Trick or Treat: Spooky Science to Give You a Scare
Halloween is a good season to treat yourself to some thrilling discoveries from scientists at UT Austin.
The supernatural, like vampires and werewolves, may get all the attention at Halloween time, but natural science can bring thrills and chills, too. From superbugs to glow-in-the-dark bats, examples of spooky science from researchers at The University of Texas at Austin span across departments.
Fear Itself
Department of Neuroscience
For horror lovers, haunted houses and scary movies may provide an exhilarating dose of adrenaline. But Sam Cooper, a postdoctoral fellow at UT Austin, studies how some fearful experiences can lead to distress.
“Seemingly irrelevant sights, sounds and smells can trigger really painful or extreme reactions for some people,” said Cooper. “In some people with PTSD, fear can infiltrate entire sets of beliefs.”
For any of us, being frightened causes physical reactions, says Michael Drew, a neuroscientist and the college’s associate dean for undergraduate education. When scared, the amygdala in the brain stirs a “constellation of hormonal, neural, behavioral and cognitive responses…all happening at once,” Drew told KXAN news. Our bodies even developed ways to attempt to scare off whatever scared us: “When we had ancestors that were hairier, the hair standing up actually had the effect of making us appear larger.”
These cosmic objects, identified by the James Webb Space Telescope Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey, may be “dark stars,” theoretical objects powered by particles of dark matter annihilating, according to research from a team including Katherine Freese. Image credit: NASA/ESA.
Dark Matter
Department of Physics
Rivaling the dread-inducing powers of darkness itself, dark matter — the mysterious cosmic force that’s incapable of interacting with light — makes up more than a quarter of the universe, and it’s celebrated every Dark Matter Day on October 31. UT physicists Katherine Freese and Scott Kravitz are among those working to determine whether the true essence of dark matter may in fact be weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). WIMPS may sound passive, but as Freese has said: “All these WIMPs flying around in the galaxy, there could be a billion going through your body every second.”
Creepier still, the search for dark matter requires going a lot more than six feet under. Kravitz works with LUX-ZEPLIN, the world’s most sensitive dark matter detector underground. As the deputy physics coordinator on the project, he reports: “If you think of the search for dark matter like looking for buried treasure, we’ve dug almost five times deeper than anyone else has in the past.”
Bat Signal
Department of Computer Science
Austin is known for its iconic urban population of Mexican free-tailed bats. Alonso Narro Delgado, a graduate student currently pursuing his master’s in computer science online, was part of a team of researchers, led by UNAM in Mexico, that recently discovered these bats have photoluminescent bristles on their feet.
Don’t expect the bats to light up the night sky, since under regular light, they look like any other bat species. Only under ultraviolet light will their toes glow in the dark, making them the first type of free-tailed bat to exhibit this trait.
Superbugs
Department of Molecular Biosciences
The term “superbug” may evoke chilling images of a spider with 10 legs or a bee with 5 stingers. But scientists know a superbug refers not to a mutated insect but to antibiotic-resistant pathogens.
Rasika Harshey, professor of molecular biosciences, studies how bacterial swarms allow bacteria to evolve antibiotic resistance. In one study, she and her team found that bacteria with antibiotic-resistant mutations, which have decreased fitness compared to regular bacteria, are pushed to the edges of the swarm, allowing the bacterial swarm to maintain levels of both the mutants and original bacteria, which supports antibiotic resistance.
UT biologists looked at fossils of lizards found in Central Texas and discovered that, over the last 20,000 years, the lizard population was likely more diverse and less stable than originally thought.
Skeletal Surprises
Department of Integrative Biology and Texas Science & Natural History Museum
Bones don’t have to emerge from the grave to tell a story. Earlier this year, UT Ph.D. student David Ledesma and faculty member Melissa Kemp published research focused on fossil bones found in a specific Central Texas cave. They discovered that, over the last 20,000 years, the fossils told a story of large shifts in the local lizard population. Because lizards are cold-blooded, they are thought to be more sensitive to changes in climate and environment, and the study provided important clues to how these animals and others survive such changes. The team found less stability and more diversity in the fossils than they had expected.
This Saturday, the campus Texas Science & Natural History Museum will have its own spin on the secrets of skulls and bones. Community members are invited to bring clean animal bones and teeth to the museum for in-person identification by a paleontologist.
Insect Rivers & Zombies
Department of Integrative Biology
Tawny crazy ants, an invasive ant species from South America, form colonies of interconnected nests up to 100 meters in diameter, and they can spell doom. Characterized by erratic movements, these ants spread terror as they infest and damage humans’ electrical boxes and water pumps and cause baby rabbits to go blind, when the swarming ants spew acid.
“Once they get established in an environment, they reach tremendous densities, where every tree has rivers of ants going up and down it,” Edward LeBrun, a research scientist at Brackenridge Field Laboratory who studies tawny crazy ants, said. “Everywhere you put your hand down on the ground, you end up getting covered with a glove of ants.”
These fearsome ants are felled by microsporidia, a group of fungal pathogens that infect and kill crazy ants. A fungal pathogen may sound eerily similar to the source of the pandemic in “The Last of Us,” where a fungal infection turns people into zombies. But LeBrun and his colleagues found another species of ants fell prey to a zombie effect from another source. Parasitoid phorid flies have a ghoulish way of targeting living fire ants. They implant their eggs in the body of the fire ant, which leads to a zombie-like behavior in the ant before it meets its awful end: being devoured from within by the fly’s offspring.
Happy Halloween!
