November 14, 2023: The oldest fish, brains on Pink Floyd, and the oddity of why one isn't the loneliest number. —Robin Lloyd, Contributing Editor | | | Scientists have discovered evidence of the oldest deep-sea fish after analyzing a variety of pits, scrapes and other fossilized feeding traces on the ocean floor. The research indicates that several fish species were living in deep waters and hunting there for squishy prey by 130 million years ago, writes Riley Black. The telltale fossils were first discovered a decade ago in Italy's Palombini Shale Formation, which once lay roughly 6,500 feet below the surface of the Cretaceous seas.
What the experts say: "It took more than 10 years to realize the true nature of the trace fossils," says Andrea Baucon, a paleontologist at the University of Genoa and one of the study authors. But after he observed modern Mediterranean fish creating similar structures, he says, "a light went on in my head."
How they did it: The pits, for example, appear to have been made by fish that could jet water at the sediment to reveal hiding prey. Distinctive two-lobed scrapes were created by fish mouthing at the bottom to catch worms. And S-shaped trails were created by a fish flicking its tail back and forth as it swam just above the seafloor. | | | A modern-day floor-dwelling fish (Synodus intermedius). Credit: Wild Horizons/Universal Images Group via Getty Images | | | Neuroscientists have reconstructed recognizable audio of a 1979 Pink Floyd song by using machine learning to decode electrical activity in the brains of listeners. As study participants undergoing surgery listened to " Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)," electrodes placed on the surface of the brain captured the activity of regions attuned to the song's acoustic profile. An artificial intelligence model was trained to decipher the activity data, analyzing patterns in the brain's response to the song's pitch, rhythm and tone; then a second model reassembled the patterned fragments to estimate the sounds heard by patients. The song's melody was roughly intact, and its lyrics are discernible if one knows what to listen for: "All in all, it was just a brick in the wall."
Why this song: "The scientific reason…is that the song is very layered," says Ludovic Bellier, a cognitive neuroscientist and the study's lead author. "It brings in complex chords, different instruments and diverse rhythms that make it interesting to analyze. The less scientific reason might be that we just really like Pink Floyd."
Why it matters: The technology, if it continues to advance, could prove most useful for translating brain waves into human speech, particularly for people who have lost the ability to speak because of conditions such as stroke or paralysis.
The result: Download a 14-second clip of the reconstructed audio at this link. | | | Living with Missiles
A member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation digs into a decades-long mystery: how 15 intercontinental ballistic missiles came to be siloed on her ancestral lands. Ella Weber is 20 years old and a junior at Princeton University.
This podcast episode is part of Scientific American's The Missiles on Our Rez, a new miniseries from Science, Quickly. This is Episode 1: "Becoming Nuclear." The miniseries itself is part of "The New Nuclear Age," a special report in Scientific American's December issue on a $1.5-trillion effort to remake the American nuclear arsenal. | | | • Hair straighteners and relaxers contain formaldehyde and may be harmful to our health. Here's how to make them safer. | 9 min read | | | • Invasive "cocaine hippos" are being sterilized in Colombia. | 5 min read | | | • A curious mathematical phenomenon called Benford's law governs the numbers all around us, writes Jack Murtagh in a new essay in the magazine's December issue. The law, also called the first-digit law, states that the digits 1 and 2 each occur with greater than a one in nine frequency as the leading digit of listings, tables of statistics, and all kinds of counts such as national populations, river lengths, death rates, stock prices and how many social media followers you have. "Not only are smaller leading digits more common but they follow a precise and consistent pattern," Murtagh writes. "An astonishing 30.1 percent of the entries begin with a 1, 17.6 percent begin with a 2, and so on." Mathematicians have yet to explain why this pattern crops up so often. Not all data sets conform to the law, but it has been used to help enforce laws in cases involving fraud and a Russian bot network. | 6 min read | | | The December issue of Scientific American was published online today, featuring a special report on the new nuclear arms race. In the coming weeks, we will roll out each of the issue's stories, essays and episodes in this newsletter. Today we started with part 1 of The Missiles on our Rez podcast miniseries. I will peruse many of these stories and multimedia pieces online, but I also enjoy turning the pages and reading my new print issue of the magazine when it arrives by mail.
| —Robin Lloyd, Contributing Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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