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Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that yucked it up, went interstellar, controlled the weather, and sang our praises.First, the sounds of ape laughter have been gracing our planet for 15 million years. Then: a visit from a cosmic elder, a meteorological martial art, and bops by blowhards. 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. A history of hominids in hystericsDe Gregorio, Chiara et al. “Rhythm and timing in laughter reveal that human vocal plasticity falls on a hominid continuum.” Communications Biology.You’ve heard about getting the last laugh, but who got the first one? Scientists have now determined that laughter, a behavior common to all great apes, may have initially appeared in chortling primate ancestors that lived 15 million years ago, according to a new study that analyzes the evolutionary roots of getting the giggles.In addition to being the best medicine, laughter plays an outsized role in human cultures and interpersonal relationships. The fact that all other great apes, from bonobos to gorillas, also enjoy a good chuckle suggests that this form of vocal expression has broad benefits and potentially deep evolutionary origins.To probe the history of hilarity, scientists analyzed recordings of laughter from four orangutans, two gorillas, three bonobos, four chimpanzees, and four human children during bouts of playtime, roughhousing, and tickling. The results revealed that the isochronous nature of laughter—meaning clear sound intervals like “ha ha ha”—was likely present in the last common ancestor of the Hominid family, which contains all great apes including extinct relatives such as Neanderthals.“While all major branches of the Hominid family have evolved distinct call repertoires shaped by their species-specific socio-ecologies, one vocalization has been conserved across species and age-sex classes: laughter,” said researchers led by Chiara De Gregorio of the University of Warwick.The team’s analysis reveals that “great apes have been laughing in a recognizable way to modern humans for at least 15 million years” and that apes that are more closely related to humans have more complex and variable laughs similar to our own diversity of guffaws, cackles, and snorts.To sum up: lol…lmao.  In other news…A long time ago in a star system far, far away…Cordiner, Martin et al. “Isotopic Evidence for a Cold and Distant Origin of 3I/ATLAS.” Nature.The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS caused a sensation last summer when it was first discovered streaking through the solar system, partly because it revived the debate over whether these objects from other star systems could be alien handiwork.While the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that 3I/ATLAS is not an extraterrestrial spaceship, it is nonetheless unlike any comet seen in human history. Scientists have revealed that the comet is by far the oldest object ever detected in the solar system, having “accreted as long ago as 12 billion years, following a period of intense, early star formation,” according to researchers led by researchers led by Martin Cordiner of the Catholic University of America.  In other words, 3I/ATLAS is nearly three times older than the solar system, formed when the observable universe was only a third of its current size. The age is based on the comet’s ratio of deuterium to hydrogen (D/H), which was measured by the James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful observatory ever launched. JWST revealed a “surprisingly high” ratio of deuterium enrichment, about 30 times the level of solar system bodies, with the exception of Venus. “3I/ATLAS thus represents a preserved fragment of an ancient planetary system,” concluded the team. So long to this primordial pilgrim, and may it live to be 13 billion. I have a black belt in hurricane deflectionHuang, Qin et al. “Weather Jiu-Jitsu: Prospects for atmospheric nudging to defuse the impact of catastrophic weather extremes.” PLOS Water.Finally, we have an answer to the age-old question: Can we use martial arts to control the weather? In a new study, scientists propose the concept of “weather jiu-jitsu,” which uses gentle atmospheric “nudges” to redirect potentially catastrophic weather events, such as hurricanes, heat waves, or droughts.“Imagine harnessing the power of nature to help steer hurricanes away from land, redirect atmospheric rivers to spread their rain safely and evenly, or defuse extreme weather patterns like heatwaves, freezes, or prolonged droughts before they take hold,” said researchers led by Qin Huang of Arizona State University. “It’s a vision where we partner with Earth’s own forces to create resilience, rather than reacting to disasters.”Conceptual illustration of weather jiu-jitsu. Image: Qin Huang, Moyan Liu, Upmanu Lall, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)Weather jiu-jitsu involves seeding clouds with particles to influence weather outcomes, but it differs from existing methods by opting for light touches in advance of a developing weather event, as opposed to the heavier lift of weakening an event that is already ongoing.The team’s models suggest this method could have nudged Hurricane Sandy well away from New York City in 2021, warmed Texas by about 18 degrees Fahrenheit during its deadly 2021 freeze, and reduced the rainfall that caused widespread flooding in California from 2022 to 2023 by about 5 percent. That said, the study emphasized that the technique is only a proof-of-concept and it will take far more research to determine if it would be useful in the real world. In the meantime, let’s try some other martial arts-inspired approaches and figure out how to crane-kick a tornado or karate-chop a heat dome.I bet you think this song is about MEGolubickis, Marius et al. “Are societies becoming more self-centric? Evidence from five decades of popular music spanning three continents.” PLOS One.While the Song of Summer 2026 has yet to be determined, odds are that it will be singularly self-absorbed. That’s the hook of a study that discovered popular music has shown “a significant increase in self-focused language over time in individualistic societies” such as the United States or Germany, while no comparable trend was observed in more collectivistic societies such as Japan or Hong Kong.Mean use of first-person singular pronouns as a function of Year and Country/Region. Image: Golubickis et al., 2026, PLOS One, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)Scientists led by Marius Golubickis of United Arab Emirates University analyzed the lyrics of top 10 hits from 1970 to 2019 by quantifying the use of the plural pronouns like “we” and “us” compared with the first-person singular pronouns like “I” and “me” (check out the full list here). The results revealed that while “Western societies exhibited a clear increase in self-focused language over time, East Asian societies showed relative stability.”This all checks out with my go-to playlist for narcissists, featuring “I Me Mine” by the Beatles, “Me Myself and I” by De La Soul, and, of course, “ME!” by Taylor Swift.Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Plants, insects, and larger animals, like the forest’s white-faced capuchin monkeys, are well adapted to these changes. But in 2015, during an abnormally severe drought influenced by the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), Perry, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, observed behaviors that once seemed impossible.Under normal conditions "The [capuchin] mothers are quite devoted," she explained. "Now, I was seeing babies crying on the ground piteously. And the mothers just looking down like 'Too much trouble' and walking off, abandoning their infants.""Even capuchins have their limits," Perry said. "And we need to start paying attention because all the weather predictions are saying that we're going to get more unpredictability and more climate extremes."Monkeying aroundOdd Jacobson, a behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, was a student at Lomas Barbudal in 2016, a year after this severe drought. His focus was on understanding how the study site's 12 different capuchin groups were moving through the forest. But now he's set out to investigate how else climate extremes may affect the behaviors and social structures of these monkeys.In a paper published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, Jacobson and his coauthors — including Perry — analyzed how climate variability correlated to the 33 years of geolocation data they had on the capuchins.Their first step was understanding how the size of each group was affecting the relationships between monkeys within the same group. To do this, they observed variables such as daily fruit intake, the size of the group's home range, and the distance the group traveled each day to find food.Finally, to understand how monkey groups interacted, they used a "hierarchical social relations model," which allowed the scientists to predict how two different monkey groups would move through the forest and where their territories would overlap.The team repeated this process, two monkey groups at a time, until they analyzed the interactions between all 12 monkey groups at Lomas Barbudal. Then, they added the climate-over-time layer to predict how the home range overlap and encounter rates (meaning moments where capuchins from two different groups engaged, often violently) would change with the seasons.Strength (and weakness) in numbersGenerally, large monkey groups have advantages and disadvantages in the forest. One key advantage is the ability to control resource-rich areas, such as land with fruiting trees known as food patches. A key disadvantage is increased intragroup competition for food, meaning the daily fruit intake of individual monkeys was lower.The researchers found that during climatic extremes, such as extremely wet or dry seasons, this intragroup competition intensifies, making the group less efficient at foraging overall. Behavior between groups changed with the climate as well. For example, in a typical dry season, large groups often overpower smaller ones to take over areas with more available fruit, such as along rivers.But the new research found that this long-understood idea doesn't always hold true: During extreme climate events, like a dry season made even drier by the effects of El Niño, capuchins didn't try to hoard the higher-quality areas."We don't really know exactly why," Jacobson said. "Maybe there's not as much heterogeneity in the landscape during these resource poor times, and so there's not much that larger groups can monopolize."Climate extremes, the research suggests, may be upsetting the balance that determines the optimal size of monkey groups. And, as a warming atmosphere makes climate extremes like El Niño or La Niña more intense, it's growing increasingly important to understand how these changes will affect animal societies.Filippo Aureli, an ethologist at the Universidad Veracruzana, in Mexico, was not involved with this study, but he has studied the effects of extreme weather events on spider monkeys in Mexico. He also registered the infant mortality rates of capuchin and spider monkeys in the Costa Rican dry tropical forest during that 2015 drought. Capuchin populations experienced high infant mortality during the extreme event, while spider monkey populations tended to stop reproducing.Related storiesCapuchins have started abducting newborn howler monkeys in bizarre, deadly fadAdorable monkeys caught commiting grisly act of cannibalismLab monkeys on the loose in Mississippi don't have herpes, university says. But are they dangerous?"With climate change, [climate extremes] are going to be more frequent and intense," Aureli said. "And we don't know what's going to happen. For this period [so far], they've held on very well, the spider monkeys, but we don't know for how much longer."Perry agreed, noting "the importance of having a baseline when you're trying to study rare events like El Niño droughts.""We know what normal is," she explained. "If you just try to drop in right now in all the chaos that we're starting to feel around the planet, then you really can't study it."This article was originally published on Eos.org. Read the original article.