A fungus that recently evolved to infect humans is spreading rapidly in health care facilities in the United States and becoming harder to treat, a study from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds.

Candida auris infections were first detected in the United States in 2013. Each year since, the number of people infected — though still small — has increased dramatically. In 2016, the fungus sickened 53 people. In 2021, the deadly fungus infected 1,471 people, nearly twice the 756 cases from the year before, researchers report March 21 in Annals of Internal Medicine. What’s more, the team found, the fungus is becoming resistant to antifungal drugs.
The rise of cases and antifungal resistance is “concerning,” says microbiologist and immunologist Arturo Casadevall, who studies fungal infections. “You worry because [the study] is telling you what could be a harbinger of things to come.” Casadevall, of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, was not involved in the CDC study.

In tests of people at high risk of infection, researchers also found 4,041 individuals who carried the fungus in 2021 but were not sick at the time. A small percentage of carriers may later get sick from the fungus, says Meghan Lyman, a medical epidemiologist in the CDC’s Mycotic Diseases Branch in Atlanta, possibly developing bloodstream infections that carry a high risk of death.

Starting in 2012, C. auris infections popped up suddenly in hospitals on three continents, probably evolving to grow at human body temperature as a result of climate change (SN: 7/26/19). The fungus, typically detected through blood or urine tests, usually infects people in health care settings such as hospitals, rehabilitation facilities and long-term care homes. Because people who get infected are often already sick, it can be hard to tell whether symptoms such as fevers are from the existing illness or an infection.
Those most at risk of infection include people who are ill; those who have catheters, breathing or feeding tubes or other invasive medical devices; and those who have repeated or long stays in health care facilities. Healthy people are usually not infected but can spread the fungus to others by contact with contaminated surfaces, including gowns and gloves worn by health care workers, Lyman says.

Growing drug resistance
Infections can be treated with antifungal drugs. But Lyman and colleagues found that the fungus is becoming resistant to an important class of such medications called echinocandins. These drugs are used as both the first line and the last line of defense against C. auris, says Casadevall.

Before 2020, six people were known to have echinocandin-resistant infections and four other people had infections resistant to all three class of existing antifungal drugs. That resistance developed during treatment using echinocandin. None of those cases passed the resistant strain to others. But in 2021, 19 people were diagnosed with echinocandin-resistant infections and seven with infections resistant to multiple drugs.

More concerning, one outbreak in Washington, D.C., and another in Texas suggested people could transmit the drug-resistant infections to each other. “Patients who had never been on echinocandins were getting these resistant strains,” Lyman says.

Some health care facilities have been able to identify cases early and prevent outbreaks. “We’re obviously very concerned,” Lyman says, “but we are encouraged by these facilities that have had success at containing it.” Using those facilities’ infection control measures may help limit cases of C. auris, she says, as well as reducing spread other fungal, bacterial and viral pathogens.

SAN DIEGO — Marijuana use during teenage years may change the brain in key decision-making areas, a study in rats suggests.

“Adolescence is a dangerous time to be insulting the brain, particularly with drugs of abuse,” study coauthor Eliza Jacobs-Brichford said November 7 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

Jacobs-Brichford and colleagues gave adolescent male and female rats a marijuana-like compound. Afterward, the researchers found changes in parts of the brain involved in making decisions.
Normally, many of the nerve cells there are surrounded by rigid structures called perineuronal nets, sturdy webs that help stabilize connections between nerve cells. But in male rats that had been exposed to the marijuana-like compound in adolescence, fewer of these nerve cells, which help put the brakes on other cells’ activity, were covered by nets. Drug exposure didn’t seem to affect the nets in female rats.

“Males look more susceptible to these drugs,” said Jacobs-Brichford, a behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

DENVER — Three jugs placed as offerings in a roughly 3,600-year-old tomb in Israel have revealed a sweet surprise — evidence of the oldest known use of vanilla.

Until now, vanilla was thought to have originated in Mexico, perhaps 1,000 years ago or more. But jugs from the Bronze Age site of Megiddo contain remnants of two major chemical compounds in natural vanilla extract, vanillin and 4-hydroxybenzaldehyde, said archaeologist Vanessa Linares of Tel Aviv University in Israel. Chemical analyses also uncovered residues of plant oils, including a component of olive oil, in the three jugs.
“Bronze Age people at Megiddo may have used vanillin-infused oils as additives for foods and medicines, for ritual purposes or possibly even in the embalming of the dead,” Linares said. She described these findings at the annual meeting of American Schools of Oriental Research on November 16.

Vanillin comes from beans in vanilla orchids. About 110 species of these flowers are found in tropical areas around the world. The chemical profile of the vanillin in the Megiddo jugs best matches present-day orchid species in East Africa, India and Indonesia, Linares said.

Extensive Bronze Age trade routes likely brought vanillin to the Middle East from India and perhaps also from East Africa, she suggested.

“It’s really not surprising that vanillin reached Bronze Age Megiddo given all the trade that occurred between the [Middle East] and South Asia,” says archaeologist Eric Cline of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. But no evidence exists of trade at that time between Middle Eastern societies and East Africa, says Cline, who did not participate in the Megiddo research.
Vanilla orchids or their beans probably reached Megiddo via trade routes that first passed through Mesopotamian society in southwest Asia. However Bronze Age Middle Easterners ended up with those products, discoveries at Megiddo challenge the idea that vanilla use originated only in Mexico and then spread elsewhere, Cline says.

The vanillin-containing jugs at Megiddo came from a tomb of three “highly elite” individuals who were interred with six other people of lesser social rank, said archaeologist Melissa Cradic of the University of California, Berkeley, a member of the current Megiddo research team. Excavations uncovered the tomb in 2016, Cradic also reported at the ASOR meeting.

Primary burials in the tomb consist of an adult female, an adult male and an 8- to 12-year-old boy. Elaborate types of bronze, gold and silver jewelry were found on and around the three skeletons. Exact replicas of several pieces of jewelry appeared on each individual.

The tomb lies in an exclusive part of Megiddo near a palace and a monumental city gate.

“We can’t definitively say that these three people were royals,” Cradic said. “But they were elites in Megiddo and may have belonged to the same family.”

For three years, a team of scientists kept a big secret: They had discovered a giant crater-shaped depression buried beneath about a kilometer of ice in northwestern Greenland. In November, the researchers revealed their find to the world.

They hadn’t set out to find a crater. But in 2015, glaciologists studying ice-penetrating radar images of Greenland’s ice sheet, part of an annual survey by NASA’s Operation IceBridge mission, noticed an oddly rounded shape right at the northern edge of Hiawatha Glacier. If the 31-kilometer-wide depression is confirmed to be the remnant of a meteorite impact — and the team has produced a wealth of evidence suggesting that it is (SN: 12/8/18, p. 6) — the discovery is exciting in and of itself. It’s rare to find a new crater, let alone one on land that has retained its perfect bowl shape.

“This is just a straight-up exciting discovery that starts with this wonderful element of serendipity,” says team member Joseph MacGregor, a glaciologist with Operation IceBridge.

But the crater — let’s call it that, for the sake of discussion — may have also reignited a debate over a controversial hypothesis about a mysterious cold snap known as the Younger Dryas. This cold period began abruptly about 12,800 years ago and ended just as abruptly about 11,700 years ago. For more than a decade, a small group of researchers, unconnected with the group behind the new discovery, has suggested that a cosmic impact triggered the cooling (SN: 7/7/18, p. 18).
Proponents of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis say that the remnants of a comet exploded in Earth’s atmosphere and that the airbursts sparked wildfires across North America. Soot and other particles from the fires blocked out the sun, causing the cold snap, which has been blamed for everything from the extinction of the mammoths to the disappearance of a group of people known as the Clovis.

Most scientists reject that an impact was responsible, refuting the idea that there were vast wildfires at the time or that the Clovis people even disappeared. Another big objection: the lack of a smoking gun, a crater dating to the onset of the Younger Dryas.
The “mammoth in the room,” therefore, is whether the Greenland crater might be that smoking gun. But a large, recent impact would be extremely unlikely, given the rarity of such impacts on Earth, particularly on land, says planetary scientist Clark Chapman of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., who was not involved with the discovery.

Indeed, one sticking point is that there are no direct dates for the newly discovered crater, because it is still buried beneath all that ice. The radar data offer only tantalizing clues to the age, suggesting that the crater is between 2.6 million and 11,700 years old.

That’s a huge time range, but the proponents of the hypothesis are convinced that this crater is what they’ve been waiting for. “I think it’s transformational in terms of convincing a lot of skeptics,” says James Kennett, a geologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
There’s another big sticking point when it comes to linking this crater to the impact hypothesis: Instead of a fragment of a comet, the discoverers think the Hiawatha impactor was an iron meteorite. That determination is based on measurements of platinum and other elements in glacial outwash, sediments carried by meltwater from beneath the ice. An iron meteorite impact would probably not produce the kinds of explosive airbursts that could ignite continent-scale wildfires, says Michail Petaev, a geochemist at Harvard University.
Petaev and colleagues previously found a hint that an iron meteorite might have smacked into Greenland about 13,000 years ago. In 2013, his group examined Greenland ice cores and found a strange platinum anomaly dating to right before the Younger Dryas. The ratio of platinum to iridium measured in the ice cores points to an iron meteorite, the team reported.

Despite the platinum data, the impact hypothesis proponents hold firmly to the idea that the Hiawatha impactor was a comet. Because little is known about comet compositions, Kennett says, a comet might well have been the source for the platinum found in the glacial outwash and the ice cores. But Petaev maintains that the observed platinum ratios just wouldn’t occur in a comet, which is made of the primitive stuff of the universe. Instead, he says, those ratios require the cycles of melting and recrystallizing that form iron meteorites, the ancient cores of asteroids or planets.
Glaciologist Kurt Kjær of the University of Copenhagen, who led the team that identified the crater, and his colleagues don’t want to weigh in on the Younger Dryas debate. “We can’t prove it,” Kjær says. “But we can certainly not disprove it.”

Instead, the crater’s discoverers are planning to collect more sediments from the glacial outwash, and perhaps even drill directly into the crater to retrieve sediment cores that can be dated. And there may be other craters lurking beneath Greenland’s ice, or even Antarctica’s — perhaps more easily identifiable once you know what to look for, says MacGregor.

Asked whether the team has actually identified any other round shapes of interest, he pauses. Then MacGregor says, cryptically, “stay tuned.”

Quantum physics has earned a reputation as a realm of science beyond human comprehension. It describes a microworld of perplexing, paradoxical phenomena. Its equations imply a multiplicity of possible realities; an observation seems to select one of those possibilities for accessibility to human perception. The rest either disappear, remain hidden or weren’t really there to begin with. Which of those explanations pertains is debated by competing interpretations of the quantum math, pursued in a field of study known as quantum foundations.

Numerous quantum interpretations have been proposed — and an even greater number of books have been written about them. Two of the latest such books offer very different perspectives.
Philip Ball, in Beyond Weird, argues that much of the famous quantum weirdness lies in the popular descriptions of it, rather than in the math itself. Adam Becker’s What is Real? insists that the traditional “Copenhagen interpretation” is misguided; he extols the work of several physicists who reject it. Becker writes with exuberance and self-assuredness, often focusing on the personal stories of the scientists he discusses. Ball’s approach is less personal but more conversational, although he does not try to evade the sticky technicalities that illustrate and partially explain the quantum mysteries.
Ball contends that many of the analogies and illustrations used by popularizers (and physicists) to convey the weirdness of quantum theory (like a particle being in two places at once) are actually misleading. With less flamboyant phrasing, in Ball’s view, quantum physics can seem less perplexing, even almost understandable.

Without fully endorsing it, Ball gives a fairly sound presentation of the Copenhagen interpretation, based on the ideas of the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Bohr held that quantum reality cannot be described apart from the experiments designed to probe it. A particle has many possible locations before you experimentally observe it; once observed, the location is established and the other possibilities vanish. And an electron will seem to behave as a particle or wave, depending on what sort of experimental apparatus you use to observe it.

Bohr expressed these truths by a principle he called complementarity — mutually exclusive concepts (such as wave or particle) are required to explain reality, but both concepts cannot be observed in any individual experiment. Bohr’s elaborations on this idea are famously convoluted and expressed rather obscurely. (When asked what is complementary to truth, Bohr replied, “clarity.”)

Bohr’s lack of clarity has led to many misinterpretations of what he meant, and it is those misinterpretations that Becker criticizes, rather than Bohr’s actual views. Becker’s main argument insists that the Copenhagen interpretation embraces the philosophy known as positivism (roughly, nothing unobservable is real, and sensory perceptions are the realities on which science should be based), and then demonstrates positivism’s fallacies. He does a fine job of demolishing positivism. Unfortunately, the Copenhagen interpretation is not positivistic, as its advocates have often pointed out. Bohr’s colleague Werner Heisenberg said so quite clearly: “The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory is in no way positivistic,” he wrote. And the philosopher Henry Folse’s 1985 book on Bohr’s philosophy thoroughly dispelled the mistaken belief that Bohr’s view was positivistic or opposed to the existence of an underlying reality.

Becker’s book commits many other more specific errors. He says Heisenberg found his famous uncertainty principle “buried in the mathematics of [Erwin] Schrödinger’s wave mechanics.” But Heisenberg despised wave mechanics and did his work on uncertainty wholly within his own matrix mechanics. Becker claims that physicists Murray Gell-Mann and James Hartle “had long been convinced that the Copenhagen interpretation had to be wrong.” But Gell-Mann and Hartle are on record stating that the Copenhagen view is not wrong, merely limited to special cases and not general enough to tell the whole quantum story.

Becker’s book does offer engaging discussions of the physicists who have questioned Bohr’s ideas and proposed alternate ways of interpreting quantum physics. But he allows the opponents to frame Bohr’s position rather than devoting any effort of his own to examining the subtlety and depth of Bohr’s philosophy and arguments. And Becker fails to address the important point that every quantum experiment’s results, no matter how bizarre, are precisely what Bohr would have expected them to be.

Becker does not engage deeply with the more recent body of work on quantum foundations, an area where Ball excels. Ball especially favors the perspective on quantum physics offered by the notion of quantum decoherence. Very roughly, the decoherence process dissipates various possible quantum realities into the environment, and only those versions of reality that are robustly recorded in the environment present themselves to observers. It’s of course much more complicated than that, and Ball admirably conveys those complications even at the occasional expense of clarity. Which puts his account closer to the truth.

Like a quantum version of a whirling top, protons have angular momentum, known as spin. But the source of the subatomic particles’ spin has confounded physicists. Now scientists have confirmed that some of that spin comes from a frothing sea of particles known as quarks and their antimatter partners, antiquarks, found inside the proton.

Surprisingly, a less common type of antiquark contributes more to a proton’s spin than a more plentiful variety, scientists with the STAR experiment report March 14 in Physical Review D.
Quarks come in an assortment of types, the most common of which are called up quarks and down quarks. Protons are made up of three main quarks: two up quarks and one down quark. But protons also have a “sea,” or an entourage of transient quarks and antiquarks of different types, including up, down and other varieties (SN: 4/29/17, p. 22).

Previous measurements suggested that the spins of the quarks within this sea contribute to a proton’s overall spin. The new result — made by slamming protons together at a particle accelerator called the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC — clinches that idea, says physicist Elke-Caroline Aschenauer of Brookhaven National Lab in Upton, N.Y., where the RHIC is located.

A proton’s sea contains more down antiquarks than up antiquarks. But, counterintuitively, more of the proton’s spin comes from up than down antiquarks, the researchers found. In fact, the down antiquarks actually spin in the opposite direction, slightly subtracting from the proton’s total spin.

“Spin has surprises. Everybody thought it’s simple … and it turns out it’s much more complicated,” Aschenauer says.
Editor’s note: This story was updated April 3, 2019, to correct the subheadline to say that up antiquarks (not up quarks) add more angular momentum than do down antiquarks (not down quarks).

Life after shingles
In “With its burning grip, shingles can do lasting damage” (SN: 3/2/19, p. 22), Aimee Cunningham described the experience of Nora Fox, a woman whose bout with shingles nearly 15 years ago left her with a painful condition called postherpetic neuralgia. Fox hadn’t found any reliable treatments, Cunningham reported.

Fox praised Science News for our portrayal of shingles-related pain. “The cover is excellent and looks just like I felt,” she wrote.

As the story went to press, Fox had a surgery during which doctors placed electrodes under the skin near sites of pain. A device lets Fox control when stimulation is delivered to those areas. But the treatment, called peripheral nerve stimulation, may not work for all patients with postherpetic neuralgia. There are reports in scientific journals of individual patients experiencing relief from their neuropathic pain after the procedure, Cunningham says.
Fox’s husband, Denver C. Fox, sent Science News an update on her pain since the procedure: “There [has] been a significant change to the unbearable pain my wife has endured EVERY afternoon and evening for 14 years, despite trying every possible treatment the MDs knew of.” Shortly after the procedure, “her pain is greatly and markedly diminished.”
Stone Age throwback
Tests with replicas of a 300,000-year-old wooden spear suggest that Neandertals could have hunted from a distance, Bruce Bower reported in “Why modern javelin throwers hurled Neandertal spears at hay bales” (SN: 3/2/19, p. 14).

Reader Brenda Gray suggested that Neandertals’ spears could have been used for fighting instead of hunting.

The ancient spear found in Germany, on which the spear replicas were based, came from sediment that also contained stone tools and thousands of animal bones displaying marks made by stone tools, Bower says. “Such evidence indicates that the spears were used as hunting weapons. Neandertals could have used wooden spears in different ways, but there is no evidence that I know of for Neandertals using spears in warfare,” he says.

Young and restless
Earth’s inner core began hardening sometime after 565 million years ago, Carolyn Gramling reported in “Earth’s core may have hardened just in time to save its magnetic field” (SN: 3/2/19, p. 13). The core may have solidified just in time to strengthen the planet’s magnetic field, saving it from collapse.

Reader John Bunch thought that the timing of the inner core’s solidification “lines up nicely” with the Cambrian explosion, when life rapidly diversified about 542 million years ago. “It leads me to wonder if there may be some cause and effect or some other relationship between the two that’s going on here.”

That extremely low-intensity magnetic field actually roughly lines up with the Avalon explosion, an earlier proliferation of new life forms called the Ediacaran biota, between about 575 million and 542 million years ago, Gramling says. It’s an intriguing coincidence that researchers noted.

Earth’s magnetic field helps protect the planet from radiation. So a weak magnetic field might somehow be linked with the Avalon explosion. One idea is that increased radiation reaching Earth’s surface hundreds of millions of years ago might have increased organisms’ mutation rates, Gramling says. But there just isn’t any evidence to support a causal link at the moment.

A week after two large earthquakes rattled southern California, scientists are scrambling to understand the sequence of events that led to the temblors and what it might tell us about future quakes.

A magnitude 6.4 quake struck July 4 near Ridgecrest — about 194 kilometers northeast of Los Angeles — followed by a magnitude 7.1 quake in the same region on July 5. Both quakes occurred not along the famous San Andreas Fault but in a region of crisscrossing faults in the state’s high desert area, known as the Eastern California Shear Zone.

The San Andreas Fault system, which stretches nearly 1,300 kilometers, generally takes center stage when it comes to California’s earthquake activity. That’s where, as the Pacific tectonic plate and the North American tectonic plate slowly grind past each other, sections of ground can lock together for a time, slowly building up strain until they suddenly release, producing powerful quakes.

For the last few tens of millions of years, the San Andreas has been the primary origin of massive earthquakes in the region. Now overdue for a massive earthquake, based on historical precedent, many people fear it’s only a matter of time before the “Big One” strikes.
But as the July 4 and July 5 quakes — and their many aftershocks — show, the San Andreas Fault system isn’t the only source of concern. The state is riddled with faults, says geophysicist Susan Hough of the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena, Calif. That’s because almost all of California is part of the general boundary between the plates. The Eastern California Shear Zone alone has been the source of several large quakes in the last few decades, including the magnitude 7.1 Hector Mine quake in 1999, the magnitude 6.7 Northridge quake in 1994 and the magnitude 7.3 Landers quake in 1992 (SN Online: 8/29/18).

Here are three questions scientists are trying to answer in the wake of the most recent quakes.

Which faults ruptured, and how?
The quakes appear to have occurred along previously unmapped faults within a part of the Eastern California Shear Zone known as the Little Lake Fault Zone, a broad bunch of cracks difficult to map, Hough says. “It’s not like the San Andreas, where you can go out and put your hand on a single fault,” she says. And, she adds, the zone also lies within a U.S. Navy base that isn’t generally accessible to geologists for mapping.

But preliminary data do offer some clues. The data suggest that the first rupture may actually have been a twofer: Instead of one fault rupturing, two connected faults, called conjugate faults, may have ruptured nearly simultaneously, producing the initial magnitude 6.4 quake.

It’s possible that the first quake didn’t fully release the strain on that fault, but the second, larger quake did. “My guess is that they will turn out to be complementary,” Hough says.

The jury is still out, though, says Wendy Bohon, a geologist at the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology in Washington, D.C. “What parts of the fault broke, and whether a part of the fault broke twice … I’m waiting to see what the scientific consensus is on that.”
And whether a simultaneous rupture of a conjugate fault is surprising, or may actually be common, isn’t yet clear, she says. “In nature, we see a lot of conjugate fault pairs. I don’t think they normally rupture at the same time — or maybe they do, and we haven’t had enough data to see that.”

Is the center of tectonic action moving away from the San Andreas Fault?
GPS data have revealed exactly how the ground is shifting in California as the giant tectonic plates slide past one another. The San Andreas Fault system bears the brunt of the strain, about 70 percent, those data show. But the Eastern California Shear Zone bears the other 30 percent. And the large quakes witnessed in that region over the last few decades raise a tantalizing possibility, Hough says: We may be witnessing the birth pangs of a new boundary.

“The plate boundary system has been evolving for a long time already,” Hough says. For the last 30 million years or so, the San Andreas Fault system has been the primary locus of action. But just north of Santa Barbara lies the “big bend,” a kink that separates the northern from the southern portion of the fault system. Where the fault bends, the Pacific and North American plates aren’t sliding sideways past one another but colliding.

“The plates are trying to move, but the San Andreas is actually not well aligned with that motion,” she says. But the Eastern California Shear Zone is. And, Hough says, there’s some speculation that it’s a new plate boundary in the making. “But it would happen over millions of years,” she adds. “It’s not going to be in anyone’s lifetime.”

Will these quakes trigger the Big One on the San Andreas?
Such large quakes inevitably raise these fears. Historically, the San Andreas Fault system has produced a massive quake about every 150 years. But “for whatever reason, it has been pretty quiet in the San Andreas since 1906,” when an estimated magnitude 7.9 quake along the northern portion of the fault devastated San Francisco, Hough says. And the southern portion of San Andreas is even more overdue for a massive quake; its last major event was the estimated magnitude 7.9 Fort Tejon quake in 1857, she says.

The recent quakes aren’t likely to change that situation. Subsurface shifting from a large earthquake can affect strain on nearby faults. But it’s unlikely that the quakes either relieved stress or will ultimately trigger another earthquake along the San Andreas Fault system, essentially because they were too far away, Hough says. “The disruption [from one earthquake] of other faults decreases really quickly with distance,” she says (SN Online: 3/28/11).

Some preliminary data do suggest that the magnitude 7.1 earthquake produced some slippage, also known as creep, along at least one shallow fault in the southern part of the San Andreas system. But such slow, shallow slips don’t produce earthquakes, Hough says.

However, the quakes could have more significantly perturbed much closer faults, such as the Garlock Fault, which runs roughly west to east along the northern edge of the Mojave Desert. That’s not unprecedented: The 1992 Landers quake may have triggered a magnitude 5.7 quake two weeks later along the Garlock Fault.

“Generations of graduate students are going to be studying these events — the geometry of the faults, how the ground moved,” even how the visible evidence of the rupture, scarring the land surface, erodes over time and obscures its traces, Bohon says.

At the moment, scientists are eagerly trading ideas on social media sites. “It’s the equivalent of listening in on scientists shouting down the hallway: ‘Here’s my data — what do you have?’ ” she says. Those preliminary ideas and explanations will almost certainly evolve as more information comes in, she adds. “It’s early days yet.”

The James Webb Space Telescope’s first peek at the distant universe unveiled galaxies that appear too big to exist.

Six galaxies that formed in the universe’s first 700 million years seem to be up to 100 times more massive than standard cosmological theories predict, astronomer Ivo Labbé and colleagues report February 22 in Nature. “Adding up the stars in those galaxies, it would exceed the total amount of mass available in the universe at that time,” says Labbé, of the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. “So you know that something is afoot.”
The telescope, also called JWST, released its first view of the early cosmos in July 2022 (SN: 7/11/22). Within days, Labbé and his colleagues had spotted about a dozen objects that looked particularly bright and red, a sign that they could be massive and far away.

“They stand out immediately, you see them as soon as you look at these images,” says astrophysicist Erica Nelson of the University of Colorado Boulder.

Measuring the amount of light each object emits in various wavelengths can give astronomers an idea of how far away each galaxy is, and how many stars it must have to emit all that light. Six of the objects that Nelson, Labbé and colleagues identified look like their light comes from no later than about 700 million years after the Big Bang. Those galaxies appear to hold up to 10 billion times the mass of our sun in stars. One of them might contain the mass of 100 billion suns.

“You shouldn’t have had time to make things that have as many stars as the Milky Way that fast,” Nelson says. Our galaxy contains about 60 billion suns’ worth of stars — and it’s had more than 13 billion years to grow them. “It’s just crazy that these things seem to exist.”

In the standard theories of cosmology, matter in the universe clumped together slowly, with small structures gradually merging to form larger ones. “If there are all these massive galaxies at early times, that’s just not happening,” Nelson says.

One possible explanation is that there’s another, unknown way to form galaxies, Labbé says. “It seems like there’s a channel that’s a fast track, and the fast track creates monsters.”

But it could also be that some of these galaxies host supermassive black holes in their cores, says astronomer Emma Curtis-Lake of the University of Hertfordshire in England, who was not part of the new study. What looks like starlight could instead be light from the gas and dust those black holes are devouring. JWST has already seen a candidate for an active supermassive black hole even earlier in the universe’s history than these galaxies are, she says, so it’s not impossible.
Finding a lot of supermassive black holes at such an early era would also be challenging to explain (SN: 3/16/18). But it wouldn’t require rewriting the standard model of cosmology the way extra-massive galaxies would.

“The formation and growth of black holes at these early times is really not well understood,” she says. “There’s not a tension with cosmology there, just new physics to be understood of how they can form and grow, and we just never had the data before.”

To know for sure what these distant objects are, Curtis-Lake says, astronomers need to confirm the galaxies’ distances and masses using spectra, more precise measurements of the galaxies’ light across many wavelengths (SN: 12/16/22).

JWST has taken spectra for a few of these galaxies already, and more should be coming, Labbé says. “With luck, a year from now, we’ll know a lot more.”

Blurry vision sounds like a reason to visit an eye doctor. But visual fuzziness might actually help some animals catch dinner. Out-of-focus areas created by vertically elongated pupils help predators triangulate the distance to objects, scientists propose August 7 in Science Advances. Prey animals may gain different visual advantages from pupil shapes that provide panoramic views.

Cats, foxes and many other predators that ambush prey have vertical pupils. Through these narrow slits, vertical objects appear sharp over great distances, the scientists report. Horizontal shapes are clear over a more limited distance, quickly going out of focus as an object moves farther away. This rapidly blurring vision should make it easy to detect even subtle changes in distance, the researchers say. That makes blur a good estimate of distance, says study author Martin Banks, a vision scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. A stalking predator might rely upon an object’s fuzziness to judge its location.
The benefits of this mix of visual cues make good sense, says Michael Land, a neurobiologist at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England. A predator that must pounce on its dinner needs to be able to accurately judge distances, he says.
Many herbivores, like horses and deer, have horizontal, rectangular pupils, rather than vertical slits. The authors don’t think these pupils help with depth perception. But rectangular pupils probably have their own advantages, the authors report, including better panoramic vision and shielding of potentially blinding overhead light. These benefits could help grazing prey spot – and flee from – an approaching slit-eyed hunter.
These visual benefits could explain why predators and prey evolved their pupil shapes, Banks’ team says. But vision scientist Ronald Kröger of Lund University in Sweden warns against assuming that an animal’s habits caused the evolution of a certain pupil shape. Counterexamples exist of predators without slit pupils and herbivores with them, he says. Additionally, many predators and prey animals, including most birds – which were excluded from the study’s analysis – have circular pupils.

But evolution is complex, and the new hypotheses about the advantages of pupil shape only address one aspect of the evolution of vision, Banks says. “There are multiple forces that push the eye to evolve in multiple ways.”