\ud83c\udf18Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that peacefully passed the crown, predicted trouble on the horizon, gave life after death, and coastally shelved an idea.First, scientists watch a succession story play out for years in a naked mole rat colony. Then: prediction markets as a public health threat, the thorny questions of posthumous reproduction, and a walk on the shores of an ancient alien seas.As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.Digging into the palace intrigue of a rodent realm\u00a0Abeywardena, Shanes C., M. Schraibman, Alexandria et al. \u201cPeaceful queen succession in the naked mole rat.\u201d Science Advances.Murderous queens. Bloody power struggles. Strictly enforced hierarchies. I\u2019m speaking, of course, of naked mole rats, a bizarre species of rodent that becomes embroiled in violent conflicts over the succession of one breeding queen to the next.\u00a0Though aggression in succession is the norm for these animals, scientists now report a rare peaceful transition of power from one queen to her daughter in a captive colony.\u00a0The discovery suggests that \u201cthe less common peaceful trajectory to queen succession\u2026is possible under some conditions\u201d especially when \u201caggression-based enforcement may be insufficient or unnecessary and when the cost of a \u2018war\u2019 may be too high,\u201d according to the new study.As we\u2019ve covered before on the Abstract, mole rats (both the naked kind and the non-naked kind) are the only mammals to live in eusocial colonies similar to bees or ants, meaning they are reigned over by one breeding queen and her subordinate workers. In addition to this unique social structure, mole rats display a number of fascinating behavioral and genetic adaptations, including long lifespans and low rates of cancer, which has made them a popular species for research.Naked mole rats may not look all that intimidating, but when it\u2019s time to anoint a new queen, the fur starts to fly (or it would, if these animals had any fur). If a queen dies or is deposed by rivals, subordinate females in the colony battle to take the throne.But scientists co-led by Shanes Abeywardena and Alexandria M. Schraibman of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies observed a different succession story that unfolded over many years in the Amigos captive colony housed in San Diego.\u00a0Starting in 2019, a queen named Ter\u00e9 reigned over the colony and produced many healthy pups. Once the colony became crowded, with nearly 40 members, Queen Ter\u00e9 began delivering litters with no surviving pups. When the researchers removed half of the members, she began to produce surviving pups again, though not many. The team then deliberately introduced another stressor by moving the colony to a new facility in 2022, which ceased Queen Ter\u00e9\u2019s fertility.Summary of the Amigos colony\u2019s succession story. Image: Abeywardena, Shanes C., M. Schraibman, Alexandria et al.In response, Alexandria, one of Ter\u00e9\u2019s daughters, became pregnant in 2023 and 2024, but her litters also produced no survivors, and she had to be euthanized in 2024 due to a uterine torsion. Finally, the long reproductive hiatus was ended after three years by the ascension of Alexandria\u2019s sister, Arwen, who became Queen Arwen upon her delivery of healthy pups in October 2025.\u201cAside from a single incident on 6 February 2025 in which one animal was found with a superficial bite wound and dried blood around the face, an injury that resolved without recurrence, no aggression or dominance related conflict was observed,\u201d the researchers said. \u201cInstead, Queen Ter\u00e9 was reported to exhibit \u2018guarding\u2019 behavior of Arwen and her litter. No other signs of social instability, behavioral escalation, or colony-wide distress were documented.\u201d\u201cTogether, these observations indicate that following the decline of Queen Ter\u00e9\u2019s reproductive capacity and the loss of the intermediary breeder Alexandria, Arwen successfully assumed the reproductive role without eliciting aggression from the reigning queen or from other colony members,\u201d the team concluded.The study is an antidote to the story we covered last week about a lethal chimp \u201ccivil war,\u201d demonstrating that animals with strict dominance structures choose peace over violence in some cases. My only note is that Ter\u00e9\u2019 be given the honorific Queen Mother for her service.In other news\u2026The over\/under on predication marketsPackin, Nizan Geslevich and Rabinovitz, Sharon. \u201cPrediction markets as a public health threat.\u201d Science.Prediction markets (PMs) are exploding in popularity, but researchers warn that the \u201caddictive design, vulnerable users, and permissive regulatory environments\u201d that characterize these markets \u201care a well-established formula for population-level harm,\u201d according to the Policy Forum section of the journal Science.\u00a0PMs operated by companies like Kalshi or Polymarket \u201cpose underappreciated threats to democratic integrity\u201d and are linked to \u201caddictive behaviors,\u201d according to authors Nizan Geslevich Packin of Baruch College Zicklin School of Business and Sharon Rabinovitz of the University of Haifa. For instance, PMs can enable insider trading about classified government information and expose millions of users to the risk of addiction and major financial losses.\u201cA public health approach reframes PM risks as predictable outcomes of environmental design, analogous to tobacco control\u2019s success in treating smoking as population-level exposure rather than individual vice,\u201d the team argued in the article.\u00a0\u201cThe window for precautionary action is closing,\u201d the researchers emphasized. \u201cEach week of billion-dollar PM activity\u2026prolongs a large uncontrolled experiment on users.\u201dIt remains to be seen whether this warning about the dangers of a wild new industry will materialize into meaningful regulatory action. Want to make a bet?Creating new life after deathBamford, Sandra Carol. \u201cSpectral Connections: Anthropological Engagements with Posthumous Reproduction.\u201d Cambridge Archaeological Journal.Posthumous children\u2014children born after the death of one or both parents\u2014are popular in myth and fiction, from the Greek Dionysus to more modern characters like John Connor or Daenerys Targaryen.\u00a0But this is also a real demographic of people that may evolve in interesting ways as reproductive technologies enable larger numbers of posthumous conceptions\u2014in which the sperm and egg donors for an embryo may be deceased, such as the case of a boy born in 2018 whose mother and father had both died years earlier in a car crash.In this way, \u201cfrozen sperm, eggs (or embryos) are, at one and the same time, both alive and dead,\u201d said Sandra Bamford of the University of Toronto in a new anthropological study of the topic. \u201cThrough their frozen gametes and the potential of new kin connections in the future, the dead remain as active participants influencing the lives of the living.\u201dThe study, which is part of a broader journal issue exploring kinship, pulls together many intriguing case studies, including the \u201cNuer ghost marriage\u201d practices of Sudan, in which a deceased man can be considered the father of a kinsman\u2019s children, or the case of William Kane, who bequeathed frozen sperm to his girlfriend, sparking a legal battle with his adult children after his death by suicide.\u00a0In other words, the legal, ethical, and practical implications of posthumous conception are still very much in flux, raising thorny questions about when, and how, the dead can produce new life. For instance: the ambiguities over judging the consent of a deceased person over the use of their posthumous gametes; the rights of posthumously conceived children to be named heirs of estates; and the possible emotional and psychological toll on posthumously conceived children, along with their family members.\u00a0\u00a0The Rime of the Really Ancient Mariner\u00a0Zaki, Abdallah S. and Lamb, Michael P.\u00a0 \u201cIdentifying the topographic signature of early Martian oceans.\u201d Nature.\u00a0We\u2019ll close, as all things should, with waves lapping on long-lost alien shores. The surface of Mars is etched with the memory of rivers, lakes, and perhaps even an expansive ocean that may have covered much of its northern hemisphere between three and four billion years ago.\u00a0Scientists have already mapped out the rough contours of what may be an ancient Martian shoreline, but a new study throws the seas into sharper relief by identifying topographic signs of a possible coastal shelf. The team argued in their study that these shelf features may be a better indicator of a past ocean than shoreline features, based on similar observations on Earth.An illustration taken from orbiter data identifying the coastal shelf region on Mars. Image: A. Zaki\u201cOur results indicate that long-lived ancient oceans on presently arid planets may be best identified not only through discrete shorelines but also through\u2026a global coastal shelf,\u201d said researchers led by Abdallah Zaki and Michael Lamb of Caltech University. The study supports \u201cthe presence of an ancient ocean on the northern plains of Mars that was bounded by a coastal shelf.\u201dWhile this ocean dried up long ago, its topographic remnants are a reminder of a time when Mars was warm, wet, and perhaps, wriggling with life.Thanks for reading! See you next week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"