Science News Headlines . A massive clump of dark matter may lurk in the Milky Way . The right sounds may turn sleep into a problem-solving tool . Fossil vomit shows what one pre-dino predator hunted . Building blocks of life discovered in Bennu asteroid Read more about some of them below. . A massive clump of dark matter may lurk in the Milky Way Th Sun lies in the Milky Way Galaxy. Scientists found evidence of an invisible, massive nugget in the galactic neighborhood of the Sun. The suspected clod of dark matter has a mass about 10 million times that of the sun, researchers report. Dark matter is an unidentified substance, whose presence has been inferred based only on its impact on the cosmos. The Milky Way is enveloped in an enormous dark matter “halo,” and scientists suspect that untold numbers of smaller clumps, called “subhalos” reside within it. Now they have a candidate, located about a kiloparsec from the sun, or around 3,260 light-years away. Scientists spotted the unobtrusive object by monitoring remnants of dead stars called pulsars, which send out bursts of radio waves at a regular rate. Tracking how the rate of pulses changes over time allows scientists to make a variety of measurements of the cosmos. Out of 53 pulsars the researchers studied, one pair of neighboring pulsars showed signs of a shift in their pulse rate that pointed to a gravitational pull from something massive. To estimate the mass of the object, the researchers included additional pulsars in the vicinity of the original pair, for a total of 19 pulsars. Notably, there were no stars or gas clouds nearby that could explain the observations, leaving dark matter as the likely culprit. Different dark matter theories predict different distributions of dark matter subhalos. So, if scientists could map out all of the Milky Way’s subhalos, that could pin down the nature of dark matter, says astrophysicist Sukanya Chakrabarti of the University of Alabama in Huntsville. “That’s the final goal. That’s what we’re after.” . The right sounds may turn sleep into a problem-solving tool When solving a puzzle, the answer could lie in your dreams. There are many stories of scientists having brilliant ideas after a nap or daydream. For instance Kekule is supposed to have dreamed the right structure of Benzene! But scientists have struggled to successfully influence people’s dreams and rigorously test the idea. “This study provides one of the first experimentally grounded demonstrations of such a link,” says Giulio Bernardi, a cognitive neuroscientist at IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, in Italy, who was not involved with the work. Whether we remember our dreams or not, we have countless dreams in our sleep, according to Karen Konkoly, a cognitive neuroscientist who performed the study at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, USA. “Your dreams are such a big part of your inner life,” she says. And in the right circumstances, manipulating those dreams could help people think of problems in new ways. While some scientists have shown that sleeping on a problem increases the odds of solving it the next day, others have shown no benefit. Of course, it might help only if you actually think about the problem in your sleep. Konkoly and her colleagues were especially interested in helping sleepers think about specific topics using targeted memory reactivation, or TMR. “It’s this research technique where you have a sensory stimulus that’s associated with a memory,” Konkoly says. “It could be a very soft sound or a smell that’s presented to a sleeper, and it functions to remind the sleeping brain of the full memory.” While people dream in every stage of sleep, the effects of TMR have been strongest in deep, slow-wave sleep, she says. Konkoly wanted to look at the effects of TMR at a different sleep stage — rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which could be helpful for creative thinking. She and her colleagues recruited 20 volunteers who could lucid dream — where someone realizes they are dreaming, and can even potentially change the dream as they dream it. The participants were given sets of brain-teasing puzzles to solve, some they could — and some they couldn’t. Each was accompanied by a specific soundtrack unrelated to the task itself, such as a brief clip of instrumental music. The scientists next hooked the participants up to electrodes to monitor their sleep and put them to bed. At 4 a.m., the participants were woken up and encouraged to lucid dream as they returned to sleep. Then, the scientists started playing sounds associated with the puzzles the participants couldn’t solve, asking them to sniff to indicate they were working on the puzzles in their sleep. The next morning, 75 percent of sleepers reported dreaming about the unsolved puzzles, though participants were only able to lucidly dream of the problems nine times. Sleepers who heard the sound cues in their sleep and dreamed about the puzzles —even if they weren’t lucid dreaming — solved the puzzles they dreamed about 42 percent of the time, while those who didn’t dream about the cued puzzles only solved them 17 percent of the time. While the effects were modest, the idea of hacking your dreams to increase productivity and problem-solving could tempt some people. But that’s not why Konkoly does this research. “I don’t think that all our dreams should be corrupted for creative problem-solving,” she says. “I want people to value dreams more,” for their own sake, as what can be disjointed reflections of our inner lives and experiences. . Fossil vomit shows what one pre-dino predator hunted Some 290 million years ago — before dinosaurs roamed the Earth — a predator gobbled up three other animals. Later, it vomited up their bones. Over the ages, that puke hardened into a fossil (the preserved remains, or trace of any once-living organism from a past geological age, typically found embedded in rock, often formed when hard parts like bones, shells, or teeth are replaced by mineral deposits). The newly imaged cluster of bones inside it now offers a window into some of the world’s earliest land predators. Scientists have a name for fossil vomit: regurgitalite (to regurgitate something is a polite (or scientific!) way of saying vomit). This sample held bones from three different animals eaten by one predator. That means “we can literally say, for sure, that these three were living at exactly the same place and exactly the same time, maybe to the week or even to the day,” says Arnaud Rebillard. He’s a paleontologist and was part of the research team. He works at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, Germany. Fossils of partially digested food, including vomit and poop, are valuable clues for studying Earth’s past. They reveal more than just which species lived in an area. They also help scientists figure out which animals were predators and which were prey. We need fossils like this to really tie together how the ecosystem functioned and how the food webs were structured. Rebillard’s team discovered the lime-sized barf blob at a fossil site known as the Bromacker locality. They scanned the fossil with powerful X-rays to get a 3-D image of what was inside (without breaking it open). That CT scan revealed a cluster of 41 bones from different animals. This suggests the debris had come from a predator’s gut. Something leaving the gut can either be thrown up or pooped out. To find out which this was, the team analyzed chemicals in material surrounding the bones. Unlike puke, fossilized poop tends to be high in the element phosphorus. Since it was low in phosphorus, the new fossil appears to be ancient vomit. Researchers scanned 290-million-year-old fossilized vomit to find out what was in it. Figure A shows the complete specimen. Figure B shows a CT scan of it, revealing a cluster of 41 bones. Figure C shows scans of 25 bones from it that the team could attribute to prey species. The researchers don’t know which predator threw up the bones. They suspect it was one of two animals similar to today’s monitor lizards (such as Komodo dragons). One candidate is Dimetrodon teutonis. It’s known for the sail on its back. The other is Tambacarnifex unguifalcatus. It had long, curved fingers and toes and sharp, backwards-curved teeth and is considered to be an apex predator. (The picture shows an illustration of Tambacarnifex unguifalcatus consuming a Dimetrodon teutonis carcass from Carnegie Museum of Natural History). Both predators resembled dinosaurs. But they were not dinos. They weren’t even reptiles. Instead, they belonged to a group known as synapsids. This group includes today’s mammals and their extinct relatives. Rebillard’s group found two small, lizard-like reptiles among the vomited-up bones. They also found the limb bone from a larger, reptile- like plant eater. Several more bones came from animals that could not be identified. These bones from different species suggest the predator did not have a taste for just one type of prey. It ate whatever it could find. “It’s kind of like a photograph of a moment in the past that is telling us about the animal that was living,” says Rebillard. “Any data that we can find about their behavior is very precious.” Even several of today’s predators cough up bones and other body parts that are tough to digest. Owls, for instance, famously vomit up the fur and bones of prey that they’ve swallowed whole. Scientists don’t know if this is why the ancient animal spit up those bones. But that’s likely, Rebillard says. That, or the animal simply ate too much! The site where this fossil was found preserves a snapshot of an early land ecosystem on the supercontinent Pangaea. Fossils from this site date from the Permian Period, 299 million to 254 million years ago. Back then, predators that could travel on land often lived in semi- aquatic landscapes. There, they hunted crustaceans and fish. Around this time, plant eaters gradually started moving to dry, inland sites. New predators would soon follow. Fossil poop and puke are much rarer inland than in aquatic habitats. That’s part of what makes the new fossil vomit so exciting. “We’re talking about almost 300-million-years-old ecosystems,” Rebillard says. Any fossil that gives such precise information about when and where animals lived “is extremely fascinating.” . Building blocks of life discovered in Bennu asteroid Amino acids, the building blocks necessary for life, were previously found in samples of 4.6-billion-year-old rocks from an asteroid called Bennu, delivered to Earth in 2023 by NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission. How those amino acids—the molecules that create proteins and peptides in DNA —formed in space was a mystery. New research led by Penn State scientists shows they could have originated in an icy-cold, radioactive environment at the dawn of Earth's solar system. According to the researchers, who published new findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, some amino acids in the asteroid Bennu samples likely formed in a different way than was previously thought. The scientists analysed a precious bit of space dust no bigger than a teaspoon. The team used custom instruments capable of measuring slight variations in the mass of atoms that could point to different isotopes. In studying Bennu, the researchers focused on glycine, the simplest amino acid, a tiny two‑carbon molecule that serves as one of life's basic building blocks. Amino acids link together to form proteins, which carry out nearly every biological function—from building cells to catalyzing chemical reactions. Glycine can form under a wide range of chemical conditions and it's often considered a key indicator of early prebiotic chemistry. Finding glycine in asteroids or comets suggests that some of life's fundamental ingredients may have formed in space and were delivered to early Earth. Previously, the main hypothesis for glycine formation was Strecker synthesis, during which hydrogen cyanide, ammonia, and aldehydes or ketones react in the presence of liquid water. The new results, however, hint that Bennu's glycine may not have formed in warm water at all, but instead in frozen ice exposed to radiation in the outer reaches of the early solar system. For decades, scientists have examined carbon-rich meteorites like the famous Murchison meteorite, which landed in Australia in 1969, to study the amino acids inside. The Penn State team compared its results from Bennu to an analysis of amino acids from the Murchison meteorite. The Murchison molecules seemed to form through a process that required liquid water and mild temperatures. Such conditions could have existed on the ancient parent bodies of such meteorites, conditions that also existed in early Earth. What's a real surprise is that the amino acids in Bennu show a much different isotopic pattern than those in Murchison. The results suggest that Bennu and Murchison's parent bodies likely originated in chemically distinct regions of the solar system. Looking forward, the results present many new mysteries for science. For example, amino acids come in two mirror-image forms, like left and right hands. Previously, it had been assumed that these pairs should have the same isotopic signature. But in Bennu, the two forms of glutamic acid show drastically different nitrogen values. It is not known why. The scientists hope to analyse a range of different meteorites to look at their amino acids and study their diversity. Sources: Science News , Sciencew News Explores , Phys.org