December 12, 2023: A new explanation for why we dream, star formation beyond the Milky Way and what a tyrannosaur liked to eat. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | Why do we dream? David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, has proposed that dreaming is a kind of brainspace land-grab. Neurons compete for brain territory--sensory areas can gain or lose neural territory depending on if and how they're used. So as REM sleep begins, visual neurons fire into action, hypothetically to maintain the territory in the brain they might otherwise lose while we're sleeping. As long as the visual neurons are firing, their brain real estate will not be commandeered by other functions. Other possibilities: Dreams are thought to help us process complex emotions. For example, in the early days of the pandemic, society experienced a so-called "dream surge," with global reports of more frequent, anxiety-riddled dreams about social distancing and getting sick. The nature of the dream often correlates with the waking mood state--depressed people often have very dark dreams. And other research has shown that dreams play a role in transferring memories from short to long-term storage.
Harness your dreams: The artist Salvador Dalí famously woke himself up during his dream cycle to help him achieve creative breakthroughs in his work. And recent studies have found that brief naps can enhance creativity in everyday life. There's even an app that helps you target your dream content on themes to help spark ideas and solutions to problems when you wake up. | | | Stars begin as clumps of dust and gas rotating in a disk. As the matter in the disk coalesces, the gravity at the center of the disk fuses and glows as a nascent star. We've seen such disks around forming stars in our own galaxy before, but now astronomers have, for the very first time, detected the rotating disk of material around a very young star in another galaxy, writes astronomer Phil Plait in his latest column for Scientific American.
Why this is so cool: The young star, called HH 1177, has jets of matter shooting out from its disk–each spanning 33 light-years end to end. Astronomers believe that because of the direction the jets are pointed in space, there must be a disk around the star, feeding the jets. This disk appears more massive and "bulky" than counterparts in the Milky Way, where such dense disks break apart.
What the experts say: Being able to see diverse types of star formation is crucial. "By seeing how the process unfolds under different conditions, we can push the limits of our models to learn how they perform under stress," writes Plait. "If they remain intact, so, too, does our confidence in their correctness; if they break, then important gaps must linger in our accounts of stellar birth." | | | An artist's concept of the HH 1177 system, a dusty disk around a newborn massive star in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighboring galaxy of the Milky Way. The glowing star in the center is feeding on material from the disk, while also ejecting matter in powerful jets. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser | | | • In a first, 134 countries at the COP28 conference signed a declaration pledging to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from processes related to producing and consuming food. | 4 min read | | | • Damage from thunderstorms alone forced insurers to pay claims worth $60 billion worldwide in 2023--nearly twice the annual amount paid on average over the previous five years. | 2 min read | | | • The shuffling of the management board at OpenAI (and the firing and rehiring of Sam Altman) might appear like a victory, writes Ed Zitron, who is the CEO of EZPR, a national tech and business public-relations agency. But the result of all this drama is that, "the largest artificial intelligence company in the world is—corporate structure be damned—controlled by venture capitalists and a multitrillion-dollar public tech company," he says. | 6 min read | | | Thomas Edison was another creative mind who relied on napping and the sleep cycle to spur his strokes of genius. He would hold a ball in each hand that would fall and jolt him awake just as he was reaching that twilight phase of sleep. Some research has shown that the semi-lucid state might be a brief period of heightened insight, but one we rarely remember. All I'm taking from this is that naps = good. | Before you take a snooze, send me your feedback and suggestions for this newsletter: newsletters@sciam.com. Sweet dreams. | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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