Scientific work and discovery is progressing at a breakneck speed,
with new items of interest coming in from all areas of science happening each month.
So here ten wide ranging new scientific discoveries as of June of this year.
Number 10. Plants Get Noisy When Thirsty
Recent measurement of tomato and tobacco plants shows that plants have a tendency
to emit ultrasonic clicks when they are low on water, or if their stem has been severed.
If you move the sounds to the range of human hearing, thirsty plants would sound something
like rapidly popping bubble wrap. This is actually based on earlier research that
showed that plants do emit ultrasonic sounds, but the question was could that be detected
from a distance rather than the detector physically touching the plant. The answer
was yes, and this opens up some interesting possibilities for agricultural efficiency.
The clicking was interesting in that in ultrasound, it was loud. If we could hear in
that range, we’d live in one noisy plant filled world. Moreover, the clicks were distinct in
two ways. The first is that different species of plants, such as tobacco and tomatoes didn’t emit
the same click, or if you will you could identify the plant by the quality of its clicks. Different
species had different voices, but also in rates of clicking. Tomatoes click more than tobacco
does. Since, this type of clicking has also been found in cactuses, grapevines, corn and wheat.
What causes the clicking is unknown, but whatever it is,
it may prove useful in the future for greenhouses monitoring just how much to water their plants,
leading to more efficient plant and water usage.
Number 9. Volcanic Disruption of Satellites
You would normally think that satellites in low earth orbit would not be affected
by geologic phenomena on Earth, but that’s actually not the case. The earth’s atmosphere
has a phenomenon known as equatorial plasma bubbles that are areas of low pressure that
rise through the atmosphere. These are formed in several ways, mostly commonly by the sun warming
the upper atmosphere, and then when night falls ions recombine and form the bubbles.
These can adversely affect the transmission of radio satellite downlinks through the atmosphere.
Scientists had long suspected that there was another way to form the bubbles, a volcanic
eruption but that had never been proven. In 2022, there was a volcanic eruption in Tonga that shot
ash over 50 kilometers into the atmosphere and created tsunamis. At the same time however,
a degradation in GPS signals happened almost on the other side of the world from the eruption.
Researchers found evidence of the bubbles as pressure
waves from the eruption propagated over Asia.
Number 8. When Low on Phosphorus, Turn Carnivorous!
Carnivorous plants are rare, but known, and even cultivated by specialist plant enthusiasts.
But in those cases, they tend to be carnivorous from the start, with an evolutionary adaptation
for it. But a discovery regarding a type of vine from West Africa known as tryphophylium peltatum,
shows that it’s also possible for a planet to be a part time carnivore when needed.
This aspect was known, these plants will sometimes grow a different type of leaf
than its normal non-carnivorous types that emits a sticky substance that traps insects.
But no one was certain why until recently. Scientists cultivating the plants subjected
them to different nutrient deficiencies. That ones that turned carnivorous, were the ones
specifically denied phosphorus. If they were given a phosphorus supplement, the plants returned to
normal and stopped producing carnivorous leaves. This may have evolved simply because the soils
in which they are native are known to become easily depleted of nutrients, basically it’s
known that the local equatorial monsoon season tends to wash out phosphorus from the soil.
The strange thing here is that phosphorus is the odd man out regarding life. Most nutrients for
life are abundant in the universe, but phosphorus doesn’t appear to be. And it’s someone scarce
here on earth, leading to a future agricultural phosphorus shortage as our mined sources for it
deplete. So you have to ask a question, how smart would it be to genetically engineer a crop to do
something similar to the west african vine and start getting phosphorus from trapped insects.
Never make the corn carnivorous, there are just too many risks.
Number 7. Wooly Mammoths Were A Lot Like Elephants
Mammoths have always been of great interest to me, indeed they are one of my favorite animals.
The Great Columbian mammoth for example once inhabited the area of North America where I was
born, and survived so late in the geologic record, to around just 11,500 years ago,
as to have interacted with the ancient Native Americans. This is unlike a dinosaur,
in that this was a species that humans interacted with, and may even bring back from extinction.
Its closest living relative today is the Asian Elephant,
and bull elephants go through a stage could the Musth. This is characterized by a very
large rise in reproductive hormones such as testosterone, and they can get really aggressive.
This actually indicates than elephant is healthy and normal. It also causes them to
lose their appetite, and male elephant can lose a thousand pounds during this cycle,
but they quickly recover and it’s a perfectly natural state that lasts about 2 to three months.
At the same time, perhaps like teething or cutting wisdom teeth in humans,
while fully natural it’s uncomfortable. The elephants secrete a substance called
temporin from ducts on the sides of their heads that gets in their mouth,
made of protein and lipids but might be unpleasant, but also pain which the elephants
seem to react to by pushing on trees and digging their tusks into the ground, part of why they get
cranky and aggressive during this period. This may have been evolutionarily useful in driving
rival bulls from territory, but also favor smaller bull elephants and a better chance at dominance.
As it turns out, Mammoths, at least the Wooly Mammoth, also experienced Musth.
This comes from elevated testosterone found in preserved mammoth tusks.
Chemical samples of mammoth DNA and tusk is easily available because in the case of the
Wooly Mammoth, it may have only gone extinct just 3700 years ago in some parts of the world,
with another species potentially making it until 1650 BC, which means that there were mammoths
around a thousand years after the Giza pyramids were built, but in a different part of the world.
The researchers were able to examine tusk material and determine how hormone levels
had changed over time in the animal and it looked like a modern elephant’s musth,
whereas a female mammoth showed no change. This hammers home that elephants and mammoths
were actually very closely related, both genetically and behaviorally. But scary,
in that some of the mammoths were significantly bigger than modern elephants,
someone deep in human history once had to deal with cranky, dangerous mammoths.
Number 6. Hunting Traps were once Extremely Important to Humans
In the 1920’s aviators flying over North Africa, the middle east and central asia noticed odd
artificial structures that resembled kites on the landscape. Still known as desert kites,
these structures were used to funnel animals, such as gazelles for hunting and many are extremely
old, to the tune of 9000 years or more. Recently however, another aspect of the desert kites has
come to light. Some of them came with instruction plans on how to build and maintain them.
The find involved an unexcavated kite in Jordan that had a stone
erected near it that bears an exact and to scale depiction of the kite.
That they were cut into stones, the instructions were probably intended to stand for many
generations, allowing new, younger hunters joining society to comprehend the function of the much
larger kite itself meaning that these are the earliest known examples of architectural plans.
Number 5. Octopus Nightmares
You could make the case that the closest thing to an alien intelligence on earth is an octopus. It
achieved, actually like a number of cephalopods, a level of intelligence that looks a lot like that
of our land mammals which includes all sorts of interesting attributes including problem solving,
camouflage and so on. This is interesting because it appears to be a matter of convergent evolution,
where two radically separated and distant species develop the same traits because
they are useful evolutionarily speaking. This is of great interest because it tells
that paths to intelligence aren’t limited to just one type of a group of species,
but happens in different evolutionary paths, which is a tick in the box for the existence
of intelligent alien civilizations in the universe in that it’s not a fluke, but something evolution
has several different paths to do which increases the likelihood of intelligent alien civilizations.
But in the case of the octopus, they seem to have hit on something else as a matter
of evolution. Nightmares. This involves a remarkable octopus called Costello, that upon
being taken captive by humans actually started sleeping out in the open instead of in a den.
Apparently it feels safe enough to risk that, and might understand that the researchers aren’t
interested in eating it. The octopus, while sleeping, will thrash around and emit ink in
just such a way as octopuses do in nature when confronted by a predator. It’s interesting to
note that before having been captured, Costello had lost a tentacle to a predator in nature.
Looking into past footage of Costello, the researchers found other incidents of apparent
nightmares that perhaps the octopus is having nightmares of its days of evading predators,
something like mammals do. And we do. And octopuses skin color changes while asleep, most
of the time, but can show different fluctuations that might indicate pleasant or neutral dreaming,
and there are patterns to it, and also tentacle movement and eye movement. It’s unknown what
the octopus dreams are like, or if they have any sort of narrative structure, but it does
seem to occur suggesting that nightmares might serve some sort of evolutionary purpose as an
advantage. But what’s really interesting there is a peripheral question, if very different species
on earth can have nightmares like humans, cats and dogs and very distant octopuses, then do we
live in a universe of dreams, and one thing we share with aliens might be sleep and nightmares.
Number 4. Microbial Life Developments that Might Shed Light on Mars
Mars was once a water world, with flowing rivers and seas. It no longer is, it dried up.
So did a former body of water in Spain known as Tirez lagoon.
It totally dried up in 2015 and has not recovered, making it look maybe
something like what Mars might have looked like during its global drying period,
something on the order of three billion years ago. The interesting result of the study of
this lakebed is that while life there took a hit, the very simplest life on earth are holding on.
Formerly moisture loving prokaryotic life in the lagoon has apparently adapted to dry conditions
and some analog on Mars might have persisted, offering a way to search for it looking for
traces of fatty acids known as lipids in Mars’ geologic record. Interestingly, this also opens up
the opportunity to study how life existing in the dry lagoon bed might react to the reintroduction
of water. This brings into question the idea of changing environments and how life reacts,
whether it adapts or goes extinct and might yield clues as to whether microbial life could
have persisted until now deep below the surface of Mars, or even the upper atmosphere of Venus.
Number 3. Bowhead Whales are Cancer Resistant
There might be a reason why, so far as we know, the bowhead whale might be the longest living
mammals that currently exist. Scientists think Bowheads can live over 200 years, for a mammal
though, there are clams that may live up to 500 years and certain trees and plants can go much
longer. Think about that, there are bowhead whales out there that might have been born before 1823 on
this world. Part of the reason for the longevity of the bowhead is its resistance to cancer.
This is actually paradoxical in that large animals have more cells than small ones,
so thus it should be that the larger you are, the more likely you are to get cancer.
But this is not so in observation. Actually a lot of larger animals on earth seem more
cancer resistant than smaller animals. It turns out, the whales may have a unique genetic makeup
that allows for them to be cancer resistant. Scientists studied skin cells of various animals
to see how they actually repair genetic damage that leads to some cancers, specifically when
both strands of the DNA are broken and damaged, leading to uncontrolled dangerous cell growth.
It turns out that the Bowhead whale is really good at repairing this kind of damage. It also
seems to be related to a protein called CIRBP, that is involved with DNA repair which is found
in higher levels in Bowheads than humans. It turns out that when introduced into mice,
higher levels of this protein were actually able to repair DNA twice as well as ordinary cells,
leading potentially to doing the same in humans and at least adding a tool in the
kit for cancer prevention, but also might help to extend human lifespans.
Number 2. Revenge of the Dying Star
Binary star systems can get weird situationally.
You can have stable binary systems that can even support habitable planets but you can also have
weird, but actually rather common systems like contact binaries where stars touch each other.
If you could get in a starship and travel to such a system, you would see something very
different than what we see. We see the sun as a round ball of nuclear fire, but in the cast of
a contact binary you would see two stars so close as to resemble a single star shaped like a peanut.
But sometimes under certain circumstances it can get far more interesting. A binary
system known as SSN 7 located in the small magellanic cloud,
a satellite galaxy of the milky way about 200,000 lightyears distant hosts two giant stars,
far more massive than the sun. These stars orbit so closely that it takes about 3 days
for them to complete an orbital cycle and they are exchanging material through the larger star,
about 55 solar masses robbing the other star, about 32 solar masses of material.
This is happening rapidly, the larger star is accumulating 13 solar masses per year,
so this arrangement is not long term. In about 800,000 years it’s going to change
and the smaller star will lose enough mass, yet retain enough mass, to collapse into a black hole.
As this happens, and the expansion of the remaining larger star will turn the tables
and the black hole will begin to feed off the larger star. Eventually the larger star
will also collapse into a black hole and things will be set up for an eventual black hole merger
and a gravitational wave signature that far future humans will detect if we’re still here.
Number 1. Milky Way Stars Halfway to Andromeda
Defining the limits of the Milky Way galaxy is a bit ambiguous,
for individual stars it’s a matter of what it’s gravitationally bound to. While this
can be difficult to study with regular stars, a type of variable star known as an RR Lyrae
can provide a standard candle to astronomers to better determine distances and tell just how far
the galactic halo extends based on how faint these stars appear. In this there were two surprises.
The first is that the distance to milky way stars in the halo is surprisingly distant,
about a over a half to a million light-years from the galactic center. This is consistent
with modeling, which predicted stars out that far that were gravitationally bound.
This means that the milky way’s halo stretches almost halfway to the Andromeda Galaxy,
which the Milky Way in the far future is set to collide with and merge. This is interesting,
because Andromeda is the bigger of the two galaxies and might perhaps have an even larger
halo, opening the question as to whether we are already in the earliest stages of the collision.
The other surprise was that the researchers found more RR Lyrae stars at this distance than what
was predicted, which is that the distance that astronomers had predicted for when the
milky way’s star population dramatically declines is further out than we thought.
This would mean that there are already stars being gravitationally tugged,
and possibly even exchanged between the two galaxies.
And then there is the question of materials, is the Milky Way already capturing asteroids,
meteorites and maybe rogue planets of not just an interstellar nature, but an intergalactic one.
Thanks for listening! I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier
and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online book retailer
and subscribe to my channels for regular, in-depth explorations into the interesting,
weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live.