ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
It's time now for our science news roundup from Short Wave, NPR's science podcast. I am joined by the show's host, Regina Barber, and producer Rachel Carlson. Good to have you both here.
RACHEL CARLSON, BYLINE: Hey, Ari.
REGINA BARBER, BYLINE: Yeah, it's good to be here.
SHAPIRO: As usual, you've brought us three science stories that caught your attention this week. What are they?
BARBER: Mysterious red dots in space.
CARLSON: One way the brain might fill in missing information.
BARBER: And the wiggly world of octopus arms.
SHAPIRO: Cool. All right. I am imagining space acne. What are these mysterious red dots?
CARLSON: (Laughter).
BARBER: Well, let's start at the beginning, Ari. The universe probably started with the big bang.
SHAPIRO: At the very beginning.
BARBER: Very, very beginning. So, Ari, this story starts with images from the new James Webb Space Telescope of the very, very early universe. We're talking, like, 500 million years after the big bang, which, since the universe is 13.8 billion years old, that's basically less than 5% of the universe's life.
CARLSON: So when scientists were looking far back into the dawn of the universe, they noticed these very strange red objects in these images of space. They debated whether the dots were big, black holes or galaxies. But the weird thing was, if they were galaxies, they were much older than they should have been.
BINGJIE WANG: It would be like checking on your little kid and finding a fully grown adult.
BARBER: That's Bingjie Wang, an astrophysicist who is part of a team that published a study about one of these red dots in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics last week.
SHAPIRO: What do her team think these red dots are?
BARBER: So long story short, Ari, we still don't know. They're all very different. They all have, like, different features. The lead author of that study, astrophysicist Anna de Graaff, says that our existing models really just don't explain what's going on in this specific case.
ANNA DE GRAAFF: So any normal star or galaxy model or black hole model does not fit the data, essentially.
CARLSON: So they needed a new model to explain this specific red dot's features. And the study is claiming this new model points to a new kind of black hole, one surrounded by a dense cloud of cooler gas kind of like an atmosphere, but it's not a planet or a star.
SHAPIRO: I didn't know black holes could have an atmosphere. What does that mean exactly?
CARLSON: It means that this could be a stage in black hole growth that scientists have never seen before. It could also be a new clue as to how supermassive black holes at the centers of almost all galaxies are made, but astrophysicists aren't really sure.
SHAPIRO: Do they have ideas about how that might work?
BARBER: Yeah, so I reached out to astrophysicist at Yale Priya Natarajan, and she says this could be one example of how black holes rapidly grew into supermassive black holes, but that this is only one example of a model that she and her colleague, Tal Alexander, actually proposed a while ago. They thought that black holes created soon after the big bang, with big clouds of dust and gas around them, could rapidly grow to become supermassive black holes. So she thinks more work needs to be done.
SHAPIRO: OK, let's pivot from black holes to holes in information in the human brain.
(LAUGHTER)
SHAPIRO: What's the second story?
CARLSON: So the brain is wired to fill in visual gaps. For example, Ari, maybe an animal sees the tail of a lion hiding behind a bush, but their brain alerts them as if they've seen the entire lion.
SHAPIRO: So, like, the brain fills in the gaps to say run.
CARLSON: Exactly. And in that case, that brain feature is really helpful. But sometimes in the case of things like optical illusions, the brain perceives objects that aren't actually there.
BARBER: And because of that, scientists can study illusions to try to understand how the brain fills in those gaps. A new study in Nature Neuroscience did exactly this in mice.
CARLSON: So Ari, I want you to look at an example of what the researchers showed the mice.
SHAPIRO: OK.
CARLSON: It's called the Kanizsa illusion and tell me what you see.
SHAPIRO: It looks like three black Pac-Mans...
BARBER: Yeah.
SHAPIRO: ...Heading for a threesome towards each other.
(LAUGHTER)
CARLSON: OK.
BARBER: No. No.
CARLSON: Honestly, I like that description. A lot of people see a triangle when they look at it.
SHAPIRO: Oh, OK. Yeah, 'cause, like, the gaps between the Pac-people's mouths makes a triangle. Yeah. Got it.
CARLSON: Yeah, exactly. So to a lot of people, it seems like there's a white triangle on top of those black Pac-Men circle things.
BARBER: So this is an example of how the brain fills in the edges of a shape, even when those edges don't exist. And when researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the Allen Institute in Seattle showed this image to mice, they found a special group of neurons in mice brains specifically involved in that process of filling in the missing edges.
CARLSON: And researchers have known that the brain has neurons that respond to both the edges of real objects and the edges of illusions, or objects that aren't really there, like that triangle. But these were different neurons specifically activated by the edges of the illusion.
SHAPIRO: So what can researchers do with that information now that they've identified this, like, specific brain circuit?
CARLSON: One of the study authors, Hyeyoung Shin, says with a lot more work and, of course, work on humans, this could help researchers understand mental disorders that affect perception.
HYEYOUNG SHIN: The most famous example of that is schizophrenia, but also autism, ADHD, Alzheimer's, many other diseases.
BARBER: Although one limitation of the study is that it's mice. A mouse can't say whether they see the triangle or not. So there's lots more to be done before we can make claims about humans.
SHAPIRO: OK. Third story - octopus arms. Take it away.
BARBER: OK, Ari, so this new study came out in the journal Scientific Reports, and it's all about how octopuses use different arms for different tasks.
CARLSON: Scientists analyzed a bunch of videos of octopuses in the wild, and they were like, great. What's each individual arm doing here?
CHELSEA BENNICE: Octopuses have eight arms, and to look at what each arm is doing at a specific point, you have to watch that video eight times.
CARLSON: That's Chelsea Bennice. She's a field biologist at Florida Atlantic University and a coauthor of the study.
SHAPIRO: It sounds like a lot of octopus content to go through.
CARLSON: Yeah.
SHAPIRO: What did they find?
CARLSON: Two things. One, there was no arm specialization, meaning all of their arms were capable of doing all the same actions. But two, the octopuses still seem to prefer doing certain tasks with certain arms. The majority of the time, they use their front arms for exploration and their back arms for locomotion.
BARBER: Just to be clear, octopus researchers have observed some of these arm preferences in lab settings before. But Kirt Onthank, an octopus researcher at Walla Walla University in Washington state, who's not affiliated with this research, says it's important for us to observe it in the wild too.
KIRT ONTHANK: They're really good at hiding. Just finding them is difficult. And then once you do find them, it's really hard to then ensure that you, the big, hairless monkey covered in neoprene, is not, like, messing up their behavior.
SHAPIRO: OK, well, what do we get out of knowing that an octopus might use one arm to give a thumbs up and another to give a peace sign?
BARBER: (Laughter).
CARLSON: Yeah, when we ask Chelsea (laughter), she told us that it could help us get inspiration for flexible or soft robotics, which she says could be helpful for things like search and recovery or even ocean exploration.
SHAPIRO: Cool. That's Rachel Carlson and Regina Barber, from NPR's science podcast Short Wave. Subscribe now for new discoveries, everyday mysteries and the science behind the headlines. Thank you, both.
BARBER: Thank you.
CARLSON: Thanks.
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