Cluster spikes for black holes; microbes affect drinking; a new dinosaur just dropped

What did the scientists do this week? Four things to be exact, all of which are summarized below.

“This Sweet Baby Can Hold 4.3 Million Suns”

Supermassive Black Holes: How Can They Get So Huge? This simple question is much more complicated than it seems. Science is infuriating. But an international team of astronomers may have found the answer. They discovered a strong rotating magnetic wind in the relatively nearby galaxy ESO320-G030, which surrounds a supermassive black hole.

They chose the galaxy to observe because it is highly active, forming new stars at a rate 10 times faster than our own galaxy, and is therefore highly luminous in the infrared spectrum, allowing details in the center of the galaxy, otherwise obscured, to be captured. visible light and dust clouds.

Using ALMA, they peered through the surrounding dust to zoom in on the dense gas around the black hole. They could discern patterns in the gas that strongly suggested the presence of a rotating magnetized wind. Unlike other kinds of winds and jets, which tend to bounce matter away from supermassive black holes, a magnetic wind can feed material into a black hole and make it grow larger over time. The researchers say this process is analogous to the way baby stars accret mass, albeit on a much larger scale.

Microbe Temperance League

Binge drinking is generally defined as the consumption of large amounts of alcohol in a short period of time that results in a blood alcohol concentration of 0.08% or higher. Binge drinking behavior has short-term health risks, but also carries an increased risk of alcohol use disorder later in life. Although young people have reported a decline in their use of illegal drugs and alcohol in recent years, researchers have found that many young people drink regularly.

Current support for alcohol use disorders is mainly through interventions such as therapy and peer-led support groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous, as few approved medications are available; researchers are interested in developing new and more effective pharmaceutical treatments.

A team from the University of Connecticut School of Medicine reports that drinkers have different patterns of gut microbiota than people who drink alcohol; their gut microorganisms also produce a different mix of short-chain fatty acids associated with the fermentation of undigested fiber and protein. They hypothesized that the microbiome might influence drinking behavior.

Using mice bred to express binge drinking behavior, the researchers investigated whether changes in diet affected drinking patterns. Mice were allowed to drink alcohol at night for four nights and were fed different types of short-chain fatty acids for 10 days during the experiment. The researchers found that increasing valeric acid in their food corresponded to a 40% reduction in alcohol consumption in the engineered mice.

“There are likely multiple mechanisms at play in how valerate reduces drinking,” says UConn School of Medicine microbiome scientist Yanjiao Zhou. “But the impact of this microbial metabolite on brain epigenetics can be quite powerful in regulating drinking behavior.”

When 3.14 isn’t good enough

A team of researchers at the Indian Institute of Science modeling the interactions of high-energy particles accidentally discovered a new serial representation for pi. Because these interactions involve so many parameters, one of the researchers was tasked with the optimization. Using the Feynman diagram, a mathematical representation of energy exchange during particle interaction and scattering, and the Euler-Beta function, they managed to optimize their model of particle interactions, but also created a new series representation of pi combining specific parameters so that researchers could quickly arrive at a value of pi that can then be incorporated into the calculations.

“Our effort initially was never to find a way to look at pi. All we were doing was studying high-energy physics in quantum theory and trying to develop a model with fewer, more precise parameters to understand how the particles interact. We were excited , when we got a new way of looking at pi,” says Aninda Sinha, a professor at the Center for High Energy Physics.

A new dinosaur just dropped

A multi-institutional team of paleontologists is reporting the discovery of a new plant-eating dinosaur in northern Montana with a spectacular, frilled set of horns resembling the headdress worn by Loki, the trickster god in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And since the specimen is now located in Denmark, the scientists went ahead and named it Lokiceratops rangiformis. The fossilized bones were discovered in 2019, two miles south of the Canadian border.

After assembling the skull fragments, Colorado State University researcher Joseph Sertich and University of Utah professor Mark Loewen realized they had discovered a new species. Lokiceratops lived about 78 million years ago; the same rock layer yielded the remains of four other species, suggesting they all lived at the same time. They estimate that Lokiceratops was 22 feet long and weighed 11,000 pounds, making it the largest of the centrosaurine horned dinosaurs in North America.

“This new dinosaur pushes against the bizarre headgear of a ceratopsian with the largest frilled horns ever seen in a ceratopsian,” Sertich said.

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