The Universe Will Decay a Lot Sooner than Expected

Welcome back to the Abstract! 

I’m trying out something a little different this week: Instead of rounding up four studies per usual, I’m going deep on one lead study followed by a bunch of shorter tidbits. I’m hoping this shift will make for a more streamlined read and also bring a bit more topic diversity into the column. 

With that said, wild horses couldn’t drag me from the main story this week (it’s about wild horses). Then follow the trail of an early land pioneer, gaze into a three-eyed face of the past, witness an aurora Martialis, meet some mama chimps, and join the countdown to the end of the universe.    

You Can Lead a Horse to an Ice-Free Corridor… 

Running Horse Collin, Yvette et al. “Sustainability insights from Late Pleistocene climate change and horse migration patterns.” Science.

Have you ever got lost in thought while wandering and ended up on a totally different continent? You’re in good company. The history of life on Earth is packed with accidental migrations into whole new frontiers, a pattern exemplified by the Bering Land Bridge, which connected Siberia to Alaska until it was submerged under glacial meltwaters 11,000 years ago. 

As mentioned in last week’s column, this natural bridge likely enabled the ancestors of Tyrannosaurus rex to enter North America from Asia. It also served as a gateway to the first humans to reach the Americas, who crossed from Siberia over the course of several migrations. 

Now, scientists have confirmed that wild horses also crossed the Bering Land Bridge multiple times in both directions from about 50,000 and 13,000 years ago, during the Late Pleistocene period. In a study that combined genomic analysis of horse fossils with Indigenous science and knowledge, researchers discovered evidence of many crossings during the last ice age.  

“We find that Late Pleistocene horses from Alaska and northern Yukon are related to populations from Eurasia and crossed the Bering land bridge multiple times during the last glacial interval,” said researchers led by Yvette Running Horse Collin (Lakota: Tašunke Iyanke Wiŋ) of the Université de Toulouse. “We also find deeply divergent lineages north and south of the American ice sheets that genetically influenced populations across Beringia and into Eurasia.” 

Wild horses at the Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary in South Dakota, USA. Image: Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary

I couldn’t resist this study in part because I am an evangelical Horse Girl looking to convert the masses to the cult of Equus. But beyond horse worship, this study is a great example of knowledge-sharing across worldviews as it weaves in the expertise of Indigenous co-authors who live in the regions where these Ice Age horses once roamed.

“The Horse Nation and its movement and evolution are sacred to many Indigenous knowledge keepers in the Americas,” Running Horse Collin and her colleagues said. “Following the movement and evolution of the horse to reveal traditional knowledge fully aligns with many Indigenous scientific protocols. We thus integrate the biological signatures identified with Indigenous knowledge regarding ecosystem balance and sustainability to highlight the importance of corridors in safeguarding life.”

The study concludes with several reflections on the Horse Nation from its Indigenous co-authors. I’ll close with a quote from co-author Jane Stelkia, an Elder for the sqilxʷ/suknaqin or Okanagan Nation, who observed that, “Today, we live in a world where the boundaries and obstacles created by mankind do not serve the majority of life. In this study, Snklc’askaxa is offering us medicine by reminding us of the path all life takes together to survive and thrive. It is time that humans help life find the openings and points to cross and move safely.”

In other news….

A Strut for the Ages

Long, John et al “Earliest amniote tracks recalibrate the timeline of tetrapod evolution.” Nature.

Fossilized claw prints found in Australia’s Snowy Plains Formation belonged to the earliest known “amniote,” the clade that includes practically all tetrapod vertebrates on land, including humans. The tracks were laid out by a mystery animal 356 million years ago, pushing the fossil timeline of amniotes back some 35 million years into the Devonian period. 

“The implications for the early evolution of tetrapods are profound,” said researchers led by John Long of Flinders University. “It seems that tetrapod evolution proceeded much faster, and the Devonian tetrapod record is much less complete than has been thought.”  

Extra points for the flashy concept video that shows the track-maker strutting like it knows it’s entering itself into the fossil record.

Blinky the Cambrian Radiodont

Moysiuk, Joseph and Caron, Jean-Bernard. “Early evolvability in arthropod tagmosis exemplified by a new radiodont from the Burgess Shale.” Royal Society Open Science.

What has three eyes, two spiky claws, and a finger-sized body? Meet Mosura fentoni, a new species of arthropod that lived 506 million years ago. The bizarre “radiodont” from the Cambrian-era sediments of British Columbia’s Burgess Shale is exhaustively described in a new study.

Concept art of Mosura fentoni. Fantastic creature. No notes.  Image: Art by Danielle Dufault, © ROM

“Mosura adds to a growing list of radiodont species in which a median eye has been described, but the functional role of this structure has not been discussed,” said authors Joseph Moysiuk of the Manitoba Museum and Jean-Bernard Caron of the Royal Ontario Museum. “The large size and hemiellipsoidal shape of the radiodont median eye are unusual for arthropod single-lens eyes, but a possible functional analogy can be drawn with the central member of the triplet of median eyes found in dragonflies.”

Green Glow on the Red Planet 

Knutsen, Elise et al. “Detection of visible-wavelength aurora on Mars.” Science Advances.

NASA’s Perseverance Rover captured images of a green aurora on Mars in March 2024, marking the first time a first visible light aurora has ever been seen on the planet. Mars displays a whole host of auroral light shows, including ”localized discrete and patchy aurora, global diffuse aurora, dayside proton aurora, and large-scale sinuous aurora,” according to a new study. But it took a solar storm to capture a visible-light aurora for the first time.

Perseverance Rover. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS/SSI

“To our knowledge, detection of aurora from a planetary surface other than Earth has never been reported, nor has visible aurora been observed at Mars,” said researchers led by Elise Knutsen of the University of Oslo. “This detection demonstrates that auroral forecasting at Mars is possible, and that during events with higher particle precipitation, or under less dusty atmospheric conditions, aurorae will be visible to future astronauts.”

Parenting Tips from Wild Chimps

Rolland, Eléonore et al. “Evidence of organized but not disorganized attachment in wild Western chimpanzee offspring (Pan troglodytes verus).” Nature Human Behavior.

Coasting off of Mother’s Day weekend, researchers present four years of observations focused on mother-offspring attachment styles in the wild chimpanzees of Côte d'Ivoire’s Taï National Park. 

Mama-offspring bonding in Taï chimps. Image: © Liran Samuni, Taï Chimpanzee Project

The team documented “organized” attachment styles like “secure” in which the offspring look to the mother for comfort, and “Insecure avoidant,” characterized by more independent offspring.

 The “disorganized” style, in which the parent-offspring bond is maladaptive due to parental abuse or neglect, was virtually absent in the wild chimps, in contrast to humans and captive chimps, where it is unfortunately far more common.     

“The maternal behaviour of chimpanzees observed in our study lacked evidence of the abusive behaviours observed in human contexts,” said researchers led by Eléonore Rolland of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “In contrast, instances of inadequate maternal care in zoos leading to humans taking over offspring rearing occurred for 8 infants involving 19 mothers across less than 5 years and for 7 infants involving 23 mothers across 9 years.”

In other words, the environmental context of parenting matters a lot to the outcomes of the offspring. Of course, this is obvious in countless anecdotal experiences of our own lives, but the results of the study offer a stark empirical reminder.

Live Every Day As If The Universe Might End in 10⁷⁸ Years

Falcke, Heino et al. “An upper limit to the lifetime of stellar remnants from gravitational pair production.” Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.

Bad news for anyone who was hoping to live to the ripe old age of 10⁷⁸ years. It turns out that the universe might decay into nothingness around that time, which is much sooner than previous estimates of cosmic death in about 10¹¹⁰⁰ years. Long-lived stellar remnants, like white dwarfs and black holes, will slowly evaporate through a process called Hawking radiation on a more accelerated timeline, according to the study, which also estimates that a human body would take about 10⁹⁰ years to evaporate through this process (sorry, would-be exponent nonagenarians).  

“Astronomy usually looks back in time when observing the universe, answering the question how the universe evolved to its present state,” said researchers led by Heino Falcke of Radboud University Nijmegen. “However, it is also a natural question to ask how the universe and its constituents will develop in the future, based on the currently known laws of nature.”

Answer: Things fall apart, including all matter in the universe. Have a great weekend!