Growing up, I had an uncle who was a scientist. A physicist, to be precise. He did some kind of mysterious work involving biofuel, long before it was a buzzword, and his home held all manner of enigmas: a telescope, an analemma, an explanation for why popcorn popped. Long before there was Google, there was my uncle. “The deeper you get into science,” he said, “the deeper you get into philosophy.”

To this day, when the world seems inexplicable or bewildering, I seek refuge in science. Not because there is an explanation for everything – the predictability of life lies, after all, largely in its chaos – but because there’s a certain poetry in it that I find soothing. When some South Africans are having to travel several kilometres to find a toilet with water while others are using thousands of litres of water per day; when it feels as though the world has lost its rhythm, I feel comforted knowing that somewhere, nature is still running its course.

This is a double-edged sword, of course, because reading news of the natural world can go either way: either you unearth an incredible new discovery or you find out we’re all about to die. This week’s updates held a bit of both, although I didn’t really mind; to be honest, I’d prefer being whacked by a giant asteroid to being slowly destroyed by idiotic/ corrupt/ unfathomable human leadership.

Nonetheless, nature has held its disconcerting moments lately. There’s the endangered European hamster, which has taken up cannibalism as a result of not having access to enough nutrients any more (violence over increasingly scarce resources being a frightening human parallel). Invasive farming practices, reports Sky News, have resulted in these previously grain-eating rodents feasting on their own babies. Further afield, a New Brunswick forest has been frozen whole.

Then there’s this rather nightmarish feature on the lifestyle and habits of the crypt-keeper wasp, which is not news so much as it rivals the most depraved fiction. This little monster isn’t strong enough to burrow its own way out of the trees in which its larvae are hatched, so instead it manipulates its prey to do the dirty work before it eats it. Once the prey has served its purpose and chewed a hole big enough for the wasp to escape through, it eats its way through the unfortunate victim to get out. Head and all.

Metaphorically speaking, I can think of a few humans like that.

Then there are the occasional, surreal consequences of mismanaged relationships between human and beast: a cow lands in a swimming pool; a moose falls into an Idaho family’s basement; a daring red panda and a bobcat go on the run.

Something else that threw me a bit: there is, it turns out, life after death, though not the kind that involves a cloud and a harp. New research has found that after one is declared dead, life continues. In some cases, gene expression (where information stored in one’s DNA converts to “instructions” for building particular molecules) can even increase after death, particularly in stem cells. Death, argues researcher Peter Noble, is a process rather than an event (tell that to the victims of the crypt-keeper wasp). Seriously, though: it seems to align with this research on the “fourth phase of life” or “death spiral”. Biologists have traditionally separated life into three stages – development, ageing and late life – but in the study of fruit flies have identified a fourth stage, what researcher Laurence Mueller calls “genetically programmed death”. Research on Mediterranean fruit flies found that nearly 100% of these poor buggers began lying down in preparation about 16 days prior to death, which in the life of a fruit fly is a hell of a long time; by my calculations I should start lying down round about now.

These news bites are like candies; small, quick-fix reminders that humans aren’t alone in the madness, that a little chaos is normal, or that sometimes, nature still gets its revenge. But venture a little further afield and the mindboggling mystery begins; the moments that put our own place – and our own foolishness – in perspective. Apparently we humans, as simple as we are, aren’t necessarily our own worst enemy. A little more convincingly than these fellows, Nottingham Trent University astronomer Daniel Brown writes, “If you ask yourself what the biggest threat to human existence is you’d probably think of nuclear war, global warming or a large-scale pandemic disease. But assuming we can overcome such challenges, are we really safe?” Cheery chap, Brown.

Turns out there are a myriad ways we could meet a sticky end: a high-energy solar flare; asteroid impact; the expanding sun; a local gamma ray burst, nearby supernovas or moving stars. “The end of humanity on Earth is a given,” he explains helpfully. “But this is not something to make us crawl under a table. It is something that we cannot change, similar to our lives having a definite start and end. This is what defines us.” As it happens, a number of extremely powerful gamma rays have made the headlines recently, but they are mercifully some distance away. Monster black holes – as LiveScience.com describes them – have been spotted shooting jets of gamma-ray radiation right at Earth, and they’ve been located further away than ever before. They date back, if you can wrap your head around this (I struggle), to when the universe was nearly one-tenth of its current age.

“The light we observed from these five objects left when the universe was just somewhere between 1.9- to 1.4-billion years old,” explains NASA astronomer Roopesh Ojha, adding that “you arrive at the conclusion that they’re all home to really, really massive black holes. Two of them are so big that their black holes may be well over 1-billion solar masses”. To put it in perspective, the supermassive black hole within our galaxy is about four- to five-million times the mass of our sun, or about one-third the size of Donald Trump’s ego.

That’s a pretty powerful vacuum cleaner. And just to make you feel a little smaller, Ojha believes that for every one supermassive object spotted in space, there are around 600 we don’t see.

A couple of cosmic conundrums are being solved here on Earth, too. The IceCube experiment is progressing well, giving scientists from the American Physical Society (APS) new insights into neutrinos –
“phantom” particles that travel down to Earth from the sun, but largely unimpeded, hardly interacting with the matter they pass through at all. Researchers suspect they have found symmetries that may indicate previously unknown physical principles, in this case potentially the nature of dark matter, which some researchers believe may be a new type of neutrino particle.

The continued adaptability of the natural world – and the belief that it is to such a large extent still undiscovered human intervention, a blip on the horizon – makes me feel marginally better about the brutality of human beings; and also a great deal calmer about its significance. According to recent research, we can make ourselves more agreeable, less anxious, less aggressive, less neurotic, by training the brain to change its shape; and a key way to do this is through mindful behaviour, spending more time in nature, or less time plugged into our devices. Are we really getting smarter, then? On balance, it seems not. But perhaps if we tune into the natural world a little more, we will.

So for as long as the world keeps turning, and the greatest human minds are devoted to explaining how and why, I reckon we are heading – slowly – towards greater understanding. I don’t know about you, but that comforts me that we may evade Idiocracy for a while yet. DM