Black hole flare unprecedented; the strength of memories; bugs on the menu

This week, researchers reported finding a spider megacity in a sulfur cave on the Albania-Greece border, and experts say that you, personally, have to go live there. Economists are growing nervous about the collapse of the trillion-dollar AI bubble. And a new study links physical activity levels with the risk of digestive system cancers.

Additionally, astronomers reported the most massive and distant black hole flare ever observed; researchers determined why emotional memories are more vivid; and the scientists are once again exploring farmed insects as a food source—this time, for lengthy interplanetary missions:

Large black hole now larger

Good news for melanoheliophobics: It’s far more likely that you’ll be trapped within a black hole’s accretion disk and accelerated to relativistic speeds, becoming pure energy and flung away, than fall into and beyond the event horizon, forever vanishing from the universe. I mean, it obviously does happen, but it turns out to be surprisingly difficult for a black hole to eat stuff, kind of like a guy feasting at a table who keeps rudely knocking everything away with his elbows. But when they do? It’s called a black hole flare, and it’s like throwing a cow into a shark tank.

A new study from the California Institute of Technology reports on a massive flare observed by researchers at the Zwicky Transient Facility in 2018 that astronomers now understand as the most powerful, and most distant, black hole flare ever recorded. The supermassive black hole is in the category of active galactic nuclei, estimated at 500 million times the mass of the sun. It’s the first observed AGN consuming a supermassive star.

At its brightest, the flare emitted the equivalent light of 10 trillion suns. The AGN is 10 billion light-years away; due to both the distance and the time dilation effect of massive gravitational objects, astronomers are continuing to watch the slowly diminishing flare at one-quarter speed.

Why emotional memories are more vivid

Psychological experiments have suggested that people recall emotional events more vividly than neutral events. But the actual neural underpinnings of this phenomenon are not well understood. A study from the University of Chicago now suggests that emotional experiences increase communication between networks across brain regions.

The researchers took a clever, economical approach, reanalyzing the publicly available data of past studies to identify the mechanisms that make emotional memories more vivid. During these studies, participants watched movies and listened to stories while researchers recorded their brain activity via functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Jadyn Park, first author of the paper, says, “Some scenes were more emotionally arousing than others, such as when a character tries to hide a dead body and gets caught in the act. We used behavioral ratings, pupil size, and ratings from AI models to measure how arousing each scene was.”

They found that emotional memory emerges from the coordinated interaction of multiple systems rather than any isolated network.

Yuan Chang Leong, senior author of the paper, says, “It is more like an orchestra, where different sections work together to create a unified performance, with arousal serving as a conductor that coordinates their activity. This perspective suggests that whether we remember an emotional memory depends not only on the strength of activity in any single region, but also on how effectively different systems communicate and share information.”

Salt, fat, acid, chitin

Science writers have been insisting for years that insects are the “food source of the future,” and tend to be kind of oblivious to the fact that whatever lead paragraph they write, the reader’s mind jumps instantly to Joe Rogan’s stint as the host of “Fear Factor,” coercing contestants to swallow large bugs in exchange for cash. Even in this post about insect consumption from the European Space Agency, the phrase “attractive option” appears right there in the first paragraph, as if you might be looking through the fridge for aphids or something.

But OK, if you apply cold, Vulcan-like logic to the constraints of resources available among a broad population, yes, insects are nutrient dense and easily cultivated, and from that perspective you could argue that they are an “attractive option.” And certainly nobody is talking about chowing down on a roasted hissing cockroach; it’s possible that in the future, inputs like protein-rich flour made from farmed insects could find a foothold. So a newly assembled team at the ESA is exploring insects as a food source for lengthy interplanetary space missions.

Åsa Berggren, professor at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, says, “Insects seem to cope quite well in space environments. They have a good ability to withstand physical stresses… These small animals are also very good at converting materials that we humans cannot eat into their own growth and provide us with nutritious food.”

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