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Animals earth, Улица Каткова, Kyiv (2025)

21/02/2023

Something strange and rather wonderful happens when two people are working together on the same task, a new study shows: key regions of their brains sync up, suggesting we can match each other's neural activity when we're in groups.

In the study, 39 pairs of volunteers were asked to design the interior of a virtual room together via a touchscreen, until it was satisfactory to both of them. As well as having their brain activity monitored through a functional near-infrared spectroscopy technique, the participants were watched for signs of eye contact.

To study the participants' responses, the researchers developed special processing and modeling techniques capable of recognizing social interactions (the eye contact) and mapping them to particular moments and regions of brain activity.

Experiment details
The experiment setup and synchronizations noticed in the brain. (Xu et al., Neurophotonics, 2023)
"Neuron populations within one brain were activated simultaneously with similar neuron populations in the other brain when the participants cooperated to complete the task, as if the two brains functioned together as a single system for creative problem-solving," says psychologist Yasuyo Minagawa, from Keio University in Japan.

The study participants were directed to complete the designated task on their own as well as in pairs, giving the researchers the opportunity to examine both solo brain activity (within-brain synchronizations or WBSs) and group brain activity (between-brain synchronizations or BBSs).

Working together jointly led to "robust" BBS in the superior and middle temporal regions of the brain, as well as specific parts of the prefrontal cortex in the brain's right hemisphere. However, WBS wasn't as strong in the test scenarios.

What's more, the BBSs were shown to be strongest when one of the individuals raised their gaze to look at the other, suggesting an important role here for social interactions. On the other hand, when the volunteers were working on their own, the WBS was much stronger within the same brain regions.

"These phenomena are consistent with the notion of a 'we-mode', in which interacting agents share their minds in a collective fashion and facilitate interaction by accelerating access to the other's cognition," says Minagawa.

The investigation's method is an improvement over previous experiments in 'second-person neuroscience', which simply put two people to work on the same motor task, but scientists will need to find ways of measuring more complex social interactions besides eye contact in the future.

The authors behind this new study think that's possible though – and there is already evidence that some kind of brain synchronization happens when two people are in dialog with each other.

We know that human beings are wired to be social creatures, but there's still a lot we don't understand about how our brains shift when we're in company. As scanning and computing technology improves, we can shed light on those unknowns.

"We could apply our method to more detailed social behaviors in future analyses, such as facial expressions and verbal communication," says Minagawa.

"Our analytical approach can provide insights and avenues for future research in interactive social neuroscience."

21/02/2023

Seven new funnel web spider species have been found emerging in caves in Israel, and they're all in various stages of losing their vision.

In Charles Darwin's famous example of adaptation, a population of finches split apart on different islands gradually drifted from their shared ancestral form, to the point they came to represent distinct species.

This early observation recognized isolation as a key ingredient for organisms to change enough to speciate.

But as this latest cave discovery shows, vast stretches of water are just one way populations can be separated.

"In this study, we sought to understand the evolutionary relationships between funnel web spiders with normal eyes that are found at the cave entrance, with those that are further in the cave and are pigmentless, eye-reduced, and even completely blind," explains ecologist Shlomi Aharon from the The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI).

Close up view of three new spider species face showing small or missing eyes
Three of the newly discovered species with reduced (top and middle) or entirely missing eyes (bottom). (Shlomi Aharon)
Aharon and colleagues found species of Tegenaria funnel web spiders in 30 caves. Twenty-six of these were cave-preferring species that still relied on some outside conditions like light (troglophiles) and they lived at the entrances and twilight zones of the caves. Meanwhile, 14 other species were found to be obligate cave dwellers (troglobites), who only inhabit the twilight or dark zones.

Seven of these troglobite species were new to science, five of them with reduced eyes and two completely blind.

"Among the spiders we found, five were unique to different caves, and the two other species were found in several caves in the Galilee and in caves situated at the Ofra karst field, which is now under threat due to construction plans," explains HUJI ecologist Efrat Gavish-Regev.

The researchers analyzed the spiders' DNA to track their history across the landscape.

Those spiders that adapted to the unique cave conditions can no longer thrive in the world beyond these dark, sheltered crevices. This means there was very little if any gene flow between cave systems, even when each population sits relatively close to one another.

Pale reddish brown spider sitting on web within cave with no eyes
One of the newly discovered species, Tegenaria ornit, that's completely blind. (Shlomi Aharon)
"One of the surprising findings in the study show that the new species are evolutionarily closer to species from caves in Mediterranean areas in southern Europe, than to species living in close proximity to them at cave entrances in Israel," says Gavish-Regev.

The genetic trail suggests a single Tegenaria species swept through the area and eventually ventured deeper into the caves. By removing the need for functional eyes, the new environment molded their traits, selecting for offspring that didn't waste energy on unnecessary visual systems. This happened independently across the different cave systems – a process called convergent evolution – resulting in distinct species all losing their eyes after they went separate ways.

Then the original species became locally extinct outside of the caves, before other related species moved in on the outside.

The team suspects the extinction event was a result of climate change around 5 million years ago, during the beginning of the Pliocene when seas rose to present levels.

"We are currently witnessing the effects of climate change on many habitats, which obliges us to consider, maintain and promote programs that include the preservation of underground habitats – many of which are at immediate risk," concludes Hawlena.

"We must protect Israel's unique nature, preserve its underground systems for the future and further explore the processes that created these systems in the country."

18/02/2023

Life finds a way: Geneticists have created disease-resistant catfish using alligator DNA – and they may one day become a part of our diet.

A group of scientists at Auburn University published a paper in January detailing their efforts to genetically modify catfish with the cathelicidin gene of an alligator.

Cathelicidin, found in the intestines, is an antimicrobial peptide responsible for helping organisms fight diseases.

The gene, which was added using CRISPR, heightened disease resistance among the catfish in comparison to wild catfish. Researchers noted that the survival rates of the catfish were "two- and five-fold higher" in an interview with MIT Technology Review.

Because researchers added the cathelicidin to a gene for a reproductive hormone, it also reduced the catfish's ability to reproduce, which they said was important to prevent genetic contamination of the hybrid fish with wild catfish.

The authors noted some uncertainties in using CRISPR technology – primarily used and studied in mammals – on fish. The paper has not yet been peer-reviewed.

However, researchers hope that the alligator and catfish gene-editing can be used in tandem with other catfish breeding techniques to help farmers with their catfish yields.

In 2021, an estimated 307 million pounds of live catfish were produced in the US, primarily in the south. Catfish make up over 50 percent of US demand for farm-raised fish.

The process of farming them is resource-intensive. Diseases spread among catfish due to lack of space on the farms where they're raised. Around 45 percent of catfish fingerlings die as a result of infectious diseases. Fish in general are also becoming less resistant to antibiotics.

Although consumers may be uncomfortable with the idea of their catfish sharing DNA with an alligator, Rex Dunham and Baofeng Su, two of the lead researchers of the study, told MTR that the hybrid meat would be perfectly safe.

"I would eat it in a heartbeat," Dunham told MTR.

16/02/2023

MSL Curiosity is going about its business exploring Mars. The high-tech rover is currently exploring the sulphate-bearing unit on Mt. Sharp, the central peak in Mars' Gale Crater. Serendipity placed a metal meteorite in its path.

The meteorite is made mostly of nickel and iron, and it has a name: Cacao. (Chocolate comes from cacao.) Cacao isn't very large; it's only about 30 cm (1 ft.) across.

Curiosity has come across several meteorites since landing in Gale Crater in August 2012.

Cacao stands out visually from its surroundings. While the Martian surface is red from oxides, the meteorite is dark grey and metallic-looking. It's also smooth and rounded, obvious signs that it passed through an atmosphere.

A big rock covered with red dust on red dirt surrounded by smaller rocks
Cacao meteorite and its surrounds on Mars. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
The image is a composite of six individual images taken with the rover's Mastcam. Curiosity captured the images on 27 Jan 2023, the 3,724th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. The colors in the image have been corrected to match the lighting conditions as seen with human eyes on Earth.

The grooves and pits are called regmaglypts. They're particularly interesting on iron meteorites. They formed when Cacao was travelling through the atmosphere.

Even though Mars' atmosphere is much thinner than Earth's, it still creates enough friction to heat the meteorite's surface. The regmaglypts are likely created by vortices of hot gas that melted the rock as it travelled through the atmosphere.

The meteorite may have been on Mars' surface for a long time, but nobody knows for sure.

Details of a silvery rock covered with red dust and lots of grooves
Curiosity found the iron-nickel meteorite "Cacao" on 27 January 2023. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
This isn't the first meteorite rovers have found on Mars. In 2016, MSL Curiosity found another metal meteorite about the size of a golf ball named "Egg Rock." It examined that one with its ChemCam instrument to determine its composition.

The grid pattern of five small white dots shows where the instrument's laser struck the rock.

Iron-nickel meteorites are the rarest type of meteorites, making up about six percent of witnessed falls. But because of their tell-tale visual appearance, they're over-represented in collections. That's because they're more likely to survive passage through an atmosphere and are more resistant to weathering, even on Mars.

Most iron-nickel meteorites come from the cores of shattered planetesimals that formed in the early Solar System. Those objects were large enough to differentiate when they were molten. They formed a core of dense iron and nickel, much like Earth did.

But life as a planetesimal was risky, and many of them were shattered into asteroids. That's Cacao's likely history.

That's what makes meteorites, and especially metal ones, so scientifically interesting. They can date back billions of years to the beginning of the Solar System.

Details of metallic meteorites pits and ridges
Cacao's fascinating pits and ridges. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
On Earth, meteorites like Cacao were humanity's first source of iron. Long before smelting, people collected these meteorites when they could and made knives and other implements out of them. King Tut was buried with a dagger made of meteoric iron, and the Inuit people in the Arctic and in Greenland also used meteoric iron.

They repeatedly visited one particularly large iron meteorite called the Cape York meteorite. They hammered off chunks of iron to shape into harpoon tips and started their own iron age without knowing anything about smelting. They even traded iron with other groups of people.

But only our robot explorers will ever set eyes on Cacao.

Cacao is only an interesting oddity to MSL Curiosity. Curiosity's job is to study Gale Crater, Mt. Sharp, and features like the sulphur-bearing unit. The unit is rich in salty minerals that formed in the presence of water.

By researching the area, Curiosity is shedding light on Mars' ancient history, and how it dried up to become the desiccated wasteland it is now.

Finding Cacao is just a bonus.

13/02/2023

One of the most interesting stars in the Milky Way is still serving up more than its fair share of intrigue.

In October 2020, SGR 1935+2154, the magnetar responsible for spitting out radio signals never before detected in our home galaxy, unexpectedly slowed down.

Now, scientists believe the rotational slowdown could be evidence of a volcano-like eruption on its surface, spewing material out into space that altered the star's environment enough to decelerate the spinning of the planet minutely.

It's a finding that could shed some light on the mystery of fast radio bursts – how these ultra-dense dead stars can spit powerful staccato radio flares across millions of light-years.

"People have speculated that neutron stars could have the equivalent of volcanoes on their surface," says astrophysicist Matthew Baring of Rice University in Houston, Texas.

"Our findings suggest that could be the case and that on this occasion, the rupture was most likely at or near the star's magnetic pole."

SGR 1935+2154 burst onto the scene of global fame – quite literally – in May 2020, when astronomers detected it emitting a brief, but powerful, radio flare.

The reason this was exciting was because we'd only ever previously detected such flares from other galaxies. These flares, occurring in radio wavelengths, are just milliseconds in length, emitting up to as much energy in that timeframe as 500 million Suns. And most of them flared once, unexpectedly, and have not been detected since.

Their distance and unpredictability make these fast radio bursts very difficult to learn more about. Astronomers have been able to trace some to the galaxies that emitted them, but figuring down the mechanism or mechanisms behind them was a lot harder to pin down.

SGR 1935+2154 was a breakthrough: here, finally, we could trace a fast radio burst to a specific object.

SGR 1935+2154 is a type of neutron star known as a magnetar.

Neutron stars are already extreme: the ultra-dense cores of massive stars that have gone supernova, blasting off their outer material while the remaining heart of the star collapses under gravity to a sphere packing the mass of up to around 2.4 Suns into a diameter of around 20 kilometers (12 miles).

Add an insanely powerful magnetic field, around 1,000 times more powerful than a normal neutron star's and a quadrillion times more powerful than Earth's, and you have a magnetar.

Astronomers speculated that the outward pull of that magnetic field against the inward pressure of gravity could cause the magnetar to occasionally rupture, producing flares and fast radio bursts.

But more information was needed, so SGR 1935+2154 remained under close surveillance. Then, in October 2020, it was caught emitting millisecond radio signals again.

And now, a research team led by astrophysicist George Younes of George Washington University have found that just a few days prior to that activity, it did something really weird: it suddenly slowed down.

Neutron stars have, occasionally, been caught suddenly changing their rotation speed. It's called a glitch, and it's a poorly understood phenomenon.

A neutron star glitch is usually a sudden acceleration in the rotation speed. A slowdown, sometimes known as an anti-glitch, is much rarer.

Just three anti-glitches, including SGR 1935+2154, have been detected. And, while a glitch can be explained by changes inside the star, an anti-glitch cannot.

So, the researchers decided to investigate what could have caused it – and what role, if any, the anti-glitch could have played in generating the radio burst activity detected a few days later.

If internal changes could not be the cause of the slowdown, the researchers turned to external explanations.

They constructed a model based on a volcano-like rupture on the magnetar's surface, ejecting a wind of particles out into the space around the star, postulating that the rarity of both events – the anti-glitch and the radio activity – means that their temporal proximity implies a relationship.

"What makes the October 2020 event unique is that there was a fast radio burst from the magnetar just a few days after the anti-glitch, as well as a switch-on of pulsed, ephemeral radio emission shortly thereafter," Baring says.

"We've seen only a handful of transient pulsed radio magnetars, and this is the first time we've seen a radio switch-on of a magnetar almost contemporaneous with an anti-glitch."

And, according to their model, a rupture close to the stellar pole could have generated a wind that interacts with the magnetar's magnetic field, slowing down the star's rotation rate, and changing the geometry of the magnetic field in a way that could enhance the conditions for radio emission.

A powerful, massive wind blowing for just a few hours from a volcano-like spot could create the conditions needed for the slow-down and the subsequent radio activity, the team found.

"The wind interpretation provides a path to understanding why the radio emission switches on," Baring says.

"It provides new insight we have not had before."

11/02/2023

Night is naturally suited for paranormal activity, with less light and sound to limit the imagination.

While the relationship is still murky, new research shows an interesting link between paranormal beliefs and one of the most important night-time activities for we earthly beings: sleep.

In a new study, researchers found subjective measures of poorer sleep quality were associated with stronger beliefs in ghosts and demons, the soul living on after death, an ability for people to communicate with the dead, near-death experiences as evidence of an afterlife, and aliens visiting Earth.

This reduced quality of sleep included lower sleep efficiency, longer sleep latency, shorter sleep duration, and increased insomnia symptoms, the study's authors report.

In addition to the self-reported measures of sleep quality, the researchers found the belief that aliens have visited Earth is associated with isolated sleep paralysis and exploding head syndrome, a disorder characterized by the sensation of a loud noise or crashing sound inside a person's skull.

Isolated sleep paralysis – in which a person is aware and alert, yet unable to move, without other symptoms of a sleep disorder like narcolepsy – was also associated with the belief that near-death experiences are evidence for life after death, the study found.

"To the best of our knowledge, this is a novel finding worthy of further examination," the researchers write.

These findings generally fit with previous studies, they note, which have also found links between paranormal beliefs and sleep variables, especially sleep paralysis. The new study aims to shed more light on this by examining a wider range of sleep variables with a larger sample.

The researchers conducted the study via an online survey, with recruitment publicized through social media and by BBC Science Focus Magazine. They ended up with 8,853 participants, all at least 18 years old, who answered questions about several paranormal topics and sleep variables.

"For all associations, it was found that a higher level of paranormal belief was associated with a poorer subjective sleep quality, even when controlling for age and gender effects," the study's authors report.

While the new study may help improve our understanding of the link between paranormal beliefs and sleep variables, as a cross-sectional study it wasn't designed to answer the obvious follow-up question of why these two things are associated.

The authors do offer some speculation, though. Since sleep paralysis can involve visual and auditory hallucinations, and exploding head syndrome has its namesake sound, the results suggest a belief in aliens may be linked with sleep disturbances featuring sounds or images.

"One explanation for these associations is therefore that someone experiencing sounds or images associated with sleep could interpret this as evidence that aliens or other supernatural beings exist," they write, although they note more research is still needed to test that.

On the other hand, some of the associations may go the other way, the researchers add, with paranormal beliefs causing anxiety that interferes with sleep. The prospect of paranormal visitors at night could conceivably make it hard to sleep, and not just for children.

That might help explain why a belief in ghosts, demons, or aliens was linked to lower subjective sleep quality, the researchers write, but what about beliefs that don't involve menacing entities? Is sleep quality also influenced by anxiety about the existence of a soul or an afterlife?

More research will be needed to answer questions like those, they add, including studies that examine additional factors like mental health, education, personality traits, and religious beliefs, due to their associations with both sleep and paranormal beliefs.

While the new study helps illuminate this link, and may fill some gaps in our knowledge about it, it does have a few significant limitations.

Despite the large sample size, for example, participants self-selected to join the study, and are therefore "unlikely to be representative of the general population," the researchers write.

"For example, the seemingly high rates of [isolated sleep paralysis] and [exploding head syndrome] could indicate that individuals with these symptoms were more likely than others to be interested in taking part in this study," they explain.

In addition to recruiting more representative samples, the researchers note, future studies on paranormal beliefs and sleep should use objective measures of sleep variables for greater accuracy.

Nonetheless, the authors say their study offers new insights on the link between sleep and paranormal beliefs, and while there's still a lot we don't know, it could help to raise awareness of the mere association, both for patients and healthcare providers.

"Reports of paranormal activity or anomalous beliefs could be mistaken as prima facie evidence for more severe disorders," they write. This study "may encourage clinicians to assess for relevant sleep disturbances and parasomnias in addition to other forms of psychopathology."

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