2025-11-01 21:00:22
Welcome back to a special scary installment of the Abstract! Is Halloween over? Technically yes. But as lovers of spooky season will know, the fallout from Halloween—when dawn reveals the remains of the festivities—is an extension of the day itself. That is why I have assembled a parade of horrors for you this morning.
First, ancient mummies from a watery grave. Then: : let’s get tangled up in one of the great mysteries of spider webs; watch out for the venomous snakes; and lastly, scientists literally ask where the bodies are buried.
For more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.
And now, Halloween is over but the darkness lingers on…
If you think human mummies are scary, wait until you meet dinosaur mummies.
Paleontologists have discovered the mummified remains of two duck-billed dinosaurs that belong to the species Edmontosaurus (go Oilers!) annectens, which lived 66 million years ago in what is now Wyoming.
The immaculate preservation of the animals—a 2-year-old juvenile and young adult that was roughly 5 to 8 years old—exposed unprecedented corporeal details, such as intricate polygonal scales, spinal spikes, fleshy contours, skin wrinkles, and the first hooves ever identified in a dinosaur (or any reptile), making them the oldest hooves in the fossil record.
“The late juvenile is the first subadult dinosaur mummy on record and the first large-bodied dinosaur preserving the fleshy midline over the trunk,” said researchers led by Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago. “The early adult is the first hadrosaurid to preserve the entire spike row from hips to tail tip and the first reptile preserving wedge-shaped pedal hooves.”
These “end-Cretaceous E. annectens preserve the oldest hoof renderings for any tetrapod, the first record of hooves in a reptile” and “the first instance of a hooved tetrapod capable of bipedal locomotion,” the team added.
For more than a century, paleontologists have discovered dinosaur mummies in what the team delightfully calls the “mummy zone” of the Lance Formation of east-central Wyoming. In addition to adding new specimens to this collection, Sereno and his colleagues have also shed light on the rare process of “clay templating” that produces this preservation of mummified flesh, skin, and other soft tissues.
As the carcasses of these Edmontosaurs dried in the Cretaceous sun, they were suddenly immersed under a flash flood that left a thin biofilm over their skin, preserving the three-dimensional soft tissues in time. The team concluded that “the extraordinary preservation of the ‘mummy zone’ is due to rapid subsidence in a coastal setting subject to seasonal drought-flood cycles.”
While it’s sad that these dinos died young, it’s a miracle that we can observe their flesh, skin, and hooves 66 million years later. Anyway, it’s not as if they had much to look forward to, since the die was already cast for the non-avian dinosaurs. In this case, the die is an apocalyptic space rock to which we humans owe our existence—and the reality of these cosmic gambles of fate is frankly scarier than any mummy, even a dinosaur mummy, ever could be.
In other news…
Halloween revelers will be taking down their decorative spider-web today, but real spiders keep their web decor up all year long. Researchers have long struggled to make sense of the silky zigzag ornaments that some spiders weave, known as “stabilimenta,” which could serve as insect attractors, predator defense, thermal protection, or water collection. Nobody is really sure!
Now, a team has suggested that stabilimenta might be vibrational amplifiers that help alert spiders to prey impacting the web. “No studies have yet investigated how web decorations affect vibration propagation in orb webs,” said researchers led by Gabriele Greco of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. By studying wasp spiders in Sardinia, the team found that in certain cases, ”the presence of the stabilimentum enhances the spider’s ability to detect prey location…compared to webs without a stabilimentum.”
“However, from a biological standpoint, the high variability in stabilimentum geometry suggests that the observed differences in elastic wave propagation are unlikely to have a consistent or significant functional role,” the team added.
In other words, these web decorations still defy a one-size-fits-all explanation. My own hypothesis is that they are just the dorm room posters of the spider world.
Though I am a militant ophiophilist, even I can see how a clade of dangerous limbless weirdos ended up becoming so widely feared and maligned. Snakes kill tens of thousands of people per year, an ongoing tragedy that has galvanized researchers to develop antivenom “cocktails” that could treat snakebit emergencies across many species while also mitigating adverse immunological reactions.
A new study has now addressed this challenge “by immunizing an alpaca and a llama with the venoms of 18 different snakes, including mambas, cobras and rinkhals,” said researchers led by Shirin Ahmadi of the Technical University of Denmark.
The cocktail “effectively prevented venom-induced lethality in vivo across 17 African elapid snake species” and “shows considerable promise for comprehensive, continent-wide protection against snakebites by all medically relevant African elapids,” the team added.
While it will take much more research to prove it is safe and effective in humans, the antivenom is a significant step toward preventing snakebite deaths and injuries. It's also about the only cocktail that you hope you’ll never have the desire to order.
We’ll close on that most hallowed of Halloween traditions—a trip to the haunted cemetery.
In an unprecedented study, researchers mapped out tens of thousands of ancient Chinese tombs spanning the past 4,000 years since the Xia Dynasty. The team used mapping software to analyze the age and location of the tombs to search for clues about the social and political impacts on burial locations.
“The number of ancient tombs varied significantly across historical periods” with the Qing dynasty (1644 - 1912) accounting for 47.012 percent of the national total, while the Sui dynasty (581 - 618) had only 0.134 percent, according to researchers led by Quanbao Ma of the Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture.
“From a temporal perspective, periods of frequent dynastic transitions and wars in Chinese history were often accompanied by significant population declines and migrations,” the team added. “However, during post-war recovery and periods of societal stability, population numbers typically rebounded and grew rapidly, which was also reflected in the increasing number of deceased individuals requiring burial.”
In other words, contrary to Halloween lore, it can be a good sign to find a lot of dead bodies in one place because it’s often an indicator of more peaceful and stable times (dead bodies, after all, are the product of living ones). What might be more creepy is an absence of graves in your general vicinity. With that in mind, go visit your local ghosts; they are great company this time of year.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
2025-11-01 01:33:23
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss keeping FOIA reporting in front of a paywall, Ray-Bans, and what pregnate Schoolhouse Rock bills say about our current AI-driven hellscape.
JOSEPH: Yesterday I did a livestreamed event with Freedom of the Press Foundation and WIRED. It was called Unpaywalled: The case for making public records-based reporting free and you can check it out here.
As you might know, we made a decision very early on with 404 Media, I think in the first week maybe, to not paywall our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reporting. There are a few reasons, but the main one simply is that with public records, we think people should be able to see those records without paying. It’s like a government agency publishing certain databases, or census data, or whatever. These are public records and should be published or re-published as such.
2025-10-31 21:47:10
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does not let people decline to be scanned by its new facial recognition app, which the agency uses to verify a person’s identity and their immigration status, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document obtained by 404 Media. The document also says any face photos taken by the app, called Mobile Fortify, will be stored for 15 years, including those of U.S. citizens.
The document provides new details about the technology behind Mobile Fortify, how the data it collects is processed and stored, and DHS’s rationale for using it. On Wednesday 404 Media reported that both ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) are scanning peoples’ faces in the streets to verify citizenship.
2025-10-31 03:25:28
I am haunted by a pregnant bill in Andrew Cuomo’s new AI-generated attack ad against Zohran Mamdani.
Cuomo posted the ad on his X account that riffed on the famous Schoolhouse Rock! song “I’m just a bill.” In Cuomo’s AI-generated cartoon nightmare, Zohran Mamdani lights money on fire while a phone bearing the ChatGPT logo explains, apparently, that Mamdani is not qualified.
2025-10-31 02:00:37
Chimpanzees revise their beliefs if they encounter new information, a hallmark of rationality that was once assumed to be unique to humans, according to a study published on Thursday in Science.
Researchers working with chimpanzees at the Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Uganda probed how the primates judged evidence using treats inside boxes, such as a “weak” clue—for example, the sound of a treat inside a shaken box—and a "strong" clue, such as a direct line of sight to the treat.
The chimpanzees were able to rationally evaluate forms of evidence and to change their existing beliefs if presented with more compelling clues. The results reveal that non-human animals can exhibit key aspects of rationality, some of which had never been directly tested before, which shed new light on the evolution of rational thought and critical thinking in humans and other intelligent animals.
“Rationality has been linked to this ability to think about evidence and revise your beliefs in light of evidence,” said co-author Jan Engelmann, associate professor at the department of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, in a call with 404 Media. “That’s the real big picture perspective of this study.”
While it’s impossible to directly experience the perspective of a chimpanzee, Engelmann and his colleagues designed five controlled experiments for groups of anywhere from 15 to 23 chimpanzee participants.
In the first and second experiments, the chimps received a weak clue and a strong clue for a food reward in a box. The chimpanzees consistently made their choices based on the stronger evidence, regardless of the sequence in which the clues were presented. In the third experiment, the chimps were shown an empty box in addition to the strong and weak clues. After this presentation, the box with the strong evidence was removed. In this experiment, the chimpanzees still largely chose the weak clue over the empty box.
In the fourth experiment, chimpanzees were given a second “redundant” weak clue—for instance, the experimenter would shake a box twice. Then, they were given a new type of clue, like a second piece of food being dropped into a box in front of them. They were significantly more likely to change their beliefs if the clue provided fresh information, demonstrating an ability to distinguish between redundant and genuinely new evidence.
Finally, in the fifth experiment, the chimpanzees were presented with a so-called “defeater” that undermined the strong clue, such as a direct line of sight to a picture of food inside the box, or a shaken box containing a stone, not a real treat. The chimps were significantly more likely to revise their choice about the location of the food in the defeater experiments than in experiments with no defeater. This experiment showcased an ability to judge that evidence that initially seems strong can be weakened with new information.
“The most surprising result was, for sure, experiment five,” Engelmann said. “No one really believed that they would do it, for many different reasons.”
For one thing, he said, the methodology of the fifth experiment demanded a lot of attention and cognitive work from the chimpanzees, which they successfully performed. The result also challenges the assumption that complex language is required to update beliefs with new information. Despite lacking this linguistic ability, chimpanzees are somehow able to flexibly assign strength to different pieces of evidence.
Speaking from the perspective of the chimps, Engelmann outlined the responses to experiment five as: “I used to believe food was in there because I heard it in there, but now you showed me that there was a stone in there, so this defeats my evidence. Now I have to give up that belief.”
“Even using language, it takes me ten seconds to explain it,” he continued. “The question is, how do they do it? It’s one of the trickiest questions, but also one of the most interesting ones. To put it succinctly, how to think without words?”
To hone in on that mystery, Engelmann and his colleagues are currently repeating the experiment with different primates, including capuchins, baboons, rhesus macaques, and human toddlers and children. Eventually, similar experiments could be applied to other intelligent species, such as corvids or octopuses, which may yield new insights about the abundance and variability of rationality in non-human species.
“I think the really interesting ramification for human rationality is that so many people often think that only humans can reflect on evidence,” Engelmann said. “But our results obviously show that this is not necessarily the case. So the question is, what's special about human rationality then?”
Engelmann and his colleagues hypothesize that humans differ in the social dimensions of our rational thought; we are able to collectively evaluate evidence not only with our contemporaries, but by consulting the work of thinkers who may have lived thousands of years ago. Of course, humans also often refuse to update beliefs in light of new evidence, which is known as “belief entrenchment” or “belief perseveration” (many such cases). These complicated nuances add to the challenge of unraveling the evolutionary underpinnings of rationality.
That said, one thing is clear: many non-human animals exist somewhere on the gradient of rational thought. In light of the recent passing of Jane Goodall, the famed primatologist who popularized the incredible capacities of chimpanzees, the new study carries on a tradition of showing that these primates, our closest living relatives, share some degree of our ability to think and act in rational ways.
Goodall “was the first Western scientist to observe tool use in chimpanzees and really change our beliefs about what makes humans unique,” Engelmann said. “We're definitely adding to this puzzle by showing that rationality, which has so long been considered unique to humans, is at least in some forms present in non-human animals.”
2025-10-31 00:22:42
Last night Trump directed the Pentagon to start testing nukes again. If that happens, it’ll be the first time the US has detonated a nuke in more than 30 years. The organization that would likely be responsible for this would be the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), a civilian workforce that oversees the American nuclear stockpile. Because of the current government shutdown, 1,400 NNSA workers are on furlough and the remaining 375 are working without pay.
America detonated its last nuke in 1992 as part of a general drawn down following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Four years later, it was the first country to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) which bans nuclear explosions for civilian or military purposes. But Congress never ratified the treaty and the CTBT never entered into force. Despite this, there has not been a nuke tested by the United States since.
Trump threatened to resume nuclear testing during his first term but it never happened. At the time, officials at the Pentagon and NNSA said it would take them a few months to get tests running again should the President order them.
The NNSA has maintained the underground tunnels once used for testing since the 1990s and converted them into a different kind of space that verifies the reliability of existing nukes without blowing them up in what are called “virtual tests.” During a rare tour of the tunnel with journalists earlier this year, a nuclear weapons scientist from Los Alamos National Laboratory told NPR that “our assessment is that there are no system questions that would be answered by a test, that would be worth the expense and the effort and the time.”
Right now, the NNSA might be hard pressed to find someone to conduct the test. It employs around 2,000 people and the shutdown has seen 1,400 of them furloughed and 375 working without pay. The civilian nuclear workforce was already having a tough year. In February, the Department of Government Efficiency cut 350 NNSA employees only to scramble and rehire all but 28 when they realized how essential they were to nuclear safety. But uncertainty continued and in April the Department of Energy declared 500 NNSA employees “non-essential” and at risk of termination.
That’s a lot of chaos for a government agency charged with ensuring the safety and effectiveness of America’s nuclear weapons. The NNSA is currently in the middle of a massive project to “modernize” America’s nukes, an effort that will cost trillions of dollars. Part of modernization means producing new plutonium pits, the core of a nuclear warhead. That’s a complicated and technical process and no one is sure how much it’ll cost and how dangerous it’ll be.
And now, it may have to resume nuclear testing while understaffed.
“We have run out of federal funds for federal workers,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a press conference announcing furlough on October 20. “This has never happened before…we have never furloughed workers in the NNSA. This should not happen. But this was as long as we could stretch the funds for federal workers. We were able to do some gymnastics and stretch it further for the contractors.”
Three days later, Rep. Dina Titus (D-NV) said the furlough was making the world less safe. “NNSA facilities are charged with maintaining nuclear security in accordance with long-standing policy and the law,” she said in a press release. “Undermining the agency’s workforce at such a challenging time diminishes our nuclear deterrence, emboldens international adversaries, and makes Nevadans less safe. Secretary Wright, Administrator Williams, and Congressional Republicans need to stop playing politics, rescind the furlough notice, and reopen the government.”
Trump announced the nuclear tests in a post on Truth Social, a platform where he announces a lot of things that ultimately end up not happening. “The United States has more Nuclear Weapons than any other country. This was accomplished, including a complete update and renovation of existing weapons, during my First Term in office. Because of the tremendous destructive power, I HATED to do it, but had no choice! Russia is second, and China is a distant third, but will be even within 5 years. Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP,” the post said.
Matt Korda, a nuclear expert with the Federation of American Scientists, said that the President’s Truth social post was confusing and riddled with misconceptions. Russia has more nuclear weapons than America. Nuclear modernization is ongoing and will take trillions of dollars and many years to complete. Over the weekend, Putin announced that Russia had successfully tested a nuclear-powered cruise missile and on Tuesday he said the country had done the same with a nuclear-powered undersea drone. Russia withdrew from the CTBT in 2023, but neither recent test involved a nuclear explosion. Russia last blew up a nuke in 1990 and China conducted its most recent test in 1996. Both have said they would resume nuclear testing should America do it. Korda said it's unclear what, exactly, Trump means. He could be talking about anything from test firing non-nuclear equipped ICBMs to underground testing to detonating nukes in the desert. “We’ll have to wait and see until either this Truth Social post dissipates and becomes a bunch of nothing or it actually gets turned into policy. Then we’ll have something more concrete to respond to,” Korda said.
Worse, he thinks the resumption of testing would be bad for US national security. “It actually puts the US at a strategic disadvantage,” Korda said. “This moratorium on not testing nuclear weapons benefits the United States because the United States has, by far, the most advanced modeling and simulation equipment…by every measure this is a terrible idea.”
The end of nuclear detonation tests has spurred 30 years of innovation in the field of computer modeling. Subcritical computer modeling happens in the NNSA-maintained underground tunnels where detonations were once a common occurrence. The Los Alamos National Laboratories and other American nuclear labs are building massive super computers that are, in part, the result of decades of work spurred by the end of detonations and the embrace of simulation.
Detonating a nuclear weapon—whether above ground or below—is disastrous for the environment. There are people alive in the United States today who are living with cancer and other health conditions caused by American nuclear testing. Live tests make the world more anxious, less safe, and encourage other nuclear powers to do their own. It also uses up a nuke, something America has said it wants to build more of.
“There’s no upside to this,” Korda said. He added that he felt bad for the furloughed NNSA workers. “People find out about significant policy changes through Truth social posts. So it’s entirely possible that the people who would be tasked with carrying out this decision are learning about it in the same way we are all learning about it. They probably have the exact same kinds of questions that we do.”