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Overnight News Digest: Firefly spooky synergy, shy raccoon IQ, cyborg roaches, Neptune & more [1]

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Date: 2022-09-24

This week’s science news collection reports on

My favorite stories to write all sound a little bit fictional... so here's one @QuantaMagazine on new efforts to decipher a code that hangs in the air above swamps and forests and is written in a language of mathematics and pure light. https://t.co/tXhz8gPiV2

“Field research suggests a new explanation for the synchronized flashing in fireflies and confirms that a novel form of “chimeric” synchrony occurs naturally.”

In the last two years, a series of papers from Peleg’s group have opened a fire hose of real-world data about synchrony in multiple firefly species at multiple study sites, and at a much higher resolution than previous modelers or biologists had managed. “Pretty astonishing” is how the mathematical biologist Bard Ermentrout at the University of Pittsburgh described the team’s results to Quanta. “I was blown away,” said Andrew Moiseff, a biologist at the University of Connecticut.

These papers establish that real firefly swarms depart from the mathematical idealizations that flitted through journals and textbooks for decades. Nearly every model for firefly synchrony ever concocted, for example, assumes that each firefly maintains its own internal metronome. A preprint that Peleg’s group posted in March, however, showed that in at least one species, individual fireflies have no intrinsic rhythm, and it posited that a collective beat emerges only from the spooky synergy of many lightning bugs gathered together. An even more recent preprint, first uploaded in May and updated last week, documented a rare type of synchrony that mathematicians call a chimera state, which has almost never been observed in the real world outside of contrived experiments.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/9/24/2124381/-Overnight-News-Digest-Firefly-spooky-synergy-shy-raccoon-IQ-cyborg-roaches-Neptune-amp-more

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