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May 1, 2025—Dolphins have an unusual way of communicating, a gravity hole under the Indian Ocean, and no explanation yet for Spain's blackout. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | An artist's concept of the dark energy-driven accelerating expansion of the universe. Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library/Alamy Stock Photo | | - In March, preliminary results from a giant survey of galaxies indicated that dark energy is not constant in the universe—and physicists are shook up. | 9 min read
- Officials have yet to determine the cause of a major electrical blackout in Spain this week. The U.S. energy secretary blamed renewable energy. | 5 min read
- Could a monster earthquake sink parts of the Pacific Northwest into the sea? A new study speculates on the impact of a major seismic event. | 4 min read
- The Trump Administration has stopped approving new allocations for a federal program that has been a top funding source for protecting people and property from disasters since 1989. | 5 min read
| | Marine biologists have observed a strange behavior in male Amazon River dolphins. A male turns on its back on the surface of the water and ejects a stream of pee into the air like a fountain jet. In almost 70 percent of instances another nearby male dolphin approaches this spontaneous fountain. Why they do this: For many animals, urine is a crucial way to convey information about sex, hierarchy, species, health and much more. The researchers speculate that male dolphins might use aerial peeing to deliberately communicate their "social position or physical condition," says study co-author Claryana Araújo-Wang, a biologist at Botos do Cerrado Research Project in Brazil. What the experts say: "When it comes to communication, humans always focus on visual cues and acoustic cues because we are visual animals and acoustic animals," says Joachim Frommen, a behavioral ecologist at Manchester Metropolitan University in England. But smell is a crucial sense, though understudied in some species, and urine is a major source of olfactory information. | | An image of Earth's geoid produced from data obtained by the European Space Agency's GOCE (Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer) mission. Science History Images/Alamy Stock Photo | | There's a hole under the Indian Ocean. Spanning more than three million square kilometers, the gouge is centered about 1,200 km southwest of the southern tip of India. Because of a low pull of gravity there, combined with higher gravity in surrounding areas, the sea level over the hole is 106 meters lower than the global average, according to a recent study. What the experts say: Slabs of the floor of an ancient sea called the Tethys Ocean, which existed between 250 to 50 million years ago between the supercontinents of Laurasia and Gondwana, sank into the mantle, creating plumes of molten rock. The hole under the Indian Ocean probably took its present shape about 20 million years ago, when the plumes started to spread within the upper mantle, says Debanjan Pal, a doctoral student at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, and lead author of the study. | | | | |
- The way people think about time, aging and sickness plays a remarkably powerful role in their health, write Ellen Langer and Peter Aungle, a psychology professor and psychology Ph.D. candidate, respectively, at Harvard University. For example, wounds heal more quickly for people who think time has passed quickly. Their research suggests that "people can think themselves sick when they could otherwise be healthy and that they can also think themselves well." | 5 min read
| | Biologist Mariola Sánchez-Cerdá uses radio tracking to monitor European wildcats (Felis silvestris) in southern Spain with her daughter, Sabana. "I love this image, because it brings together my two worlds: science and motherhood," she says. "It is important to me to inspire her love for nature, and my life as a field biologist allows me to do this almost every day." (Nature | 3 min read) | | As the researcher notes above, humans are very visual creatures. I sometimes wonder how much information we are missing because our sensory experience is oriented primarily around eyesight. Consider dogs, our stalwart, butt-sniffing companions. Dogs have more than a billion olfaction receptors (humans have about 5 million) and use this superpower to sniff out bombs, drugs and even invasive species. They can detect when their owners are stressed, or about to have a seizure or whether cancer is present. A dog's nose must be foremost in its mind, and its world a buffet of scents, most of which the human brain could never detect. | | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | | |
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