You can make amber fossils in 24 hours, instead of millions of years
Amber is coveted the world over as both jewelry and a vessel for prehistoric remnants, with rarer specimens preserving ancient water, air bubbles, plants, insects or even birds. Typically, amber forms over millions of years as tree resin fossilizes, but paleontologists have sped that up, creating amberlike fossils from pine resin in 24 hours. The technique could help reveal the biochemistry of amber as it forms, a process that otherwise would remain hidden in the fog of prehistory.
Published in the journal Scientific Reports, the results of the fast-fossilization experiment are akin to a meal made in a pressure cooker. “It’s similar to an Instapot,” said Evan Saitta, a research associate at the Field Museum in Chicago and co-author of the paper. The recipe for synthetic amber started with pine resin from the Chicago Botanic Garden. Saitta and his co-author, Thomas Kaye, an independent paleontologist, placed half-inch sediment disks in which the resin was embedded in a device that Kaye built using a medical pill compressor, air canisters and other parts.
By both heating and pressuring the samples, researchers were trying to simulate diagenesis, the slow chemical transformation required before sediment consolidates into rock. “Diagenesis is the ultimate hurdle you need to pass to become a fossil,” Saitta said. “It’s sort of the final boss.” Some samples were imperfect, but a few echoed amber’s physical properties, such as darkened coloration, fracture lines, dehydration and increased luster.
Looking ahead, experimental fossilization techniques may even allow scientists to explore the fossils of the future, Saitta said. How will Anthropocene life fossilize? What would happen to tissue or bone infused with microplastic or industrial heavy metals? We won’t be here millions of years from now to find out. But with a pressure-cookerlike device, we may get closer.
Foie gras that skips the force-feeding is developed by physicists
Thomas Vilgis, a food physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Germany, has long been in love with foie gras. The delicacy is a pate or mousse made from the rich, fattened livers of ducks or geese.
Vilgis recalled his early encounters with foie gras when he lived and worked in Strasbourg, France. It was soft and buttery, and once the fats began to melt in his mouth, the flavors evolved and exploded. “It is like fireworks,” he said. “You have suddenly a sensation of the whole liver.”
But such transcendence comes at a price. To fatten up the liver that’s used to create foie gras, farmers force-feed the fowl more grain than their bodies need. The excess food is stored as fat in the animal’s liver, which balloons in size.
Although he’ll eat foie gras produced by local farmers on occasion, Vilgis finds the force-feeding intolerable at an industrial scale. Vilgis wondered whether he could somehow “make a similar product but without this torture.”
In a paper in the journal Physics of Fluids, he and his colleagues say they believe they have devised a technique that allows ducks and geese to eat and grow normally. To be clear, though, this is not a foie gras substitute that spares the lives of the birds.
The lab’s approach uses enzymes to break down duck fat. Then the mixture of normal duck liver and treated fat is finished the same way as traditional foie gras — pureed in a blender and heated slightly. It’s not “a 100% agreement” but very close, Vilgis said — so close that he can’t even taste the difference.
“It’s much better than many other products which try to simulate foie gras,” he said. That includes processes that use plant fats (“It has not the same flavor; it has not the same melting, nothing,” he said) or collagen (“This makes it like a rubber,” he said).
This octopus’s other car is a shark
When she spotted the mako shark in the Hauraki Gulf off New Zealand, Rochelle Constantine, a marine ecologist at the University of Auckland, was concerned. The animal had a curious orangey-brown mass perched on top of its head. “At first, I was like, ‘Is it a buoy?’” Constantine said. “‘Is it entangled in fishing gear or had a big bite?’”
Wednesday Davis, a technician, sent up a drone to get a closer look at the 10-foot shark. As the boat sidled closer, her colleague Esther Stuck dangled a camera overboard to record some underwater footage.
“We could see these tentacles moving,” Constantine said.
Their eyes weren’t deceiving them. An octopus was riding the shark. They nicknamed it the “sharktopus.”
The team identified the eight-armed commuter as a Maori octopus. The hefty cephalopods can stretch up to 6.5 feet and weigh about 26 pounds. Even riding a huge predator such as the shark, a shortfin mako, this hitchhiker occupied a lot of room.
“You can see it takes a fair amount of real estate on the shark’s head,” Constantine said of the encounter, which the researchers recorded during a field expedition to study marine life and birds in December 2023.
Tucking its arms into a tight ball, the stowaway looked as if it were trying to go unnoticed.
Although the shark might not have been able to see the crafty cephalopod, it was most likely aware of its passenger. Sharks have sensory organs called lateral lines all over their bodies to help them perceive the world around them.
Sharks and whales sometimes attract suckerfish, which cling on for protection and remove dead skin and parasites from the predator’s body. Makos are known to leap above the water’s surface. Some researchers speculate that when they fling themselves out of the water, they are trying to dislodge these riders when they become irritating.
But this shark didn’t seem bothered by its freeloader. “The shark seemed quite happy, and the octopus seemed quite happy,” Constantine said. “It was a very calm scene.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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