Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that broke ice, broke hearts, and broke out the libations. Also, if you haven’t seen it already, we just covered an amazing breakthrough in our understanding of the cosmos, which is as much a story about humanity’s endless capacity for ingenuity as it is about the wondrous nature of black holes.

Microbes on ice 

Zhang, Qing et al. “Ice gliding diatoms establish record-low temperature limits for motility in a eukaryotic cell.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Scientists have discovered Arctic algae moving around with ease in icy environments of -15°C (5°F)—the lowest temperatures ever recorded for motility in a eukaryotic lifeform. While some simple microbes can survive lower temperatures, this is the first time that scientists have seen eukaryotic life—organisms with more complex cells containing a nucleus—able to live, thrive, and locomote in such chilly environments.

It’s amazing that these so-called “ice diatoms” can move around at all, but it’s even cooler that they do it in style with a gliding mechanism that researchers describe as a “‘skating’ ability.” Their secret weapon? Mucus threads (“mucilage”) that they use like anchors to pull themselves through frozen substrates.

“The unique ability of ice diatoms to glide on ice” enables them “to thrive in conditions that immobilize other marine diatoms,” said researchers led by Qing Zhang of Stanford University.

Zhang and her colleagues made this discovery by collecting ice cores from 12 locations around the Arctic Chukchi Sea during a 2023 expedition on the research vessel Sikuliaq, which is owned by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and operated by the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Unfortunately, this is a research area that could be destroyed by the Trump administration, with NSF facing 70 percent cuts to its polar research budget.

In other news…

How did Mars get its leopard spots? 

Hurowitz, Joel et al. “Redox-driven mineral and organic associations in Jezero Crater, Mars.” Nature.

If lifeforms are doing triple axels in Arctic ice on Earth, it’s natural to wonder whether alien organisms may have emerged elsewhere. To that end, scientists announced the discovery of a tantalizing hint of possible life on Mars this week. 

NASA’s Perseverance rover turned up organic carbon-bearing mudstones that preserve past redox reactions, which involves the transfer of electrons between substances resulting in one being “reduced” (gaining electrons) and one being “oxidized” (losing electrons). The remnants of those reactions look like “leopard spots” in the Bright Angel formation of Jezero Crater, where the rover landed in 2021, according to the study. 

This is not slam-dunk evidence of life, as the reactions can be geological in origin, but they “warrant consideration as ‘potential biosignatures.”  

“This assessment is further supported by the geological context of the Bright Angel formation, which indicates that it is sedimentary in origin and deposited from water under habitable conditions,” said researchers led by Joel Hurowitz of Stony Brook University. 

The team added that the best way to confirm the origin of the ambiguous structures is to bring Perseverance’s samples back to Earth for further study as part of the Mars Sample Return (MSR) program. Unfortunately, the Trump administration wants to cancel MSR. It seems that even when we have nice things, we still can’t have nice things, a paradox that we all must navigate together. 

The last flight of Lucky and Lucky II

Smyth, Robert S.H. et al. “Fatal accidents in neonatal pterosaurs and selective sampling in the Solnhofen fossil assemblage.” Current Biology

About 150 million years ago, a pair of tiny pterodactyls—just days or weeks old—were trying to fly through a cataclysmic storm. But the wind was strong enough to break the bones of their baby wings, consigning them to a watery grave in the lagoon below. 

Now, scientists describe how the very storm that cut their lives short also set them up for a long afterlife as exquisitely preserved fossils, nicknamed Lucky and Lucky II, in Germany's Solnhofen limestone. 

“Storms caused these pterosaurs to drown and rapidly descend to the bottom of the water column, where they were quickly buried in storm-generated sediments, preserving both their skeletal integrity and soft tissues,” said researchers led by Robert Smyth of the University of Leicester.

“This catastrophic taphonomic pathway, triggered by storm events, was likely the principal mechanism by which small- to medium-sized pterodactyloids…entered the Solnhofen assemblage,” they added.  

While it’s sad that these poor babies had such short lives, it’s astonishing that such a clear cause of death can be established 150 million years later. Rest in peace, Lucky and Lucky II.

Trump’s aid cuts could cause millions of deaths from tuberculosis alone

Mandal, Sandip et al. “A deadly equation: The global toll of US TB funding cuts.” PLOS Global Public Health.

The Trump administration’s gutting of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), carried out in public fashion by Elon Musk and DOGE, will likely cause millions of excess deaths from tuberculosis (TB) by 2030, reports a sobering new study.

“Termination of US funding could result in an estimated 10.6 million additional TB cases and 2.2 million additional TB deaths during the period 2025–2030,” said researchers led by Sandip Mandal of the Center for Modeling and Analysis at Avenir Health. “The loss of U.S. funding endangers global TB control efforts” and “potentially puts millions of lives at risk.”

Beyond TB, the overall death toll from the loss of USAID is estimated to reach 14 million deaths by 2030. The destruction of USAID must never be memory-holed as it is shaping up to be among the most deadly actions ever enacted by a government outside of war.

Small microbes with big impacts

Ribalet, François et al. Future ocean warming may cause large reductions in Prochlorococcus biomass and productivity. Nature Microbiology.

In more bad news, it turns out that the bacteria that’s responsible for making a lot of Earth’s oxygen is highly vulnerable to human-driven climate change. Prochlorococcus, the most abundant photosynthetic organism on Earth, is the source of about 20 percent of the oxygen in our biosphere. But rapidly warming seas could set off “a possible 17–51 percent reduction in Prochlorococcus production in tropical oceans,” according to a new study.

“Prochlorococcus division rates appear primarily determined by temperature, increasing exponentially to 28°C, then sharply declining,” said researchers led by François Ribalet of the University of Washington. “Regional surface water temperatures may exceed this range by the end of the century under both moderate and high warming scenarios.”

It’s possible that this vital bacteria will adapt by moving to higher latitudes or by evolving more heat-tolerant variants. But that seems like a big gamble on something as important as Earth’s oxygen budget. 

Last, we feast

Esposito, Carmen et al. “Diverse feasting networks at the end of the Bronze Age in Britain (c. 900-500 BCE) evidenced by multi-isotope analysis.” iScience.

We are far from the first generation to live through unstable times, as evidenced by a new study about the “climatic change and economic upheaval” in Britain during the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age about 3,000 years ago. 

These disruptions were traumatic, but they also galvanized new modes of community connection—a.k.a epic parties where people ate, drank, made merry, and dumped the remnants of their revelry in trashpiles called “middens.” 

“These vast mounds of cultural debris represent the coming together of vast numbers of people and animals for feasts on a scale unparalleled in British prehistory,” said researchers led by Carmen Esposito of Cardiff University. “This study, the largest multi-isotope faunal dataset yet delivered in archaeology, has demonstrated that, despite their structural similarities, middens had diverse roles.” 

"Given the proximity of all middens to rivers, it is likely that waterways played a role in the movement of people, objects and livestock,” the team added. “Overall, the research points to the dynamic networks that were anchored on feasting events during this period and the different, perhaps complementary, roles that different middens had at the Bronze Age-Iron Age transition.”

When in doubt—then as now—have a big party. 

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Scientists have captured the clearest ever gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime—a breakthrough that has resolved decades-old mysteries about black holes and the nature of our reality, according to a study published on Wednesday in Physical Review Letters.

Gravitational waves forged by an ancient merger between two massive black holes reached Earth on January 14 of this year, where they were picked up by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) located in Washington and Louisiana. LIGO has discovered hundreds of these waves, but the January event, known as GW250114, is the cleanest detection ever made with a signal-to-noise ratio of 80 (meaning that the signal is about 80 times louder than the noise). 

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that transgressed the rules, explored extraterrestrial vistas, and went with the flow.

First, ants are doing really strange things again. I don’t even want to spoil it—you’ll just have to read on! Then, plan your trip to the latest hot exoplanet destination (literally, in the case of the lava planets), and check out Saturn’s new bling on the way. Lastly, all aboard on a trip to the riverboats of the past.

Same mama, different species

Y. Juvé, C. Lutrat, A. Ha, et al. “One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants.” Nature.

Scientists have discovered a gnarly reproductive strategy that is unlike anything ever documented in nature: Ant queens that produce offspring from two entirely different species by cloning the “alien genome” of males from another lineage. This unique behavior has been  dubbed “xenoparity,” according to a new study.

Researchers were first tipped off to this bizarre adaptation after they kept finding builder harvester ants (Messor structor) in the colonies of Iberian harvester ants (Messor ibericus). Field and laboratory observations revealed that, in addition to mating with males of their own species, M. ibericus queens mate with M structor. The queens store and clone this sperm to produce hybrids with M. structor genomes and M. ibericus mitochondria. Even though these two ant species diverged five million years ago and don’t share the exact same range, the queens rely on M. structor males exclusively for its worker caste, suggesting a “domestication-like process,” the study reports.

“Living organisms are assumed to produce same-species offspring,” said researchers co-led by Y. Juvé, C. Lutrat, and A. Ha of the University of Montpellier. “Here, we report that this rule has been transgressed by Messor ibericus ants, with females producing individuals from two different species.”

“M. ibericus queens strictly depend on males of M. structor, which is a well-differentiated, non-sister species,” the team added. “To our knowledge, females needing to clone members of another species have not previously been observed.”

Iberian harvester queens only produce females when they mate within their own species, which may have prompted this cross-species adaptation. By producing cloned M. structor males, the queens ensure the continuation of a worker caste as well as a supply of male mates for later generations of queens. 

“At the intraspecific level, several cases of ants cloning males from their own species’ sperm have been observed,” the researchers noted. “Here, our results imply that this phenomenon has crossed species barriers.”

“Taken together, these results further support the idea that clonal males should be characterized as a domesticated lineage of M. structor,” they continued. “Although matching all criteria of domestication, the relationship we describe is both more intimate and integrated than the most remarkable examples known so far.”

What’s next, dogs giving birth to whales? Probably not, but still, these transgressive queens have rewritten the reproductive rulebook in a truly astonishing way.

In other news…  

Vacationing really far abroad 

Dovey, Ceridwen. Imagining exoplanets as destinations: a case study of artist-scientist collaborations on NASA's iconic Exoplanet Travel Bureau posters. Journal of Science Communication.

In 2015, NASA released a bunch of splashy retro posters that imagined exoplanets as travel destinations, as part of a collaborative project between scientists and artists. A new study dissects the huge success of that campaign, which engaged the public in the burgeoning field of exoplanet research and helped scientists visualize their distant observational targets.

Exoplanet posters. Image: NASA

The Exoplanet Travel Bureau posters “were not images designed to be understood by the public as objectively ‘real’ or ‘scientific’, yet they were still scientifically informed,” said author Ceridwen Dovey of Macquarie University. “As tourism posters proposing travel to extremely distant exoplanets, they were not pretending to be direct images of astronomical objects, yet they were also not pure speculation or fantasy. They sat very comfortably—and alluringly—somewhere in between.”

There’s always a fine line to tread when depicting alien exoplanets, given how little we know about what it is really like on these distant worlds. But since interstellar travel does not seem to be coming anytime soon, the NASA posters served as a powerful imaginative stopgap for thinking about these new worlds—even if their amenities remain unknown. 

Saturn has ‘strange dark arms’ and beads to match its rings

Stallard, Tom S. et al. “JWST/NIRSpec Detection of Complex Structures in Saturn's Sub-Auroral Ionosphere and Stratosphere.” Geophysical Research Letters.

The James Webb Space Telescope is most famous for peering farther back in space and time than ever before, revealing amazing insights about the early universe. But JWST is also shedding light on planets right in our own backyard, as evidenced by a new study about “dark beads” and “strange dark arms” that showed up in its observations of Saturn. 

These features arise from Saturn's stratosphere and ionosphere, which were captured in "unprecedented detail” by JWST’s near-infrared instruments. The “arms” are methane-gas  structures that extend down from the poles toward the equator while the beads emerge “in a variety of sizes and shapes” on one side of the ionosphere.

“This stratospheric structure is again unlike anything previously observed at other planets,” said researchers led by Tom Stallard of Northumbria University. “While we do not understand how or why these dark arms are generated, it is perhaps noteworthy that they occur in a region where the underlying atmosphere is also disturbed, suggesting this stratospheric layer might be influenced from below.”

Given its famous rings and now its beads, my prediction is that they will discover a bedazzled bangle on Saturn next.

Up history’s creek without a paddle

Filet, Clara et al. “As the water flows: A method for assessing river navigability in the past.” Journal of Archaeological Science.

Rivers are often employed as metaphors for the passage of time into the future, but a new study is paddling upstream into the past. The goal was to reconstruct the navigability of rivers in ancient times, which is important information for understanding past trade networks, migrations, and social connections. However, it is difficult to pinpoint how ancient peoples traversed these waterways using only archeological sites and historical documents.

“The very notion of a navigable river seems problematic, as the possibilities for navigation on a river are highly dependent on the section considered, the type of boat, the climate and seasonal cycles,” said researchers led by Clara Filet of the Bordeaux Montaigne University. 

To address this gap, the researchers developed an algorithm that searched for flat and calm stretches of a river, called “plain sections.” They tested out their approach on dozens of rivers used by cultures in ancient Gaul and Roman and concluded that it “provides a good approximation of navigable sections.” 

“Applying this method offers a new perspective on navigable areas in the Roman world, providing a reasonable first guess that could guide future empirical research into the navigability of ancient rivers,” the team concluded.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Scientists have long been puzzled by the sturdy glaciers of the mountains of central Asia, which have inexplicably remained intact even as other glaciers around the world rapidly recede due to human-driven climate change. This mysterious resilience may be coming to an end, however. 

The glaciers in this mountainous region—nicknamed the “Third Pole” because it boasts more ice  than any place outside of the Arctic and Antarctic polar caps— have passed a tipping point that could set them on a path to accelerated mass loss, according to a new study. The end of this unusual glacial resilience, known as the Pamir-Karakoram Anomaly, would have major implications for the people who rely on the glaciers for water. 

Scientists suggested that a recent decline in snowfall to the region is behind the shift, but it will take much more research to untangle the complicated dynamics of these remote and under-studied glaciers, according to a study published on Tuesday in Communications Earth & Environment.

“We have known about this anomaly since the early 2000s,” said study co-author Francesca Pellicciotti, a professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), in a call with 404 Media. “In the last 25 years, remote-sensing has really revolutionized Earth sciences in general, and also cryospheric sciences.”

“There is no definite answer yet for why those glaciers were quite stable,” said Achille Jouberton, a PhD student at ISTA who led the study, in the same call. “On average, at the regional scale, they were doing quite well in the last decade—until recently, which is what our study is showing.”

This space-down view of the world’s glaciers initially revealed the resilience of ice and snowpack in the Pamir-Karakoram region, but that picture started to change around 2018. Many of these glaciers have remained inaccessible to scientists due to political instabilities and other factors, leaving a multi-decade gap in the research about their curious strength. 

To get a closer look, Jouberton and his colleagues established a site for monitoring snowfall, precipitation, and water resources at Kyzylsu Glacier in central Tajikistan in 2021. In addition to this fieldwork, the team developed sophisticated models to reconstruct changes within this catchment since 1999. 

While the glaciers still look robust from the outside, the results revealed that snowfall has decreased and ice melt has increased. These interlinked trends have become more pronounced over the past seven years and were corroborated by conversations with locals. The decline in precipitation has made the glacier vulnerable to summer melting, as there is less snowpack to protect it from the heat. 

“It will take a while before these glaciers start looking wasted, like the glaciers of the Alps, or North America, or South America,” said Pellicciotti. 

While the team pinpointed a lack of snowfall as a key driver of the shift, it’s unclear why the region is experiencing reduced precipitation. The researchers are also unsure if a permanent threshold has been crossed, or if these changes could be chalked up to natural variation. They hope that the study, which is the first to warn of this possible tipping point, will inspire climate scientists, atmospheric scientists, and other interdisciplinary researchers to weigh in on future work. 

“We don't know if this is just an inflection in the natural cycle, or if it's really the beginning of a trend that will go on for many years,” said Pellicciotti. “So we need to expand these findings, and extend them to a much longer period in the past and in the future.”

Resolving these uncertainties will be critical for communities in this region that rely on healthy snowpack and ice cover for their water supply. It also hints that even the last stalwart glacial holdouts on Earth are vulnerable to climate change.

“The major rivers are fed by snow and glacier melts, which are the dominant source of water in the summer months, which makes the glaciers very important,” concluded Jouberton. "There’s a large amount of people living downstream in all of the Central Asian countries that are really direct beneficiaries of those water and meltwater from the glaciers.”

Welcome back to the Abstract! What an extreme week it has been in science. We’ve got extreme adaptations and observations to spare today, so get ready for a visually spectacular tour of deep seas, deep time, and deep space.

First up, a study with an instant dopamine hit of a title: “Extreme armour in the world’s oldest ankylosaur.” Then, stories about two very different marine creatures that nonetheless share a penchant for brilliant outfits and toxic lifestyles; a baby picture that requires a 430-light-year zoom-in; and lastly, we must once again salute the Sun in all its roiling glory. Enjoy the peer-reviewed eye-candy!

Ankylosaurs: Swole from the start

Maidment, Susannah et al. “Extreme armour in the world’s oldest ankylosaur.” Nature.

Paleontologists have discovered an ankylosaur that is epic even by the high standards set by this family of giant walking tanks. Partial remains of Spicomellus—the oldest known ankylosaur, dating back 165 million years—reveal that the dinosaur had much more elaborate body armor than later generations, including a collar of bony spikes up to three feet long, and fused tail vertebrae indicating an early tail weapon. 

Ankylosaurs are known for their short-limbed frames, clubbed tail weapons, and thick-plated body armor that puts Batman to shame. These dinosaurs, which could reach 30 feet from beak to club, are mostly known from Late Cretaceous fossils. As a consequence “their early evolution in the Early–Middle Jurassic is shrouded in mystery due to a poor fossil record” and “the evolution of their unusual body plan is effectively undocumented,” according to a new study.

In October 2022, a local farmer in the Moroccan badlands discovered a partial skeleton that fills in this tantalizing gap. The fossils suggest that the plates, spikes, and weaponized tails were features of ankylosaurian anatomy from the Jurassic jump.

“The new specimen reveals extreme dermal armour modifications unlike those of any other vertebrate, extinct or extant,” said researchers led by Susannah Maidment of the National History Museum in London. “Given that Spicomellus is an early-diverging ankylosaur or ankylosaurid, this raises the possibility that ankylosaurs acquired this extravagant armour early in their evolutionary history, and this was reduced to a simpler arrangement in later forms.”

As you can see, this early ankylosaur was the living embodiment of the phrase “try me.” Two huge spikes, one of which is almost entirely preserved, flanked the “cervical half-ring” on the animal's neck. The fossils are so visually astonishing that at first glance, they almost look like an arsenal of spears, axes, and clubs from an ancient army. 

The team doesn’t hide their amazement at the find, writing that “no known ankylosaur possesses any condition close to the extremely long pairs of spines on the cervical half-ring” and note that the fossils overturn “current understanding of tail club evolution in ankylosaurs, as these structures were previously thought to have evolved only in the Early Cretaceous.”

This incredible armor may have initially evolved as a sexual display that was adapted for defensive purposes by the rise of “multitonne predators” like T. rex. That might explain why the ornaments seemed to have simplified over time. Whatever the reason, the fossils demonstrate that ankylosaurs, as a lineage, were born ready for a fight. 

In other news…

Now you sea(horse) me

Qu, Meng et al. “Symbiosis with and mimicry of corals were facilitated by immune gene loss and body remodeling in the pygmy seahorse.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

We’ll move now from the extremely epic to the extremely twee. Pygmy seahorses, which measure no more than an inch, mimic the brightly-colored and venomous gorgonian corals that they symbiotically inhabit. Scientists have now discovered that these tiny animals achieved their extraordinary camouflage in part by discarding a host of genes involved in growth and immune response, perhaps because their protective coral habitats rendered those traits obsolete.

“We analyzed the tiny seahorse’s genome revealing the genomic bases of several adaptations to their mutualistic life,” said researchers led by Meng Qu of the South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. The analysis suggests “that the protective function of corals may have permitted the pygmy seahorse to lose an exceptionally large number of immune genes.” 

Living in a toxic environment can have its benefits, if you’re a seahorse. And that is the perfect segue to the next story…

When life hands you arsenic, make lemon-colored skin

Wang, Hao et al. “A deep-sea hydrothermal vent worm detoxifies arsenic and sulfur by intracellular biomineralization of orpiment (As2S3).” PLOS Biology.

After a long day, isn’t it nice to sink into a scalding bath of arsenic and hydrogen sulfide? That’s the self-care routine for Paralvinella hessleri, a deep sea worm that “is the only animal that colonizes the hottest part of deep-sea hydrothermal vents in the west pacific,” according to a new study.

So, how are these weirdos surviving what should be lethally toxic waters that exceed temperatures of 120°F? The answer is a "distinctive strategy” of “fighting poison with poison,” said researchers led by Hao Wang of the Center of Deep-Sea Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences. The worm stores the arsenic in its skin cells and mixes it with the sulfide to make a dazzling mineral, called orpiment, that provides its bright yellow hue.

“This process represents a remarkable adaptation to extreme chemical environments,” the researchers said. “The yellow granules observed within P. hessleri’s epithelial cells, which are the site of arsenic detoxification, appear to be the key to this adaptation.”

My own hypothesis is that this worm offers an example of convergent evolution with Freddie Mercury’s yellow jacket from Queen’s legendary 1986 Wembley Stadium performance. 

Mind the protoplanetary gap

Close, Laird et al. Wide Separation Planets in Time (WISPIT): Discovery of a Gap Hα Protoplanet WISPIT 2b with MagAO-X. The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Your baby photos are cute and all, but it’s going to be hard to top the pic that astronomers just snapped of a newborn planet 430 light years from Earth. This image marks the first time that a planet has been spotted forming within a protoplanetary disk, which is the dusty gassy material from which new worlds are born.

Our “images of 2025 April 13 and April 16 discovered an accreting protoplanet,” said researchers led by Laird Close of the University of Arizona. “The ‘protoplanet’ called WISPIT 2b “appears to be clearing a dust-free gap between the two bright rings of dust—as long predicted by theory.” 

If Earth is the pale blue dot, then WISPIT 2b is the funky purple blob. Though stray baby planets have been imaged before in the cavity between their host stars and the young disks, this amazing image offers the first glimpse of the most common mode of planetary formation, which occurs inside the dusty maelstrom. 

Welcome to the Arcade of Coronal Loops

Tamburri, Cole et al. “Unveiling Unprecedented Fine Structure in Coronal Flare Loops with the DKIST.” The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

We’ll close with yet another cosmic photoshoot—this time of everyone’s favorite star, the Sun. from the Daniel K Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) in Hawaii. The telescope captured unprecedented pictures of a decaying solar flare at a key hydrogen-alpha (Hα) wavelength of 656.28 nanometers.

The images show coronal loops—dramatic plasma arches that can spark flares and ejections—at resolutions of just 13 miles, making them the smallest loops that have ever been observationally resolved. The pictures are mesmerizing, filled with sharp features like the “Arcade of Coronal Loops” (and note that the scale is measured in planet Earths)  But they also represent a new phase in unlocking the mysterious physics that fuels solar flares and coronal mass ejections. 

“This is initial evidence that the DKIST may be capable of resolving the fundamental scale of coronal loops,” said researchers led by Cole Tamburri of the University of Colorado Boulder. “The resolving power of the DKIST represents a significant step toward advancing modern flare models and our understanding of fine structure in the coronal magnetic field.”

May your weekend be as energetic as a coronal loop, but hopefully not as destructive. 

Thanks for reading! See you next week. 

Scientists have made a major breakthrough in the mystery of how life first emerged on Earth by demonstrating how two essential biological ingredients could have spontaneously joined together on our planet some four billion years ago. 

All life on Earth contains ribonucleic acid (RNA), a special molecule that helps build proteins from simpler amino acids. To kickstart this fundamental biological process, RNA and amino acids had to become attached at some point. But this key step, known as RNA aminoacylation, has never been experimentally observed in early Earth-like conditions despite the best efforts of many researchers over the decades.

Now, a team has achieved this milestone in the quest to unravel life’s origins. As they report in a study published on Wednesday in Nature, the researchers were able to link amino acids to RNA in water at a neutral pH with the aid of energetic chemical compounds called thioesters. The work revealed that two contrasting origin stories for life on Earth, known as “RNA world” and “thioester world,” may both be right.

“It unites two theories for the origin of life, which are totally separate,” said Matthew Powner, a professor of organic chemistry at University College London and an author of the study, in a call with 404 Media. “These were opposed theories—either you have thioesters or you have RNA.”

“What we found, which is kind of cool, is that if you put them both together, they're more than the sum of their parts,” he continued. “Both aspects—RNA world and thioester world—might be right and they’re not mutually exclusive. They can both work together to provide different aspects of things that are essential to building a cell.” 

In the RNA world theory, which dates back to the 1960s, self-replicating RNA molecules served as the initial catalysts for life. The thioester world theory, which gained traction in the 1990s, posits that life first emerged from metabolic processes spurred on by energetic thioesters. Now, Powner said, the team has found a “missing link” between the two. 

Powner and his colleagues didn’t initially set out to merge the two ideas. The breakthrough came almost as a surprise after the team synthesized pantetheine, a component of thioesters, in simulated conditions resembling early Earth. The team discovered that if amino acids are linked to pantetheine, they naturally attach themselves to RNA at molecular sites that are consistent with what is seen in living things. This act of RNA aminoacylation could eventually enable the complex protein synthesis all organisms now depend on to live.

Pantetheine “is totally universal,” Powner explained. “Every organism on Earth, every genome sequence, needs this molecule for some reason or other. You can't take it out of life and fully understand life.”

“That whole program of looking at pantetheine, and then finding this remarkable chemistry that pantetheine does, was all originally designed to just be a side study,” he added. “It was serendipity in the sense that we didn't expect it, but in a scientific way that we knew it would probably be interesting and we'd probably find uses for it. It’s just the uses we found were not necessarily the ones we expected.” 

The researchers suggest that early instances of RNA aminoacylation on Earth would most likely have occurred in lakes and other small bodies of water, where nutrients could accumulate in concentrations that could up the odds of amino acids attaching to RNA.

“It's very difficult to envisage any origins of life chemistry in something as large as an ocean body because it's just too dilute for chemistry,” Powner said.  For that reason, they suggest future studies of so-called “soda lakes” in polar environments that are rich in nutrients, like phosphate, and could serve as models for the first nurseries of life on Earth.

The finding could even have implications for extraterrestrial life. If life on Earth first emerged due, in part, to this newly identified process, it’s possible that similar prebiotic reactions can be set in motion elsewhere in the universe. Complex molecules like pantetheine and RNA have never been found off-Earth (yet), but amino acids are present in many extraterrestrial environments. This suggests that the ingredients of life are abundant in the universe, even if the conditions required to spark it are far more rare.  

While the study sheds new light on the origin of life, there are plenty of other steps that must be reconstructed to understand how inorganic matter somehow found a way to self-replicate and start evolving, moving around, and in our case as humans, conducting experiments to figure out how it all got started.

“We get so focused on the details of what we're trying to do that we don't often step back and think, ‘Oh, wow, this is really important and existential for us,’” Powner concluded. 

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that ruled the roost, warmed the soul, and departed for intergalactic frontiers. 

It will be a real creature feature this week. First, we will return to the realm of bats and discover that it is, in fact, still awesome. Then: poops from above; poops from the past; a very special bonobo; and last, why some dead stars are leaving the Milky Way in a hurry.

Scientists have discovered possible hints of an undiscovered world in the solar system—nicknamed “Planet Y”—orbiting about 100 to 200 times farther from the Sun than Earth, according to a new study.  

The newly proposed planet, assuming it exists, is predicted to be somewhere between Mercury and Earth in scale, which would likely make it detectable within the next few years. It is distinct from Planet Nine or Planet X, another hypothetical planet that is predicted to be much larger and more distant than Planet Y.

Scientists speculated about the potential existence of Planet Y after discovering a strange “warp” in the Kuiper belt, which is a ring of icy bodies beyond Neptune, reports the study, which was posted on the preprint server arXiv on Wednesday. 

“We still are skeptical because it's not a ‘grand slam’ signal by any means,” said Amir Siraj, a graduate student in astrophysics at Princeton University who led the study, in a call with 404 Media. “At the most, it's a hint—or it’s suggestive of—an unseen planet.” The paper has been accepted for publication in The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Siraj said.

Siraj and his co-authors made the discovery while laying the groundwork for an upcoming search for Planet Nine. For more than a decade, scientists have debated whether this hypothetical world—roughly five to ten times as massive as Earth, making it a “super-Earth” or “mini-Neptune”—is orbiting at a distance of at least 400 astronomical units (AU), where one AU is the distance between Earth and the Sun. 

Scientists came up with the Planet Nine hypothesis after observing small celestial bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune called trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), which appear to be gravitationally influenced by some hidden phenomenon. Planet Nine could be the culprit. 

It’s an exciting time for Planet Nine watchers, as the next-generation Vera C. Rubin Observatory  in Chile achieved first light in June. Rubin is expected to begin running its signature project, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), by the end of 2025, and will spend a decade scanning the southern sky to produce a time-lapsed map that could expose Planet Nine, if it exists.

For this reason, scientists are gearing up for a worldwide race to be the first to spot the planet in the incoming LSST data. To prepare for the observational onslaught, Siraj and his colleagues have been developing new techniques to learn all they can about the murky Kuiper belt. 

“This is something I've been focusing on for the past couple of years, particularly because we are going to be flooded very soon—knock on wood—with thousands of new TNOs from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s LSST,” said Siraj. “So, my philosophy for the past couple of years has been, well, let me make sure I know everything that I can know from all the efforts so far.”

To that end, the team developed an improved technique for measuring the mean motions of objects in the distant Kuiper belt and comparing them to the plane of the solar system. Ideally, the mean plane of the objects’ orbits should fall in line with the solar system’s plane, but deviations could point to more evidence for Planet Nine.

Instead, the team’s novel approach found that the Kuiper belt’s mean plane was tilted by about 15 degrees relative to the solar system plane at ranges of 80 to 400 AU. This “warp” could be caused by many factors, such as orbital resonances with known solar system planets. But it could also hint at the presence of a small rocky world, lurking anywhere from three-to-five times as far as the orbit of Pluto.

“It was certainly a big surprise,” Siraj said. “If this warp holds up, the best explanation we can come up with is an undiscovered and relatively small inclined planet, roughly 100 to 200 AU from the Sun. The other thing that was exciting to us is that, whether the warp is real or not, it will be very quickly confirmed or refuted within the first few years of LSST’s operation.”

Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science who was not involved in the study, said the work was “interesting” but that “it is hard to say if the results are significant” in an email to 404 Media. 

Sheppard, who is an expert on small worlds in the solar system, noted that there could be multiple explanations for the weird orbital motions and pointed out that the authors acknowledge their findings are below the standard of “over 99 percent to make something likely.”

“A warped outer plane would be interesting if real, but a planet also isn’t the only explanation as passing stars or other effects could have done something similar in the distant past,” Sheppard concluded. 

If there truly is an undiscovered Mercury-ish world beyond Pluto, it is probably a homegrown member of the solar system that was ejected by the turbulent environment in the early solar system. Planet Nine, in contrast, could have either formed in the solar system, or it could have been a wandering exoplanet that was gravitationally captured by the solar system.

“The solar system probably formed with a lot of planetary embryos,” Siraj said. “There were probably a lot of bodies that were roughly Mercury-mass and most of them likely were just scattered out of the solar system like balls in a pinball machine during the violent stages of solar system formation.” 

“That would definitely be the most likely and possible formation scenario for such an object,” he added. “I think it would be very unlikely for an orbit like this to be produced from a capture event.”

Time will tell whether or not the warp represents a lost world that was kicked out of our local neighborhood more than four billion years ago. But the intense focus on the outer solar system and its many mysteries, spurred by LSST, is sure to bring a flood of new discoveries regardless. Indeed, the hypothetical existence of Planet Y does not rule out the existence of Planet Nine (and vice versa) so there may well be multiple mysterious worlds waiting to be added to our solar family.

“It is really remarkably hard to see objects in the outer solar system,” Siraj said. “These kinds of measurements were not even remotely possible 20 years ago, so this speaks to the technological progress that's been made. It is potentially putting us into an era in astronomy that's unfamiliar these days, but was much more familiar in, say, the 1700s or 1800s—the idea of adding another planet to our own solar system.” 

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies that stood out to me this week, covering everything from silver to scat.

First, a story about an ancient Andean tradition that will somehow end with a full-sized replica of a person posthumously made with his own hair. Enjoy the ride! 

Then: the health risks of climate change for children; you’ll never guess what came out of this otter’s butthole; and wow, Vikings sure were good at raiding, huh. 

The tangled origins of Inka khipus

Hyland, Sabine et al. “Stable isotope evidence for the participation of commoners in Inka khipu production.” Science Advances.

For thousands of years, Andean peoples have woven intricate patterns, known as khipus, that encode information into clusters of knots and multi-colored threads. Made from cotton, wool, and often human hair, khipus are an idiosyncratic form of writing used for a range of purposes like arithmetic, census-keeping, calendrical cycles, and more.

Spanish invaders, who overthrew the Inka empire in the 16th century, reported that only high-ranking bureaucratic men became khipu-makers (khipukamayuqs)—though this assertion has been challenged in the past by Indigenous sources.

Now, a strand of human hair woven into a 500-year-old khipu has resolved this centuries-old question. Scientists performed an isotopic analysis of the hair, revealing that the individual who wove it into the khipu was likely a low-status commoner with a simple plant-based diet. The discovery confirms that khipus were made by people from different classes and backgrounds, and that Inka women probably made them as well.

Khipukamayuqs “have been viewed primarily as imperial male elites who played key roles in running the empire,” said researchers led by Sabine Hyland of the University of St. Andrews. “However, the indigenous chronicler, Guaman Poma de Ayala”—who lived in the 16th century—”stated that women also made khipu records, explaining that females over fifty “[kept] track of everything on their [khipu],” the team added. 

Hyland and her colleagues found a solution to the discordant accounts in a khipu called KH0631, which was made around the year 1498. Though the provenance of the khipu is not known, the primary cord was made of human hair, allowing them to unravel the diet of this ancient khipukamayuq from the elemental composition of their tresses. 

The sampled strand was more than three feet long, and would have taken about eight years to grow. Carbon and nitrogen analysis of the hair indicated that it belonged to an individual that “ate a plant-based diet consisting primarily of tubers and greens with little consumption of meat or high-status plants such as maize,” according to the study. Strontium analysis showed “little marine contribution to the diet, indicating that the individual likely lived in the highlands.” Overall “this diet is a characteristic of low-status commoners, unlike the diet of high-status elites who consumed considerably more meat and maize,” the researchers said.

The team speculated that this long-haired khipukamayuq could have just been a proto-vegan, but that wouldn’t explain why there was so little maize in their diet given elites were professional beer drinkers. 

“Obligatory drinking of maize beer formed a central feature of Inka ceremonies of governance in which high-ranking khipukamayuqs participated,” the researchers said. “Given the symbolic importance of hair in the Andes, and the frequent use of hair on the primary cord to indicate the khipukamayuq, our results indicate that the creator of KH0631 was likely a non-elite commoner” suggesting that “khipu literacy in the Inka Empire may have been more inclusive and widespread than hitherto thought.”

IIn addition to broadening our understanding of khipukamayuq origins, the study is full of amazing insights about veneration of hair in Inka culture.

“Hair in the ancient Andes was a ritually powerful substance that represented the individual from whom it came,” the researchers said. “Historically, when human hair was incorporated into a khipu’s primary cord, it served as a ‘signature’ to indicate the person who created the khipu.”

“For important ceremonies, the Inka emperor sacrificed his own hair,” they added. “His hair clippings were saved during his lifetime; after death, they were fashioned into a life-size simulacrum revered as the emperor himself.”

I strongly suggest we revive this funerary practice, so start saving your hair clippings for your wake.

In other news…

The kids are not going to be alright 

Reichelt, Paula et al. “Climate change and child health: The growing burden of climate-related adverse health outcomes.” Environmental Research.

The climate crisis is a tragedy for people of all ages, but kids are among the most exposed to harm. A new study provided an exhaustive review of climate-related threats to babies, children, and adolescents, which include: food insecurity, malnutrition, water scarcity, bad air quality, infectious diseases, exposure to extreme weather, displacement, trauma, and mental illness.

“Children are particularly affected by adverse environmental influences, as their immature organ systems are less able to cope with thermal stress and disease,” said researchers led by Paula Reichelt of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research. “Moreover, their developmental stage makes them especially vulnerable to long-term consequences; early-life nutrient or health disruptions can lead to permanent impairments in growth and development.”  

“Due to the relatively modest global efforts by political decision-makers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, further global warming and the associated negative developments in child and adolescent health are likely,” the team concluded. 

“Relatively modest” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. While I recognize the allure of doomerism or tuning out from these horrible realities, I recommend carrying around a manageable dose of incandescent rage at all times over the world we’re leaving behind to kids who had nothing to do with this mess.

Parasite lost (in otter poop)

Wise, Calli et al. “North American river otters consume diverse prey and parasites in a subestuary of the Chesapeake Bay.” Frontiers in Mammal Science.

You have to love a study that was inspired by an otter crapping out a weird red worm on a dock in the Chesapeake Bay. Curious about the poopy parasite, researchers sought out other otter “latrines” and discovered that these furry floaters eat a lot of parasites, probably because infected prey is often easier to catch. In this way, otters efficiently remove parasites from ecosystems; it may be a bummer for any infected prey on the otter menu, but is beneficial to the wider population. 

“This study is the first to characterize river otter latrines and diet in a tidally influenced estuarine habitat within the Chesapeake Bay,” said researchers led by Calli Wise of Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. 

“Our results indicate that river otters consume a wide range of terrestrial and aquatic fauna, primarily consisting of finfish and crustaceans, but also including frogs and ducks,” the team said. “Multiple parasite species were identified, including parasites of river otters and those infecting prey, indicating that parasites likely play an important role in both prey availability and otter health.”

Tl;dr: Otters are parasite vacuums. Yet another reason to love these cuddly creatures and forgive their more unsavory attributes.

Some Viking booty, as a treat

Kershaw, Jane et al. “The Provenance of Silver in the Viking-Age Hoard From Bedale, North Yorkshire.” Archaeometry.

We’ll end, as all things ideally should, with treasure. A new study tracks down the likely origins of a hoard of gold and silver items—including a sword pommel, jewelry, and several ingots—that were stashed by Vikings in the English town of Bedale, North Yorkshire, more than 1,200 years ago. 

Vikings are well-known for their epic raids (source: Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla) and this particular hoard included far-flung loot sourced from across Europe and the Middle East.

“The results indicate a dominant contribution of western European silver, pointing to the fate of loot seized by the Vikings during their raids on the Continent in the ninth century,” said researchers led by Jane Kershaw of the University of Oxford. “Nonetheless, Islamic silver is also present in several large ingots: silver from the east—the product of long-distance trade networks connecting Scandinavia with the Islamic Caliphate—permeated Viking wealth sources even in the western part of the Viking overseas settlement and should be seen as a significant driver of the Viking phenomenon.”

“The Vikings were not only extracting wealth locally; they were also bringing it into England via long-distance trade networks,” the team concluded.

With that Viking spirit in mind—skål, and see you next week.

For more than a million years, early humans crafted stone tools as part of the Oldowan tradition, which is the oldest sustained tool-making industry in the archaeological record. Now, scientists have discovered that Oldowan tool-makers who lived in Kenya at least 2.6 million years ago transported high-quality raw materials for tools across more than seven miles to processing sites. 

The find pushes the recorded timeline of this unique behavior back half-a-million years, at minimum, and reveals that hominins possessed complex cognitive capacities, like forward planning and delayed rewards, earlier than previously known, according to a study published on Friday in Science. 

Hominins at this site, called Nyayanga, used their tools to pound and cut foraged plants and scavenged animals, including hippos, to prepare them for consumption. Intriguingly, the identity of the tool-makers remains unknown, and while they may have been early humans, it’s also possible that they could have been close cousins of our own Homo lineage.

“I've always thought that early tool-makers must have had more capabilities than we sometimes give them credit for,” said Emma Finestone, associate curator and the Robert J. and Linnet E. Fritz Endowed Chair of Human Origins at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, who led the study, in a call with 404 Media.

“I was excited to see that at 2.6 million years ago, hominins were making use of many different resources and moving stones over large distances,” she added.

While many animals craft and transport tools, hominins are unique in their ability to identify and move special materials across long distances, which the team defines as more than three kilometers (or 1.86 miles). This innovation reveals a capacity for forward planning, complex mental maps, and delayed payoff of food consumption. 

“What's unique is the amount of effort put into moving resources around a landscape,” said Finestone. “There's several steps involved, and there's also time in between these efforts and the reward. Although you see that to some extent in other animals, humans really separate themselves, especially as we get further and further in evolutionary time, in terms of the complexities of our foraging system."

Previously, the earliest record of this behavior in hominins came from a site called Kanjera South, which is about two million years old. Both sites are on the Homa peninsula, a region dominated by soft rocks that are not durable as tools; this may have prompted early hominins to search elsewhere for high-quality resources, such as quartz, chert, and granite. 

Given that long-distance material transport was present at Kanjera South, the discovery of similar behavior at Nyayanga was not completely unexpected—though Finestone and her colleagues were still surprised by the scope and variety of materials these hominins gathered.

“Often, when you're dealing with these really old archeological assemblages, it's dominated by one type of raw material that's coming from a single source, or a few sources that are really nearby,” said Finestone. “Nyayanga has a lot of different raw materials, and they're using a variety of different sources, so that was surprising and exciting to us.”

Finestone and her colleagues have made many discoveries during their decade-long excavation at Nyayanga. The team previously reported that the tool-makers butchered hippopotamus carcasses which were probably scavenged rather than hunted, providing the earliest evidence of hominin consumption of large animals, according to a 2023 study led by Thomas Plummer, a professor of anthropology at Queens College, City University of New York. 

That study also reported fossils from Paranthropus, a close hominin cousin of our own Homo genus, which went extinct more than a million years ago. So far, these are the only hominin remains recovered from Nyayanga, raising the possibility that the Oldowan tool-making industry was not limited to our own human lineage. 

“It is interesting because Paranthropus is not traditionally thought to be a tool-user,” Finestone said. “There's debate over whether Paranthropus made tools or whether it was only genus Homo that was making Oldowan tools. I don't think that evidence at Nyayanga is definitive that Paranthropus was the tool maker. It's still an open question. But because we found Paranthropus remains at Nyayanga, and we haven't found anything from genus Homo—at least yet—there's definitely reason to consider that Paranthropus might have been manufacturing these tools.”

With luck, the team may uncover more fossils from these ancient hominins that could shed light on their place in the family. Finestone and her colleagues are also working on constraining the age of the Nyayanga artifacts, which could be anywhere from 2.6 million to three million years old. 

But for now, the study marks a new milestone in the evolution of Oldowan tools and their makers, which eventually dispersed across Africa and into Europe and Asia before they were succeeded by new traditions (like the one from our story last week about yet another group of ancient tool-makers with an unknown identity). 

The stones once used to butcher hippos and pound tubers offer a window into the minds of bygone hominins that pioneered technologies that ultimately made humans who we are today.

“What's really interesting about humans and their ancestors is we're a technologically dependent species,” Finestone said. “We rely on tools. We're obligate tool users. We don't do it opportunistically or occasionally the way that a lot of other animals use tools. It's really become ingrained in our way of life, in our survival, and our foraging strategies across all people and all cultures.”

“What was exciting about this study is that you see this investment in tool technology, and you see tools becoming ingrained in the landscape-scale behaviors of hominins 2.6 million years ago,” she concluded. “We might be seeing the roots of this importance that technology plays in our foraging behaviors and also just the daily rhythms of our life.”