Huge eruptions from a black hole; the largest-ever functional brain map; origins of human musicality

This week, researchers reported a brain circuit linked to the intensity of political behavior. Microbiologists found that the 2018 eruption of the Kīlauea volcano drove a rare, massive summertime phytoplankton bloom, the largest ever recorded in the North Pacific. And a physics professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville proposed a new model of the universe built on multiple singularities rather than a single Big Bang.

Additionally, a huge, quasiperiodic black hole flare is prompting a rethink about models of black hole behavior; scientists have made the most detailed functional map of a brain to date; and anthropologists propose that the transition to bipedal movement deeply influenced human thinking, musicality and communication:

Boring galaxy interesting, actually

In 2019, a boring galaxy that nobody cared about 300 million light-years away started producing flashes of X-ray light in a clear bid for attention. Rolling their eyes in a theatrical, passive-aggressive display, astronomers said, “FINE” and aimed the Swift telescope at it but didn’t find anything unusual.

But in February 2024, SDSS1335+0728 flared up again with bursts of X-ray emissions at regular intervals, an example of seldom-observed quasiperiodic eruptions, in which a supermassive black hole wakes up from a long period of dormancy and has a kind of tantrum, probably because a small astronomical object like a star, planet or a smaller black hole is interacting with its rapidly spinning accretion disk. The black hole at the center of this unremarkable galaxy is now called Ansky.

Joheen Chakraborty, a Ph.D. student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said, “The bursts of X-rays from Ansky are 10 times longer and 10 times more luminous than what we see from a typical QPE.” The astronomers say this indicates that current models of quasiperiodic eruptions may need revisiting. Ansky’s current series of eruptions could represent a different phenomenon, such as gravity waves interacting with the accretion disk.

Mouse takes red pill

Biologists at Baylor College of Medicine have published the largest functional map of a brain ever made, comprising about 84,000 neurons in a region of a mouse’s visual cortex about the size of a poppy seed. Despite the tiny sample area of the mouse brain, the researchers note that the map’s stunning complexity resembles a map of cosmological filaments.

The 3D reconstruction, colored to delineate different brain connections, is the result of an experiment in which the researchers showed a mouse snippets of video, including sports, animation and scenes from “The Matrix.” The mouse was engineered with a gene that makes its neurons luminous when activated, and the researchers used a laser-powered microscope to record the activation of individual cells in the mouse’s visual cortex as it watched the video images. Afterward, they shaved that tiny piece of brain into 25,000 ultra-thin sections, taking 100 million high-resolution images to reconstruct the neural connections in 3D.

Scientists at Princeton University used AI to trace the filaments in the model and render the connections in different colors so they could be individually identified. Ultimately, the goal is to achieve a complete map of an entire mouse brain.

So I guess there’s a long way to go before I can nondestructively compile a complete functional model of my own brain, which (judging from my physical brain) would do absolutely nothing but remind me of embarrassing and humiliating things I did at parties and repeatedly play the KARS-4-KIDS song.

Step theory

A multi-institutional team of anthropologists theorizes that human musicality and language may have arisen with bipedal movement. In fact, they suggest that the transition from walking on four legs to two legs may have influenced creativity along with changes to thinking and communication.

Dean Falk, professor of anthropology at Florida State University, says, “Bipedal footsteps create rhythmic and more predictable sounds of movement, in comparison with the way in which our closest living relative, the chimpanzee, moves on all fours, with irregular steps among rustling tree branches.” Human walking pace is about 120 steps per minute, the same tempo as many pieces of music.

They suggest that human baby talk arose as a substitute for physical contact with children—when humans began walking upright, small offspring could no longer cling to their parent’s fur to maintain body contact. The special musicality of baby talk could have arisen to maintain contact between adults and children. “This may have stimulated the evolution of music and language,” says co-author Matz Larsson.

© 2025 Science X Network