Saturday Quote: Octopus as a fish shift supervisor. The universe confuses the standard model. very old cheese

This week, biologists tracked a mysterious group of killer whales near Chile. Hubble has discovered a black hole jet that explodes stars along its orbit. Researchers then described mysterious craters that began appearing in Siberian permafrost in the 2010s. But you’re probably here for cheese, cosmology, and taco, so here you go:

8 arms to hit you

Octopuses, like Boo Radley, tend to be solitary creatures, living and hunting alone before eventually mating and dying from strange brain declines like Alzheimer’s disease. But sometimes they interact socially and behave cooperatively in interspecific networks, such as hunting with schools of fish.

Researchers at the University of Konstanz conducted underwater field observations using three-dimensional field-based tracking and captured 100 hours of footage of Octopus cyanea individuals hunting cooperatively with groups of multiple fish species. collected and discovered the hidden mechanisms of leadership and complexity. Social dynamics.

Schools of fish scouting ahead constituted an expanded sensory network for the octopus, allowing it to localize and better locate its prey. In all the cases they observed, the octopus was the de facto group leader, eating its prey before the fish and administering corporal punishment to fish subordinates who did not comply.

Previous observations of similar octopus and fish hunting parties raised questions about group leadership and exploitation. Do fish use octopuses to catch prey more easily? But the researchers found that regardless of the species in the hunting group, octopuses are the group’s main interspecific regulators, hitting exploitative fish partners with their tentacles and driving them to the outskirts of the group.

Contrarian Universe for Physicists: Drop Dead

If you like events that defy predictions once observed directly, then the universe will really knock your socks off. For many years, the Standard Model of physics has predicted things like the rate of expansion of the universe, the age of the universe, and the likely date of the birth of the first stars and galaxies. Then, as engineers come up with more sophisticated equipment, they make observations, and the universe says, “Haha, no.”

This week, a multi-institutional group of astronomers published a paper suggesting it may be time for new physics to reconcile recent observations from dark energy spectrometers of neutrinos.

DESI creates the deepest and most accurate maps of the universe and provides baryon acoustic vibration measurements. Combined with measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation, this allows physicists to calculate the absolute mass scale of neutrinos. Neutrinos, one of the most abundant particles in the universe, are extremely difficult to study, but by determining their mass scale, physicists can learn how matter has clumped together throughout the evolution of the universe. can.

But while cosmologists expected to find suppressed clustering of matter, as predicted by the Standard Model, actual DESI observations revealed enhanced clustering. Joel Myers, an associate professor of physics at Southern Methodist University, said: “Explanations for this enhancement could point to some problems with the measurements, or could point to problems with the standard model of particle physics and cosmology. “It may require new physics that is not included.”

Ancient cheese identified

Chinese researchers extracted and analyzed DNA from samples of cheese found in ancient snack packs unearthed with mummies in northwestern China’s Tarim Basin 20 years ago.

The mummy and cheese were estimated to be approximately 3,300 to 3,600 years old. Their analysis revealed cow and goat DNA. The microorganisms that made up the white substance confirmed that it was kefir cheese, which contains Lactobacillus kefiranofaciens and Pichia kudryavzevi, the constituents of modern kefir grains. Researchers report that this microorganism is most closely related to modern Tibetan kefir.

“Our observations suggest that the Kefir culture has been maintained in the Xinjiang region of northwestern China since the Bronze Age,” said Qiaomei Fu, a researcher at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. said.

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