A baffling discovery from Webb; the face of an early human; humans and dogs like to chill together

This week, we reported on the difficulty humans experience trying to read their dogs’ emotions. Researchers reported that male blue-lined octopuses paralyze females before mating with them to avoid being eaten. And physicists demonstrated quantum advantage with a simple cooperation game. Additionally, galaxies prefer to spin clockwise, apparently; researchers found the oldest face bones of an early human; and a play intervention reduces stress markers in both humans and dogs.

Galactic bias

Basically every image generated by the James Webb Space Telescope contains enough data to spend an entire career studying. A new study analyzing 263 galaxies in the JADES field captured by Webb has turned up a completely unexpected finding with deep implications for the origin of the universe and the methods astronomers use to measure cosmic distances. The finding is simple: The vast majority, two-thirds, of galaxies in the universe are spinning clockwise. The other third are spinning counterclockwise (or “Australiawise”).

“The analysis of the galaxies was done by quantitative analysis of their shapes, but the difference is so obvious that any person looking at the image can see it,” says Lior Shamir, associate professor of computer science at Kansas State University. The problem is that a completely random universe would be expected to produce roughly even numbers of galaxies with either spin direction.

The researchers propose two explanations: one is that the universe was born rotating, in accordance with theories like black hole cosmology, which propose that the entire universe is the interior of a black hole. The second possible explanation for this overrepresentation of clockwise-spinning galaxies is the Doppler shift effect.

Galaxies spinning in the same direction relative to the spin of the Milky Way appear red; opposite-spinning galaxies appear blue. Because the sun rotates around the center of the Milky Way, light coming from galaxies rotating in the opposite direction of the sun’s trajectory appears to be brighter.

“If that is indeed the case, we will need to recalibrate our distance measurements for the deep universe,” Shamir said.

Face old

A group of archaeologists digging in northern Spain in 2022 uncovered the oldest known facial bones of a human ancestor. The fossil, a section of the left cheek bone and upper jaw, is between 1.1 million and 1.4 million years old. The record holder for “oldest guy” is still a collection of H. erectus fossils found in Georgia, at the boundary of Europe and Asia, estimated to be 1.8 million years old, but the remains did not include a face.

The site of the new find shows clearly that early humans ventured into Europe over 1 million years ago. The researchers report in the study that the midface has H. erectus traits, including a primitive nose that does not project out as much as H. sapiens. It has a narrower midface than previous H. erectus finds. The lack of teeth makes it hard to definitively identify the species, so the researchers call it H. affinis erectus, meaning “sorta’ like H. erectus.” In the same geologic layer, the researchers also found animal bones that had been defleshed with stone tools.

Non-educated dogs benefit college students

Playing with dogs for just 15 minutes relieves stress in humans and the dogs themselves, according to researchers with Chiang Mai University in Thailand. Specifically, a group of stressed-out students who participated in the study had reduced heart rates and lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol following a canine mental health intervention. Compared to immediately before dog interactions, students’ self-reported stress levels decreased by 33.5%.

Additionally, the dogs in the study had lower fecal cortisol levels one week after the intervention. None of the dogs in the study were certified as therapy dogs, and the researchers suggest that even in situations when dogs with higher education are unavailable, non-certified dogs can help humans reduce stress levels.

“Overall, these findings contribute to our understanding of the beneficial impact of human-dog interactions on human stress levels and highlight the importance of addressing stress in both humans and animals during targeted interventions,” the researchers write.

© 2025 Science X Network