Saturday Citations: Drifting Continental Plates, Communicative Monkeys, and a Stunning Einstein Ring

April 5, 2025 report

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by Chris Packham, Phys.org

This week, researchers reported on nine rivers and lakes in the Americas that defy hydrologic expectations. Geologists report that Earth's first crust probably had chemical features similar to today's continental crust. And engineers advanced quantum technology by merging two exotic, lab-synthesized materials into an artificial structure, atom by atom.

Additionally, geologists report that the North American continent is dripping blobs of rock into the mantle; a study conducted in the Democratic Republic of the Congo strongly suggests that bonobos have a compositional language; and the James Webb Space Telescope took another pretty picture of an Einstein ring:

Geologists at the University of Texas at Austin report that the underside of the North American continent is dripping blobs of rock into the Earth's mantle in the first discovery of a phenomenon they're calling cratonic thinning. The thinning is concentrated under the U.S. Midwest and seems to be driven by the subduction of an oceanic tectonic plate, the Farallon Plate, below North America, even though it's 600 kilometers away from the region of thinning craton. Farallon has been subducting below North America for the last 200 million years and interacts with the entire craton underlying most of the United States and Canada.

The researchers built a computer model of the subduction dynamics and ran simulations that both included and excluded Farralon; the thinning was present only in those simulations that included Farralon. These are dynamics that occur over hundreds of millions of years, and the project contributes to the study of vast geologic epochs.

Thorsten Becker, a geologist at the University of Texas at Austin, says, 'This sort of thing is important if we want to understand how a planet has evolved over a long time. It helps us understand how do you make continents, how do you break them, and how do you recycle them [into Earth.]'

Researchers at the Kokolopori Community Reserve in the Democratic Republic of the Congo report that vocal communication between bonobos relies extensively on compositionality—the ability to combine meaningful ideas into larger structures from which meaning can be derived based on the content of the individual units and the way they're structured. Y'know. The way humans talk.

The first step in the project was determining the meanings of individual calls and their combinations. They began with the assumption that bonobo calls have different types of meaning, including giving orders, announcing future actions, expressing internal states and referring to external events.

Using over 300 contextual parameters, they assiduously described individual vocalizations in the context of external events (like the presence of other bonobos), and the activities of the callers—e.g., eating, resting, playing. Following a call, they coded activities that occurred over the next two minutes. In this way, they determined that if a particular call preceded the bononbo beginning to travel, the call meant 'I will travel.' The result was what they describe as a complete dictionary of bonobo calls.

In the second step, they sought to learn whether combinations of calls were compositional—that is, whether the combinations modulated the greater meaning. Using methods derived from linguistics, they ultimately identified four call combinations whose meanings were derived from their single parts; every call type appeared in at least one of these combinations. This suggests that bonobo communication has compositionality.

Among many other achievements, the epoch of space-based telescopes confirmed Einstein's prediction that gravity curves spacetime and bends light. Einstein rings are gravitational lenses that bend the light passing near them, and in the best cases, magnify distant objects that are too far away to observe.

Recently, the James Webb Space Telescope captured an elliptical galaxy, SMACS J0028.2-7537, whose gravity warps the light of a spiral galaxy behind it into a colorful circle around it. Although the spiral galaxy is warped, individual star clusters and gas structures are clearly visible.

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