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April 8, 2025—A new kind of sea slug, supermazes inside black holes, and a biotech firm claims dire wolves are back from extinction. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | A mystery mollusk at a depth of approximately 1,900 meters. © 2021 MBARI | | For more than 20 years, scientists at California's Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) have occasionally encountered a strange-looking five-inch creature between 3,300 and 13,100 feet deep. Its face is ringed by a giant translucent hood that can trap prey and propel it through the water. Finally, researchers have determined that this mysterious creature, dubbed Bathydevius caudactylus, is a nudibranch, or sea slug—one that represents an entirely new nudibranch family. Why this is interesting: In the two decades since it was first spotted, researchers have observed more than 100 B. caudactylus and studied some in their laboratories. Genetic analysis revealed the creature probably belongs to a family that split from the other nudibranchs long ago and is now specialized to deep sea living. What the experts say: "Similar features can evolve multiple times, but to see it happen in such a unique kind of organism under such different circumstances than what we see in other nudibranchs is pretty cool," says Jessica Goodheart, a mollusk researcher at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. | | Black holes, the densest objects in the universe, eat up anything that comes too close, even light. Is there anything left inside these behemoths that could reveal what they devoured in the first place? String theory, an attempt to merge gravity with quantum physics, says yes. A new study suggests that within black holes lie tangled pathways of strings called supermazes, which hold devoured information in multiple dimensions. Supermaze-filled black holes wouldn't be truly black holes at all. Instead they'd be fuzzballs: fuzzy balls of multidimensional vibrating strings called branes. Why this matters: Fuzzballs and stringy supermazes have emerged as a way to solve a puzzle called the black hole information paradox. This quandary arose when physicists realized black holes seem to break a sacred law of physics: that information can never be destroyed. Fuzzballs, however, would be able to transmit some of this information through evaporating particles (discovered by Stephen Hawking in 1974). What the experts say: "The supermaze has a huge capacity to store information," says study co-author Nicholas Warner of the University of Southern California, noting that the maze's intricate structure is full of rooms and chambers and intersecting walls where two-dimensional things meet five-dimensional things. The capacity to store vast amounts of information, "solves the information paradox."—Clara Moskowitz, senior space and physics editor | | | | |
Dark matter is the hidden mass of the universe. But what if it's more mysterious than we thought? Join theoretical physicist Kathryn Zurek and science journalist Clara Moskowitz on April 9 to learn about the latest research and compelling findings. This event is for Scientific American subscribers only, so sign into your account to sign up. Or subscribe and get access! | | Not a subscriber? Subscribe now and visit our homepage to sign up. | | - The Trump administration decided to halt funding for Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. This "threatens to undermine immunization efforts for approximately 75 million children over the next five years, potentially leading to more than 1.2 million preventable deaths," writes Mario Jimenez, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Fellows for Health Equity and a Senior Country Manager at Gavi. "The world must choose: invest in vaccines and secure a future defined by health, equity and opportunity; or retreat into a more dangerous, more vulnerable age—one where preventable diseases return with a vengeance, and hope becomes the exception, not the rule," he says. | 3 min read
| | Gerard 't Hooft, Breakthrough prizewinner and theoretical physicist, has some surprising insights on the field of quantum mechanics. Part of what's keeping the field from making major advances, he says in an interview with Scientific American, is that everyone in it is thinking the same way. I wonder if quantum physics is due for what Thomas S. Kuhn called "paradigm shifts" in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Sometimes, to think outside of the box (and perhaps trigger a shift) requires an entirely new way of thinking. | | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | | |
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