Watch: Last Week in Science (April 2~8, 2018)

A Galaxy teeming with black holes

The centre of the Milky Way is filled with caramel and nougat. The centre of the actual Milky Way galaxy is filled with tens of thousands of black holes, according to a new study published in the journal Nature. Till now, we had found only around 60, including Sagittarius A, the Supermassive Black Hole at the centre of our galaxy. For more than two decades, astronomers had been looking for the strong burst of X-rays that are emitted when a black hole merges with a star. But this occurs only once in 100 to 1,000 years. So instead, they began looking for, and have found, faint but consistent post-initial burst x-rays from 12 black hole binaries around Sagittarius A. This is going to help majorly in discovering secrets about the universe, including what makes the Milky Way so darn tasty.

A four-eyed extinct reptile

Not that reptiles in the past may have been the nerdy type, but researchers suggest that you wouldn’t have been wrong to call them “four-eyes”. Turns out, 49 millions years ago, there walked a monitor lizard species that had four eyes, called Saniwa ensidens. A CT scan of bones unearthed in 1871 showed that the lizard had two holes in the head that would have held eyelike structures called the pineal and parapineal organs, that were light-sensitive. The only living four-eyed species is the jawless lamprey, which actually sucks, unlike any nerdy reptile.

How Life on earth may have begun

4 billion years ago, the Earth had no life, no oxygen and was constantly bombarded by space rocks and volcanic emissions. Scientists have long wondered how life ever began in such a harsh environment. Now, planetary researchers have reworked the question as “What was abundant enough in that era to have helped spark life?” The answer: Sulfidic Anions. MIT researchers found that volcanoes would have spat out huge amounts of sulfur dioxide into the air, which settled and dissolved in shallow lakes and rivers, breaking down into sulfites and biosulfites, which may catalyse formation of RNA, the building block of life. They clarify that this does not mean you should drink sulfur dioxide as a pick-me-up.