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Benevolent Orca Pods Are Adopting Baby Pilot Whales in an Apparent Effort to Clean Up the Species’ Image

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Researchers have noticed a strangely sweet behavior among Icelandic orcas: the adoption of a baby whale from an entirely different species. 

As so-called "killer whales" have made news over the past few years for violent boat attacks in European waters, marine biologists have noticed a far sweeter behavior in Iceland's frigid waves: the adoption of a baby whale from an entirely different species.

In interviews with Scientific American, scientists described their shock at observing a pilot whale calf that traveled with an Icelandic pod of orcas over a period of years.

One of those researchers, Chérine Baumgartner, said she and her colleagues at the Icelandic Orca Project initially couldn't believe their eyes.

"At first, we were like, 'Oh my god, this killer whale calf has a problem,'" the researcher said of the bulbous-headed baby she and her team first spotted back in 2022. It looked at first glance like a malformed orca — until they realized it was no killer whale at all.

The next day, when Baumgartner and her colleagues were witnessing the same pod again, the baby pilot whale was absent. Eventually, however, they started seeing baby pilot whales with orca pods throughout 2022 and 2023, and began to develop theories about what was happening.

In a new paper published in the journal Ecology and Evolution, Baumgartner and her team from a consortium of Nordic research institutions have posited three theories about the fascinating matchup: that the orcas are hunting the babies, playing with them, or perhaps even nurturing them.

As SciAm notes, each sighting involved a pilot whale calf that could be no more than a few weeks old that swam alongside an adult orca female in what marine biologists call "echelon position," with the baby beside and slightly behind the elder.

In some instances, the baby pilot whale was nudged along by the adult orcas, and on another occasion, it swam ahead of the pod before the adults caught up to it and lifted it out of the water and onto one of their backs.

That kind of playful and protective behavior does not, of course, sound predatory — but because "killer whales" are known for their violence, it can't be completely ruled out, the scientists say.

Along with what the orcas are doing with the baby pilot whales, researchers want to know how the two species, which generally do not overlap, came to not only be in the same place but also coexist in such a way.

"It could be," Baumgartner told SciAm, "[that the orcas] encountered the pilot whale opportunistically, and some individuals played with the whale, and others tried to nurture it."

As study co-author Filipa Samarra noted, there's a chance that climate change has led pilot whales, which typically follow schools of warm water-seeking mackerel, into orca territory.

More on marine life: Scientists Take First Ever Video of Colossal Squid in the Wild... With One Comical Issue

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Benevolent Orca Pods Are Adopting Baby Pilot Whales in an Apparent Effort to Clean Up the Species' Image

Giving ADHD Drugs to Kids Has a Long-Term Side Effect That Might Change Their Minds About Taking It

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ADHD drugs may have bizarre side effects for kids who take them while they're growing — and it's a tall order as to whether they're worth it.

As wildly overinvolved parents shell out to give their kids growth hormones to make them taller, some research suggests that putting them on drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may have the opposite effect.

As the New York Times reports, the scientists behind the Multimodal Treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Study, or MTA Study for short, weren't exactly looking for physiological changes in their subjects: a cohort of 579 kids with ADHD, some of whom were given methyphenidate (better known as Ritalin), counseling, a mix of the two, or neither.

Beginning in 1994, researchers across the country began tracking outcomes of children who were seven to ten years old at the start of the study. After 36 months, the researchers realized something odd: that the children who had been given the popular stimulant seemed to be growing more slowly than their non-medicated counterparts.

The researchers presumed, per their retelling to the NYT, that this "height gap" would close in adolescence. When they followed up with them nine years after the study began, however, the medicated cohort was still 1.6 inches, on average, shorter than the kids who didn't take Ritalin.

On a certain level, the concern is very shallow. There's nothing wrong with being short, and if a drug can help with a myriad of other symptoms, maybe the risk is worth it.

But that's not the only controversy around prescribing ADHD drugs to kids. The MTA study's biggest takeaway was, troublingly, that the attention benefits of Ritalin seemed to cease after the first year, and that there were no apparent benefits to academic performance.

And even on top of that, the "height suppression" side effect was also enough to give the researchers pause.

In 2017, the MTA study scientists published a follow-up looking into the height gap that tracked the original cohort until they were 25. That height gap remained, per the study, into adulthood. And the findings countered bold academic assertions from just a few years prior claiming that any height suppression from ADHD meds in children would, as the researchers initially presumed, ultimately be undone in adolescence.

Years later, another group of scientists reviewed 18 childhood Ritalin studies and found, similarly to the MTA researchers, that the drug can indeed "result in reduction in height and weight" — though their opinion was that the size of the effect is negligible when compared to the purported benefits of these drugs.

To this day, researchers can't agree as to whether or not stimulants can cause height suppression in children, primarily because the mechanism behind the demonstrated effect remains unknown.

Speaking to the website Health Central in 2022, childhood psychiatrist and MTA study co-author Laurence Greenhill of the University of California, San Francisco suggested that amphetamines' well-known propensity to suppress appetite could be behind the growth differences.

"There could be some lack of nutrition going on that explains this," Greenhill told the website.

"However, the kids aren't malnourished," he countered. "They're just growing a little more slowly."

If Ritalin or other stimulants help a child significantly, such a minor height disparity would be worthwhile. But with some of the original MTA study authors now questioning how effective these medical interventions really are, it may behoove parents to think before they put their kids on these pills.

More on ADHD meds: To Fill Your Adderall Prescription Amid Shortage, Try Getting It Filled on This Particular Day of the Month

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Strange Signal Coming From Dead Galaxy, Scientists Say

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Astronomers say they've detected a mysterious type of signal known as a fast radio burst coming from an ancient, dead galaxy.

Radio Star

Astronomers say they've detected a mysterious type of signal known as a fast radio burst coming from an ancient, dead galaxy billions of light years away. Figuratively speaking, it makes for one hell of a sign of life. 

The findings, documented in two studies published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, upends the long held belief that FRBs — extremely powerful pulses of energy — originate exclusively from star-forming regions of space, as dead galaxies no longer support the birth of new stars. 

Adding to the seeming improbability of the FRB's origin, the researchers believe that the signal's source came from the furthermost outskirts of the galaxy, about 130,000 light years from its center, with only moribund stars at the end of their stellar evolution for company.

"This is both surprising and exciting, as FRBs are expected to originate inside galaxies, often in star-forming regions," said Vishwangi Shah, lead author of one of the studies and an astronomer at McGill University, said in a statement about the work.  "The location of this FRB so far outside its host galaxy raises questions as to how such energetic events can occur in regions where no new stars are forming."

Quick and the Dead

Though they're often only milliseconds in duration, FRBs are so powerful at their source that a single pulse emits more energy than our Sun does in an entire year. 

What could cause such staggering outbursts? Astronomers have speculated that they originate from magnetars, a type of collapsed, extremely dense stellar object called a neutron star that maintains an unfathomably potent magnetic field, perhaps trillions of times stronger than Earth's.

But that theory is now being challenged by this latest FRB, designed FRB 20240209A, because there are no young stars in the 11.3 billion year old galaxy that could form magnetars. Only extremely massive stars, which have short lifespans as a consequence of their size and thus would need to have been recently formed, possess enough mass to collapse into neutron stars in the first place. 

Outcasts Together

FRB 20240209A isn't the first to be found in such a remote location. In 2022, astronomers detected another signal originating from the outskirts of its galaxy, Messier 81, where no active star formation was taking place.

"That event single-handedly halted the conventional train of thought and made us explore other progenitor scenarios for FRBs," said Wen-fai Fong, a coauthor of both studies and an astrophysicist at Northwestern University, in the statement. "Since then, no FRB had been seen like it, leading us to believe it was a one-off discovery — until now."

Crucially, the M81 FRB was found in a dense conglomeration of stars called a globular cluster. Given their similar circumstances, it led the astronomers to believe that FRB 20240209A could be residing in a globular cluster, too. To confirm this hunch, they hope to use the James Webb Telescope to image the region of space around the FRB's origins.

More on space: Scientists Intrigued by Planet With Long Tail

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Scientists Horrified by "Mirror Life" That Could Wipe Out Biology As We Know It

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A group of scientists have called for an immediate halt on creating

A group of the world's leading biologists have called for an immediate halt on a technology you've probably never even heard of — but is so dangerous, they say, that it could upend the order life itself on this planet, if not wipe it out.

In a nearly three-hundred page technical report published this month, the scientists describe the horrifyingly existential risks posed by what's known as mirror life: synthetic organisms whose DNA structures are a mirror image to that of all known natural organisms.

Mirror lifeforms are probably a few decades away from being realized. But the risk they pose is unfathomably serious, according to the scientists.

"The consequences could be globally disastrous," report coauthor Jack W. Szostak, a Nobel-prize-winning chemist at the University of Chicago, told The New York Times.

The famous DNA double helix is considered right-handed, meaning its spiral strands — a sugar-phosphate backbone — twist to the right. (To picture this, make a thumbs-up with your right hand; your thumb is the vertical axis and your curled-up fingers represent the direction of the spiral.) On the other hand, proteins, the building block of cells, are left-handed.

Why this is the case remains a matter of scientific debate. But this so-called homochirality is the state of nature on the planet — and it's gotten us this far.

Yet in our infinite human arrogance lies the capacity to defy that order. What happens if we make mirror organisms with left-handed DNA and right-handed proteins?

Proponents of pursuing this research argue that such mirror cells could have incredible medical applications. Scientists have already forged mirror proteins and discovered that they are much more resilient than natural ones because the enzymes that are designed to break them down can't bind to them. This could be a breakthrough in treating chronic diseases, since many therapeutic drugs are broken down too quickly to have a lasting effect without simply taking more of them.

The problem, however, is that mirror organisms could act unpredictably when interacting with natural cells. We simply don't know what would happen when mirror life clashes with ours. And in a void of information, you plan for the worst.

What if, for example, an experimental mirror bacteria was accidentally released into the world? Our biology would have no idea how to deal with these synthetic organisms. They could bypass detection by our immune system, easily infect a host, and spread a deadly pandemic. The risk applies to all lifeforms, too — not just humans.

To drive the point home, think of how invasive species have totally annihilated native ones. Now supercharge that deadly advantage with organisms that are completely alien to all life on Earth, and we may not stand a chance.

"Unless compelling evidence emerges that mirror life would not pose extraordinary dangers, we believe that mirror bacteria and other mirror organisms, even those with engineered biocontainment measures, should not be created," the report authors wrote in an accompanying letter published in Science. "We therefore recommend that research with the goal of creating mirror bacteria not be permitted, and that funders make clear that they will not support such work."

More on deadly biology: UN Deploys Investigators as Mysterious "Disease X" Continues to Spread

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Crypto Guy Buys $6.2 Million Banana, Eats It on the Spot

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A crypto baron spent a whopping $6.2 million on a banana duct-taped to a wall has eaten it at a flashy event in Hong Kong.

Money in the Banana Stand

A crypto baron spent a whopping $6.2 million on a banana duct-taped to a wall — a conceptual artwork titled "Comedian" by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan — at a Sotheby's auction in New York last week.

Instead of "hodling," by allowing his unusual investment to grow in value, entrepreneur Justin Sun did the opposite: eating the banana in front of a group of attendees, as the Guardian reports.

"Eating it at a press conference can also become a part of the artwork’s history," he told the crowd during a flashy event at a Hong Kong luxury hotel last week.

At least the world's most expensive banana was fresh enough for Sun to enjoy eating it.

"It’s much better than other bananas," he claimed. "It’s really quite good."

Some Potassium

To be clear, Cattelan always intended the controversial artwork to spark a conversation around what we can feasibly call "art." In other words, Sun's unusual strategy as an art collector isn't quite as bizarre as it sounds.

He did, however, take the eyebrow-raising concept to its depressing conclusion by comparing the banana to a non-fungible token (NFT).

"Most of its objects and ideas exist as (intellectual property) and on the internet, as opposed to something physical," he said, as quoted by the Guardian.

It wasn't his only questionable investment, either; Sun also disclosed to regulators that he would back US president-elect Donald Trump by investing a whopping $30 million in the former reality TV star's dubious crypto project, World Liberty Financial.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission has also charged Sun for selling unregistered securities. It's an unsurprising development, given the sheer number of crypto founders currently being sued over securities fraud.

The crypto baron has also vowed to buy 100,000 bananas from Shah Alam, the owner of the New York City fruit stand that originally sold Cattelan the fateful banana for less than a dollar.

"Through this event, we aim not only to support the fruit stand and Mr. Shah Alam but also to connect the artistic significance of the banana to everyone," Sun told the crowd during the event last week.

More on bananas: Bananas May Go Extinct From Deadly Disease, Scientists Warn

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