Parasite gives wolves what it takes to be pack leaders

Wolves infected with a parasite that commonly infects cats are more likely to become leaders of the pack or strike out on their own. In a data set spanning 27 years, wolves in Yellowstone National Park that were infected with Toxoplasma gondii were 46 times more likely to become pack leaders and 11 times more likely to start a new pack than were uninfected animals.

Extreme numbers get new names

By the 2030s, the world will generate around a yottabyte of data per year — that’s 10²⁴ bytes, or the amount that would fit on DVDs stacked all the way to Mars. The data boom has prompted the governors of the metric system to agree on new prefixes to describe the outrageously big and small. The prefixes ronna and quetta represent 10²⁷ and 10³⁰, and ronto and quecto signify 10⁻²⁷ and 10⁻³⁰. Earth weighs around one ronnagram, and an electron’s mass is about one quectogram. Ronna and quetta might sound strange now, but so did giga and tera once, says metrologist Olivier Pellegrino. This is the first update to the prefix system since 1991, when zetta (10²¹), zepto (10⁻²¹), yotta (10²⁴) and yocto (10⁻²⁴) were added.

World votes to ditch leap seconds

Metrologists have agreed to stop adding ‘leap seconds’ to official clocks to keep them in sync with variations in Earth’s rotation. Leap seconds can disrupt systems based on precise timekeeping, because there’s no set way to integrate them (Google, for example, smears out the extra second in the 24 hours around midnight at coordinated universal time). To make matters worse, Earth’s rotation has sped up since 2020 — normally, over the long term, Earth’s rotation slows because of the pull of the Moon. So, for the first time, a leap second might need to be removed rather than added. The practice of adding leap seconds will be put on hold from 2035.

Bronze hand might rewrite history of Basque

A flat, life-size bronze hand engraved with symbols could prove the existence of written Vasconic — the language that developed into Basque.

Mathematician who solved prime-number riddle claims new breakthrough

Number theorist Yitang Zhang, who went from obscurity to luminary status in 2013 for cracking a century-old question about prime numbers, now claims to have solved another. The problem is similar to — but distinct from — the Riemann hypothesis, which is considered one of the most important problems in mathematics. Zhang posted his proposed solution — a 111-page preprint — on arXiv, and it has not yet been validated by his peers. If it checks out, it will help to tame the randomness of prime numbers, but Zhang and other scientists have previously proposed solutions to this problem that turned out to be faulty. It will take a while for researchers to comb through Zhang’s argument to see whether it is correct.