In the next selection of interesting science news of the week: Everyone knows Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile that glides across her face like a shadow, and everyone admires how the great Leonardo managed to capture that elusive moment. But while art historians struggle to explain the phenomenon, geneticist David Taler of the University of Basel is ready to offer an explanation: it could all be due to the phenomenon of high-frequency vision possessed by the great Renaissance master. According to Taler, it is now possible to meet people who can see the seams on a baseball while it is flying, or tennis players who can return super-fast serves. The idea of Leonardo’s “quick eye” first came to Talero when he read a description of the flight of a dragonfly in the artist’s notes. “The dragonfly flies with four wings,” Leonardo reported, “and when the two front ones are in the upper position, the two rear ones remain in the lower position. “I thought, this is cool, I should see it for myself,” the scientist recalls. “It was summer and there were a lot of dragonflies flying around, but no matter how closely I looked, it just seemed like a constant flickering. None of my friends could make out the flight structure either, so I took the subject of rapid eye movements seriously and started to study it.
We explain quickly, simply, and clearly what happened, why it matters, and what will happen next. Episodes The end of history: Podcast Advertising Talerom’s research showed that the back and front wings of a dragonfly are in antiphase for a hundredth of a second, and Leonardo’s notebook indicates that he observed this, meaning that his eyes captured the image at a frequency of 100 hertz, or one hundred times per second, which is about twice as fast as normal people. Taler explains this by pointing to genes responsible for the formation of potassium ion channels in retinal cells. According to him, in some animal species, especially many insects, the retina is able to detect very fast movements due to pronounced genetic differences. The same developmental differences in retinal cells may also be responsible for the increased speed of image fixation in humans. According to Thaler, it might be possible to determine whether Leonardo’s “quick eye” was the result of genetic influence on retinal development or developed through training and increased attention to detail by analyzing the painter’s DNA. However, this would require somehow extracting DNA from his works, since Leonardo’s burial site has been moved and historians are unsure if his remains are actually in the tomb.
Every schoolchild (if he is in the upper grades and not the worst student) knows that it is better not to mess with black holes: they will suck you in and forget you, that’s how they are. It is understandable that astronomers know much more about black holes, but even experts were astonished when they found out that the hole discovered in 2018 is growing at a record speed for the entire universe. It is capable of swallowing the sun in a day and has already accumulated a mass equivalent to 34 billion suns like ours, which puts it in the league not of supermassive but of ultramassive black holes. “The mass of this black hole is 8,000 times greater than the black hole at the center of the Milky Way,” explains astronomer Christopher Onken of the Australian National University in Canberra. “If our black hole were as voracious, it would have already swallowed two-thirds of all the stars in our galaxy. Fortunately, the monster is billions of light-years away, in the center of a galaxy that doesn’t even have a coherent name, just a combination of letters and numbers: SMSS J215728.21-360215.1 (the pros just call it J2157). But J2157 is of interest to scientists not because of its appetite or even its current size – there are bigger black holes – but because it formed shortly after the Big Bang, when the universe was very young – it was about a billion years old at the time. According to Onken, the discovery of this gap challenges the established cosmological model, since it was always believed that the formation of a supermassive black hole takes a long time and requires a significant amount of matter. So a supermassive black hole hidden in the early universe is already a super mystery. “What is this galaxy, one of the giants of the early universe? Or has the black hole already swallowed up most of its surroundings? We have yet to find out,” Onken writes in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
“For most couples whose relationship is progressing, there comes a time when they have to share a bed. This is undoubtedly a victory for the relationship, but for sleep…” Of course, scientists have written numerous papers on the benefits and harms of co-sleeping, but they have not reached a unanimous opinion. Some recipients continue to claim that sleeping together is wonderful, both physically and psychologically, while others say they don’t get enough sleep in the same bed. There are even those who divide everything by gender, saying that men somehow manage to get enough sleep… at the expense of women. And that’s where the authors of a new study published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, scientists from Germany, Denmark and the USA, want to dot the i’s. For two weeks, ten pairs of volunteers between the ages of 18 and 29 took turns sharing a bed with their partner or sleeping alone. Researchers measured their brain activity, muscle tone, heart rate, and more. As a result, they came to a clear conclusion: couples who slept together had 10% more time for the most beneficial, rapid sleep. It is this sleep that consolidates what has been seen and heard during the day, promotes emotional regulation, and helps keep the brain in optimal working condition. Researchers have also found that people who sleep together, especially those who love each other, synchronize their sleep cycles. Sleeping together may make you toss and turn more, but by all indicators, it does not affect the quality of your sleep. So, if you are young, healthy and, most importantly, ready to share a bed with someone, your brain will reward you for going to the village of Hrapovo in the embrace of a loving partner. “Well, for everyone else, there is always a couch.”
This collection of hats on a caterpillar’s head are actually its former heads, or rather, its former shells. As the larva of the moth Uraba lugens grows, it outgrows its old exoskeleton and has to change it. Instead of getting rid of the old heads, the resourceful insect stacks them on top of each other to create a whimsical, multilayered hat. For this she was even called the Mad Caterpillar, in analogy to the Mad Hatter from “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”. In the caterpillar stage, U. lugens manages to go through 13 moults, but from the fourth one on, it starts to collect hats, and each hat becomes larger and larger. Of course, such a strange headdress is not only for beauty’s sake: it protects the caterpillar from predators who bite off the top of its head, leaving them puzzled as to where the headless victim has gone. We need to consider that the number of remaining heads allows us to calculate how many attempts the caterpillar has survived. By the way, the crazy caterpillar that lives in Australia and New Zealand has another hobby besides decorating itself with hats: it skillfully devours eucalyptus leaves, leaving only a skeleton of veins behind.