Accidental Alchemy, Flamingo Food Tornado, and Kosmos-482 Lands
Kosmos-482 crash-lands, physicists turn lead to gold and animals show some clever behaviors.
By , Allison Parshall, Fonda Mwangi, Jeffery DelViscio & Alex Sugiura
Happy Monday, listeners! For Scientific American 's Science Quickly, this is Allison Parshall filling in for Rachel Feltman. Let's kick off the week with a quick roundup of some of the latest science news.
First, an update on that doomed Soviet-era spacecraft Rachel mentioned last week. After spending more than half a century orbiting Earth, the Kosmos-482 probe made a crash landing on May 10. According to a post on the app Telegram from Russian space agency Roscosmos, the spacecraft crashed into the Indian Ocean somewhere west of Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. Space.com reports that other space agencies have estimated different landing spots for the probe, from locations on land in South Asia to stretches of the eastern Pacific. We may never know exactly where Kosmos-482 finally came to rest. In any case, we haven't heard any reports of falling space junk causing harm to humans, so it seems likely the object crashed somewhere out of the way.
Now for some accidental alchemy. Despite the wishes of medieval scholars, there's no way to turn lead into gold, right? Wrong. Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider apparently did just that —very briefly, but still. The scientists published a description of this magical-sounding transformation earlier this month in the journal Physical Review C.
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Here's how it worked: Scientists at CERN use the Large Hadron Collider to study the early universe by firing lead nuclei at one another at nearly the speed of light. Instead of smashing head-on, the nuclei usually pass very close to one another. In these near-misses, the powerful electric field from one nucleus can shake up the other. If the field is strong enough, it can knock out three protons from an incoming lead nucleus. Since gold has three fewer protons than lead, this transforms the lead into gold.
The researchers estimate that 89,000 gold nuclei are produced per second during these experiments. That means that between 2015 and 2018—the accelerator's second run, which is when the scientists collected this data—the collider produced 29 trillionths of a gram of gold. Unfortunately for any prospectors at CERN, those atoms tend to get obliterated in about a microsecond. Nature reports that another CERN accelerator also observed this alchemical reaction during a 2002 to 2004 run. But because that experiment used less energy, less gold was produced.
In public health news, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data released last Wednesday indicates a massive drop in overdose deaths between 2023 and 2024. In the 45 years that the CDC has collected equivalent data, the biggest one-year dip seen previously was 4 percent in 2018, according to the Associated Press. Deaths dropped from about 110,000 in 2023 to roughly 80,000 in 2024, which represents a nearly 27 percent decrease. The AP reports that experts mentioned several possible factors behind the drop, including the increased availability of naloxone for treating overdoses.
It's important to note that, while this is promising news, we still have a long way to go. Overdose deaths are still higher than they were before the COVID pandemic, and overdose remains the leading cause of death for people in the U.S. between ages 18 and 44. If you don't already carry naloxone with you in case you encounter someone experiencing an overdose, consider looking into what resources your state and county offer for training and distribution. You can check out GetNaloxoneNow.org to find more information.
We'll wrap up with a couple of fun animal stories.
Let's start with flamingos. They're not exactly known for being very active. You're probably picturing the birds standing calmly in crystal clear water. But according to a study published last Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they're surprisingly busy just beneath the surface.
Similar to the way spiders use webs to trap prey, the study authors say, flamingos create little water tornados to coax food straight into their mouths.
First, the birds use their feet to churn sediment up. Then they jerk their heads up, turning those small whorls of sediment into vortexes. Meanwhile, the animals chatter their beaks to create even more water movement, pulling the swirling sediment into their mouths. From there, the flamingos can filter out tiny prey such as brine shrimp—but it seems like this filter feeding is a lot less passive than it looks.
In other animal news, it turns out that chimps use leaves for everything from first aid to bathroom hygiene. In a study published Tuesday in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, researchers describe their observations of two different communities of chimpanzees in Uganda. The researchers identified numerous instances of 'self-care' using leaves, from dabbing wounds to packing them with chewed-up plant matter. The chimps sometimes offered this care to others, too. That's similar to behavior other researchers reported last year in orangutans over in Indonesia. Orangutans have also been seen applying juice made from saliva and the leaves of a plant with anti-inflammatory properties all over their bodies, which scientists suspect they might be doing to relieve joint and muscle pain.
Plants seem to be part of a larger wellness routine for chimps, too: the scientists also saw them using leaves to clean themselves up after pooping or having sex. The researchers even described one instance of what they called 'prosocial postcoital penis wiping,' which means one chimp leant another a hand with intimate personal hygiene.
While these aren't the first documented cases of first aid in nonhuman animals—or even in chimps, who have been seen putting smashed insects in their wounds, possibly for medicinal purposes—scientists are excited to see evidence that medicinal plant use might be more widespread than expected among our close relatives. That could suggest that wound care goes way, way back in our evolutionary history.
That's all for this week's news roundup. Rachel will be back on Wednesday.
Science Quickly is produced by Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was hosted by me, Allison Parshall, and edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
For Scientific American, this is Allison Parshall. Have a great week!
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