A few scattered articles this month even as the war in Ukraine rages and the world is embroiled in a food crisis. These really are extraordinarily tough times.

• By far the most exciting announcement this month is the release of the very first image of Sagittarius A*, the colossal black hole at the center of the Milk Way galaxy. This isn’t a photograph of course but an image assembled from data collected by a set of 8 radio telescopes. Similarly we can’t see the black hole directly but we can perceive some of the matter that accretes around it so it looks like a bright, glowing doughnut. I’m not how much new scientific insight can be learned from this project but I’m suppose it’s enough of an achievement that it earns the public’s attention and fosters greater interest in astronomy.
• Another really import finding also concerns space by way of the meteorites that fall on Earth. It’s an announcement that all five of the nucleobases that constitute DNA have now been found in meteorites. Some of the bases have been detected as far back as the 1960s but it is only recently with the refinement of new techniques to increase the sensitivity of detection methods that all of the bases have been found. It’s not definitive proof of anything but it helps lend credence to the old theory that life on Earth was originally seeded from meteorites.
• Next we have an intriguing and highly speculative paper on how some insect colonies may possess cultural transmission of knowledge and engage in cognition on a social level. It’s a review of other studies rather than new research and it calls attention to findings such as how wasps able to recognize one another’s faces and memorize information about each other, how bumblebees can observe others use techniques and learn them and mate preferences of female fruit flies seem to be culturally transmitted over generations. The purpose is to underline how much we still don’t know about how cognition works in such seemingly simple animals and that far from being hardwired by evolution, so much of their behavior may be learned and transmitted from one generation to the next.
• Finally a really scary article about the self-destructive behavior of octopus mothers as their eggs get close to hatching. The new finding is really about working out the specific biochemical processes that occur in these octopuses, beginning from their optic glands, to prompt the behavior. But the results that have long been known about is that they might beat themselves against rocks, tear at themselves or even eat themselves when the time of hatching draws near. It’s still exactly clear why this occurs but the best guess is that octopuses are cannibals so this kind of programmed suicide protects babies from being eaten by their own mothers once they are hatched.