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What did the scientists do this week? Exactly four things, all of which are summarized below.

“This cute baby can hold 4.3 million suns”

Supermassive black holes: How do they get so huge? This simple question is much more complicated than it sounds. Science is irritating. But an international team of astronomers may have found an answer. In the relatively nearby galaxy ESO320-G030, which surrounds a supermassive black hole, they discovered a powerful, rotating magnetic wind.

They chose the galaxy to observe because it is very active, forming new stars at a rate 10 times faster than our own galaxy, and is therefore highly illuminated in the infrared spectrum, making it possible to capture details in the center of the galaxy otherwise obscured by visible light and clouds of dust.

Using ALMA, they peered through the surrounding dust to zoom in on the dense gas around the black hole. They can distinguish patterns in the gas that strongly suggest the presence of a rotating, magnetized wind. Unlike other types of winds and jets, which tend to blow matter away from supermassive black holes, the magnetic wind can feed material into the black hole, accreting it over time. The researchers say the process is analogous to how baby stars accumulate matter, albeit on a much larger scale.

Germ Temperance League

Binge drinking is generally defined as consuming a large amount of alcohol in a short period of time, resulting in a blood alcohol concentration of 0.08% or higher. Binge eating poses short-term health risks, but also carries an increased risk of alcohol use disorder later in life. Although young people have reported reduced consumption of illicit drugs and alcohol in recent years, researchers have found that many young people drink regularly.

Current support for alcohol use disorder is mainly through interventions such as therapy and peer-led support groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous, as there are few approved medications; 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 non-drinkers; their gut microorganisms also produce a different mix of short-chain fatty acids associated with the fermentation of undigested dietary fiber and protein. They theorized that the microbiome could influence drinking behavior.

Using mice bred to express a propensity to drink, 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 in their food for 10 days. The researchers found that increasing valeric acid in their diet corresponded to a 40% reduction in alcohol consumption in the modified mice.

“Multiple mechanisms likely play a role 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 series representation for pi. Because these interactions involve so many parameters, one of the researchers was tasked with optimization. Using the Feynman diagram, a mathematical representation of the energy exchange during particle interaction and scattering, and the Euler-Beta function, they were able to optimize their model of particle interactions, but also created a new series representation of pi combining specific parameters so that researchers can quickly arrive at a pi value that can then be incorporated into calculations.

“Our original effort 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 and more accurate parameters to understand how particles interact. excited when we got a new way to look 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 reports the discovery of a new plant-eating dinosaur in northern Montana with a spectacular, tufted set of horns resembling the hairstyle worn by Loki, the trickster god in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And since the specimen is now housed in Denmark, the researchers went ahead and named it Lokiceratops rangiformis. The fossilized bones were discovered in 2019 two miles south of the Canadian border.

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

“This new dinosaur pushes the boundaries of the strange headgear of ceratopsians, bearing the largest horns ever seen on a ceratopsian,” Sertich said.