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Welcome back to the Abstract! This week, we’re going to the movies. For 77 hours straight. At the end, we’ll know whether we are doomed to villainy or driven to heroism. These are the only two options! Then, you’re not going to believe this, but the global trade for exotic ornamental plants is a bit sus. Next, OCTOPUS BRAINS! Last, scientists solve the mystery of the missing Moon craters, which has been a cold case for about four billion years. May you all be burdened with glorious purpose. With Great Power Comes Great Reproducibility Wigmore, Julia et al. “Are adverse childhood experiences scores associated with heroism or villainy? A quantitative observational study of Marvel and DC Cinematic Universe characters.” PLOS ONE. Losing parents. Surving genocide. Having your home planet explode. Superheroes and supervillains sure go through a lot of trauma. Now, this emotionally manipulative trope has undergone scientific scrutiny in a new study that assessed whether traumatic experiences in childhood predict heroism or villainy in superhero movies. Put another way, researchers devised a professional justification for watching 33 films from the Marvel and DC cinematic universes, totalling 77 hours and 5 minutes. By scoring 28 characters—19 men, 8 women, and a gender-fluid Loki—the team established that trauma has no impact on whether a character becomes a hero or a villain. “No one is doomed to be a villain just because of early childhood experiences,” concluded researchers led by Julia Wigmore of the University of Calgary. In other words: Magneto, no more excuses, dude. Stop murdering people with metal. Go touch grass. Naturally, characters like Harley Quinn and Loki were head-scratchers, given that they can swing both ways (I’m officially coining the term: bimoral). The team categorized Harley as a hero, because she has a redemption arc after dumping the Joker. Loki is classified as a villain because he spends most of his screentime making mischief. I don’t get the distinction here and think it should be contested in future academic literature. The study includes some interesting context about how therapists use superhero stories to help children process grief and trauma, and other Serious Stuff. But mostly, I’m here for the authors’ cheeky little flourishes, letting us know that they really got away with this one. “No superheroes or villains were involved in this research study,” the team said, presumably while winking in synchronous harmony. “If anyone could connect us with them, we would be happy to conduct a follow up study to overcome this limitation.” Snakes (in a Pot) on a Plane Hinsley et al. “Understanding the environmental and social risks from the international trade in ornamental plants.” BioScience. The next time you decide to order an ornamental plant from overseas, a thing I assume we are all constantly doing, make sure to check it for hitchhikers. A study this week revealed that the multi-billion dollar trade in ornamental plants—including olive trees, cut roses, and exotic shrubs—is opening up new vectors for invasive species, such as insects, frogs, geckos, and snakes. “Given the number and diversity of vertebrates, including fragile ones such as tropical frogs, reported live in imported products, the number of imported invertebrate pests is likely underestimated, and more consistent measures are needed to provide an accurate understanding of the true implications of trade and how they might be managed,” said researchers led by Amy Hinsley of the University of Oxford. People are straight-up bagging plants that still have a bunch of creepy crawlies still on them, and flying them out to customers in other continents. The authors of the study outline a range of actions to help mitigate the risks, including introducing “plant passports.” Ultimately, though, we might have to break out the big guns and get Samuel L. Jackson to reprise his role as the globetrotting FBI agent Neville Flynn, who could solve this problem, like all others, with eruptive profanity. Because I, for one, have had it with these (bleep) biosecurity risks due to (bleep) under-regulated industries in this (bleep) complex integrated global economy. Octopuses Map Their World Through “Suckerotopy” Olson, Cassady et al. “Neuronal segmentation in cephalopod arms.” Nature Communications. Scientists have confirmed once again, and to the surprise of nobody, that octopuses are epic. While it’s well-established that these charismatic mollusks basically have prehensile brains, a team has now zoomed in on the axial nerve cords that animate the tentacles, revealing some of the mechanics behind their coordination of such segmented anatomy. “The octopus has a motor control challenge of enormous complexity,” said researchers led by Cassady Olson of the University of Chicago. “Each of its eight arms is a muscular hydrostat, a soft-bodied structure that lacks a rigid skeleton and moves with near infinite degrees of freedom.” “Even with this complexity, octopuses control behaviors effectively along the length of a single arm, across all eight arms and between suckers,” the team said. “The neural circuits underlying these behaviors have been unexplored with modern molecular and cellular methods.” By studying the nervous system of the California two-spot octopus (Octopus bimaculoides) the researchers discovered that axial cords nerves “form a spatial topographic map” for each sucker, which they call “suckerotopy.” In other words, octopuses generate topographic maps of their own suckers, which helps them coordinate the immense motor and sensory input from these appendages. Bonus points to the authors for including video footage of octopuses doing neat stuff, like playing with a baseball and emerging from what looks like ancient Greek pottery. Mother Nature gets a 10/10, would evolve eight-limbed intelligent molluscs again. The Moon is a Harsh Viscous Zhu, Meng-Hua et al. “Obliteration of ancient impact basins on the Moon by viscous relaxation.” Nature Astronomy. The Moon was born in the cataclysmic fallout of a crash between Earth and a Mars-sized object—and that was the easy part. Earth and the Moon were bombarded with a heavy flux of space rocks for hundreds of millions of years after they formed (talk about a traumatic childhood!). Earth has erased most craters from this time because it moisturizes daily, but the Moon is an airless inactive world that should have preserved an estimated 300 craters with diameters greater than 185 miles. Yet there are only about 40 ancient crater basins on this massive scale on the lunar surface. What gives? Who ate all the craters? This week, scientists presented a new explanation for the mysterious discrepancy: Viscous relaxation. It sounds like something Gwynth Paltrow wants to sell you, but it is actually a geological process that smooths out terrestrial surfaces over time. In the case of the Moon, the team found that viscous relaxation from high temperatures in the crust, fueled in part by radioactive elements, could have obliterated hundreds of impact basins. This scenario offers “a realistic explanation for the low number of basins observed on the Moon,” said Meng-Hua Zhu of the Macau University of Science and Technology. “The substantial relaxation of early basins suggests that terrestrial planets…may have suffered far more impacts than the basin records indicate” but those “early epochs are obliterated.” And with that, it’s time for all of us to experience the substantial relaxation of the weekend. Obliterate responsibly. Thanks for reading! See you next week.
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