your science briefing for 04.22.2025

The ghost of our earliest ancestor is buried in our genes, finding a lone black hole in the darkness of space, the death toll of USAID cuts, and more...

All life on Earth, no matter how simple or complex, has the same basic instructions for existing, from which and how many nucleotides we use, to which molecule we use for energy storage. That means at some point, there was a common ancestor of all life as we know it today, known as LUCA, or last universal common ancestor, in biology. In an attempt to distill what this commonality to the very basics, a new study whittled down thousands of genomes to just 2,600 genes that describe a 4.2 billion year old microbe capable of sustaining itself and becoming pretty much anything in existence today. It probably isn’t a complete model, and it almost certainly wasn’t alone on Earth, but it’s the most detailed idea of LUCA that’s been created… (Earth.com)

You’re almost certainly sick of hearing about disinformation on social media making its way into the news and to people’s eyeballs. At the same time, it’s probably one of the biggest and most poorly understood problems for societies today, and the latest inter-generational study of misinformation is not full of great news. We’re all bad at quickly identifying lies and hoaxes to some degree. At the same time, there are a few interesting twists. Gen Z’s are brutally self-aware, and those with conservative views also know they tend to fall for misinformation, they often just don’t care. Meanwhile the highly educated tend to think too highly of their skills, and their years of internet use make them more resilient than they are… (ScienceAlert)

Stellar mass black holes are very difficult to detect. Sure, they may have as much pull as a dozen suns like ours, but packed into a cosmic disturbance as small as a city and separated by light years from anything to pull, they’re almost impossible to see. That’s why every other black hole we’ve found so far have either been supermassive, or had companions they tugged around, alerting astronomers. But one team of astronomers got lucky and managed to detect “a dark object” floating through the sky in two data sets from 2017 and 2022. Given that this object was seven solar masses and neutron stars top out at about two and a half solar masses before collapsing, that means they could’ve only seen a lone black hole floating through space… (PhysOrg)

In the eerie comedy song by Bo Burnham, a narrator asks you “could I interest you in everything, all of the time?” Because this is how the internet functions today. Once an amazing source of bottomless deep dives, it’s now consumed passively and in short, loud, colorful bursts. Which is a tad worrying given that about two thirds of people say that they get their news from social media. How much political news are they getting, how much are they engaging with it, and what’s the quality of said new? Turns out, all they get are just 2% of all content the average user sees, in bursts lasting a minute or two in which they just scan headlines and talking points… (PsyPost)

USAID is one of those programs shrouded in ignorance. Americans believed that they spend a quarter of the federal budget on foreign aid for the last two decades. But the real figure has been around one percent, which is spent buying goodwill and trying to prevent politically destabilizing migration and refugee crises all over the world, as well as prevent disease outbreaks in developing nations so they don’t get back to us. So, if the unilateral DOGE cuts to the program stay in place, how many more people will die as a direct result? Turns out that number is 25 million by 2040… (Nature)