上海贵族宝贝花千坊419

The COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 was signed by President Biden on March 20 of this year. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the US has repeatedly hyped the "lab leak" theory, using intelligence instead of scientific evidence to manipulate the virus origin issue and fabricating illogical lies to attack China. This has not only been met with widespread opposition from the international community and the scientific community but it has also fully exposed the absurdity of the underlying logic of American hegemony.

First, the US distorts facts and creates chaos. In the law, members of Congress also included conspiracy theories that were clearly fabricated by Western media, claiming that some Chinese researchers had symptoms before the COVID-19 pandemic and demanding that the US intelligence agencies provide "specific evidence." Virus origin tracing is a serious and complex scientific issue that should be studied and explored by scientists and medical experts. Reliable evidence is necessary to draw conclusions. However, the US apparently believes that as long as it can confuse the public and rely on spreading a large amount of false information, they can condescendingly attack China without considering the scientific basis. In April 2022, former US President Obama openly stated in a speech at Stanford University that "you just have to flood a country's public square with enough raw sewage. You just have to raise enough questions, spread enough dirt, and plant enough conspiracy theorizing that citizens no longer know what to believe." 

This is the consistent cognition and practice of American hegemony, which means that wherever there is chaos, the US will profit from it. If there is no chaos, they will go to great lengths to create chaos. 

Second, the US shifts contradictions and evades responsibility. Shortly after the outbreak of the pandemic, the US began to blame China, maliciously calling the novel coronavirus the "China virus" or "Panda virus," attributing the epidemic to China. Some members of the US Congress even threatened to "seek compensation" from China. However, the US has yet to provide reasonable and convincing explanations for the suspicious Fort Detrick biolab, the University of North Carolina biolab, and military biobases around the world.

Research has already confirmed that the novel coronavirus was present in the US in December 2019, but the US has been evasive and tight-lipped about it. The pandemic reflects and exacerbates the wealth gap and racial conflicts in American society. The US government repeatedly spreads rumors and creates trouble in the COVID-19 origin tracing issue, intending to divert the anger of the grassroots people towards foreign countries in order to cover up its government's mistakes and evade accountability. The US Congress members, who claim to be its representatives, not only fail to supervise and criticize the executive authorities but also collude with them, jointly smearing and attacking China using the virus origin tracing issue.

Thirdly, the US fabricates charges and exerts pressure. The COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 explicitly requires US intelligence agencies to disclose a list of "suspicious" Chinese researchers. Its intentions are more sinister than the previous US attempts to hype up the COVID-19 origin tracing issue, and its objectives are even more sinister. In the process of combating opponents and maintaining hegemony, the US repeatedly uses its power to retaliate against individuals. The most typical example is the "Meng Wanzhou case". The US not only tried to destroy Huawei but also made efforts to trap its senior executives, manipulating Canada to unreasonably detain Meng for more than a thousand days. When the US maintains its hegemony, they will fabricate various lies and despicable excuses and use the state apparatus to threaten and persecute individuals, their affiliated companies, and international organizations. The US side will use the state apparatus to persecute individuals and institutions, creating greater chaos. This will also become a "new focal point" for the US to hype up the origin tracing issue, sustain its momentum and lay the groundwork for its subsequent actions on this issue.

Of course, the underlying logic of American hegemony embodied in the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 is not limited to the above three points, but these three points are enough to outline the basic thinking and cognitive patterns of the US in maintaining hegemony. Although the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 is "full of absurdities", as a rare "sample", it highly condenses the underlying logic of American hegemony and reflects the increasingly irrational and impetuous state of the US against the background of the decline of its hegemonic power. This deserves high vigilance from the international community.

The author is assistant research fellow at Department for Developing Countries Studies, China Institute of International Studies.

"Who is McCarthy?" The New York Times quoted an American on Friday as proving US grassroots are so disconnected from politics. Why? The answer is in the headline - "How Do Americans Feel About Politics? Disgust Isn't a Strong Enough Word."

The article said "griping about politics is a time-honored American pastime but lately the country's political mood has plunged to some of the worst levels on record," thanks to the recent government shutdown crisis, chaotic Congress and the removal of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Many American voters interviewed said "they viewed the whole episode as evidence of broad dysfunction in Washington, and blamed political leaders for being consumed by workplace drama at the expense of the people they are meant to serve."

It also quoted a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in July, which pointed out that only 16 percent of American adults said they trusted the federal government, close to the lowest levels in seven decades of polling. 

If "disgust" isn't a strong enough word, which word would be strong enough? A more accurate adjective is hard to find to describe Americans' state of mind. It seems to be a complex emotion composed of tiredness, anger and despair. 

When Americans look at their own system, it feels as if they are watching two patients in an ICU arguing over who should lead the country, and what's worse is that they have no other options, Lü Xiang, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times.

Since Joe Biden took office, political polarization and division in the US have not decreased, but intensified. The long-standing struggle between the Democratic and Republican parties for their own self-interest is nothing new. And now, the internal divisions within each party have become increasingly apparent, leading to a more complicated US political atmosphere.

US politicians have long caught impeachment fever. Former president Donald Trump's presidency has been an unusually busy season for impeachments. Efforts to impeach Joe Biden are also underway. McCarthy's impeachment, however, happened suddenly and unexpectedly. He was expelled from his role by a right-wing revolt in his own party over his compromise with Democrats to avert a government shutdown.

This shows that for some Republican hardliners, embracing a bipartisan deal is not tolerable, even if a deal could guarantee there would be no US government shutdown. The rules of the game are changing. Politics is no longer the art of compromise for the greater good in the US system. 

The two US political parties have long been divided from within. The Democratic Party, because of the potential threat they feel from Trump, still maintains unity and harmony on the fa?ade. The Republican Party, on the other hand, has not been so rational, as mirrored in the latest episode. Next, the House needs to elect a new speaker, but the process will turn out to be extremely difficult, Lü said. 

Having witnessed too many farces, the American people naturally develop fatigue toward the political infightings. And some start to realize the American democratic system is manipulated by a handful of elites with money, and common American people have no say in the politics, Xu Liang, an associate professor at the School of International Relations of Beijing International Studies University, told the Global Times.

The biggest problem in American politics lies with the elites. Political elites and the general public are from distinct planets — one from Mars and the other from Venus. Political elites rarely consider how to take care of their people, addressing people's concerns over livelihood, education and the economy. On the contrary, they focus on how to consolidate their political positions through creating opposition, confrontation and division. 

The New York Times writes that the Biden administration has made great efforts to combat climate change, among other things, "yet those accomplishments have not fully registered with voters." Why? Because each party tends to focus on their own traditional advantageous fields and policy positions, rather than the common interests of all Americans. Take climate change. Even if the Democratic Party yearns for a good score, the Republican Party has from time to time emphasized that climate change is a "hoax." It is difficult to guarantee whether the next administration will dismantle the achievement made by the current government. Ultimately, the US' own development of new energy technologies will be crippled and the response of the US and the world to climate change will be hampered. 

The two parties cannot even agree on the most basic issues, imagine how they can make any difference on major issues, Lü said. Lü also underlined when the Biden administration talks about economic data or boasts about its policies on some programs, they are running out of money, and borrowing money from the distant future to create some seemingly acceptable numbers. This is obscurantism, a way of deceiving people. But they cannot hide US political dysfunction forever. An economic crisis in the US will break out sooner or later, possibly in 2024, the expert warned. 

And what would the American people do? Apart from feeling tired, disappointed and hopeless, the public could choose to avoid talking about politics, pretend they are disconnected from politics, or one day express their disgust by voting out the current leaders. Unfortunately, even by then, there is still no guarantee that the next leaders will genuinely take their interests into careful consideration. 

Forget about "of the people, by the people, for the people." The current US system is one where the government is detached from the people. It presents to observers from other countries a superpower that continues to emit a decaying odor, corroding its own development vitality, disappointing its people, and causing astonishment and unease in the international community. How could such a system possibly be sustainable? 

China will study the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in avoiding space debris, a significant effort to use orbital resources more effectively and strengthen the control of super-large scale constellations, ensuring the safety of spacecraft in orbit and creating a new technology of rapid intelligent calculation capability for preventing large-scale space debris. 

The project on "intelligent modeling of the complex evolving principle of complex environments for space debris and autonomous monitoring" was launched by the State Key Laboratory of Astronautic Dynamics (ADL), affiliated with the Xi'an Satellite Control Center in Northwest China's Shaanxi Province. 

It was approved by the Ministry of Science and Technology as a "New Generation of Artificial Intelligence 2022 Major Program" in Science and Technology Innovation 2030, the Global Times learned from the satellite control center on Wednesday. 

Space debris generated by human activities has become a major obstacle and threat to space exploration. This situation urgently calls for joint efforts by the international community. 

According to researchers, there have been more than 640 events including explosions, disintegrations and collisions resulting in serious consequences during the history of astronautics.

There are more than 30,000 pieces of debris of more than 10 centimeters in space, more than 1 million with sizes ranging from 1-10 centimeters, and hundreds of millions that are just over 1 millimeter in size. 

Space debris research and monitoring face multiple challenges, including an extremely large number of pieces of passing debris at any one time. Difficulties in terms of fast computation and matching make it difficult to predict their speed, direction and fragmentation.

ADL has been engaged in researching space collision avoidance and space debris mitigation. Its new project aims to integrate AI model algorithms and domain knowledge.

"We will take the implementation of the project as an opportunity to actively align national strategic needs and cooperate with domestic competitive units to provide strong technical support for strengthening the nation's space traffic management and contributing to China's building of a space power," Li Hengnian, director of ADL, told the Global Times on Wednesday. 

"We will study the AI paradigm of online monitoring of space debris, the evolution of debris environment and space situational awareness," Jiang Yu, chief scientist of the project from ADL, told the Global Times on Wednesday. 

A fire broke out at a local inn in Liping county, Southwest China's Guizhou Province, on Friday, killing nine people and injuring two others. The injured were sent to the hospital immediately, and an investigation into the cause of the fire is underway, Liping emergency management bureau said on Friday.

The fire broke out at 1:02 am Friday and was put out around 1:35 am. Preliminary investigation found that the building is a brick-concrete structure, covering an area of about 240 square meters, according to the local emergency management bureau.

The inn is close to a local tourist attraction, with the room prices ranging from around 270 yuan ($37.09) to 400 yuan each room, according to media reports. Currently, it's not available for booking.

A tourist in another hotel said she was sleeping in the hotel when the power suddenly went out. She went to the balcony and saw flames from another inn a few hundred meters away. Fire trucks and ambulances passed through the hotel she lived in, and the crowd was noisy, the tourist said, according to Sichuan-based media The Cover. After the fire broke out, there was power outage in some inns in the scenic area, said the report.

Several local firefight authorities on Friday issued the news to remind tourists to be cautious, as homestay has become popular during recent years.

Zhaoxing Dong village, known as the "first village of Dong township," has over 1,000 households and nearly 6,000 residents. And it's also well-known for its five beautiful drum towers.

BALTIMORE — When it comes to swimming sperm, it’s not every man for himself. Instead, sperm form groups that swim together, a bit like schools of fish or flocks of birds, physicists have observed.

Understanding the physics underlying such behavior in animals is difficult because their actions arise in part from cognitive processes — birds, for instance, can see what their neighbors are doing and adjust their flight path accordingly. But with sperm, group swimming emerges from the physics of the medium in which they swim, Chih-Kuan Tung of North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro said in a news conference March 16 at a meeting of the American Physical Society. That makes sperm a simpler system for studying the physics behind a form of coordinated biological action. “They don’t think,” Tung said. “So whatever interaction is happening, we can quantitatively describe it.”

Sperm don’t form groups in ordinary water, Tung said, but they do in viscoelastic fluids such as the mucus of mammalian reproductive tracts. A viscoelastic fluid combines resistance to flow with the ability to restore its previous state when disturbed. Tung and colleagues created such elasticity by adding a polymer to the fluid used for testing the swimming ability of bulls’ sperm. Those experiments showed that it’s the elasticity, not the viscosity, that encourages collective swimming.

Further work will be needed, Tung said, to determine whether such group swimming confers an advantage to sperm seeking an egg. In any event, the new understanding of sperm dynamics could lead to improved methods for in vitro fertilization procedures, he said.

Neither a giant asteroid nor a gradual die out can take full blame for dinosaurs’ demise.

Rather, the culprit may be both, two new studies suggest.

Tens of millions of years before the asteroid delivered its killer blow some 66 million years ago, the number of dinosaur species had already begun to drop, researchers report online April 18 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But not all dino groups were in decline, including some maniraptoran dinosaurs, a different group of researchers suggests online April 21 in Current Biology.
At first glance, the two studies seem to conflict, but “they can coexist,” says paleontologist Michael Benton, who coauthored the PNAS paper. Both studies add to what has become an increasingly intricate picture of dinosaurs’ final days.

“Things are a wee bit more complicated than we used to think,” says Benton, of the University of Bristol in England.

In the 1960s and ‘70s, scientists generally believed that dinosaurs petered out after a long, gradual decline. That view took a U-turn in 1980, when researchers proposed that, instead, an asteroid impact might have suddenly triggered the extinction. “The flip-flop was quite extreme,” Benton says of the changed thinking. “Dinosaurs went from long-term decline to instant death.”

What actually happened, he says, is probably more nuanced. Benton and colleagues analyzed the number of dinosaur species emerging and going extinct over a huge timescale: roughly 175 million years. Around 40 million to 50 million years before the mass extinction, dinosaurs started losing species faster than they were gaining new ones, the researchers found. This loss in diversity could have made it harder for dinosaurs to bounce back from the asteroid’s catastrophic impact.

“This doesn’t in any way attack the importance of the impact,” Benton says. But across the board, he says, dinosaur species numbers were dwindling. At least two groups, however, seemed to buck the trend. Hadrosaurs (duck-billed dinosaurs) and ceratopsids (the group that includes Triceratops) were booming up until the end, the team found.
According to the Current Biology analysis, toothed maniraptorans (small birdlike relatives of velociraptors) were thriving, too. A detailed examination of more than 3,000 of these dinosaurs’ teeth suggests that these dinos’ ecosystem was pretty stable millions of years before the extinction, says study coauthor Derek Larson, a paleontologist at the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum in Alberta and the University of Toronto.

Larson and colleagues looked for variations in the teeth’s dimensions, and the size of tooth serrations. Then they determined how much that variation changed over time. Big changes could be a hint that these dinos were on the decline, Larson says. But instead, “things basically stayed the same through the last 18 million years of the Cretaceous,” he says.

Toothed maniraptorans “seemed to be doing just fine right up until the extinction,” says University of Oxford paleobiologist Roger Benson, who was not involved in either study.

Larson’s team wondered why the toothed, meat-eating maniraptorans went extinct after the impact while their relatives — the beaked ancestors of modern birds — didn’t. The answer could be dietary, the researchers propose. They analyzed the diets of modern birds to try and figure out what an ancestral bird might have eaten. It probably relied on seeds, Larson says, a hardy food source that could have lasted for decades.

Seeds might have sustained ancient birds through a “nuclear winter,” the debris-darkened skies that could have blotted out the sun following an asteroid impact. When hoards of plants and animal species died out, and dinosaurs ran out of food, he says, “the only resource that would have been reliable and available would have been seeds.”

Not all cosmic mysteries lie light-years away. Some secrets are being unearthed on our nearest neighbor, about a quarter of a million miles from home.

For almost seven years, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been keeping a close eye on the moon. During its tenure, the spacecraft has cataloged craters, pinpointed subsurface deposits of water ice and found evidence of recent volcanic activity. It has even witnessed crashes by three other spacecraft. (One, LCROSS, launched a plume of ejecta from the south pole that scientists searched for water vapor.)
“No other mission has orbited the moon for as long as LRO has,” says Noah Petro, a geologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Constant lunar vigilance has “really pushed our understanding of how the moon changes today, over the last billion years and what happened early on.” A July 15 special issue of Icarus celebrates the mission’s many discoveries, which fill out not only the moon’s story, but also reveal how Earth and other rocky planets have been pummeled by space debris over the last 4 billion or so years.

When LRO launched on June 18, 2009, its goals were more modest. The spacecraft was sent to scout landing sites for future astronaut expeditions, hunt for resources such as water and better understand the radiation hazards that human crews would face. Since completing its original one-year assignment, the mission has been extended several times. LRO plans to stay busy through September, and the team has asked NASA for two more years.
Water ice turned up in some unexpected places. Other spacecraft had previously seen hints of water, but none could map precisely where it was. Researchers suspected that water lay within permanently shadowed craters at the poles, and LRO did find evidence of ice there. But LRO also found that not all shady spots harbor water, and not all water is found in the shadows — some appears to hide under soil that sits in direct sunlight.

“That was bit of a surprise,” says LRO project scientist John Keller, also at Goddard. Looking at temperature alone, it seems, isn’t enough for understanding the history of water on the moon. In the polar shadows, where temperatures hover around –250° Celsius, water ice can endure for billions of years. But elsewhere, water may have been trapped more recently and protected by the terrain. “There’s an interplay with time, temperature and topography underlying this water story,” says Keller.
How the various water deposits are implanted and shuffled about is one enduring puzzle. How small subterraneous pockets stayed warm for so long after the moon formed is another. Lava oozed on the surface in the last 100 million years, judging by smooth, dark terrains that are sparsely cratered. “This flies in the face with what was known about the moon,” Petro says. “We thought lunar volcanism ended about a billion years ago.”
Some changes are much more recent. In 2013, Earth-based telescopes detected a flash of light from the moon. LRO checked it out and found a new crater 18 meters across. “What was surprising was how far the ejecta went,” Keller says. Debris had been tossed 35 kilometers — much farther than expected from a space rock estimated to be only about a meter wide.

Understanding what’s currently hitting the moon and the traces those objects leave is crucial to interpreting the history of impacts plastered across the lunar surface; similar impacts also affected Earth but most have been erased by weather and geologic forces. “The moon is our way of studying the history of the Earth since the creation of the Earth-moon system,” Petro says.

One of the seven instruments that LRO carries is a laser altimeter, a beam of light that scans and maps the surface in exquisite detail. “That’s been a game changer,” says Simone Marchi, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. “We can use the topography data to find old degraded craters that otherwise would not be easily detected in imagery.”

Detailed maps reveal craters on top of other craters, laying out a rough sequence of when things hit the moon. And astronauts have brought back samples from some of these terrains, allowing researchers to use radiogenic dating to figure out when craters formed. That in turn supplies a record of what was smacking into other planets and asteroids. “We have a deep understanding of collisions going back to the beginning of the solar system,” says Marchi. “That can only be done with the moon.”

The females of Stylops ovinae, a parasitic insect species that lives in mining bees, have pretty dull lives. While the males, tiny winged insects, get to flit about — for a few hours, at least, before they die — the females are literally stuck at home, wedged inside a mining bee for their entire lives with only a bit of their cephalothorax (neck) exposed. And worse, once a female’s offspring hatch, they will eat her alive. Oh, and they’ve got no wings, legs, antennae, eyes, mouthparts or genitalia.

How do those offspring come about if the females don’t have genitals? That’s where this female insect’s life gets even more miserable: To get those cannibalistic kids, she has to first undergo traumatic insemination — a mating in which the male pierces her body with his penis.

Mining bees are common in Germany, and sometimes the bees emerge weeks earlier in the spring than expected; these bees have been infected with parasites. Despite how prevalent the bees and their parasites are, figuring out how the parasites reproduce was no easy task. These insects are tiny and their reproductive systems even tinier. The male parasite’s penis, for instance, is only 0.4 millimeters long.

Scientists have bandied about hypotheses of how S. ovinae might reproduce. With no female genitalia and males once thought to be rare, one idea was that the insects employed parthenogenesis to create more insects. Other researchers posited that the bee parasites did have sex but the males used the same brood canal through which offspring emerged to inseminate the female.

Hans Pohl of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany decided to take a closer look. They brought mining bees into the lab, imaged the bee parasites with a scanning electron microscope, recorded four parasite mating events and did mating experiments to see how often and how long the insects mated. Their results appear April 29 in Scientific Reports.

A male bee parasite, they found, will attach himself to the bee then stick his penis into the female’s body through her neck. He then hangs on for an average of 8 minutes, and as many as 34 minutes, before taking off. Only a few seconds are actually needed to transfer his sperm, so copulating for so long, the researchers say, could be a way to reduce sperm competition with other males.

By bypassing a female’s reproductive tract, traumatic insemination itself is also a way for males to better ensure that their sperm is the stuff that a female uses to make offspring. And the female parasites may have evolved a way to not be too harmed by the act — they have a little pocket of tissue in the neck area in which the male deposits his sperm, and this may provide a little protection from the trauma of multiple males stabbing her in the neck.

Schrödinger’s cat can’t seem to catch a break. The unfortunate imaginary feline is famous for being alive and dead at the same time, as long as it remains hidden inside a box. Scientists have now gone one step further, splitting one living-dead cat between two boxes.

Animal lovers can relax — there are no actual cats involved. Instead, physicists used microwaves to mimic the cat’s weird quantum behavior. The new advance, reported May 26 in Science, brings scientists a step closer to building quantum computers out of such systems.
Schrödinger’s cat is the hapless participant in a hypothetical experiment dreamt up by physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. He imagined a cat in a closed box with a lethal poison that will be released if a sample of radioactive material decays. After any given amount of time passes, quantum math can provide only the odds that the material has decayed and released the poison. So from the quantum perspective, the cat is in a state of superposition — both dead and alive. It remains in limbo until the box is opened, and out comes a purring kitty or a lifeless corpse (SN: 11/20/10, p. 15).

In a real laboratory version of the experiment, microwaves inside a superconducting aluminum cavity take the place of the cat. Inside the specially designed cavity, the microwaves’ electric fields can be pointing in two opposing directions at the same time — just as Schrödinger’s cat can be simultaneously alive and dead. These states are known as “cat states.” Now, physicists have created such cat states in two linked cavities, thereby splitting the cat into two “boxes” at once.

Though the idea of one cat in two boxes is “kind of whimsical,” says Chen Wang of Yale University, a coauthor of the paper, it’s not that far off from the real-world situation. The cat state “is shared in two boxes because it’s a global quantum state.” In other words, the cat is not only in one box or the other, but stretches out to occupy both.

Because the states of the two boxes are linked — or in quantum parlance, entangled — if the cat turns out to be alive in one box, it’s also alive in the other (SN: 11/20/10, p. 22). Wang compares it to a cat with two symptoms of life: an open eye in the first box and a heartbeat in the second box. Measurements from the two boxes will always agree on the cat’s status. For microwaves, this means the electric field will always be in sync in both cavities. The scientists measured the cat states produced and found a fidelity of 81 percent — a measure of how close the state was to the ideal cat state. This fidelity is comparable to that achieved in similarly complex systems, the researchers say.

The result is a step toward quantum computing with such devices. The two cavities could serve the purpose of two quantum bits, or qubits. One stumbling block for quantum computers is that errors inevitably slip in to calculations due to interactions with the outside environment that muck up the qubits’ quantum properties. The cat states are more resistant to errors than other types of qubits, the researchers say, so the system could eventually lead to more fault-tolerant quantum computers.
“I think they’ve made some really great advances,” says Gerhard Kirchmair of the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Innsbruck. “They’ve come up with a very nice architecture to realize quantum computation.”

The demonstration of entanglement in the two-cavity system is very important, says Sergey Polyakov of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md. “The next step would be to demonstrate that this approach is actually scalable” by adding more cavities to the mix to build a bigger quantum computer.

A sloppy light system may be just what a squid needs to hide from predators. Bioluminescent cells in some glass squid work in a surprisingly inefficient way — leaking a lot of light rather than fully channeling it, a new study suggests.

Glass squid have largely transparent bodies, helpful for inconspicuous swimming in deep open water. Marine predators often scan the waters above them for the telltale silhouettes of prey blocking sunlight, but there’s little to betray a glass squid — except for a few notable features such as the shadow-making eyes on its head.
Underneath those eyes, squid in the genus Galiteuthis grow silvery patches of cells that act as undersurface bioluminescence, a camouflage technique that has evolved in various marine creatures, making their shadows less conspicuous to hunters below.

Biophysicist Alison Sweeney of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia had hypothesized that the cells, called photophores, act like microscopic cables that channel the bioluminescent glow of the squid down or out in a specific direction. The skinny, cablelike cells are surrounded by thin, protein-dense layers that create a silver tube that reminds Sweeney of Saran Wrap. But in the first detailed look at these structures, Sweeney and Pennsylvania colleague Amanda Holt found that the channels performed poorly, letting most of the light leak away sideways. That efficiency, it turns out, could be useful, Sweeney and Holt report June 8 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
“We always expect that the most ‘perfect’ or efficient mechanism will be the pinnacle of evolution, but this study shows that there are many ways to solve challenges imposed by the environment,” says marine biologist Steven Haddock of Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California.

Inefficiency might sound like an improbable scenario for success. But, says visual ecologist Justin Marshall of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, “I believe it.”

Other researchers had discussed the idea that certain sea creatures show a great deal of subtlety in disguising their silhouettes, but Sweeney knew of no other study trying to figure out how supposed cables work.
It turns out that the squid structures were “really bad at being fiber-optic cables,” Sweeney says. The cells are about 50 micrometers long, longish for a cell but short for a cable. And the cells couldn’t guide light even over that short distance without losing much of it. Looking at the cross sections of the photophores under a microscope showed big, uneven gaps in the layers. When she first recognized this, she expected to write “a boring paper that’s, ‘Gee, squid cells kind of sort of guide light, but not really.’”

Then came the “of course” moment for Sweeney and her puzzling measurements. “The lesson that keeps coming back to us,” she says, “is that these things are meaningless until you consider the habitat.” After calculating the light environment where wild squid swim, the researchers realized that the overall effect of the leaking tubes created a plausible approximation for the twilightlike haze in which the squid live. A glowing blur might actually make the eyes less conspicuous to predator approaching from a variety of angles.

Irregularities in the sheathing and shapes of the leaky cables might even make the living cables more remarkable, Sweeney speculates. Dividing them into five rough types, the researchers investigated the kinds of light effects each produced and matched those effects with ocean conditions at two locations off Hawaii. If squid can pick which cable doodads to use and when, the animals could improve the match between their under-eye shine and conditions in the ocean.

Other squid with opaque skin flicker, darken and quick-change their tiny color-making structures, she points out. So, the suggestion that eye-glow structures might change, too, “is not crazy,” Sweeney says.