverse immunological reactions.  

A new study has now addressed this challenge “by immunizing an alpaca and a llama with the venoms of 18 different snakes, including mambas, cobras and rinkhals,” said researchers led by Shirin Ahmadi of the Technical University of Denmark. 

The cocktail “effectively prevented venom-induced lethality in vivo across 17 African elapid snake species” and “shows considerable promise for comprehensive, continent-wide protection against snakebites by all medically relevant African elapids,” the team added. 

While it will take much more research to prove it is safe and effective in humans, the antivenom is a significant step toward preventing snakebite deaths and injuries. It's also about the only cocktail that you hope you’ll never have the desire to order.

The more (dead), the merrier

Ma, Quanbao et al. “The spatiotemporal distribution characteristics and influencing factors of ancient tombs in China: A study on the conservation of ancient tombs in China.” PLOS One.

We’ll close on that most hallowed of Halloween traditions—a trip to the haunted cemetery.

In an unprecedented study, researchers mapped out tens of thousands of ancient Chinese tombs spanning the past 4,000 years since the Xia Dynasty. The team used mapping software to analyze the age and location of the tombs to search for clues about the social and political impacts on burial locations.  

“The number of ancient tombs varied significantly across historical periods” with the Qing dynasty (1644 - 1912) accounting for 47.012 percent of the national total, while the Sui dynasty (581 - 618) had only 0.134 percent, according to researchers led by Quanbao Ma of the Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture.

“From a temporal perspective, periods of frequent dynastic transitions and wars in Chinese history were often accompanied by significant population declines and migrations,” the team added. “However, during post-war recovery and periods of societal stability, population numbers typically rebounded and grew rapidly, which was also reflected in the increasing number of deceased individuals requiring burial.”

In other words, contrary to Halloween lore, it can be a good sign to find a lot of dead bodies in one place because it’s often an indicator of more peaceful and stable times (dead bodies, after all, are the product of living ones). What might be more creepy is an absence of graves in your general vicinity. With that in mind, go visit your local ghosts; they are great company this time of year.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Chimpanzees revise their beliefs if they encounter new information, a hallmark of rationality that was once assumed to be unique to humans, according to a study published on Thursday in Science.

Researchers working with chimpanzees at the Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Uganda probed how the primates judged evidence using treats inside boxes, such as a “weak” clue—for example, the sound of a treat inside a shaken box—and a "strong" clue, such as a direct line of sight to the treat. 

The chimpanzees were able to rationally evaluate forms of evidence and to change their existing beliefs if presented with more compelling clues. The results reveal that non-human animals can exhibit key aspects of rationality, some of which had never been directly tested before, which shed new light on the evolution of rational thought and critical thinking in humans and other intelligent animals.      

“Rationality has been linked to this ability to think about evidence and revise your beliefs in light of evidence,” said co-author Jan Engelmann, associate professor at the department of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, in a call with 404 Media. “That’s the real big picture perspective of this study.”

While it’s impossible to directly experience the perspective of a chimpanzee, Engelmann and his colleagues designed five controlled experiments for groups of anywhere from 15 to 23 chimpanzee participants. 

In the first and second experiments, the chimps received a weak clue and a strong clue for a food reward in a box. The chimpanzees consistently made their choices based on the stronger evidence, regardless of the sequence in which the clues were presented. In the third experiment, the chimps were shown an empty box in addition to the strong and weak clues. After this presentation, the box with the strong evidence was removed. In this experiment, the chimpanzees still largely chose the weak clue over the empty box. 

In the fourth experiment, chimpanzees were given a second “redundant” weak clue—for instance, the experimenter would shake a box twice. Then, they were given a new type of clue, like a second piece of food being dropped into a box in front of them. They were significantly more likely to change their beliefs if the clue provided fresh information, demonstrating an ability to distinguish between redundant and genuinely new evidence.

Finally, in the fifth experiment, the chimpanzees were presented with a so-called “defeater” that undermined the strong clue, such as a direct line of sight to a picture of food inside the box, or a shaken box containing a stone, not a real treat. The chimps were significantly more likely to revise their choice about the location of the food in the defeater experiments than in experiments with no defeater. This experiment showcased an ability to judge that evidence that initially seems strong can be weakened with new information.

“The most surprising result was, for sure, experiment five,” Engelmann said. “No one really believed that they would do it, for many different reasons.”

For one thing, he said, the methodology of the fifth experiment demanded a lot of attention and cognitive work from the chimpanzees, which they successfully performed. The result also challenges the assumption that complex language is required to update beliefs with new information. Despite lacking this linguistic ability, chimpanzees are somehow able to flexibly assign strength to different pieces of evidence.

Speaking from the perspective of the chimps, Engelmann outlined the responses to experiment five as: “I used to believe food was in there because I heard it in there, but now you showed me that there was a stone in there, so this defeats my evidence. Now I have to give up that belief.” 

“Even using language, it takes me ten seconds to explain it,” he continued. “The question is, how do they do it? It’s one of the trickiest questions, but also one of the most interesting ones. To put it succinctly, how to think without words?”

To hone in on that mystery, Engelmann and his colleagues are currently repeating the experiment with different primates, including capuchins, baboons, rhesus macaques, and human toddlers and children. Eventually, similar experiments could be applied to other intelligent species, such as corvids or octopuses, which may yield new insights about the abundance and variability of rationality in non-human species.

“I think the really interesting ramification for human rationality is that so many people often think that only humans can reflect on evidence,” Engelmann said. “But our results obviously show that this is not necessarily the case. So the question is, what's special about human rationality then?”

Engelmann and his colleagues hypothesize that humans differ in the social dimensions of our rational thought; we are able to collectively evaluate evidence not only with our contemporaries, but by consulting the work of thinkers who may have lived thousands of years ago. Of course, humans also often refuse to update beliefs in light of new evidence, which is known as “belief entrenchment” or “belief perseveration” (many such cases). These complicated nuances add to the challenge of unraveling the evolutionary underpinnings of rationality.

That said, one thing is clear: many non-human animals exist somewhere on the gradient of rational thought. In light of the recent passing of Jane Goodall, the famed primatologist who popularized the incredible capacities of chimpanzees, the new study carries on a tradition of showing that these primates, our closest living relatives, share some degree of our ability to think and act in rational ways.

Goodall “was the first Western scientist to observe tool use in chimpanzees and really change our beliefs about what makes humans unique,” Engelmann said. “We're definitely adding to this puzzle by showing that rationality, which has so long been considered unique to humans, is at least in some forms present in non-human animals.”

Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that were exhumed from their graves, worked scatological miracles, and drew inspiration from X-rays.

First, a diagnosis 200 years in the making confirms, once again, that Napoleon’s retreat from Russia was a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad time. Then: crystal pee, life-giving poo, and the artistic side of radiotherapy. 

As always, for more of my work, check out my new book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files. 

Let’s dive in (to poopy waters)! 

Bonaparte’s battlers beaten by beets

Barbieri, Rémi et al. “Paratyphoid fever and relapsing fever in 1812 Napoleon’s devastated army.” Current Biology.

Of all the classic blunders, the most famous is getting involved in a land war in Asia (source: The Princess Bride). Napoleon Bonaparte’s troops learned this lesson the hard way during their disastrous retreat from Moscow at the wintry tail of 1812, which claimed the lives of 300,000 soldiers—more than half of the French army—largely from exposure and disease.  

Hold onto your butts, because one day you might be breathing through them. 

Scientists have tested out enteral ventilation—a possible method of administering oxygen with a liquid delivered through the rectum that is then absorbed into the intestines—in humans for the first time. The trial demonstrated that this method of ventilation is safe and “paves the way for future studies to see if this technique can help patients with respiratory failure,” according to a study published on Monday in the journal Med.

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that mounted a defense, felt out of place, found new life, and resurrected the gods of yore.

First, a tale of pregnant stinkbugs, parasitic wasps, and fungi weapons that is fit for a rebooted Aesop fable. Then, a fast food stop for an errant black hole; a new cast of worms, mollusks, and “tusk-shells” from the deep sea; and a friendly reminder to REPENT, SINNERS, or suffer divine wrath.

I also wanted to give another quick shoutout to my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, which is now out in the wild. And if you’d like to keep up with news about the book, alien lore, and my other goings-on, subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files. 

And now, to the science!  

Painting eggs (with protective fungi)

Nishino, Takanori et al. “Defensive fungal symbiosis on insect hindlegs.” Science.

For years, scientists assumed that the weird lumps on the hindlegs of some female stinkbugs were used as auditory organs to perceive sound. A new study reveals that the function of these “tympanum” organs is, in fact, way weirder: They are miniature fungi farms that the “gravid” (pregnant) females use to culture “hyphae” (fungal filaments) to grow anti-wasp coatings for their eggs. 

“To address the question of the function of the tympanum, we investigated the Japanese dinidorid stinkbug Megymenum gracilicorne and discovered that this stinkbug’s hindleg organ is not auditory but a previously unknown type of symbiotic organ,” said researchers led by Takanori Nishino of the University of Tsukuba.  

“We observed that the gravid females laid eggs in a row, and when each egg was deposited, the females rhythmically scratched the fungus-covered hindleg organ with the tarsal claws of the opposite hindleg and rubbed the egg surface, smearing the fungi onto the eggs,” the team said. “Within a few days, the fungal hyphae grew to cover the entire egg mass. On hatching, the hyphae attached to the body surface of newborn nymphs, although the fungi were subsequently lost as the nymphs molted and grew.”

Don’t you just love the smell of fungus-covered eggs in the morning? Probably not, and that’s the point. Parasitic wasps like to go around ovipositing (laying their young) inside the eggs of other bugs, but the team discovered they were repeatedly thwarted by the stinkbug shield.

“In the experimental arena, the female wasps approached both the fungus-removed eggs and the fungus-covered eggs,” the researchers said. “Immediately after antennal drumming on the egg surface, the female wasps only oviposited on the cleaned eggs… It is notable that wasps still approached egg masses fully covered by fungal hyphae, despite showing intense self-grooming, which suggested that the hyphae were adherent.”

That’s what these wasps get for trying to mooch off stinkbug eggs: a faceful of sticky fungal goo that’s going to take some very intense self-grooming to remove. To that end, the team concluded that “the fungi selectively cultured on the female’s hindleg organ of M. gracilicorne are transferred to eggs to act as a physical defense against parasitic wasp attack.”  

As the old adage goes, never judge a stinkbug by her conspicuous tympanal organs.

In other news…

Who left a supermassive black hole all the way over here?

Sfaradi, Itai et al. The First Radio-Bright Off-Nuclear TDE 2024tvd Reveals the Fastest-Evolving Double-Peaked Radio Emission.” The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

When stars wander too close to black holes, they are torn apart by extreme tidal forces, producing radiant light shows called tidal disruption events (TDEs). Astronomers have witnessed these events countless times near the central nucleus of distant galaxies, which are occupied by supermassive black holes, but a team has now captured an unprecedented glimpse of an “off-nuclear” TDE far from the galactic core. 

The event, called AT 2024tvd, involved a black hole with a possible mass of up to 10 million Suns. While it’s a pretty typical enormous black hole, what’s weird is that it was spotted eating a star about 2,600 light years from the nucleus of a distant galaxy, which produced the unusual TDE. Scientists have seen a few dim hints of these off-nuclear events, but this is the first to be clearly captured in bright radio waves.  

“AT 2024tvd is the first radio-bright, bona fide off-nuclear TDE, and it is also the TDE with the fastest evolution observed to date,” said researchers led by Itai Sfaradi of the University of California, Berkeley.

The team speculate that the black hole might have been gravitationally kicked into the galaxy after a dust-up with other, bigger black holes elsewhere. While that sounds like a tumultuous backstory, at least this black hole was able to grab a stellar bite along the way. 

Here be mollusks, worms, and chitons

Senckenberg Ocean Species Alliance (SOSA). Ocean Species Discoveries 13–27—Taxonomic contributions to the diversity of Polychaeta, Mollusca and Crustacea. Biodiversity Data Journal.

Meet the newest invertebrates on the deep-ocean block in a study that identified 14 previously unknown species from remote marine regions around the world. These taxonomic newcomers include the carnivorous sombrero-shaped mollusk Myonera aleutiana, the gummy-bear-esque worm Spinther bohnorum, and the aptly nicknamed “tusk shell” (it looks like a tusk) Laevidentalium wiesei. 

“Despite centuries of exploration, marine invertebrate biodiversity remains notably under-described,” said researchers with the Senckenberg Ocean Species Alliance (SOSA), an international collaboration that was “founded to help meet this challenge.”

While all of the newly identified species are fascinating, I have a selfish soft spot for Ferreiraella charazata (no relation to me, or any of the two million Ferreiras in the world). This deep-sea chiton species belongs to a broader genus established by researcher A.J. Ferreira several decades ago. 

The new Ferreiraella chiton was found in some sunken wood two miles under the sea and is described as having a “very large girdle” and “epibiotic tubeworms on its tail valves,” bringing extra pizazz to the family name.    

Old-world solutions to new-world problems

Shibasaki, Shota et al. “Fear of supernatural punishment can harmonize human societies with nature: an evolutionary game-theoretic approach.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. 

Here’s an out-of-the-box idea to save the environment: Bring back vengeful gods and spirits. In a truly delightful study, scientists explore the benefits of perceived supernatural punishment on the preservation of natural ecosystems with mathematical game theory outlined in the following illustration:

“Japanese folklore includes episodes where spirits of nature (e.g., mountains and trees) punish or avenge people who develop or overuse natural resources,” said researchers led by Shota Shibasaki of Doshisha University. “Similarly, the Batak people of Palawan Island in the Philippines believe in the forest spirits that punish people who overexploit or waste forest resources. Itzá Maya, Guatemala, also views forest spirits as punitively protecting local forests against exploitation.”  

This is the most galaxy-brained math paper I’ve ever read. Ultimately, the results suggest that “supernatural beliefs could play an important role in achieving sustainability.” So let’s break out the talismans and start casting eco-friendly spells because I, for one, welcome our divine treehugging overlords.  

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Climate change has pushed warm-water coral reefs past a point of no return, marking the first time a major climate tipping point has been crossed, according to a report released on Sunday by an international team in advance of the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP30 in Brazil this November.  

Tipping points include global ice loss, Amazon rainforest loss, and the possible collapse of vital ocean currents. Once crossed, they will trigger self-perpetuating and irreversible changes that will lead to new and unpredictable climate conditions. But the new report also emphasizes progress on positive tipping points, such as the rapid rollout of green technologies. 

“We can now say that we have passed the first major climate tipping point,” said Steve Smith, the Tipping Points Research Impact Fellow at the Global Systems Institute and Green Futures Solutions at the University of Exeter, during a media briefing on Tuesday. “But on the plus side,” he added, “we've also passed at least one major positive tipping point in the energy system,” referring to the maturation of solar and wind power technologies.

The world is entering a “new reality” as global temperatures will inevitably overshoot the goal of staying within 1.5°C of pre-industrial averages set by the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, warns the Global Tipping Points Report 2025, the second iteration of a collaboration focused on key thresholds in Earth’s climate system. 

Warm-water corals are rich ecosystems that support a quarter of all marine life and provide food and income to more than a billion people. These vital reefs have experienced “diebacks” for years as rising marine temperatures produce mass-mortality bleaching events. But the severe marine heat waves of 2023 were particularly devastating, and the corals are now reaching their thermal threshold. The report concludes that they are virtually certain to tip toward widespread diebacks, though preventive actions can mitigate the extent of loss and secure small refuges. 

“The marine heat wave hit 80 percent of the world's warm-water coral reefs with the worst bleaching event on record,” said Smith. “Their response confirms that we can no longer talk about tipping points as a future risk. The widespread dieback of warm-water coral reefs is already underway, and it's impacting hundreds of millions of people who depend on the reef for fishing, for tourism, for coastal protection, and from rising seas and storm surges.”

The report singled out Caribbean corals as a useful case study given that these ecosystems face a host of pressures, including extreme weather, overfishing, and inadequate sewage and pollution management. These coral diebacks are a disaster not only for the biodiverse inhabitants of the reefs, but also for the many communities who depend on them for food, income, coastal protection, and as a part of cultural identity.  

“The Caribbean is in a particularly precarious situation,” Melanie McField, founder and director of the Healthy Reefs for Healthy People Initiative, an NGO operating in the Mesoamerican Reef, told 404 Media during the briefing. "We are very concerned about the Caribbean, but it's actually all of these warm-water reefs. They're all facing the same thing.”

McField added that the actions needed to bolster the corals’ defense against rising temperatures are clear, and include better sewage treatment, the creation of marine preserves, and more strident efforts to tackle overfishing.  

“We've been saying the same things,” she said. “We haven't done them. Those are things that are completely in the power of national and local regulators.”

To that end, the report emphasizes that new governmental frameworks and institutions will need to be formed to tackle these problems, because the current system is clearly not up to the task. Avoiding future tipping points will not only require a doubling-down on decarbonization, but also demands major progress toward carbon removal technologies.

“We need to rapidly scale and take seriously the need for sustainable and equitable carbon removal technologies,” said Manjana Milkoreit, a postdoctoral researcher of sociology and human geography at the University of Oslo. “Carbon removal is now the only way to bring global temperatures back down after overshoot—to achieve net negative, not just net zero emissions. That requires serious and sustained investment, starting now.”

“We are currently not preparing for the distinct impacts of tipping points, and we do not have the capacities to address the cascading effects of tipping points,” she concluded. “The key message here is: Do not assume that we already know what to do, or we're already doing everything we can. It's not just more of the same. A different approach to governance is needed.”

Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that lived long, played hard, crashed out, and topped it off with a glass of claret.

First off, it’s Naked Mole-Rat Week! Or at least it should be, given that there are multiple new studies about these rodents, which are neither moles nor rats, but are certifiably naked. Then: dogs on benders; ships on ice; and an aged wine with notes of oak, blackberry, and aggressive trade policy.

The age of Man is over; the time of the Mole-Rat has come

Yamakawa, Masanori et al. “Quantitative and systematic behavioral profiling reveals social complexity in eusocial naked mole-rats.” Science Advances.

Y. Chen et al. “A cGAS-mediated mechanism in naked mole-rats potentiates DNA repair and delays aging.” Science.

What a whirlwind week it’s been for the naked mole-rat beat, with studies that shed light into the complex social behavior of these burrowing rodents as well as their extreme longevity. Let’s make like a naked mole-rat and dig in! 

Naked mole-rats didn’t get the memo about being a normal mammal and instead opted for a “eusocial” society similar to insects that is ruled by a colony queen with an entourage of breeder males, which are supported by a caste system of non-breeding workers. It’s super weird, but it seems to be working out for them because they can live to nearly 40 years old—ten times longer than most animals their size—and they are highly resistant to cancer and a host of other deathbringers. 

Scientists took a closer look at the palace intrigue of these rodents by setting up several colonies in laboratory conditions and tracking their movements with microchips. The results revealed that queens are bossy bullies that get so tired from shoving their subjects around that they have to take frequent royal naps. 

Non-breeding workers, meanwhile, fell into six main “clusters” including cleaners, transport specialists, caretakers, diggers, and a group that just kind of idly loafs around (my spirit mole-rat cluster). 

“Breeding females patrol burrows and display agonistic dominance toward nonbreeders paralleling queen aggression in primitively eusocial insects,” said Masanori Yamakawa of Kumamoto University. Meanwhile, non-breeding “cluster 1 individuals (high mobility and garbage occupancy) may serve as transport specialists, whereas those in cluster 4 (low mobility and frequent occupancy of nonfunctional chambers) may engage primarily in digging tasks. Cluster 5 individuals, who frequently occupied toilet chambers, may contribute to cleaning-related roles.” 

In addition to this window into mole-rat social behavior, a new genetic analysis identified the critical role of an enzyme called cGAS, a common component in animal immune systems, in extending the lives of these subterranean super-agers. 

Whereas cGAS may hinder DNA repair in most animals, including humans and mice, the naked mole-rat has evolved a version of the enzyme with four modified amino acids that enhances DNA repair . Naturally, the researchers also engineered some fruit flies with this naked mole rat enzyme—you gotta mess with fruit flies or it’s not science—and lo and behold, the juiced flies lived to about 70 days, roughly ten days longer than the control group. 

“Our work provides a molecular basis for how DNA repair is activated to contribute to the exceptional longevity during evolution in naked mole-rats,” said researchers led by Yu Chen of Tongji University in Shanghai. “These findings support the notion that efficient DNA repair decelerates the aging process and raise the possibility that targeting cGAS to enhance DNA repair could provide an intervention strategy for promoting longevity.”

All those past adventurers were looking for the Fountain of Youth in the wrong places; it wasn’t in some beautiful tropical grove, but rather a stanky underground rodent pit. 

In non-naked-mole-rat news… 

Sit. Stay. Stage an intervention.

Mazzini, Alja et al “Addictive-like behavioural traits in pet dogs with extreme motivation for toy play.” Scientific Reports. 

Dogs can literally get addicted to the game, according to a study that probed “‘excessive toy motivation” in domestic dogs as “a potential parallel to behavioral addictions in humans.” What this means in practice is that researchers enlisted 105 dogs to play with a lot of really fun toys and about a third of them got totally hooked.

Thirty-three of the playful pooches “exhibited behaviors consistent with addictive-like tendencies including an excessive fixation on toys, reduced responsiveness to alternative stimuli, and persistent efforts to access toys,” said researchers led by Alja Mazzini of the University of Bern. “Dogs [are] the only non-human species so far that appears to develop addictive-like behaviours spontaneously without artificial induction.” 

While this an interesting scientific conclusion, the study is perhaps most notable for producing delightful footage of dogs in the midst of full-on toy benders. Like all of us who struggle with bad habits and fixations, these dogs will just have to take it one play at a time.

The enduring Endurance mystery

Tuhkuri, Jukka. Why did Endurance sink? Polar Record.

Endurance, the ship crushed by ice in 1915 during Ernest Shackleton's Antarctic expedition, was actually not all that endurant, according to Jukka Tukuri of Aalto University who concludes in a new study that “Shackleton was well aware of the risks related to the strength of Endurance, but chose to use it anyway.”

“This ship is not as strong as the Nimrod constructionally” wrote Shackleton of Endurance in a letter to his wife in 1914, comparing it to his previous Antarctic ride. “There is nothing to be scared of as I think she will go through ice all right only I would exchange her for the old Nimrod any day now except for comfort.”

You have to love the phrase “there is nothing to be scared of” in a letter from a guy on his way to the South Pole in a rickety ship that is definitely going to sink the following year. I’m sure Mrs. Shackleton was totally comforted by this! Tukuri provides many other fascinating diary entries to support his conclusion that “Endurance was not among the strongest ships of its time.”  

That said, Endurance spent more than a century two miles under the Antarctic seas before the wreck was amazingly rediscovered and photographed in 2022. It’s still looking pretty good, even if Shackleton’s decision to set sail in it does not hold up as well.

A toast to the 17th century

Leary, Charlie. “Tasting 1660s Bordeaux claret: temporal transformation and wine economics.” Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science.

To fight off that polar chill, let’s warm up for the (North American) long weekend with a really, really aged glass of wine. A new study upends the traditional narrative about the emergence of Bordeaux claret as a desired wine in the 1600s, suggesting it was not strictly developed in response to tariffs (Sike! I used wine to lure you into a disguised tariff story).  

“The advent of a stronger, darker style of Bordeaux red wine, known as claret, in the English market has drawn substantial scholarly interest because it played a pivotal role in the balance of trade and international political economy during the eighteenth century,” said author Charlie Leary, a wine historian. 

“Economic historians have posited that Bordeaux vignerons developed high-quality, high-priced claret in response to England’s fixed, volume-based tariffs on French wine,” he continued. “This article…shows that the new claret style pre-existed England’s tariff regime.” 

With that, cheers to lost years and jeers to economic fears.  

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Scientists have developed a unique nanoparticle vaccine that prevented the development of multiple forms of cancer in mice, reports a study published in Cell Reports Medicine on Thursday. 

Eighty percent of mice that received the novel vaccine and were subsequently exposed to cancerous cells did not develop tumors and survived to the end of the 250-day long experiment. In contrast, all of the mice that received different vaccine formulations, or remained unvaccinated, developed tumors and none survived longer than 35 days.

It’s too early to know if this breakthrough will ever be applicable to human cancer prevention or treatment, but the successful demonstration in mice is a promising result for the team’s so-called “super-adjuvant” vaccine. This approach uses nanoparticles made of fatty molecules to deliver two distinct “adjuvants,” which are substances in vaccines that enhance an immune response.

“The results that we have are super exciting, and we're really looking forward to pushing forward to the next steps,” said Griffin Kane, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and first author on the paper, in a call with 404 Media. “But I think that the translation of these types of therapies from preclinical mouse models to the clinic is a very humbling experience for a lot of people and teams.”

“It’s these highlights that make it worth coming to work,” added Prabhani Atukorale, assistant professor of biomedical engineering in the Riccio College of Engineering at UMass Amherst and corresponding author on the paper, in the same call. “But I agree that the translation of these findings is key. We are not satisfied with simply publishing a paper. We want to get these into patients, and it is a humbling process because there are significant gaps.”

Scientists have been working on nanoparticle-based drug designs for decades, and the field has experienced rapid progress in recent years alongside advances in nanotechnology and drug delivery pathways. Nanoparticles provide a stable platform for carrying vaccine components to key targets, increasing the efficiency of delivery to specific sites in the body and uptake by the immune system. 

Atukorale’s team previously published a study on a similar vaccine that shrank and cleared tumors from mice. In their new study, the researchers adapted the nanoparticle design to achieve prophylactic protection from melanoma, pancreatic, and triple-negative breast cancer in mice, with support from the Institute for Applied Life Sciences at UMass Amherst, UMass Chan Medical School, and the National Institutes of Health.

Vaccines consist of two main components: antigens, which are substances that trigger an immune response, and adjuvants, which enhance the immune response. Like other cancer vaccines, the nanoparticle treatment delivers antigens that activate white blood cells in the immune system to help fight off specific types of tumors. 

What’s new in this study is that the nanoparticles accommodated two distinct adjuvants that target different immune pathways known as STING (stimulator of interferon genes) and TLR4 (Toll-like receptor 4), which further boosts the immune response to introduced cancer cells. 

Adjuvants often require very different drug delivery systems, but the nanoparticles, which are about 30 to 60 nanometers across, are big enough to house different adjuvants in their unique environments, while remaining small enough to enter lymph nodes where they can activate key immune cells.  

“The big picture is that we need better adjuvants for our vaccines,” Atukorale said. “We think that we can build them using nanoparticles. This is an example in a tumor.”

One of the most exciting surprises from the study turned out to be the prolonged protection against the spread of cancer provided by the nanoparticle vaccine. The vaccinated mice that did not develop tumors during their first exposure to melanoma cells were then later injected with new metastatic cancer cells, and their immune systems fought those off too, preventing the development and spread of the tumors.

“There's long-term robust memory immunity,” said Kane.

Moreover, while the team focused on certain cancers in their experiment, the nanoparticle platform could deliver a range of specialized antigen-adjuvant combinations to target different types of tumors. 

“We think that this is one of the true strengths of these strategies,” said Atukorale. “They will have much broader reach than many of the cancer-specific treatments out there.”

That said, Kane and Atukorale cautioned that their team’s work is still in early stages—and, of course, focused on mice and not people. They also noted that only a handful of cancer vaccines have been clinically approved out of thousands in development. While the new study represents an intriguing step forward, the dream of wide-ranging prophylactic cancer vaccines is many years away, assuming it can materialize at all. 

“A lot of very elegant technologies have come out of labs and have not fully succeeded in patients,” Kane said. “We believe that we're building this technology towards something that would improve on what current cancer vaccines are able to deliver.”