Dancing galaxies make a monster at the cosmic dawn

Astronomers have spotted a pair of galaxies in the act of merging 12.8 billion years ago. The characteristics of these galaxies indicate that the merger will form a monster galaxy, one of the brightest types of objects in the Universe. These results are important for understanding the early evolution of galaxies and black holes in the early Universe.

Quasars are bright objects powered by matter falling into a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy in the early Universe.

The most accepted theory is that when two gas-rich galaxies merge to form a single larger galaxy, the gravitational interaction of the two galaxies causes gas to fall towards the supermassive black hole in one or both of the galaxies, causing quasar activity.

To test this theory, an international team of researchers led by Takuma Izumi used the ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) radio telescope to study the earliest known pair of close quasars.

This pair was discovered by Yoshiki Matsuoka, at Ehime University in Japan, in images taken by the Subaru Telescope.

Located in the direction of the constellation Virgo, this pair of quasars existed during the first 900 million years of the Universe.

The pair is dim, indicating that the quasars are still in the early stages of their evolution.

The ALMA observations mapped the host galaxies of the quasars and showed that the galaxies are linked by a "bridge" of gas and dust.

This indicates that the two galaxies are in fact merging.

Read more at Science Daily

How a salt giant radically reshaped Mediterranean marine biodiversity

A new study paves the way to understanding biotic recovery after an ecological crisis in the Mediterranean Sea about 5.5 million years ago. An international team led by Konstantina Agiadi from the University of Vienna has now been able to quantify how marine biota was impacted by the salinization of the Mediterranean: Only 11 percent of the endemic species survived the crisis, and the biodiversity did not recover for at least another 1.7 million years. The study was just published in the journal Science.

Lithospheric movements throughout Earth history have repeatedly led to the isolation of regional seas from the world ocean and to the massive accumulations of salt. Salt giants of thousands of cubic kilometers have been found by geologists in Europe, Australia, Siberia, the Middle East, and elsewhere. These salt accumulations present valuable natural resources and have been exploited from antiquity until today in mines around the world (e.g. at the Hallstatt mine in Austria or the Khewra Salt Mine in Pakistan).

The Mediterranean salt giant is a kilometer-thick layer of salt beneath the Mediterranean Sea, which was first discovered in the early 1970s. It formed about 5.5 million years ago because of the disconnection from the Atlantic during the Messinian Salinity Crisis. In a study published in the journal Science, an international team of researchers -- comprising 29 scientists from 25 institutes across Europe -- led by Konstantina Agiadi from University of Vienna now was able to quantify the loss of biodiversity in the Mediterranean Sea due to the Messinian crisis and the biotic recovery afterwards.

Huge impact on marine biodiversity

After several decades of painstaking research on fossils dated from 12 to 3.6 million years found on land in the peri-Mediterranean countries and in deep-sea sediment cores, the team found that almost 67% of the marine species in the Mediterranean Sea after the crisis were different than those before the crisis. Only 86 of 779 endemic species (living exclusively in the Mediterranean before the crisis) survived the enormous change in living conditions after the separation from the Atlantic. The change in the configuration of the gateways, which led to the formation of the salt giant itself, resulted in abrupt salinity and temperature fluctuations, but also changed the migration pathways of marine organisms, the flow of larvae and plankton and disrupted central processes of the ecosystem. Due to these changes, a large proportion of the Mediterranean inhabitants of that time, such as tropical reef-building corals, died out.After the reconnection to the Atlantic and the invasion of new species like the Great White shark and oceanic dolphins, Mediterranean marine biodiversity presented a novel pattern, with the number of species decreasing from west to east, as it does today.

Recovery took longer than expected

Because peripheral seas like the Mediterranean are important biodiversity hotspots, it was very likely that the formation of salt giants throughout geologic history had a great impact, but it hadn't been quantified up to now. "Our study now provides the first statistical analysis of such a major ecological crisis," explains Konstantina Agiadi from the Department of Geology. Furthermore, it also quantifies for the first time the timescales of recovery after a marine environmental crisis, which is actually much longer than expected: "The biodiversity in terms of number of species only recovered after more than 1.7 million years," says the geoscientist. The methods used in the study also provide a model connecting plate tectonics, the birth and death of the oceans, Salt, and marine Life that could be applied to other regions of the world.

Read more at Science Daily

This tiny backyard bug does the fastest backflips on earth

Move over, Sonic. There's a new spin-jumping champion in town -- the globular springtail (Dicyrtomina minuta). This diminutive hexapod backflips into the air, spinning to over 60 times its body height in the blink of an eye, and a new study features the first in-depth look at its jumping prowess.

Globular springtails are tiny, usually only a couple millimeters in body length. They don't fly, bite or sting. But they can jump. In fact, jumping is their go-to (and only) plan for avoiding predators. And they excel at it -- to the naked eye it seems as though they vanish entirely when they take off.

"When globular springtails jump, they don't just leap up and down, they flip through the air -- it's the closest you can get to a Sonic the Hedgehog jump in real life," says Adrian Smith, research assistant professor of biology at North Carolina State University and head of the evolutionary biology and behavior research lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. "So naturally I wanted to see how they do it."

Finding the globular springtails was easy enough -- they're all around us. The ones in this study are usually out from December through March. Smith "recruited" his research subjects by sifting through leaf litter from his own backyard. But the next part proved to be the most challenging.

"Globular springtails jump so fast that you can't see it in real time," Smith says. "If you try to film the jump with a regular camera, the springtail will appear in one frame, then vanish. When you look at the picture closely, you can see faint vapor trail curlicues left behind where it flipped through the one frame."

Smith solved that problem by using cameras that shoot 40,000 frames per second. He urged the springtails to jump by shining a light on them or lightly prodding them with an artist's paintbrush. Then he looked at how they took off, how fast and far they went, and how they landed.

Globular springtails don't use their legs to jump. Instead, they have an appendage called a furca that folds up underneath their abdomen and has a tiny, forked structure at its tip. When the springtails jump, the furca flips down and the forked tip pushes against the ground, launching them into a series of insanely fast backflips.

What do we mean by insanely fast?

"It only takes a globular springtail one thousandth of a second to backflip off the ground and they can reach a peak rate of 368 rotations per second," Smith says. "They accelerate their bodies into a jump at about the same rate as a flea, but on top of that they spin. No other animal on earth does a backflip faster than a globular springtail."

The springtails were also able to launch themselves over 60 millimeters into the air -- more than 60 times their own height. And in most cases, they went backward.

"They can lean into a jump and go slightly sideways, but when launching from a flat surface, they mostly travel up and backward, never forward," says Jacob Harrison, a postdoctoral researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology and paper co-author. "Their inability to jump forward was an indication to us that jumping is primarily a means to escape danger, rather than a form of general locomotion."

Landing was found in two styles: uncontrolled and anchored. Globular springtails do have a sticky forked tube they can evert -- or push out of their bodies -- to grapple a surface or halt their momentum, but Smith observed that bouncing and tumbling to a stop was just as common as anchored landings.

Read more at Science Daily

Highest-resolution observations yet from the surface of Earth

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration has conducted test observations, using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and other facilities, that achieved the highest resolution ever obtained from the surface of Earth. They managed this feat by detecting light from distant galaxies at a frequency of around 345 GHz, equivalent to a wavelength of 0.87 mm. The Collaboration estimates that in future they will be able to make black hole images that are 50% more detailed than was possible before, bringing the region immediately outside the boundary of nearby supermassive black holes into sharper focus. They will also be able to image more black holes than they have done so far. The new detections, part of a pilot experiment, were published today in The Astronomical Journal.

The EHT Collaboration released images of M87*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of the M87 galaxy, in 2019, and of Sgr A*, the black hole at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, in 2022. These images were obtained by linking together multiple radio observatories across the planet, using a technique called very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), to form a single 'Earth-sized' virtual telescope.

To get higher-resolution images, astronomers typically rely on bigger telescopes -- or a larger separation between observatories working as part of an interferometer. But since the EHT was already the size of Earth, increasing the resolution of their ground-based observations called for a different approach. Another way to increase the resolution of a telescope is to observe light of a shorter wavelength -- and that's what the EHT Collaboration has now done.

"With the EHT, we saw the first images of black holes using the 1.3-mm wavelength observations, but the bright ring we saw, formed by light bending in the black hole's gravity, still looked blurry because we were at the absolute limits of how sharp we could make the images," said the study's co-lead Alexander Raymond, previously a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), and now at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, both in the United States. "At 0.87 mm, our images will be sharper and more detailed, which in turn will likely reveal new properties, both those that were previously predicted and maybe some that weren't."

To show that they could make detections at 0.87 mm, the Collaboration conducted test observations of distant, bright galaxies at this wavelength. Rather than using the full EHT array, they employed two smaller subarrays, both of which included ALMA and the Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment (APEX) in the Atacama Desert in Chile. The European Southern Observatory (ESO) is a partner in ALMA and co-hosts and co-operates APEX. Other facilities used include the IRAM 30-meter telescope in Spain and the NOrthern Extended Millimeter Array (NOEMA) in France, as well as the Greenland Telescope and the Submillimeter Array in Hawai'i.

In this pilot experiment, the Collaboration achieved observations with detail as fine as 19 microarcseconds, meaning they observed at the highest-ever resolution from the surface of Earth. They have not been able to obtain images yet, though: while they made robust detections of light from several distant galaxies, not enough antennas were used to be able to accurately reconstruct an image from the data.

This technical test has opened up a new window to study black holes. With the full array, the EHT could see details as small as 13 microarcseconds, equivalent to seeing a bottle cap on the Moon from Earth. This means that, at 0.87 mm, they will be able to get images with a resolution about 50% higher than that of previously released M87* and SgrA* 1.3-mm images. In addition, there's potential to observe more distant, smaller and fainter black holes than the two the Collaboration has imaged thus far.

EHT Founding Director Sheperd "Shep" Doeleman, an astrophysicist at the CfA and study co-lead, says: "Looking at changes in the surrounding gas at different wavelengths will help us solve the mystery of how black holes attract and accrete matter, and how they can launch powerful jets that stream over galactic distances."

This is the first time that the VLBI technique has been successfully used at the 0.87 mm wavelength. While the ability to observe the night sky at 0.87 mm existed before the new detections, using the VLBI technique at this wavelength has always presented challenges that took time and technological advances to overcome. For example, water vapour in the atmosphere absorbs waves at 0.87 mm much more than it does at 1.3 mm, making it more difficult for radio telescopes to receive signals from black holes at the shorter wavelength. Combined with increasingly pronounced atmospheric turbulence and noise buildup at shorter wavelengths, and an inability to control global weather conditions during atmospherically sensitive observations, progress to shorter wavelengths for VLBI -- especially those that cross the barrier into the submillimetre regime -- has been slow. But with these new detections, that's all changed.

Read more at Science Daily

Number of fish species at risk of extinction fivefold higher than previous estimates, according to a new prediction

Researchers predict that 12.7% of marine teleost fish species are at risk of extinction, up fivefold from the International Union for Conservation of Nature's prior estimate of 2.5%. Nicolas Loiseau and Nicolas Mouquet from the MARBEC Unit (the Marine Biodiversity, Exploitation and Conservation Unit) in Montpellier, France, and colleagues report these findings in a study published August 29th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology. Their report includes nearly 5,000 species that did not receive an IUCN conservation status due to insufficient data.

The IUCN's Red List of Threatened Species tracks more than 150,000 species to guide global conservation efforts on behalf of the most threatened.

However, 38% of marine fish species (or 4,992 species at the time of this research) are considered Data-Deficient and do not receive an official conservation status or the associated protections.

To better direct conservation efforts toward the species that need them, Loiseau and colleagues combined a machine learning model with an artificial neural network to predict the extinction risks of Data-Deficient species.

The models were trained on occurrence data, biological traits, taxonomy and human uses from 13,195 species.

They categorized 78.5% of the 4,992 species as Non-Threatened or Threatened (which includes Critically Endangered, Endangered and Vulnerable IUCN categories). Predicted Threatened species increased fivefold (from 334 to 1,671) and predicted Non-Threatened species increased by a third (from 7,869 to 10,451).

Predicted Threatened species tended to have a small geographic range, large body size and low growth rate.

The extinction risk was also correlated with shallow habitats.

The South China Sea, the Philippine and Celebes Seas and the west coasts of Australia and North America emerged as hotspots for predicted Threatened species.

The researchers recommend increased research and conservation efforts in these areas.

The researchers observed "a marked change in conservation priority ranking after species IUCN predictions," recommending that the Pacific Islands and Southern Hemisphere's polar and subpolar regions be prioritized to account for emerging at-risk species.

Many species that remained Data-Deficient occur in the Coral Triangle, indicating that additional research is needed there.

The researchers note that models cannot replace direct evaluations of at-risk species but AI offers a unique opportunity to provide a rapid, extensive and cost-effective evaluation of extinction risk of species.

Read more at Science Daily

Researchers map 50,000 of DNA's mysterious 'knots' in the human genome

Innovative study of DNA's hidden structures may open up new approaches for treatment and diagnosis of diseases, including cancer.

DNA is well-known for its double helix shape. But the human genome also contains more than 50,000 unusual 'knot'-like DNA structures called i-motifs, researchers at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research have discovered.

Published today in The EMBO Journalis the first comprehensive map of these unique DNA structures, shedding light on their potential roles in gene regulation involved in disease.

In a landmark 2018 study, Garvan scientists were the first to directly visualise i-motifs inside living human cells using a new antibody tool they developed to recognise and attach to i-motifs. The current research builds on those findings by deploying this antibody to identify i-motif locations across the entire genome.

"In this study, we mapped more than 50,000 i-motif sites in the human genome that occur in all three of the cell types we examined," says senior author Professor Daniel Christ, Head of the Antibody Therapeutics Lab and Director of the Centre for Targeted Therapy at Garvan. "That's a remarkably high number for a DNA structure whose existence in cells was once considered controversial. Our findings confirm that i-motifs are not just laboratory curiosities but widespread -- and likely to play key roles in genomic function."

Curious DNA i-motifs could play a dynamic role in gene activity

I-motifs are DNA structures that differ from the iconic double helix shape. They form when stretches of cytosine letters on the same DNA strand pair with each other, creating a four-stranded, twisted structure protruding from the double helix.

The researchers found that i-motifs are not randomly scattered but concentrated in key functional areas of the genome, including regions that control gene activity.

"We discovered that i-motifs are associated with genes that are highly active during specific times in the cell cycle. This suggests they play a dynamic role in regulating gene activity," says Cristian David Peña Martinez, a research officer in the Antibody Therapeutics Lab and first author of the study.

"We also found that i-motifs form in the promoter region of oncogenes, for instance the MYC oncogene, which encodes one of cancer's most notorious 'undruggable' targets. This presents an exciting opportunity to target disease-linked genes through the i-motif structure," he says.

I-motifs hold promise for new type of therapies and diagnostics

"The widespread presence of i-motifs near these 'holy grail' sequences involved in hard-to-treat cancers opens up new possibilities for new diagnostic and therapeutic approaches. It might be possible to design drugs that target i-motifs to influence gene expression, which could expand current treatment options," says Associate Professor Sarah Kummerfeld, Chief Scientific Officer at Garvan and co-author of the study.

Professor Christ adds that mapping i-motifs was only possible thanks to Garvan's world-leading expertise in antibody development and genomics. "This study is an example of how fundamental research and technological innovation can come together to make paradigm-shifting discoveries," he says.

Read more at Science Daily

Gene therapy gets a turbo boost

For decades, scientists have dreamt of a future where genetic diseases, such as the blood clotting disorder hemophilia, could be a thing of the past. Gene therapy, the idea of fixing faulty genes with healthy ones, has held immense promise. But a major hurdle has been finding a safe and efficient way to deliver those genes.

Now, researchers at the University of Hawai'i's John A. Burns School of Medicine (JABSOM) have made a significant breakthrough in gene editing technology that could revolutionize how we treat genetic diseases. Their new method offers a faster, safer, and more efficient way to deliver healthy genes into the body, potentially leading to treatments for hundreds of conditions. This research was recently published in Nucleic Acids Research.

Here's how it works.

Current methods can fix errors in genes, but they can also cause unintended damage by creating breaks in the DNA. Additionally, they struggle to insert large chunks of genetic material such as whole genes.

The new technique, developed by Dr. Jesse Owens along with his team Dr. Brian Hew, Dr. Ryuei Sato and Sabranth Gupta, from JABSOM's Institute for Biogenesis Research and Cell and Molecular Biology Department, addresses these limitations. They used laboratory evolution to generate a new super-active integrase capable of inserting therapeutic genes into the genome at record-breaking efficiencies.

"It's like having a "paste" function for the human genome," said Dr. Owens. "It uses specially engineered 'integrases' to carefully insert healthy genes into the exact location needed, without causing breaks in the DNA. This method is much more efficient, with success rates of up to 96% in some cases."

"This could lead to faster and more affordable treatments for a wide range of diseases, potentially impacting hundreds of conditions with a single faulty gene," said Dr. Owens.

Faster Development of Treatments and a Broader Range of Applications

The implications of this research extend beyond gene therapy. The ability to efficiently insert large pieces of DNA has applications in other areas of medicine.

When making cell lines to produce therapeutic proteins, the gene encoding the protein is usually randomly inserted into the genome, and it rarely lands in a location in the genome that is good for production. This is like searching for a needle in a haystack. Additionally, finding a cell with the gene inserted correctly and producing the desired protein can take many months.

Instead of searching for a needle in a haystack, Dr. Owens' technique makes a stack of needles. It delivers the gene directly to the desired location, significantly speeding up the development process.

"JABSOM takes pride in nurturing talented researchers like Jesse Owens, whose work has the power to create a global impact," said Sam Shomaker, dean of the University of Hawai'i John A. Burns School of Medicine. "This research, conducted in our lab in the middle of the Pacific, has the potential to significantly improve the way we treat genetic diseases."

Dr. Owens' team is exploring how this technique could accelerate the development and manufacture of biologics and advanced therapies such as antibodies. Currently, finding the right cell line for efficient production can be a time-consuming process. However, Dr. Owens' new genome engineering tool can reduce the cell line development timeline and accelerate the manufacture of life-saving therapeutics.

Read more at Science Daily

Dark matter could have helped make supermassive black holes in the early universe

Supermassive black holes typically take billions of years to form. But the James Webb Space Telescope is finding them not that long after the Big Bang -- before they should have had time to form.

It takes a long time for supermassive black holes, like the one at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, to form. Typically, the birth of a black hole requires a giant star with the mass of at least 50 of our suns to burn out -- a process that can take a billion years -- and its core to collapse in on itself.

Even so, at only about 10 solar masses, the resulting black hole is a far cry from the 4 million-solar-masses black hole, Sagittarius A*, found in our Milky Way galaxy, or the billion-solar-mass supermassive black holes found in other galaxies. Such gigantic black holes can form from smaller black holes by accretion of gas and stars, and by mergers with other black holes, which take billions of years.

Why, then, is the James Webb Space Telescope discovering supermassive black holes near the beginning of time itself, eons before they should have been able to form? UCLA astrophysicists have an answer as mysterious as the black holes themselves: Dark matter kept hydrogen from cooling long enough for gravity to condense it into clouds big and dense enough to turn into black holes instead of stars. The finding is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

"How surprising it has been to find a supermassive black hole with a billion solar mass when the universe itself is only half a billion years old," said senior author Alexander Kusenko, a professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA. "It's like finding a modern car among dinosaur bones and wondering who built that car in the prehistoric times."

Some astrophysicists have posited that a large cloud of gas could collapse to make a supermassive black hole directly, bypassing the long history of stellar burning, accretion and mergers. But there's a catch: Gravity will, indeed, pull a large cloud of gas together, but not into one large cloud. Instead, it gathers sections of the gas into little halos that float near each other but don't form a black hole.

The reason is because the gas cloud cools too quickly. As long as the gas is hot, its pressure can counter gravity. However, if the gas cools, pressure decreases, and gravity can prevail in many small regions, which collapse into dense objects before gravity has a chance to pull the entire cloud into a single black hole.

"How quickly the gas cools has a lot to do with the amount of molecular hydrogen," said first author and doctoral student Yifan Lu. "Hydrogen atoms bonded together in a molecule dissipate energy when they encounter a loose hydrogen atom. The hydrogen molecules become cooling agents as they absorb thermal energy and radiate it away. Hydrogen clouds in the early universe had too much molecular hydrogen, and the gas cooled quickly and formed small halos instead of large clouds."

Lu and postdoctoral researcher Zachary Picker wrote code to calculate all possible processes of this scenario and discovered that additional radiation can heat the gas and dissociate the hydrogen molecules, altering how the gas cools.

"If you add radiation in a certain energy range, it destroys molecular hydrogen and creates conditions that prevent fragmentation of large clouds," Lu said.

But where does the radiation come from?

Only a very tiny portion of matter in the universe is the kind that makes up our bodies, our planet, the stars and everything else we can observe. The vast majority of matter, detected by its gravitational effects on stellar objects and by the bending of light rays from distant sources, is made of some new particles, which scientists have not yet identified.

The forms and properties of dark matter are therefore a mystery that remains to be solved. While we don't know what dark matter is, particle theorists have long speculated that it could contain unstable particles which can decay into photons, the particles of light. Including such dark matter in the simulations provided the radiation needed for the gas to remain in a large cloud while it is collapsing into a black hole.

Dark matter could be made of particles that slowly decay, or it could be made of more than one particle species: some stable and some that decay at early times. In either case, the product of decay could be radiation in the form of photons, which break up molecular hydrogen and prevent hydrogen clouds from cooling too quickly. Even very mild decay of dark matter yielded enough radiation to prevent cooling, forming large clouds and, eventually, supermassive black holes.

Read more at Science Daily

Engineers develop all-in-one solution to catch and destroy 'forever chemicals'

Chemical engineers at the University of British Columbia have developed a new treatment that traps and treats PFAS substances -- widely known as "forever chemicals" -- in a single, integrated system.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are widely used in manufacturing consumer goods like waterproof clothing due to their resistance to heat, water and stains. However, they are also pollutants, often ending up in surface and groundwater worldwide, where they have been linked to cancer, liver damage and other health issues.

"PFAS are notoriously difficult to break down, whether they're in the environment or in the human body," explained lead researcher Dr. Johan Foster, an associate professor of chemical and biological engineering in the faculty of applied science. "Our system will make it possible to remove and destroy these substances in the water supply before they can harm our health."

Catch and destroy

The UBC system combines an activated carbon filter with a special, patented catalyst that traps harmful chemicals and breaks them down into harmless components on the filter material. Scientists refer to this trapping of chemical components as adsorption.

"The whole process is fairly quick, depending on how much water you're treating," said Dr. Foster. "We can put huge volumes of water through this catalyst, and it will adsorb the PFAS and destroy it in a quick two-step process. Many existing solutions can only adsorb while others are designed to destroy the chemicals. Our catalyst system can do both, making it a long-term solution to the PFAS problem instead of just kicking the can down the road."

No light? No problem

Like other water treatments, the UBC system requires ultraviolet light to work, but it does not need as much UV light as other methods.

During testing, the UBC catalyst consistently removed more than 85 per cent of PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid, a type of forever chemical) even under low light conditions.

"Our catalyst is not limited by ideal conditions. Its effectiveness under varying UV light intensities ensures its applicability in diverse settings, including regions with limited sunlight exposure," said Dr. Raphaell Moreira, a professor at Universität Bremen who conducted the research while working at UBC.

For example, a northern municipality that gets little sun could still benefit from this type of PFAS solution.

"While the initial experiments focused on PFAS compounds, the catalyst's versatility suggests its potential for removing other types of persistent contaminants, offering a promising solution to the pressing issues of water pollution," explained Dr. Moreira.

From municipal water to industry cleanups

The team believes the catalyst could be a low-cost, effective solution for municipal water systems as well as specialized industrial projects like waste stream cleanup.

They have set up a company, ReAct Materials, to explore commercial options for their technology.

"Our catalyst can eliminate up to 90 per cent of forever chemicals in water in as little as three hours -- significantly faster than comparable solutions on the market. And because it can be produced from forest or farm waste, it's more economical and sustainable compared to the more complex and costly methods currently in use," said Dr. Foster.

Read more at Science Daily

Neuroscientists explore the intersection of music and memory

The soundtrack of this story begins with a vaguely recognizable and pleasant groove. But if I stop writing and just listen for a second, the music reveals itself completely. In Freddie Hubbard's comfortable, lilting trumpet solo over Herbie Hancock's melodic, repetitive piano vamping, I recognize "Cantaloupe Island." Then, with my fingers again poised at the keyboard, Freddie and Herbie fade into the background, followed by other instrumental music: captivating -- but not distracting -- sonic nutrition, feeding my concentration and productivity.

Somewhere, I think, Yiren Ren is studying, focused on her research that demonstrates how music impacts learning and memory. Possibly, she's listening to Norah Jones, or another musician she's comfortable with. Because that's how it works: The music we know and might love, music that feels predictable or even safe -- that music can help us study and learn. Meanwhile, Ren has also discovered, other kinds of music can influence our emotions and reshape old memories.

Ren, a sixth-year Ph.D. student in Georgia Tech's School of Psychology, explores these concepts as the lead author of two new research papers in the journals PLOS Oneand Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience (CABN).

"These studies are connected because they both explore innovative applications of music in memory modulation, offering insights for both every day and clinical use," says Ren.

But the collective research explores music's impacts in very different ways, explains Ren's faculty advisor and co-author of the study, Thackery Brown.

"One paper looks at how music changes the quality of your memory when you're first forming it -- it's about learning," says Brown, a cognitive neuroscientist who runs the MAP (Memory, Affect, and Planning) Lab at Tech. "But the other study focuses on memories we already have and asks if we can change the emotions attached to them using music."

Making Moods With Music

When we watch a movie with a robust score -- music created to induce emotions -- what we're hearing guides us exactly where the composer wants us to go. In their CABN study, Ren, Brown, and their collaborators from the University of Colorado (including former Georgia Tech Assistant Professor Grace Leslie) report that this kind of "mood music" can also be powerful enough to change how we remember our past.

Their study included 44 Georgia Tech students who listened to film soundtracks while recalling a difficult memory. Ren is quick to point out that this was not a clinical trial, so these participants were not identified as people suffering from mood disorders: "We wanted to start off with a random group of people and see if music has the power to modulate the emotional level of their memories."

Turns out, it does. The participants listened to movie soundtracks and incorporated new emotions into their memories that matched the mood of the music. And the effect was lasting. A day later, when the participants recalled these same memories -- but without musical accompaniment -- their emotional tone still matched the tone of the music played the day before.

The researchers could watch all this happening with fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging). They could see the altered brain activity in the study participants, the increased connectivity between the amygdala, where emotions are processed, and other areas of the brain associated with memory and integrating information.

"This sheds light on the malleability of memory in response to music, and the powerful role music can play in altering our existing memories," says Ren.

Ren is herself a multi-instrumentalist who originally planned on being a professional musician. As an undergraduate at Boston University, she pursued a dual major in film production and sound design, and psychology.

She found a way to combine her interests in music and neuroscience and is interested in how music therapy can be designed to help people with mood disorders like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or depression, "particularly in cases where someone might overexaggerate the negative components of a memory," Ren says.

There is no time machine that will allow us to go back and insert happy music into the mix while a bad event is happening and a memory is being formed, "but we can retrieve old memories while listening to affective music," says Brown. "And perhaps we can help people shift their feelings and reshape the emotional tone attached to certain memories."

Embracing the Familiar

The second study asks a couple of old questions: Should we listen to music while we work or study? And if so, are there more beneficial types of music than others? The answer to both questions might lie, at least partially, within the expansive parameters of personal taste. But even so, there are limits.

Think back to my description of "Cantaloupe Island" at the beginning of this story and how a familiar old jazz standard helped keep this writer's brain and fingers moving. In the same way, Norah Jones helps Ren when she's working on new research around music and memory. But if, for some reason, I wanted to test my concentration, I'd play a different kind of jazz, maybe 1950s bebop with its frenetic pace and off-center tone, or possibly a chorus of screeching cats. Same effect. It would demand my attention, and no work would get done.

For this study, Ren combined her gifts as a musician and composer with her research interests in examining whether music can improve -- or impair -- our ability to learn or remember new information. "We wanted to probe music's potential as a mnemonic device that helps us remember information more easily," she says. (An example of a mnemonic device is "Every Good Boy Does Fine," which stands for E-G-B-D-F and helps new piano players learn the order of notes on a keyboard.)

This study's 48 participants were asked to learn sequences of abstract shapes while listening to different types of music. Ren played a piece of music, in a traditional or familiar pattern of tone, rhythm, and melody. She then played the exact same set of notes, but out of order, giving the piece an atonal structure.

When they listened to familiar, predictable music, participants learned and remembered the sequences of shapes quicker as their brains created a structured framework, or scaffold, for the new information. Meanwhile, music that was familiar but irregular (think of this writer and the bebop example) made it harder for participants to learn.

"Depending its familiarity and structure, music can help or hinder our memory," says Ren, who wants to deepen her focus on the neural mechanisms through which music influences human behavior.

She plans to finish her Ph.D. studies this December and is seeking postdoctoral research positions that will allow her to continue the work she's started at Georgia Tech. Building on that, Ren wants to develop music-based therapies for conditions like depression or PTSD, while also exploring new rehabilitation strategies for aging populations and individuals with dementia.

Read more at Science Daily